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Thursday 22nd of July 2021
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Morning
Africa
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Register and its all Free.
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Anybody can be decisive during a panic It takes a strong Man to act during a Boom. VS NAIPAUL
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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The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French @guardian
Misc.
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'I would take poison rather than do this for a living,' said VS Naipaul after teaching a creative-writing course to American students who divided into those who thought him by far the most brilliant teacher on campus and those for whom he was a bigot ('He was simply the worst, most closed-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met').
Over the past 50 years, the London literary world has been split along similar lines.
For a reclusive literary ascetic with patrician attitudes and a Miltonic sense of destiny, Naipaul has maintained a consistently high gossip quotient, trading public provocation and personal insults, pursuing and pursued to this day by private vendettas vigorously conducted in print with ex-friends and once faithful supporters.
His strange character and stranger career, coupled with rumours about his triangular private life, mystified people who knew him almost as much as people who didn't.
Naipaul and his English wife met as fellow undergraduates at Oxford, married almost at once and dedicated themselves ever after exclusively to his writing.
Patricia Hale gave up everything - her family, her future, her faith in herself - to marry a scholarship boy with no prospects, contacts or money at a time when the racial prejudice endemic at every level of British society prevented him getting a job or even renting a room in London.
Naipaul's uncles in Trinidad were 'Hindi-speaking cane-cutters'. His grandfather had been shipped out of India as indentured labour ('slavery with an expiry date', as Patrick French puts it).
In the half a century after he first landed in England, Naipaul rose up the ranks of wealth, fame and privilege to collect every available worldly honour, including a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for literature.
His wife understood from the start both the scale of her husband's ambition and the punitive price to be paid in human terms.
He stopped her acting on the grounds that it offended him, refused to buy her a wedding ring ('I had no interest in jewellery,' he explained blandly to his biographer) and stamped out any hope she may have had of an independent career, except in so far as he needed her initially to earn his keep.
Her world contracted as his expanded. He undermined her confidence, derided her opinions and told her she was too dull to take to parties.
She stopped travelling with him because, for the last 20 years of her life, he shared his favours with a far more sophisticated and no less compliant Argentinian mistress who crisscrossed the globe at his side, providing services, principally boastful, energetic and violent sex, outside the scope of his mute, sad, stay-at-home wife.
Blatant long-term infidelity proved easier to endure than Naipaul's public announcement, printed in the New Yorker in 1994 and reprinted in headlines around the world, that he had regularly paid prostitutes for sex in the early years of his marriage.
The shock of this revelation devastated Patricia Naipaul, who had been in remission from a cancer that now became terminal. 'It could be said that I killed her,' her husband conceded dispassionately to his biographer in one of the brutally frank interviews that provide the backbone of this extraordinary book.
French received similarly candid confessions from virtually everyone close to his subject, including the current Lady Naipaul, Nadira Alvi, a Pakistani journalist 20 years younger than the writer, who proposed to her in Karachi as soon as it became clear that his first wife had no chance of survival.
'He felt angry that she was dying,' Nadira reported, 'and angry that she was not dying fast enough because he wanted to carry on with his life.'
The day after Patricia Naipaul's brief, austere and impersonal funeral, her successor moved into her house and a few months later scattered her ashes in the nearest wood while reciting a prayer in praise of Allah.
The speed and ruthlessness of this takeover cost Naipaul many friends ('Friendship has not been important to me,' he told French grandly).
It also meant dumping the mistress, who had hoped to marry him, but found herself paid off instead with a lump sum because, as Naipaul pointed out, she had disqualified herself for the job by becoming, 'middle-aged, almost an old lady'.
It is at this point, in October 1996, that French abruptly breaks off a biography that reads on one level like a contemporary variation on Bluebeard's Castle, the kind of malign fairy tale at which, according to Naipaul, English writers excel.
But on another level, this book tells a different story.
The young Naipaul notoriously dismissed the achievements of better-known contemporaries still working in the great 19th-century tradition of the European novel for the same reason that artists like Matisse and Picasso struggled at the start of the last century to overthrow the canons of Western Renaissance art.
So far as he was concerned, their time was up: 'The late 20th century ... needs another kind of interpretation.'
