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Monday 14th of September 2020
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Quote from Gone with the Wind @rivatez
Misc.
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UK sells a 6-month T-bill with a negative yield for the first time @BruceReuters
World Of Finance
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(there were instances of 1- and 3-month bills being sold with negative yields in 2017)
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Britain, the U.S. and Canada persistently remain laggards in terms of economic recovery (via @RoyeBjorn & @tomorlik ) @economics
World Of Finance
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Following signs of downturn in previous weeks, the latest readings show activity stabilizing across most advanced economies, though still far from pre-Covid levels, according to Bloomberg Economics gauges that integrate high-frequency data such as credit-card use, travel and location information. Norway, Germany and Japan remain at the forefront of the recovery and after a temporary downturn in France, Italy and Spain on concern about fresh outbreaks, activity has increased in the past two weeks. The U.K., U.S. and Canada persistently remain laggards, with activity in the latter two at just two-thirds of pre-virus levels.
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22-MAR-2020 :: What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker.
World Of Finance
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Global recovery is far from V-shaped @dlacalle_IA
World Of Finance
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4-FEB-2020 :: a “V- shaped” recovery #COVID19 [is a FANTASY]
World Of Finance
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Trump: “It’s a super V, it’s beyond the V. It’s a super V.”
Law & Politics
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"Your Money Is Gone. All Gone": How SoftBank's Call Spread Strategy Led To Catastrophic Results - A Thread @zerohedge
World Of Finance
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In the aftermath of reports both here and elsewhere which identified SoftBank as the "hedge fund" responsible for much of the August gamma meltup via the use of aggressive call spreads, the stock of the Japanese financial conglomerate tumbled as much as 17%, an unacceptable outcome to CEO Masa Son who delights in parading with his surging stock (to the point where we dutifully advises investors that SoftBank's buyback program is the second largest only after Apple).
The result was a half-hearted leak through Bloomberg that the bank is "reconsidering" the use of its notorious market-moving costless collar derivative strategy, the creation of the Akshay Naheta, a SoftBank senior vice president in Abu Dhabi who previously was also the brain behind a similar costless collar "investment" in the now confirmed Wirecard fraud, and who honed his derivative strategies at his hedge fund, Knight Assets, where he generated a staggering 112.5% annually and before that at Deutsche Bank where he was Head of Principal Strategies. As a result, we dubbed Akshay the "gamma whale."
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I'm going to tweet out a thread about another large corporate entity financed from the Arabian peninsula that came to grief through absolutely massive option trades: Dubai International Capital which no longer exists. @Foudroyant
World Of Finance
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Then one night, in April of 2008, I'm working late and I get a call from a friend of mine whose brother works at DIC and who has been told that I know a lot about options. He asks if I can meet the DIC management team for a drink over near the Burj Dubai, curious, I go. When I get there, the first 30 minutes are the standard go-go Dubai pitch. DIC is rocking the world the management team are the best, the smartest guys, and though they work for a state entity, they get personal points on the P&L (a much better deal than we got at DB.) What's more, they're just getting started. They raised $10 billion and so far they've only deployed $2 billion. It's going to be a roller coaster to the moon for them. What's more, if I prove helpful enough, maybe I could join them for the ride... these hints were common in Dubai So... down to business. Well, they have some issues with their derivative transactions and they want to know what they can do. Can I suggest changes in structure? The whole task of restructuring has been complicated by the fact that their PB has stopped sending them risk reports. Hmmm... this is all very curious. So, where were the trades when they put them on. They tell me. Where are the shares now? Down about 30% from the highs (Bear Stearns had collapsed a few weeks before.) How long dated were the collars? 1 year, with 3 months left to run. I look from one, to the next, and realize to my horror that they don't see it and I say: "Well gentlemen, that's your problem right there. The reason your PB is not sending you any risk reports, is that you no longer have any risk on..."...your shares are so far below the put strike that you no longer have any exposure to the stock at all. It's as if you don't own it because one for one it's pledged to the puts." To which one of them replies, hilariously "But it's still our name on the shareholder register!" To which I reply "Indeed it is, and it will remain there until three months from now when you exercise your puts and sell it 20% up from here to the firm that sold you the puts. In the interim, the presence on the shareholder register is the ONLY connection you have... ...you no longer have any economic interest in them, only a legal one. In short gentlemen, your money is gone. All gone." Surely there is something we can do about this, can we roll the puts? "Yes you can, but you're going to have to write a big check to do it, can you?" They reply... why yes, it's a $10 billion dollar fund, and they're only down 20% at the time. "Wait a minute, did you say you're 20% down?" Yes. "And you're 20% invested?" Yes. "So you're down 100% of invested capital!?!" I guess that's a way of looking at it. "Gentlemen, I'm certain that this is how Sheikh Mohammed, the owner of your GP will look at it. You have lost $2 billion of money that wasn't his to begin with but that he has been telling the world he has. My advice to you is to leave town."
