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COVID-19 vaccine roll outthe top “tail risk” at 28% of FMS investors

#2 A “tantrum” in the bond market

#3 Higher than expected inflation 

#4 A bubble on Wall St.

The rise and fall of RCA, the biggest growth story of the 1929 bull market: @WalterDeemer

Catherine Hudson and her partner, John Harrington, flew to Cape Town on December 2 expecting to return to Britain on December 15. Due to flight chaos and lockdown they decided to stay with friends in Newlands, Cape Town. 

“We have been in paradise ever since,” Hudson says. She has repaid her friends’ kindness by looking after Willem, their Dutch shepherd dog, reorganising their IT and helping their children with home schooling; Harrington has taken care of shopping and cooking.

They fancied themselves free, wrote Camus, ―and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

We've updated our preprint on the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 VOC 202012/01, aka B.1.1.7, with new statistical and modelling methods. 

Headline: we estimate VOC is 43–82% more transmissible than preexisting variants.

“The spring virus was the first, the second in September, the third in December and the new one, the British, is the fourth. I would almost exaggerate to say that it was SARS-CoV-2 in the spring, SARS-CoV-3 in September, and SARS-CoV-4 in December until now.”

“And the British mutation should be called SARS-CoV-5. Each wave behaves clinically a little differently, the virus has a different genome, a different program, according to which it is written, “Peková specified.

“If the second or third wave came from the first, we would see the mutations that the virus picked up over time in the viruses of the second and third waves. But this is not the case. I have no idea where they came from, “Peková said.

“But it’s something else. And I don’t know where the cave they are flying from is, “the microbiologist pointed out, adding that the viruses are artificially modified according to her.

Today only the Paid for Propagandists and Virologists and WHO will argue that there is a ''zoonotic'' origin for COVID19. 

It is remarkable that the Propaganda is still being propagated more than a year later. 

There is no natural Pathway for the Evolution of COVID19.

“One was amplifying the other…How much it was command controlled, how much it was opportunistic, it was hard to tell,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia. 

Long-term, he added, China is “the more formidable competitor and adversary because of the technological capabilities they bring to the table.”
‘THE TRUTH AS I SEE IT’
In January, long before China began overtly spreading disinformation, Russian state media swept in to legitimize the theory that the U.S. engineered the virus as a weapon.
On Jan. 20, the Russian Army’s media outlet, Zvezda, announced that the outbreak in China was linked to a bioweapons test, citing a four-time failed political candidate named Igor Nikulin.
Nikulin claims to have worked with the United Nations on disarmament in Iraq from 1998 to 2003, including as an adviser to former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
But the U.N. has no record of his service. Richard Butler, the lead U.N. weapons inspector at the time, told AP he’s never heard of him. 

Neither has Hans Corell, who served as Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and Legal Counsel of the United Nations from 1994-2004, where he worked closely with Annan.
Nikulin said records of his U.N. work may have been destroyed and stuck by his theory that COVID is a U.S. bioweapon – a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. “What other proof is needed?!” he said in an email to AP.
Over the next two months, more than 70 articles appeared in pro-Kremlin media making similar bioweapons claims in Russian, Spanish, Armenian, Arabic, English and German, according to AP’s analysis of a database compiled by EUvsDisinfo, which tracks disinformation for the European Union.
Online journals identified by the U.S. State Department and others as pro-Russian proxies picked up the bioweapons narrative, enhancing its reach and resonance.
Russian politicians joined the chorus. Parliamentarian Natalia Poklonskaya argued that the novel coronavirus could be a biological weapon created “by those who want to rule the planet” to undermine China. 

Shortly after, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalistic leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, suggested that the U.S. and its greedy pharmaceutical companies were to blame.

Meanwhile, Nikulin kept flogging his theory, which morphed as the pandemic spread from an attack on China to an attack on Trump. 

Despite his inconsistency and questionable bona fides, by April, Nikulin had appeared at least 18 times on Russian television. 

U.S. officials also said Russian intelligence had been covertly spreading COVID-19 disinformation, including claims that the virus was a U.S. bioweapon.

On Jan. 23, Beijing began to roll out the largest medical quarantine in modern history, sealing tens of millions of people at the epicenter of the outbreak in central China. 

The images were harrowing, as people desperate to slip out thronged train stations.

Shortly after 11 a.m. the next morning, Francis Boyle, a Harvard-trained law professor at the University of Illinois, emailed a “worldwide alert” to 300 contacts warning, without evidence, that China had been developing the coronavirus as a bioweapon at a biosafety lab in Wuhan.

Over the next few weeks, Boyle refined his theory, now asserting that Chinese scientists had not developed the virus themselves, but taken it from a North Carolina laboratory.