He dismantled the barriers between fiction and non-fiction in bulletins on a world in flux filed from Trinidad, India, Africa, South America, Indonesia, even the etiolated manorial setting of the English South Downs.
His view is exhilarating, alien and unforgiving, at once phenomenally accurate and unsoftened by the consolations of familiarity.
If works such as A Bend in the River or The Enigma of Arrival are not novels in any conventional sense, so much the worse for the novel.
The harsh emotional honesty that made him as a writer destroyed him as a man.
Its tensions constantly threatened to wreck the fatal fruitful pact with his wife.
An inherent lack of self-assurance in Patricia Naipaul ('I have nothing but contempt for myself') latched on to the opposite in her husband, the terrible ingrained response of an acutely sensitive child to the insecurity, shame and humiliation of the poor and dispossessed in the colonial setting from which he came.
'Contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature,' Naipaul wrote in his semi-autobiographical novel, A House for Mr Biswas. 'It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.'
Beneath that invincibility lay the raw wounds of a jealous, angry, egotistical child, wounds Naipaul displayed to his wife while simultaneously punishing her for an intimacy he hid from the world.
She discussed, revised and retyped his books for him, recording the process in unpublished diaries as bleak in human terms as they are richly rewarding from a literary point of view.
In a grim entry made during the writing of his novel Guerrillas, she recognises herself both in the murder victim and in the sidekick who finally turns on and kills the murderer.
A few years later, in a rare, marvellous moment of mutual satisfaction, she describes her husband dictating a key transitional passage from A Bend in the River at speed, with his eyes closed and successive expressions chasing one another over his face, 'like weather'.
Even on her deathbed, Naipaul was still reading work in progress aloud to his wife and taking her advice about what to do with it ('A few days before her death she was able to judge it,' he told French).
There is something monstrous about the urgent, exorbitant need that overrode any consideration of human feeling, compassion or basic decency.
But radical innovation has rarely been the work of kind, tidy-minded, well-adjusted people sticking to procedures compatible with mental health and safety.
Twentieth-century Modernism was invented in the first place by artists who struck their contemporaries as freaks and madmen spewing out the contents of sick or perverted minds.
Patricia Naipaul bore the brunt of her husband's disturbed and disturbing imagination.
Her diaries recording his life as a writer, together with his own cold, hard analyses of his conduct as a man, take us probably as far as it is possible to go to the core of the creative process.
The World Is What It Is must have taken nerves of iron to write. Its clarity, honesty, even-handedness, its panoramic range and close emotional focus, above all its virtually unprecedented access to the dark secret life at its heart, make it one of the most gripping biographies I've ever read.
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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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'You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way." - V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
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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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V S Naipaul "In our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings."
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"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."-- V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State
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''You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.” ― V.S. Naipaul
Misc.
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“Going home at night! It wasn't often that I was on the river at night. I never liked it. I never felt in control. In the darkness of river and forest you could be sure only of what you could see — and even on a moonlight night you couldn't see much. When you made a noise — dipped a paddle in the water — you heard yourself as though you were another person. The river and the forest were like presences, and much more powerful than you. You felt unprotected, an intruder ... You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there.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
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In the background is one of the prettiest mosque that I have seen.#Ranthambhore @adityadickysin
Misc.
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Luminous and Fairy Tale
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Eight years ago today, Cassini took a photo of us all. That bright dot? Earth, from Saturn. @ThePlanetaryGuy
Misc.
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“Ours is the most cryptic of Centuries, it’s true Nature a Dark Secret” @SalmanRushdie
Misc.
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But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife . @MargaretAtwood
Misc.
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The Pandemic Is a Portal
Misc.
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Sunrise, Fort Jesus Mombasa @Qushh
Africa
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Fort Jesus (Portuguese: Forte Jesus de Mombaça) Designed by Italian Giovanni Battista Cairati,[1] it was built between 1593 and 1596, by order of King Philip I of Portugal, to guard the Old Port of Mombasa
Africa
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19-JUL-2021 :: The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
Misc.