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This is also my advice to the people at Softbank running money for MBS with the same strategy. @Foudroyant
World Of Finance
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Breathtaking image of Mughal courtiers from the Muraqqa-e Gulshan (The Flower Garden) commissioned by the Emperor Jahangir in the early 1600s @peterfrankopan
Misc.
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Spot the cubs face. Shot at Kabini. @GetMohanThomas
Misc.
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Greenland sharks, one of nature’s least elegant creatures, have an estimated lifespan of up to 600 years. @NewYorker
Misc.
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The mystery might have lingered were it not for the work of three Danish scientists—a physicist named Jan Heinemeier and two marine biologists, John Fleng Steffensen and Julius Nielsen. Nine years ago, Heinemeier and four of his colleagues published a paper on lens crystallines, a class of proteins found in the human eye. Like all organic molecules, crystallines contain carbon, including trace amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14. Unlike other proteins, which undergo constant recycling and replenishment, crystallines remain stable throughout a person’s life; they are envelopes sealed at birth, their contents an artifact from the womb. And, if crystallines are the envelopes, then carbon-14 is the postmark. The isotope has always occurred naturally on Earth, formed wherever incoming cosmic rays strike the atmosphere, but some of the current supply also comes from nuclear-weapons tests. The level fluctuates from year to year, and that means that every given time period has its own carbon-14 signature. (There was a particularly huge spike, called the bomb pulse, in the nuke-happy heyday of the fifties and sixties.) Experimenting on cadavers’ lenses, Heinemeier found that he could measure how much carbon-14 they contained and use it to determine the deceased’s date of birth.
Over the next five years, as Nielsen completed a master’s and then a doctorate at the University of Copenhagen, he and a group of research trawlers and local fishermen harvested eyes from twenty-eight Greenland sharks.
Nielsen and his collaborators published their results in August of last year. Using Heinemeier’s method, they found that the smallest of the sharks they caught—those around seven feet long—were born after the bomb pulse, while the largest animals were born well before it. With the help of a mathematical model that linked size with age, they estimated that one sixteen-foot female was at least two hundred and seventy-two years old, and possibly as much as five hundred and twelve years old. Because it is difficult to establish background carbon-14 levels in the ocean, and because Nielsen and his colleagues didn’t know which part of the ocean the sharks had been born in, the figure was inexact. Still, it firmly established Greenland sharks as the longest-living vertebrates on Earth. In theory, the biggest ones could be nearly six centuries old.
The question now is how the sharks do it. Increasingly, scientists are searching the natural world for the genetic and behavioral mechanisms that endow creatures with their special abilities—that make elephants virtually immune to cancer, say, or axolotls capable of regenerating a lost limb. There may be Greenland sharks alive today that were born before Christopher Columbus; the species is not even thought to reach sexual maturity until around a hundred and fifty years of age. Why? The answer likely has to do with a very slow metabolism and the cold waters that they inhabit. But for now, Nielsen said, it’s yet another mystery. “I’m just the messenger on this,” he told me. “I have no idea.”
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The Dance of Exorcism of the San People of the Kalahari Desert Jürgen Schadeberg
Africa
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Every culture has its own concept of good and evil and its own rituals to banish evil spirits.
