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Macro Thoughts

Policy Makers somehow still believe in their linear minds that more
Free money, more Rate Cuts will resuscitate the Patient which is like
a Patient anaesthetised on the Table.

Home Thoughts

''You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years
ago, to what had been there always.” ― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the
River
Don DeLillo wrote "Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We
have minutes to live."

The covid virus stuck a nuke up the ass of a pig (highly leveraged
financial system), and now the Fed thinks some big wad of cash will
put it back together. Dudes: It's a Tarantino finale: it ain't gonna
be faithful to historical precedent, but there will be blood and guts.

The COVID19 is invisible but it has already defeated the most
expensive Aircraft carriers, it lurks everywhere and in silence and
has put down Mecca, St. Peters Square and the Vatican, Qom

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar
Between the desire And the spasm
Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is
the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

Political Reflections

Many thousands more people have died in Europe this year compared with
a normal year. But deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 account
for just a fraction of the increase, suggesting many more died from
the virus than have been counted.

Our daily experience of the Covid-19 crisis is that it slows down our
lives. Jobs are on hold, holidays not booked and travel unthinkable.
We have more leisure time whether we like it or not. For people not on
the frontline of the NHS or essential supplies, the lockdown is a
slowdown.
Yet what is really happening is that the forces that will shape all
our futures – the global tensions, the economic policies, the
political ideas, the new technologies – are being sped up.
Huge decisions and great controversies that might only have come to a
head over the next couple of decades are suddenly upon us.
We are about to experience the next twenty years in twelve months, and
we need to get ready for it.
Or think about the drift to great power rivalry between America and
China, already gathering pace in recent years. Covid-19 threatens to
speed that up, with both countries trying to shift blame on to the
other.
In a US election year, candidates will vow to take a hard line on
ensuring American technology is separated from that of China.
Other Western capitals and company headquarters will conclude they
cannot be dependent any longer on supplies from one country, in a
world where borders close at the first hint of trouble.
And so the process of “deglobalisation” – more of what we consume
being made closer to home, even if it is more expensive – will
accelerate.
Instead of happening slowly as developments like 3D printing change
manufacturing techniques, it will happen quickly driven on by
political and security imperatives.
Even so, the Asia Pacific economies look likely to get through the
coming months with considerably less damage than most in the West.
They prepared for a pandemic that was like SARS, whereas we Westerners
expected something more like Spanish flu, if we thought about it at
all.
So they have the ruthless quarantining and tracing systems to suppress
the virus while we have the long agony of trying to live with it.
As things stood, 2020 was already going to be the year in which Asia’s
GDP overtook the rest of the world combined.
It was already going to account for 90 per cent of new middle-class
people in the next decade.
Perhaps we can revise that up to 95 per cent now. The Pacific century
is going to arrive faster than anyone thought.
It is not only in the West that we experience a sudden fast-forwarding
of what is to come.
Countries dependent on oil production already faced forecasts that
petroleum demand would peak and fall before 2030.
Today they are receiving the sharpest possible demonstration of what
that will mean, as oil prices plunge far below the point at which any
of them balance their budgets.
The need for Saudi Arabia to diversify away from energy production
just got starker, and the funds for doing it smaller.
For others like Russia, living rather complacently on huge oil and gas
revenues, the warning signals are getting louder.
These accelerating trends in world affairs might seem distant from us,
but they will be accompanied by the rapid intensification of political
arguments that will affect us all – over inequality, debt and state
power.
Tens of millions of people across the developed world alone are losing
their jobs or livelihoods, and they are predominantly those who are
already less well off.
It has been the natural tendency of the new technologies of recent
decades to widen inequality, increasing the returns to capital rather
than labour and leaving poorly educated people out of the booming
global economy.
Here comes the sharpest recession of our lives on top of that. It will
push to the forefront of politics fundamental issues about the
taxation of wealth, the case for basic incomes provided by
governments, and the responsibility of companies for their employees.
With young people the most severely affected socially and economically
– the year they are losing can never be restored and the jobs they
were hoping for will be in shorter supply – the issue of how to handle
the vast debts now being accumulated will shoot to the top of election
agendas.
Political parties will campaign for debt forgiveness and write offs,
and for the cancelling by central banks of money borrowed by
governments, with inflationary consequences for the future.
Most suddenly of all, the immense questions about who owns data about
each of us, and what use the state can make of it, are coming in weeks
instead of over many years.
Once we are all carrying around an app on our phones to show where we
have been and who we have met, pressure will grow to use that
information for other purposes.
Do we use it to stop a terrorist attack? To solve a murder? To detect
a spy? If the answers are yes, what is the new boundary between the
state and the individual?
Most of these trends, speeding up as I write, are profoundly
disturbing, but at least we can be better equipped for them if we can
see them racing towards us.
More optimistically, they have one positive companion – the massive
incentive this crisis provides for innovation.
New ideas about healthcare and communications have become dramatically
more urgent, and some of them will change our lives more quickly and
positively than would otherwise have happened.
If any of the dire trends I have listed can be slowed down by this
crisis being defused, that will happen because of new drugs now being
trialled, new tests being invented and new healthcare devices being
planned.
But be in no doubt as the long days at home seem to pass ever so
slowly. In its effect on societies, politics and the distribution of
power in the world, Covid-19 is on track to be the Great Accelerator.

What are the odds that a SARS-like coronavirus with overlapping
genetics from HIV mutated and crossed over into humans, next door to a
laboratory which had been enhancing coronavirus with HIV for over a
decade? And conversely, what are the odds it leaked out of the
laboratory?

Not sure what he meant by that, but I’ve been endlessly fascinated by
Trump’s lack concern for his own health during this.