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Now lets turn our gaze further afield. I used to trade Emerging Markets and what I noticed how ripples at the Periphery could boomerang towards the centre.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
Lorenz wrote:
"At one point I decided to repeat some of the computations in order to examine what was happening in greater detail. I stopped the computer, typed in a line of numbers that it had printed out a while earlier, and set it running again. I went down the hall for a cup of coffee and returned after about an hour, during which time the computer had simulated about two months of weather. The numbers being printed were nothing like the old ones. I immediately suspected a weak vacuum tube or some other computer trouble, which was not uncommon, but before calling for service I decided to see just where the mistake had occurred, knowing that this could speed up the servicing process. Instead of a sudden break, I found that the new values at first repeated the old ones, but soon afterward differed by one and then several units in the last decimal place, and then began to differ in the next to the last place and then in the place before that. In fact, the differences more or less steadily doubled in size every four days or so, until all resemblance with the original output disappeared somewhere in the second month. This was enough to tell me what had happened: the numbers that I had typed in were not the exact original numbers, but were the rounded-off values that had appeared in the original printout. The initial round-off errors were the culprits; they were steadily amplifying until they dominated the solution." (E. N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, U. Washington Press, Seattle (1993), page 134)[7]
Elsewhere he stated:
One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.
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Political Reflections
Law & Politics
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It was in 1991 [3 decades ago now] that Krauthammer spoke of the “Unipolar Moment” Thirty years later, The US is exiting Afghanistan
Misc.
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Veteran says #US forces fought a lost cause in Afghan war @TheNationalNews
Law & Politics
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19-JUL-2021 :: The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
Law & Politics
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look up @McConaughey
The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
It was in 1991 [3 decades ago now] that Krauthammer spoke of the “Unipolar Moment” and highlighted that the US had emerged as the center of world power and unchallenged superpower.
Thirty years later, The US is exiting Afghanistan and we can speak of a Tripolar World with the US, China and Russia now ruling the c21st Roost.
The ''Salami Slicer'' has snaffled up Hong Kong and the World waits on tenterhooks for the inevitable move on Taiwan.
Putin's Russia expanded into Crimea and has a firm foothold in the Middle East in Syria. It is often said that Russia's economy is a Pygmy [and comparable to Italy's] but then we have to admit Russia's Power Projection is practically miraculous.
The World is full of friction points and it is Xi Jinping [President for Life and Eternity] who has rolled the dice and is on a winning streak.
The Virus whether by design or accident accelerated the advantage in China's favour whichever way you care to slice and dice it.
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Myanmar is on the verge of collapse @spectator
Law & Politics
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Deep in south-east Asia sits a country where 54 million people are living a total nightmare. A nation that, benighted for decades, now faces a humanitarian catastrophe.
Myanmar – otherwise known as Burma – has been hit by a quadruple whammy: a military coup, a half-century long civil war reignited with a vengeance, economic collapse and coronavirus.
It faces a dire humanitarian emergency fuelled by coup, collapse, civil war and Covid.
Since the coup on 1 February, over 900 people have been killed by the army and over 5,000 jailed.
Hundreds of thousands have been displaced after the military unleashed an aerial bombardment on ethnic minorities on a scale not seen for years.
Activists are facing what the United Nations calls a ‘brute force terror campaign’, while children endure an onslaught that the UN Child Rights Committee (CRC) says risks leaving an entire generation damaged.
At least 75 children have been killed, 1,000 detained and countless more denied medical care.
Children are held in police stations, prisons and army camps.
Among them is a five year-old girl whose father demonstrated against the coup. Other children have been taken hostage. Some children have been killed at home, including a six year-old girl shot dead in her father’s arms.
‘Children in Myanmar are under siege and facing catastrophic loss of life because of the military coup,’ said CRC Chair Mikiko Otani. ‘If this crisis continues, an entire generation of children is at risk.’
On top of this comes Covid.
Myanmar weathered the early waves relatively well. Not now. Today people defy curfews to seek oxygen, cemeteries and hospitals are overflowing, and the sick die at home.
Myanmar’s health system was rudimentary at the best of times. Today, with doctors targeted by the military for opposing the coup, it’s collapsing.
As the UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews says: ‘The crisis in Myanmar is particularly lethal because of the pervasive mistrust of the military junta.’
The military’s inhumanity knows no bounds. It is seizing what remains of the country’s oxygen supply.