On the vast African continent, filled with myths and fables, the San People of the Kalahari Desert have a unique and dramatic way of exorcising their evil spirits.
The Dance of Exorcism of the San People of the Kalahari Desert is a ritual trance ceremony which draws out evil spirits from the afflicted. It is performed by the natural leader of the group who combines the role of priest, doctor and psychiatrist. He absorbs the evil forces and spews them out onto the burning embers of the fire in a final act of purification.
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Villa Palagonia Bagheria, Sicily @DalrympleWill
Misc.
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The Strangeness of Grief A writer reckons with the different forms of loss. By V. S. Naipaul @NewYorker
Misc.
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My father was forty-five or forty-six when he had a heart attack. This trouble with his heart was surprising, since for all the years we had known him as children his trouble was his stomach and his indigestion, requiring bottles and bottles of a particular brand of medicinal stomach powder, which he never had the foresight to buy when he was all right, preferring instead during a crisis to send his children on the long walk to the local pharmacy for the powder.
A couple of years after this heart trouble, my father was put on half pay by the Trinidad Guardian, the newspaper for which he worked. I was in school in England when this happened, and I worried about the effect of this half pay on my family; things had been bad enough on my father’s full pay. But my father, now near the end of things, was possessed by a strange lightness of spirit. It was as though the heart illness, officially recognized by doctors and the newspaper, gave full expression and an extra validity to the unhappiness he had felt for years, with the Guardian, with my mother’s family, with his poverty, with prejudice and the British Empire and the unhappy state of India, and with many other things; and it was no longer necessary now for him to go over any of the points.
In this strange lightness of spirit that possessed him, my father turned to the writing of comic short stories. He had been writing stories for more than a decade; he loved journalism, but to be a proper writer was his great ambition, and in 1943 he had brought out a little book of his early stories. His subject was local Indian life; he wrote more particularly, and with great love, about Indian ritual. His style in these early stories was based on Pearl Buck and “The Good Earth.” This Biblical style, and the semi-religious nature of the stories, appeared to isolate the Indian community from the rest of island life, and I feel now that my father stuck to this way of writing because it was easier for him, easier to deal with one community, one set of values, and to people his Biblical landscape. To introduce others would have been to complicate matters, as I myself was to find out later, when I began to write. Now, however, he became bolder; his view became broader, it took in more of the island, and he began to look for comedy, which he hadn’t done before.
These comic stories were among his best, and almost everything he wrote in this mood was accepted by the BBC for the “Caribbean Voices” literary program. So it happened that at the end of his life, and when he was on half pay, and half an invalid, my father began to make a little money from his stories.
“Caribbean Voices” asked me to read one of the stories for them. The fee was four guineas. This was more or less the fare from Oxford to London. I was delighted that the story was accepted, and happy to do the reading. But when I wrote my father I made rather too much about the cost of the journey from Oxford. He apologized, though he had nothing to apologize for. The failing was mine, taking away a little of his pleasure in the modest success of his story. His letter made me regret my thoughtlessness—it was no more than that, fealty, but it drove him to spend a little of the very little money that he had on a gift for me. He bought me, with some remnant of his nationalist feeling, an Indian brass vase. The grandeur of his sentiment was frustrated by the gift itself. It was too heavy and awkwardly shaped to entrust to the post office. I don’t think my father had realized how difficult his gift was, and what trouble he would have getting it to me.
His solution was to pass the vase to a branch of his family. They worked in London (that migration, of which they were pioneers, had already begun), and they were richer and more adventurous than people close to us. The idea was that someone from that adventurous family branch might, in his own sweet time, on a trip to London, take that awkwardly shaped vase over and pass it to me.
It was an arrangement that meant I might have to wait quite a while for my father’s gift to get to me. My father, his grand gesture made, appeared resigned to whatever might happen. In Oxford I waited, losing faith in the brass vase.
One day, a telegram came for me from London. Bad news come now. It was from the people with the vase. It couldn’t have been more brutal. But some instinct for drama, some wish to serve death in a correct way, had made them send a telegram. I knew that the bad news was the death of my father. It could be no one else. Still, during the journey up to London, on the four-pound train, I tried in my cruellest way, and always in vain, to imagine other family members who might have died and whose death might have warranted the sending of a telegram.