“This is clearly an offensive biological warfare agent,” Boyle told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on a Feb. 19 Infowars broadcast.

The theory spread via outlets like One America News Network, a pro-Trump channel, Iran’s Press TV, Global Research and its erstwhile partner, the Strategic Culture Foundation, an online journal that masquerades as independent but is actually directed by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, according to the U.S. State Department.

Boyle told the AP his conclusions are based on research and that he can’t stop conspiracy theorists or foreign governments from using his claims for their own ends.

“My job is to tell the truth as I see it,” he said.

we are witnessing massive decline in the cognitive capacity of leadership and a steep decline in the intellectual capacity of the cognitive capacity of the corpus. 

We live in an Era of gobbledygook debate, a moment of complete combustion. 

Just open your social media account and its a torrent of bite sized nonsense. 

This is the Achilles Heel which the Sun Tzu Maestro Xi Jinping understood and the Viral War he launched was a perfectly aimed Bullet.

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

 “There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. ”

If you look closely here you'll see references to #China's tech companies Huawei, Wechat (微信), Alibaba etc. Also 和谐 hexie over the eyes means "harmony" (from former Pres Hu catchphrase). 

In China if you've been censored you've been "harmonised".

Euro 1.2077

Dollar Index 90.727

Japan Yen 106.00

Swiss Franc 0.8938

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Aussie 0.7747

India Rupee 72.85

South Korea Won 1107.64

Brazil Real 5.3707

Egypt Pound 15.63

South Africa Rand 14.73

Democracy from Tanzania to Zimbabwe to Cameroon has been shredded.

We are getting closer and closer to the Virilian Tipping Point

“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street''

Political leadership in most cases completely gerontocratic will use violence to cling onto Power but any Early Warning System would be warning a Tsunami is coming

Martin Aglo, a law student from Benin, told Reuters: “After the Arab Spring, this is the Black Spring”.We need to ask ourselves; how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1,000, 10,000?

This is another point: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent can’t go. Where that threshold lies will be discovered in the throes of the event.

The Event is no longer over the Horizon.

Ethiopia which was once the Poster child of the African Renaissance now has a Nobel Prize Winner whom I am reliably informed

PM Abiy His inner war cabinet includes Evangelicals who are counseling him he is "doing Christ's work"; that his faith is being "tested". @RAbdiAnalyst

@PMEthiopia has launched an unwinnable War on Tigray Province.

Ethiopia’s most famous monastery has been bombed and looted of its ancient treasures according to reports emerging from the north of the country where fighting has left tens of thousands of people at risk of starvation.

Aid organisations warned they are “preparing for the worst” after four months of conflict between state forces and regional fighters in Tigray that has killed thousands amid reports of multiple massacres.

 Authorities in the capital have confirmed the rapes of scores of women and girls.

International experts have also raised the alarm over reports of “cultural cleansing” in the heritage-rich region with thefts and destruction of centuries-old artefacts at historically significant sites. 

In one recent alleged incident, troops from neighbouring Eritrea, which is backing government forces, ransacked manuscripts from the remains of the remote sixth-century Debre Damo monastery after clambering 80ft up a cliff to reach it.

Other buildings on the flat-topped mountain that were also “completely destroyed” included the monks’ ancient dwellings and the earliest existing church in Ethiopia that is still in its original style, according to the Europe External Programme with Africa.

Attacks have also been reported in recent months at the seventh century mosque of Negash, one of Africa’s oldest, and the Church of St Mary of Zion, which many Ethiopian Christians believe houses the Ark of the Covenant.

Specialists have warned that Tigray’s stolen gems could be spirited out of the country and sold to collectors. Video taken by Belgian journalists reporting on the conflict apparently showed an Eritrean tank loaded with plunder.

active #Covid19 cases record 520,000 was in January 2021 @NKCAfrica

Conclusions

This all happened with NPI [Non Pharmaceutical Intervention] however

 H. E Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed al Sa’eedi, Minister of Health, said the Supreme Committee is studying the prospect of stopping flights coming from countries that have high prevalence of coronavirus infections, including Tanzania.

Speaking to Oman TV on Monday evening, H E Dr Sa’eedi said data shows that travellers arriving from Tanzania in the sultanate have a high number of infected passengers among them. 

“Eighteen per cent tested positive for COVID-19, which is a very high number. The Supreme Committee is considering stopping flights coming from countries with high infection rates,” he said.

According to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report dated February 8, Tanzania has spent more than six months trying to convince the world that it has been cured of the coronavirus through ‘prayer’, while refusing to take measures to curb its spread. 

However, dissent is mounting, along with deaths attributed to ‘pneumonia’.