Last week, soldiers in Yangon shot into a crowd queuing for oxygen tanks.
In contrast, in a powerful sermon last Sunday the country’s courageous Cardinal Charles Bo issued a direct appeal to the military to ‘drop all guns’ and ‘bring medical care’, noting that for too many, ‘every breath has become a challenge.’
Yesterday the spokesperson for Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), Nyan Win, whom I knew well, died of Covid.
Many other political prisoners in Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison have contracted the virus, including foreigners.
I am deeply concerned for my friend Sean Turnell, an Australian economist who advised Suu Kyi, and the American journalist Danny Fenster, both of whom are in jail.
Another friend, Yangon’s jaild former social affairs minister Naing Lin, also has Covid.
For the military, the democrats it cannot shoot, it will kill off with the virus.
There is a temptation for the rest of the world to shrug. Myanmar has a history of coups, it has been ruled by the army for almost all its post-independence life and its flirtation with democracy was disappointing.
Indeed, in the past ten years of opening we witnessed genocide and the rise of religious nationalism.
Aung San Suu Kyi disappointed everyone. In office, she failed to stand up for the values we thought she held dear.
Whatever the answers, there is no doubt that she and her colleagues should not now be in jail. Her NLD won an overwhelming majority and has every right to form a government.
The National Unity Government (NUG) has been formed to oppose the military. It is made up of parties elected last November, and includes a number of different ethnic groups.
One of its leading lights is my friend Dr Sasa, their minister for international cooperation.
He told a recent inquiry by the UK House of Commons’ foreign affairs committee that Myanmar faces ‘a pivotal moment’ and its ‘darkest hour’, with genocide ever more likely.
Morally, we should recognise the National Unity Government. The military seized power with no legitimacy. Their actions are criminal. The NUG is the legitimate representative of the people.
Democratic nations may hesitate to give the Unity Government full diplomatic recognition, because they don’t want to lose their embassies in Yangon which, even in constrained circumstances, might be helpful.
Nonetheless, the free world should get as close as possible to recognising the NUG. As the UK foreign affairs committee argued, ‘rather than an exile government, the NUG should be treated as a government-in-waiting.’
Action is needed now. The UN’s Tom Andrews has called for an ‘emergency coalition’ to stop the military’s ‘reign of terror’.
We should aim to cut the financial lifeline to the military generals via tough, targeted sanctions.
Some have been imposed, but there is more to do. And we should prevent the flow of arms through a global arms embargo.
We should provide a lifeline to the people of Myanmar via humanitarian aid, through every means possible, while avoiding putting money into the army’s pockets.
It is in no one’s interests for Myanmar to end up a failed state, starving, unable to breathe, and torn apart by civil war. Such a scenario will lead to a refugee crisis, further spread of the pandemic, a failure for democracy and an advance for authoritarianism.
We have every reason to intervene now.
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19-JUL-2021 :: You will note tensions are igniting across the globe.
Law & Politics
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You will note tensions are igniting across the globe. To assume that contagion stops in country and does not turn viral in a c21st World where the Few control practically everything is another narrative I would prefer to be limit short.
To assume that contagion stops in country and does not turn viral in a c21st World where the Few control practically everything is another narrative I would prefer to be limit short.
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The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
Misc.
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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. now is the time of monsters.”
Misc.
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Prolonged stand-offs eviscerate economies, reducing opportunities and accelerate the negative feed- back loop.
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A family of 5 in Lebanon spends over 3.5 million Lebanese Pounds per month on food alone @michaeltanchum
Emerging Markets
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Take a look at how events are unfolding From Cuba to Colombia, South Africa to Lebanon, and you will note tensions are igniting across the globe
Law & Politics
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19-JUL-2021 :: COVID-19
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The Virus remains unresolved. I recall a few months ago every Pharma Co. pronounced how their Vaccine had an efficacy of close enough to 100%.
Today the relative viral loads in the Delta variant infections are 1260 times higher than the 19A/19B strains infections and the same variant ''shows 8 fold approximately reduced sensitivity to vaccine-elicited antibodies compared to wild type Wuhan-1 bearing D614G'' [@GuptaR_lab].