By the time I got to London, grief—amazingly unknown till then, though I was twenty-one—had taken me over.
The house was in the Paddington area, off the Harrow Road. There was no ceremony of welcome, not because of the death, I felt, but more (though I hardly knew London) because of the cheerlessness of the area. The death was not easy to talk about, and while this stiff conversation was going on I saw on a shelf what I felt sure was my father’s brass vase. It was unpolished, without a shine, looking rather neglected. A dry flower stalk—a piece of homemaking abandoned and gone bad—added to the feeling of neglect. The vase had been taken over by the house, without regard or relish, and I wondered, while we talked, how I might ask about it. A good part of me would have felt relieved not to have to ask at all.
When I did ask, as casually as I could, whether the vase came from my father, the people in the house, to my surprise, surrendered without a fight. They said they had been puzzled by the vase, which had come in someone’s luggage. Now that I had told them that it was my father’s, and he had sent it to me, they said they were relieved. All at once they became nice in my eyes. They put it in a carrier bag for me. I didn’t look at the vase—I wished to match their coolness—and it was only later, on the train, between Paddington and Reading, that I took it out and considered it in the dim railway light.
In shape it was classical, like an urn, wide at the mouth and at the base; and though the idea had immediately to be put aside, it might have been used for human ashes. There was no decoration on the outside, no roses, no arabesques. The goldsmith or silversmith had been content to make plain dashes, so to speak, with his chisel, and these dashes had been allowed to make patterns.
The vase stayed with me for years. I drew it often, and sometimes attempted—more difficult, this—to render it in watercolor. Because of this detached study, it became in the end only an object, without associations; the grief of which it once spoke so directly was rubbed away, like the grief itself, though that stayed with me so completely and for so long, waiting to be recalled, that I was able, some years later, during the writing of my first novel, a comedy, very light (but full of anxiety for me), to transfer much of the episode (beginning with the telegram) to that quite different book, in a concealment and sublimation of grief.
This period of disturbance took me through to the end of my time at Oxford. I had now to leave, go into the unknown, and somehow seek to get started as a writer. The many anxieties I lived with helped to push grief away. I felt I had been inoculated against grief. I had drunk that bitterness to the dregs, and since human beings have limited capacity I didn’t think I would be able to do so again.
The months and years passed. Thirty years passed. I wrote many books; I became a writer. My serenity was like a permanent condition. I became more and more removed from that awful journey to London, and in the moments when I thought of it I didn’t think grief could come near me again.
It was a poor way of thinking. We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.
This grief has its own exigencies. We can never tell beforehand for whom we will feel grief. I never thought, after all I had suffered for my father, that I would be laid low, and almost in the same way, by my younger brother. He was not close to me. He wished to appear to be making his own way. I had to let him go, and I got used to the distance.
One morning, thirty years after the death of my father, my telephone rang. It was my brother’s wife. I asked, in the common way of courtesy, “What news?” She said, “Bad news, I’m afraid. Shiva’s dead.” It did not surprise me. He was a drinking man, and I had seen death on his face the previous year, at the funeral of my younger sister. People there had talked about his worrying appearance. They had tried to get him to see a doctor (there were two in the family), but he had always refused. The appearance of impending death was more noticeable on him in a television appearance a few days later—so noticeable, in fact, I wondered whether the television people had not been worried by it.
So I was not surprised by the news of his death. The pain built up on the railway journey to London. By the time we were passing through Wimbledon (an ugly terrace in the railway cutting), I could recognize from old, even ancient, experience that, surprised though I was, grief had returned to possess me. I had no idea how long it was going to last.
The first symptom of grief that day was an inability to eat. It was new to me. It made my grief concrete, and it lasted all week, disappearing only after the cremation. One of the attendants at the crematorium, just before the coffin rolled away to be consumed, invited me to place my hand on the coffin. The rites of death were completely new to me; this was the comfort that many before me had instinctively sought. It didn’t work for me. The coffin was a coffin; below my hand, wood was wood.