“COVID-19 is killing people and we see a lot of cases but we cannot talk about the disease,” AFP quoted a doctor as saying at a public hospital in Tanzania’s biggest city Dar es Salaam, who like many asked not to be named for fear of reprisals.

Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi named mining executive and ally Sama Lukonde Kyenge as prime minister of the world’s biggest cobalt producer.

The appointment entrenches the president’s break with predecessor Joseph Kabila, whose allies Tshisekedi has accused of blocking his political and economic reform program. 

It’s likely to result in the overhaul of the central African nation’s cabinet in the coming weeks.

Lukonde is currently the chief executive officer of Gecamines, Congo’s state-controlled copper and cobalt mining company. 

Tshisekedi’s spokesman Kasongo Mwema Yamba Yamba confirmed his appointment as premier in a text message Monday.

Lukonde, 43, previously served as minister of youth and sports and as a representative to parliament, according to the Twitter account of Congo’s presidency. 

The premier didn’t immediately respond to a message requesting comment.

The immediate challenge for the new government is its need to raise more revenue to support an expansion of social programs, particularly in the face of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Lukonde said Monday after meeting Tshisekedi in Kinshasa, the capital. 

His remarks were broadcast over the Twitter feed of Congolese media outlet Actualite.cd.

The appointment comes after the previous prime minister and Kabila ally, Sylvestre Ilunga, was forced to resign last month after lawmakers passed a motion of censure against his administration.

Tshisekedi, who took over from Kabila in 2019 after a disputed election, has struggled to implement his agenda in the face of pushback from the former president’s supporters, who dominated most of the country’s institutions of government after the vote.

In recent months, allies of Tshisekedi have been appointed to the Constitutional Court and the leadership of the National Assembly. The country’s Senate head -- another Kabila ally -- was also forced to resign.

Nigeria’s federal government has set the terms for the conversion of its stock of central bank overdrafts into long-term notes in a bid to create transparency around its dependence on that source of funding.

The 10 trillion naira ($25.6 billion) debt will be exchanged for 30-year notes issued to the central bank, Patience Oniha, head of the Debt Management Office said by email. 

The agreement on timing for the conversion needs to be finalized to get the required approval from the cabinet, at the earliest in the second quarter, Oniha said.

The Nigerian government becme dependent on central bank borrowing after oil prices collapsed in 2015. 

Earnings from crude sales account for about half of government income in Africa’s largest economy. 

The financing helped plug spending shortfalls as non-oil revenues failed to cover the gap created by lower earnings from crude exports.

The increasing reliance on CBN overdrafts has come with negative consequences, the International Monetary Fund said in a report published last week.

“The financing is costly for the federal government at interest rates of the monetary policy rate plus 300 basis points, and for the CBN, with sterilization done through issuance of open market operation bills,” the IMF said.

The converted debt will be amortized over 30 years starting with a two-year moratorium when the government will not pay anything, Oniha said. 

The central bank will decide whether the securities will be sold to the public.

The conversion will add to Nigeria’s debt stock, which stood at 49 trillion naira at the end of last year, according to estimates by the IMF. 

Public debt, including the central bank overdrafts, as a proportion of gross domestic product rose to 34.4% in 2020 from 29.1% in 2019, IMF data shows. 

The fund forecasts the debt to GDP ratio will remain largely unchanged until 2023 when it will rise to 35.5% of GDP.

Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed and central bank Governor Godwin Emefiele last year agreed to end CBN overdrafts to the government by 2025 in a letter of intent to the IMF before the release of emergency financing. 

However, Emefiele rebuffed criticism on the danger of the practice by Fitch Ratings, saying it would be irresponsible not to finance the government when revenues drop.

Money printing in Africa’s most populous nation has increased the excess liquidity in the system, and pressured the naira to be devalued twice, with inflation jumping to a four-year high in January.

There will be strict adherence to the statutory limit of the central bank overdraft to the government going forward, which is 5% of the preceding year’s revenue, Oniha said.

“There is a statutory limit, but it is then a question of if it is being implemented. Let’s clean the books and going forward the intention is to comply,” she said at a meeting with market players last week.

In a strategy paper released last week, Africa’s biggest crude producer raised the amount it could borrow as a proportion of GDP to 40% from 25% to accommodate its growing debt portfolio and stimulate an economy that is recovering from its second recession in four years.

The government will borrow mainly from domestic markets, while external debt will be raised mainly from multilateral and bilateral lenders, according to the debt office head. 

The government is seeking to raise the dollar equivalent of 2.3 trillion naira in offshore markets and will consider issuing a Eurobond depending on market conditions.

The government also plans to issue Sukuk and green bonds to finance some projects, Oniha said.

Weekly hit rate has risen for 4 STRAIGHT weeks from a low of 2.62% to 4% in the week ended 15th Feb.