Thread
We now further define Delta immune evasion using a panel of 38 monoclonal antibodies, showing significant loss of potency of NTD and RBD targeting antibodies. @GuptaR_lab
Far from ebbing, the virus has gained virulence and you have to be a Naif to believe the Microbe is licked.
554,753 cases yesterday also above accelerating 485,767/day avg (up 28% past 2wks). @jmlukens
We are now approaching the FIFTH peak in COVID cases and deaths in just sixteen months @greg_travis
Certainly, the Vaccine has mitigated Mortality but lets see for how long because in a hyperconnected World just about everyone has to be vaccinated for the World to reach Herd Immunity. Its just not going to happen.
Still see 70% quoted as level of vaccination required for 'herd immunity'. Important to note it's now likely to be much higher. @AdamJKucharski
The standard (albeit rough) calculation for herd immunity threshold is (1/E) x (1-1/R) where E is vaccine effectiveness in reducing transmission above calc suggests would need to vaccinate (1-1/6)/0.85 = 98% of population @AdamJKucharski
In scenario where R is 6 (plausible for Delta in susceptible populations without any restrictions), and vaccination reduces infection/infectiousness such that onwards transmission reduced by 85%, above calc suggests would need to vaccinate (1-1/6)/0.85 = 98% of population. 2/
If transmission reduction is less than this (which is likely the case for some vaccines against Delta), or R higher, then herd immunity wouldn't be achievable through current vaccines alone. @AdamJKucharski
So, my Point is this, our Attention span is short and Many Folks seem to feel we are in the final Act of the COVID-19 Play. I would be limit short that particular narrative.
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Brits dance the night away in nightclubs from midnight as UK finally unlocks #FreedomDay @TheSun
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Globally, +12% cases & +1% deaths in last week @mvankerkhove
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The Virus remains an exogenous uncertainty that is still not resolved #COVID19
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We emerged from the below captioned 4 weeks ago.
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If you have a "normal" pandemic that is fading, but "variants" that [are] surging, the combined total can look like a flat, manageable situation. @spignal
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Weekly epidemiological update on COVID-19 - 20 July 2021 @WHO
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The global number of new cases reported last week (12-18 July 2021) was over 3.4 million, a 12% increase as compared to the previous week.
Globally, COVID-19 case weekly incidence increased with an average of around 490 000 cases reported each day over the past week as compared to 400 000 cases daily in the previous week.
Following a steady decline for over two months, the number of weekly deaths reported was similar to the previous week, with almost 57 000 deaths reported.
Last week, four Regions (all except the Regions of the Americas and Africa) reported an increase in case incidence.
The Western Pacific Region recorded the largest increase in case incidence as compared to the previous week, followed by the European Region (30% and 21%, respectively) (Table 1).
The South-East Asia and Eastern Mediterranean Regions also recorded increases in case incidence, 16% and 15%, respectively, as compared to the previous week.
The number of deaths increased in the South-East Asia and the Western Pacific Regions by 12% and 10%, respectively, as compared to the previous week.
The African, Eastern Mediterranean and European Regions reported similar numbers of deaths as compared to the previous week, whereas the Region of Americas reported a 6% decrease.
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*Reported* COVID-19 cases @Marco_Piani
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Vietnam total cases exponentially grew from 3k to 65.6k in only 46 days. @jmlukens
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Nations w/ fastest #COVID19 avg growth rate (daily/total)
Vietnam: 9.21%
Fiji: 7.12%
Laos: 3.58%
Mauritius: 2.79%
Thailand: 2.71%
Burma: 2.58%
Rwanda: 2.49%
Cuba: 2.33%
Botswana: 2.02%
Senegal: 1.93%
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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Professor Allen Bartlett
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All US counties’ diagnosed #COVID19 cases vs time since start of pandemic. US in early stages of new wave in which cases are rising universally across nearly all counties at an unprecedented rate. @jmlukens
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US 171% increase in new cases past 2wks is fastest observed exponential growth in nation since start of pandemic. @jmlukens
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Malcolm Gladwell ‟Tipping Point‟ moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It‟s the boiling point. It‟s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.