Shiva’s wife, speaking of the funeral arrangements earlier in the week, had mentioned the chapel of rest, where Shiva at some time was to lie. But the undertaker’s careful words which she was using called up fearful pictures: I couldn’t go to that chapel.
That week of waiting for the cremation I spent reading the first of Shiva’s books. I did so in a state of exaltation. It is perhaps how all writers should be read, if we are to seize their essence and understand what the writing meant to them. There was, unexpectedly, a description of our father’s funeral, thirty-two years before; it was shot through with emotion, and taught me in some ways how to deal with Shiva’s own occasion.
Afterward, at tea in Shiva’s flat, I talked to my elder sister Kamla. We talked about Shiva as a child; we remembered how, shortly after we had moved to our own house, he had once swallowed a plum and had begun seriously to choke. Fortunately, our house was next door to a doctor’s office, and he was in attendance that afternoon. He swiftly attended to the matter. It was a small crisis, but we could still, my sister and I, after all these years, celebrate the little boy’s escape from death, as though it were something final.
I said to Kamla, expecting some solace from her, “And now we have nothing.”
She said, “And now we have nothing.”
My sorrow lasted for two years. For two years I mentally dated everything, even the purchase of a book, by its distance from Shiva’s death.
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7 JAN 19 :: V.S. Naipaul, in A Bend in the River wrote “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”
Misc.
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08-JUN-2020 :: Anybody can be decisive during a panic It takes a strong Man to act during a Boom.
World Of Finance
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“The businessman bought at ten and was happy to get out at twelve; the mathematician saw his ten rise to eighteen, but didn’t sell because he wanted to double his ten to twenty.”
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“Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here'' V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street
Misc.
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“Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?”
― V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street
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A Luminous and Fairy Tale Feel
Misc.
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In the land of fairy tales. © Fabrizio Massetti @BebuCesco
Misc.
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Political Reflections
Law & Politics
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The Woodward tapes are shocking not because we can't believe Trump would lie, but because they reveal he knows what he's doing. @ProjectLincoln
Law & Politics
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WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION REPORTS RECORD SINGLE-DAY INCREASE IN GLOBAL CORONAVIRUS CASES, UP BY 307,930 IN 24 HOURS -WEBSITE @FirstSquawk
Misc.
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According to @WHO daily new #COVID19 cases hit new high of 307,299 5 days ago, with India, Brazil, United States, Argentina & Spain accounting for > 2/3 of newly confirmed cases that day @StatistaCharts @LizAnnSonders
Misc.
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We are watching for signs of plateauing in the global data. @ExanteData
Misc.
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We are seeing improvement in a number of countries, but India, Morocco, Costa Rica and others had fresh peaks in new cases today (denoted by red bars)
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The exponential moment is still in front of us. #COVID19
Misc.
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Global cases are still fairly steady: around 265k/day and R at around 1 The trend is heading for 35m. @video4me
Misc.
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>5%: Hungary⁹⁰ Tunisia¹⁰⁵ Uganda¹¹⁸ Trinidad and Tobago¹³⁵ Myanmar¹⁴⁰ Georgia¹⁴⁸ Curaçao¹⁹¹ Saint Pierre Miquelon²¹²
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India's reporting nearly 100,000 new cases every day now. @DavidInglesTV
Misc.
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#COVID19 and the Spillover Moment
Misc.
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Year of the Virus
World Of Finance
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IMPORTANT: All we need to know about #COVID19 testing. @DrSubhasree
Misc.
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Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
Misc.
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Why COVID-19 Transmission Is More Efficient and Aggressive Than Viral Transmission in Previous Coronavirus Epidemics? @TheSeeker268
Misc.
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No-one has ever produced a safe and effective vaccine against a coronavirus. Birger Sørensen, Angus Dalgleish & Andres Susrud
Misc.
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Latest Russian joke: "The Russian Covid vaccine has a 50% success rate. We tested it on Putin's daughter and Navalny." @Kasparov63
Misc.
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'The first thing is the meat market in Wuhan is a smoke screen and this virus is not from nature,' Dr Yan said. @MailOnline
Misc.