International Markets

Euro 1.0867
Dollar Index 100.075
Japan Yen 107.62
Swiss Franc 0.9692
Pound 1.2311
Aussie 0.6335
India Rupee 76.755
South Korea Won 1233.29
Brazil Real 5.3168
Egypt Pound 15.755
South Africa Rand 19.02

My Mind kept to an Article I read in 2012 ‘’Annals of Technology
Streaming Dreams’’ by John Seabrook January 16, 2012.
“People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will
continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—
because now the distribution lands-cape allows for more narrowness’’.
Netflix is not a US business, it is a global business. The Majority of
Analysts are in the US and in my opinion, these same Analysts have an
international ‘’blind spot’’
Once Investors appreciate that the Story is an international one and
not a US one anymore, we will see the price ramp to fresh all-time
highs.

Commodities

Bank of America Corp. raised its 18-month gold-price target to $3,000
an ounce -- more than 50% above the existing price record -- in a
report titled “The Fed can’t print gold.”
The bank increased its target from $2,000 previously, as policy makers
across the globe unleash vast amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus
to help shore up economies hurt by the coronavirus.
“As economic output contracts sharply, fiscal outlays surge, and
central bank balance sheets double, fiat currencies could come under
pressure,” analysts including Michael Widmer and Francisco Blanch said
in the report. “Investors will aim for gold.”
BofA expects bullion to average $1,695 an ounce this year and $2,063 in 2021.
The record of $1,921.17 was set in September 2011. Spot prices traded
around $1,678 on Tuesday and are up 11% this year.
To be sure, a strong dollar, reduced financial market volatility, and
lower jewelry demand in India and China could remain headwinds for
gold, BofA said.
“But beyond traditional gold supply and demand fundamentals, financial
repression is back on an extraordinary scale,” the report said.

At this point I would venture Gold is correlated to the #Coronavirus
which is set to turn parabolic and is already non linear and
exponential ~

What I do know is this. Regime implosion is coming to the Oil
Producers and Trump can game the price a little more sure but its a
pointless exercise. Demand has cratered and a return to a hyper
connected 100m barrels per day world is not going to happen for the
foreseeable future. Putin will survive because he prepared for this
moment. Others are as good as terminated.

We are moving from a World of Hyper Connectedness to a World of
Quarantine. A complete Quarantine is the only way to vaccine this
c21st World of ours
#Coronavirus "has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century
pathogen we've been worried about." - @BillGates
The Price of Crude Oil is perfectly correlated to the #COVID19 Sudden Stop

“Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all
a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength,
fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts
obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling
shower of money.”― Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs

Main story of #Iran’s hardliner Kayhan newspaper, close to
⁦@khamenei_ir,⁩ has this headline: “They wanted to cut Iran’s #oil
export to zero, (but) the price of U.S. crude is subzero”

And with everyone focused on Saudi-Russia-Trump, he notes: “We have no
hope of production cuts matching the demand destruction”

Emerging Markets

Frontier Markets

Sub Saharan Africa

The First Issue is whether The #CoronaVirus will infect the Continent
We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world.
Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ...
then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!

''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.
The lone and level sands
stretch far away.”

I have a curious Triple Whammy of Kicks [not Hennessey I can assure
you but Coffee, Sturm und Drang and now the practically hourly roll of
#COVID19 Stats]
And the entire China Africa relationship has been an extraordinary
exercise in Narrative Framing and linguistic control, accompanied by a
chorus of Party Hacks chirruping Hosannas at every turn
2-SEP-2019 :: the China EM Frontier Feedback Loop Phenomenon. #COVID19
This Phenomenon was positive for the last two decades but has now
undergone a Trend reversal. The ZAR is the purest proxy for this
Phenomenon.
African Countries heavily dependent on China being the main Taker
arealso at the bleeding edge of this Phenomenon.
This Pressure Point will not ease soon but will continue to intensify

Everyday, the #DesertLocust situation is unique.  This swarm has just
been reported in Samburu. It covers a length of 10km. A chopper is
being used to survey the extent, then aerial spraying will be done
early morning the following day. #FoodSecurity #ZeroHunger
@FAOemergencies

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a 500 billion rand
($26.33 billion) rescue package on Tuesday, equivalent to 10% of the
GDP of Africa’s most industrialised nation, to try to cushion the
economic blow of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The pandemic requires an economic response that is equal to the scale
of the disruption it is causing,” he said in an address on national
television, pledging to “address the extreme decline in supply and
demand and to protect jobs.”
Ramaphosa said South Africa had approached global financial
institutions like the World Bank, IMF and the African Development Bank
to help fund the package.
“As part of this phase, we’re announcing this evening a massive social
and economic support package of 500 billion rand, which amounts to
about 10% of our GDP,” he said.

Such a loan would be payable over 3.25 - 5 years and at an interest
rate of just above 1%.

The U.S. dollar hit a record high against the Nigerian naira in
non-deliverable forwards markets on Tuesday, after a historic oil
price rout pushed U.S. crude futures below zero a day earlier.
One-year dollar/naira non-deliverable forwards stood at 498.5 points,
up from Monday’s close of 492.4, Refinitiv data showed.

Kenya

Kenya’s third largest bank by assets, NCBA, has pulled its final
dividend for last year of 1.50 shillings per share due to the
coronavirus crisis, becoming the first lender in the East African
nation to do so.
NCBA, created through a merger between NIC Bank and the CBA Group last
year, will offer investors a bonus share issue of one for every 10
held instead, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
The lender was set to pay the dividend to shareholders on the books on April 23.
The board attributed the changed decision to the COVID-19 pandemic’s
“devastating effects to the world and the Kenyan economy”.

Closing Price:           28.50
Total Shares Issued:          1497745029.00
Market Capitalization:        42,685,733,327
EPS:             8.69
PE:                 3.280