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Humanity is extremely lucky that Delta's single nucleotide mutation in the furin cleavage site which has overclocked SARS2's transmissibility by an order of magnitude only got traction in May 2021, rather than May 2020. @ydeigin
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If original SARS2's furin cleavage site would have been as efficient, its R0 would have been around 6, which means by now we would have probably had ~40M dead and ~1B infected. @ydeigin
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Thankfully, we now have vaccines that greatly reduce death and severe Covid risks even from Delta.
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International Markets
World Of Finance
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However, I am resetting my target Yield to 1.25% now. 09-MAY-2021 The Markets The Lotos-eaters
World Of Finance
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Conclusions
I believe we are now headed to < than 1%
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US $TNX @beestersking
World Currencies
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09-MAY-2021 The Markets The Lotos-eaters
World Of Finance
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On 8th March when the Bears had gotten hold of the US 10 Year, I wrote that I expected the 10 Year to target 1.45% well we got real close on Friday before the market reversed
Ten- year yields initially plunged to a more than two-month low of 1.46%, then reversed to end the day at 1.58%. However, I am resetting my target Yield to 1.25% now.
Given the volume of money Printing and the extraordinary stimulus I have to say that the US Recovery is actually really weak and I believe it will be very short lived and the Penny will drop soon with the Bond Market and the Shorts will be forced to cover.
The Consensus View appears to be that the Global economy is going to accelerate big time and that its going to BOOM! I beg to differ
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19-JUL-2021 :: Mirrors On The Ceiling The Pink champagne on ice
World Of Finance
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19-JUL-2021 :: “We injected monetary heroin into the system.” Richard Fisher
World Of Finance
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The Markets have scorched higher on a tidal wave of practically ''free'' money and in anticipation of the much heralded unleashing of ''pent up'' demand.
Ex-Dallas Fed Pres. Richard Fisher put it: “We injected monetary heroin into the system.” @ClarkiiStomias
Now the only systemic outcomes are withdrawal (asset destruction) or overdose (currency destruction), either of which would lead to the system’s death.
However, there are many discordant notes.
Firstly consider
17. The Bullwhip Effect after the great lockdown is often confused with a new and stronger growth trend. @dlacalle_IA
Secondly consider the price behaviour
US Bonds across the curve @coloradotravis
I am limit long the US Ultra Bond because I recall Japan and the words of that iconic Eagles song ''Hotel California''
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device" And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave! "
And when the Feedback Loop kicks in I expect it to kick big to the downside.
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Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ
World Currencies
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Euro 1.1799
Dollar Index 92.725
Japan Yen 110.24
Swiss Franc 0.9170
Pound 1.3754
Aussie 0.7378
India Rupee 74.35
South Korea Won 1148.97
Brazil Real 5.1884
Egypt Pound 15.6675
South Africa Rand 14.5166
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Dollar Index Chart INO 92.733
World Currencies
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Euro versus the Dollar Chart 1.1799
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Commodity Markets at a Glance WSJ
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Gold 6 month INO 1801.67
Commodities
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Crude Oil Chart INO 70.17
Minerals, Oil & Energy
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19-JUL-2021 :: Now lets turn to Africa. lets look at the Virus first
Africa
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"Over the past month, #Africa recorded an additional 1 million cases. This is the shortest time it’s taken so far to add one million cases." Dr @MoetiTshidi #COVID19 @WHOAFRO
"Comparatively, it took around three months to move from 4 million to 5 million cases." - Dr @MoetiTshidi #COVID19
From the Africa CDC. (Note: this is based only on official statistics and formal testing, so it undercounts the real situation.) @geoffreyyork
We are on the cusp of the Gladwellian moment
Malcolm Gladwell ‟Tipping Point‟ moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It‟s the boiling point. It‟s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.
“Past next year we will be moving toward endemicity of this virus on our continent and the consequences will be catastrophic,” @JNkengason
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@WHO regional overviews - Epidemiological week 12 – 18 July 2021 African Region
Africa
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Following an increasing trend in the weekly number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths since early May 2021, the Region reported a slight decrease in case incidence (with over 202 000 new cases) and mortality (over 4800 new deaths) in the past week, as compared to the previous week.
These trends were largely driven by decreases reported in South Africa, which reported the highest numbers of new cases (104 583 cases) and more than 50% of the cases reported in the region in the past week.