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When asked where the virus comes from, the scientist replied: 'It comes from the lab in Wuhan.'
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I am convinced that the only ‘’zoonotic’’ origin was one that was accelerated in the Laboratory #COVID19
Misc.
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It is impossible to ignore the introduction of a PRRA insert between S1 and S2: it sticks out like a splinter. This insert creates the furin cleavage site
Misc.
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#OTD last year, Wuhan Institute of Virology deleted their "Special database of pathogens carrying viruses in wild animals" @TheSeeker268
Misc.
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01-MAR-2020 :: The Origin of the #CoronaVirus #COVID19
Misc.
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Does anyone see the pattern? @TheSeeker268
Misc.
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This law got passed on the quiet yesterday allowing the harvesting and retention of the DNA of anyone who does a covid test. @tesssummers98
Law & Politics
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Genomic surveillance
Misc.
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100 टके की बात .....!!! @Manavkaul19
Misc.
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So if black Americans were an independent nation they’d rank amongst the world’s top 20 richest countries. This is according to economist Walter E. Williams. @PhumlaniMMajozi
Misc.
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International Markets
World Of Finance
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Summary of today's GDP Twitter debate: "Glass half full" = exceeding OBR forecasts. "Glass half empty" = never had it so bad. @alfie_stirling
World Of Finance
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24-FEB-2020 :: a “V- shaped” recovery #COVID19 [is a FANTASY]
World Of Finance
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Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ
World Currencies
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Euro 1.1846
Dollar Index 93.22
Japan Yen 106.04
Swiss Franc 0.9091
Pound 1.2818
Aussie 0.7281
India Rupee 73.35
South Korea Won 1184.15
Brazil Real 5.3202
Egypt Pound 15.77
South Africa Rand 16.67
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GBP - what a week vs the USD @themarketear 1.2818
World Currencies
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Dollar Index 3 Month Chart INO 93.211
World Currencies
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27-JUL-2020 :: Drinking the Kool-Aid Conclusions Euro 1.25
World Currencies
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Speculators kept an unch bearish dollar bet against ten IMM #forex futures and the #DXY. It stood at $33.6 bn with the bulk being the near record $29 bn short against the euro @Ole_S_Hansen
World Currencies
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Despite broad $USD gains in wk to Sept 8 when risk took a hit, speculators kept an unch bearish dollar bet against ten IMM #forex futures and the #DXY. It stood at $33.6 bn with the bulk being the near record $29 bn short against the euro
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$EURUSD 4hr Chart: See Chart. @FXPIPTITAN 1.1847
World Currencies
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Commodity Markets at a Glance WSJ
Commodities
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Gold 6 month INO 1945.00
Commodities
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Crude Oil 6 Month Chart INO 37.47
Minerals, Oil & Energy
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SSA Eurobond Issuance via @MihrThakar
Africa
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5 March 2020 Debt, virus and locusts create a perfect storm for Africa @TheAfricaReport
Africa
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I never thought Khartoum was this low lying @akams_
Africa
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Africa’s catastrophic Covid response @unherd @ianbirrell
Africa
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As Covid-19 began to sweep across the planet earlier this year, the warnings about the disease’s impact on Africa were terrifying. The World Health Organisation predicted ten million cases within six months, raising the horrifying prospect of fragile health systems becoming overwhelmed with corpses piled up in hospital corridors. Other UN experts said there could be 1.2bn cases and 3.3m deaths without emergency interventions, while more optimistic modelling from the influential experts at Imperial College, London, anticipated 300,000 deaths.
Little wonder countries on the continent rushed to follow the lead of rich nations such as Italy and Spain that were visibly struggling to cope with pandemic. Many closed borders, shut businesses and locked down citizens. Among the firmest responses was Uganda’s, where public transport was suspended, schools shut down, shops closed, curfews imposed and big gatherings banned. Kampala has conducted more than 350,000 tests, according to official data. After doom-laden warnings of 68,000 fatalities from the virus if there were failure to act, there have been 44 confirmed coronavirus deaths in this east African nation of 43m.