Other countries reporting high numbers of new cases include:
Zimbabwe (15 760 cases; 106.0 cases/100 000; +20%),
Botswana (10 745 cases; 456.9 cases/100 000; +172%),
while the highest numbers of new cases per population were reported in
Seychelles (545 cases/100 000; -28%)
Botswana (see above)
Namibia (317 cases/100 000; -19%).
The highest numbers of new deaths were rep
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Drinking the Kool-Aid
Africa
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Africa is currently reporting a million new infections about every 26 days @ReutersGraphics
Africa
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8 countries are still at the peak of their infection curve. Algeria Senegal Rwanda Mauritius at peak Mozambique at 98% Botswana at 97% Libya at 95% Zimbabwe at 92%
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674,049 Active COVID-19 Cases in Africa @BeautifyData [29.624% above WAVE 2 High from January 2021]
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Active #Covid19 cases record 520,000 was in January 2021 @NKCAfrica
Africa
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19. Nationally, the test positivity rate in South Africa is still high: 7-day average at 27.8% down 5% week-on-week @rid1tweets
Africa
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Hence, for countries largely left without vaccines, the Delta wave is the most deadly yet Namibia @TWenseleers
Africa
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In one of most dramatic moves on record, 18 of 32 African countries rated by at least one of the ‘big three’ agencies ( @FitchRatings @MoodysInvSvc and S&P) endured downgrades at peak of pandemic downturn in 2020 @FofackHippolyte
Africa
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This landslide of procyclical downgrades affected more than 56% of rated African countries, significantly above the global average of 31.8% as well as averages in other parts of the world (45.4% in the Americas, 28% in Asia, and 9.2% in Europe).
The share of affected African nations is even higher (62.5%) if we extend the period covered to include the two countries downgraded in the first half of 2021.
Further curtailing investor confidence, the glut of downgrades has been accompanied by a torrent of negative reviews of African countries’ ratings outlooks.
Cumulatively, rating agencies revised downward the outlook of 17 nations, in four cases from positive to stable and in the remaining 13 from stable to negative.
The significance of these large-scale procyclical moves goes far beyond the total number of downgrades.
They have created cliff effects, with two of the very few African countries – Morocco and South Africa – that have enjoyed a relatively low sovereign risk premium losing their investment grade and becoming, in the vernacular of rating agencies, ‘fallen angels’.
For years, four nations in the region – Botswana, Mauritius, Morocco and South Africa – have enjoyed investment grade status.
By downgrading the latter two to high-yield and junk status, the financial fallout of the Covid-19 downturn has been cataclysmic for Africa’s sovereign risk profile.
The region will emerge from the pandemic with over 93% of its sovereigns rated as sub-investment grade borrowers.
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19-JUL-2021 :: Major Economies like South Africa and Ethiopia have tipped. Nigeria is not far behind.
Africa
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There is a clear attempt at rendering South Africa ungovernable.
To use state paralysis as a bargaining chip to achieve a political objective. Call this what it is, its an insurgency @Pol_Sec_Analyst
We are getting closer and closer to the Virilian Tipping Point
This week’s violence has stretched the social fabric to breaking point and left the economic powerhouse of the continent on a knife-edge. — Karl Maier
Phase Two: looting was just the start say investigators and intelligence @mailandguardian
A source close to Zuma told the M&G that it would be wise to remember that the instigators are soldiers. They know where to hit and how to plan economic sabotage.
“The plan was not for the looting but to hit the white capital that supports [President Cyril] Ramaphosa so that they will go to him and say; ‘Stop what you are doing. This is hurting us now.’ They will now strike where they don’t expect it. Zuma must be released, and Ramaphosa must go,” said the source.
According to an ANC national executive committee (NEC) leader, Ramaphosa was warned by intelligence that this was the first phase of a programme that aims to destabilise the country.
The NEC member said they were told that the instigators are equipped with heavy machinery and the looting is only phase one.
“This is what we are hearing. The second phase is to burn resources and this is what I foresee will happen soon,” said the source.
I am limit short the ZAR
Nigeria of course is in a not dissimilar situation.