Such actions won praise from global health bodies. Yet were blunt lockdowns really the right approach in Africa? A growing body of doctors, economists and scientists fear these measures will have disastrous consequences. These experts warn of financial carnage, spiralling epidemics of other diseases, the intensification of gender and wealth inequalities and the battle against poverty being set back by decades. They point to Africa’s youth, with a median age of 18 years compared with 41 years in Europe, and few people in the highest-risk older categories — which may help explain why a continent of 1.3bn people has seen fewer confirmed virus deaths than the UK. Almost one in five Britons is aged 65 or over; in Africa, it is fewer than one in 50. Yet the impact of shutting down countries will be far worse than in wealthier developed nations.
David Bell, a malaria specialist who has worked with both Bill Gates and the WHO, is among those concerned that we may be witnessing catastrophe unfolding on the continent. “It seems global health authorities did not think through the collateral damage, yet we knew by March the age-related fatality levels of this virus. If you looked at Italy or China, it was old people who were dying. In developing nations, many people live day to day, so even short disruption can be devastating to lives, while there are already large epidemics of malaria, tuberculosis and HiV that will only get worse if you reduce access and healthcare for a few months.”
Take Uganda, where borders remain closed, the curfew is still in place, and half the citizens are under 16 years old. On the plus side, there is thought to have been a fall in traffic fatalities as people stayed at home. But a new study by Bell and five other researchers indicates restrictive measures led to plummeting detection of new HiV and malaria cases, along with treatment of highly-infectious tuberculosis, while maternal mortality instantly surged from 92 deaths in January to 167 fatalities in March. “The fear is more people will die from other conditions,” said Agnes Kiragga, head of statistics at the Infectious Diseases Institute, Kampala, and co-author of the paper. “This has been a learning curve. Governments in Africa must consider not just Covid but other diseases that are more dangerous in a young population.”
Predictive modelling warned that inaction would lead to 16 million infections, 483,000 hospitalisations and 50,000 fatalities in this southern African nation of 19m people — yet there have been just 176 confirmed deaths to date.
There has been limited testing in Malawi, while doctors admit significant numbers of deaths may be going unrecorded, especially in rural areas. Yet there have been few coronavirus patients in their hospital emergency units. “We’ve not seen a lot of cases and the reasons remain unknown,” said Marah Chibwana, a member of the Viral Immunology Research Group at Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme. She has just completed a study in Blantyre that found one in eight health workers has had Covid-19, highlighting this discrepancy between predicted and actual reported deaths. “It is a mystery that despite not going into a lockdown, we have experienced a low number of fatalities.”
The youth of citizenry must be a factor. But, as Chibwana says, another theory under investigation is that previous exposure to coronaviruses, such as those responsible for common colds, might have built up immunity to Covid-19. One leading South African virologist says he cannot think of any other reason to explain the numbers of completely asymptomatic people seen on the continent. If this is correct, it would mean the very conditions expected to fuel huge fatalities — cramped homes, crowded urban areas and communal washing spaces — may in fact help to protect poorer places in developing nations. Although who knows what lies ahead with this unpredictable new virus?
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The renegade election President Abiy Ahmed’s government faces a crisis of legitimacy @GetachewSS @thecontinent_
Law & Politics
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Ethiopia’s federal government suspended all national and parliamentary elections in March, citing the risks from the Covid-19 pandemic. This week, however, Tigray – one of Ethiopia’s nine regional states – went to the polls in defiance of this edict.
Turnout was high, and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front went on to win 98% of the vote.
This has created a crisis of legitimacy for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s administration. It has refused to recognise the results of the vote, saying that the process is null and void and against Ethiopia’s Constitution. But what will it do when a new regional government is installed? And how will Tigray’s new leaders deal with Addis Ababa?
“This election signifies the intense feelings of the people of Tigray in support of the right of self-determination, and the total rejection of the actions from the federal government,” said Mehari Tadele.
The prime minister said the national government would not use force to stop the election, but used metaphor to warn: “Those who construct a shanty are illegal dwellers as they don’t have land deeds, and they don’t sleep with their eyes shut.”