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Turning to Africa
Africa
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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
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Tanzania arrests leader of main opposition party @Reuters
Africa
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Tanzania's main opposition party said on Wednesday its leader had been arrested with ten other party figures, in what it called proof that President Samia Suluhu Hassan was persisting with the authoritarianism of her late predecessor John Magufuli.
The Chadema party said leader Freeman Mbowe and the others had been detained before dawn at a hotel in the lakeside city of Mwanza, where they had been planning to hold a meeting later on Wednesday to discuss proposals for a new constitution.
The arrests followed the detention of dozens of other party members last week for holding a meeting without permission.
The Mwanza region's police commander and the regional commissioner both did not immediately respond to calls and messages seeking comment.
On Tuesday regional commissioner Robert Gabriel had told reporters that gatherings without government permission were banned in line with policies introduced since Hassan took office to curb COVID-19.
“We are condemning this violation of human rights for Tanzanians and this is a sign that the dictatorship that was prevailing during President Magufuli's administration is still persisting,” Chadema said in a statement published on its Twitter page.
Chadema's former presidential candidate, Tundu Lissu, who lives in self-imposed exile in Europe, tweeted that Hassan's rise following Magufuli's death in March had brought "hope that Magufuli's reign of terror and war on democracy would end.
"Last night's arrest of Chairman Mbowe and CHADEMA leaders has dashed any such hope. It's now time for nationwide protests and international isolation of her regime."
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Alex de Waal “In the face of the calamities of the last months, Abiy has preferred to live in a bubble of illusion rather than take the necessary and painful steps to salvage his country.” @_hudsonc
Africa
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19-JUL-2021 :: His Army has been defeated and now he is sending conscripts to slaughter whilst his Adversaries are fighting for their existence.
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Significant I venture. #Tigray Defence Forces #TDF moving towards #Ethiopia-Djibouti @BashirHashiysf
Africa
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Accordingly #Tigray Forces captured both the train route and road between Addis Ababa and #Djibouti
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South Africa All Share Bloomberg
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Dollar versus Rand Chart INO 14.5196
Africa
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Egypt Pound versus The Dollar Chart INO 15.6655
Africa
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Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg
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Weak oil and construction industries weigh on #Angola Q1 #GDP growth rate. @NKCAfrica
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Kenya 🇰🇪 has one of the lowest per capita testing for COVID-19 compared to other countries including in East Africa, Africa & globally. @DrAhmedKalebi
Africa
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BAT Kenya reports H1 2021 EPS +0.7%
N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied
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Par Value: 10/-
Closing Price: 445.00
Total Shares Issued: 100000000.00
Market Capitalization: 44,500,000,000
EPS: 55.18
PE: 8.065
Half year Results for 6 months ended 30th June 2021
Gross Revenue 20.245b versus 16.615b
Excise Duty and VAT [7.703b] versus [6.078b]
HY Net Revenue 12.542b versus 10.537b
HY Total Cost of Operations [8.638b] versus [6.790b]
HY Operating Profit 3.904b versus 3.747b
HY Profit before Tax 3.855b versus 3.666b
HY Profit After Tax 2.698b versus 2.679b
HY Total comprehensive Income 2.813b versus 2.608b
Interim Dividend 3.50 unchanged
HY EPS 26.98 versus 26.79
Commentary
Excise Duty rates on cigarettes were increased by 5% in October 2020.
This triggered price increases which generated additional pressure on consumer affordability resulting in downgrading to lower priced brands
and a high incidence of illicit trade in tax evaded cigarettes [estimated at 23%]
Gross Revenue increased by 22% driven by recovery of domestic sales volume excise led price increases and momentum on export sales
Net Revenue increased by 12.5%
Total cost of operations increased by 27% driven by higher sales volumes investments in portfolio transformation and impact of COVID-19 driven spend cuts in H1 2020
Cash generated improved significantly by 3.2b to 3.6b compared to H1 2020
Conclusions
compelling and attractive on a PE of 8.06
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BAT Kenya Plc - Results for the Six Months Ended 30th June 2021. @tradingroomke
N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied
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Kenya Shilling versus The Dollar Live ForexPros
World Currencies
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Nairobi All Share Bloomberg
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Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg
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Every Listed Share can be interrogated here
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