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14-OCT-2019 :: @PMEthiopia a fiendishly complicated task fending off the centripetal forces which are tearing Ethiopia apart
Law & Politics
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02-JUL-2018 :: He said “The ppl of Tigray are still begging for a drop of water; TPLF (the party) is not the people of Tigray”.
Africa
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Shoprite, which has 2,300 stores across Africa, in its trading statement, reported that its South African division grew by 8.7% while sales at its supermarkets outside South Africa fell by 1.4%. @CytonnInvest
Retail & Manufacturing
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South Africa All Share Bloomberg
World Of Finance
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Dollar versus Rand 6 Month Chart INO 16.672
World Currencies
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Egypt Pound versus The Dollar 3 Month Chart INO 15.76
World Currencies
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Egypt EGX30 Bloomberg
World Of Finance
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Nigeria All Share Bloomberg
World Of Finance
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Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg
World Of Finance
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Kenya Faces External-Debt Distress on Lower Export Receipts @BloombergQuint @herbling
Kenyan Economy
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Kenya is at a high risk of external-debt distress as the country’s foreign-currency obligations grow faster than its income from abroad, the National Treasury said.
The ratio of debt-service costs to exports for East Africa’s biggest economy will remain above the 21% threshold recommended by the International Monetary Fund until at least 2025, according to a report published on the Treasury’s website. This is the first time the Treasury publicly flags the danger, after the IMF in May raised Kenya’s risk of debt distress to high from moderate due to the impact of the coronavirus.
Kenya’s debt stock stood at 6.7 trillion shillings ($61.7 billion), or 65.7% of gross domestic product, by the end of June, according to Treasury. More than half of that is in foreign currency. The cost of servicing these obligations will jump 28% to 904.7 billion shillings in 2020-21 from the previous fiscal year, mainly due to an increase in foreign-debt redemption costs.
Horticulture and tourism are key sources of foreign income for Kenya and those industries were hit by shutdowns in key markets and global travel restrictions. Remittances by Kenyans working outside the country declined year-on-year in April and June and the central bank said in July those inflows will grow by 1% for the whole of 2020.
Growing Debt
The Treasury’s warning comes after the parliamentary budget office also this week sounded the alarm about the growing debt portfolio and possible distress in the absence of mitigating factors.
“Since the onset of Covid-19, external debt risk has persisted owing to domestic economic pressure, shocks on Kenya’s exports, non-conducive international financial market conditions for refinancing and the country’s reduced access to concessional financing,” the agency said in a report. The depreciation of the shilling presents further risks to external debt-service costs and requires closer monitoring, it said.
Kenya’s earnings from exports of goods and services will decline to 9.9% of GDP in 2021-22 from an estimated 10.1% in 2020-21, according to the Treasury. Earnings from tea and flowers grew in the first seven months of the year, data from the statistics agency show.
“Despite strong performance from agriculture exports, we expect lower export earnings,” Jibran Qureishi, Standard Bank Group’s head of research for Africa, said by phone. The debt stock as well as obligations have grown significantly, yet earnings from export of goods and services has been rather flat in the last few years, he said.
The liabilities risk is further aggravated by the structure of Kenya’s debt, where a third of the total is made up of commercial borrowing such as Eurobonds and syndicated loans, said Tony Watima, an independent economist based in Nairobi, Kenya.
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Finally! Net borrowing is a trillion! No one listens. Wait for the implosion & blame game! @WehliyeMohamed
Kenyan Economy
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''My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare''
Misc.
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Yields on the 10-year and 30-year Eurobonds at 6.7% and 8.0% @CytonnInvest
Kenyan Economy
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Kenya Power as of June 2020 owes: @moneyacademyKE
N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied
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— KenGen Sh 23.7 billion
— Kentraco Sh 4.67 billion
— IPPs Sh 19.48 billion.
KPLC is pushing for a state procured payment plan and deal to save it from penalties associated with late payments to Kentraco and KenGen
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Kenya Shilling versus The Dollar Live ForexPros
World Currencies
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On an YTD basis, the shilling has depreciated by 7.0% against the dollar
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Nairobi All Share Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Every Listed Share Can Be Interrogated Here
N.S.E General
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