[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The whole issue and capacity of closing down borders, monitoring exit and entry is intriguing in demonstrating that human ecology management - border control - is possible.
Furthermore, the issue of viral contagion being immediately destructive, brings into awareness and discussion the hazard and potential long term destruction of introducing different species of people into a human ecology. It assists in cultivating benign rhetoric.
We might refer back to the issue of Typhoid Mary accusing the health department of NYC of discriminating against her because she was Irish.
No, dear, it’s not arbitrary discrimination and blind prejudice. It’s not because you are Irish. On the contrary, our human ecology and the nuances of its management cannot accommodate this introduction.
Amren’s Jared Taylor comes to a similar conclusion which he relates in this communique:
Poland reports first death from COVID-19, to raise epidemic alert level
Poland reported its first death from coronavirus, local authorities in the city of Poznan said on Thursday (Mar 12), as reported by private broadcaster TVN24.
The 57-year-old female teacher, who had recently been hospitalised in critical condition with pneumonia, was put into an artificial coma and on a ventilator but “unfortunately she died not long ago,” Poznan deputy mayor Jedrzej Solarski told reporters.
Poland currently has 46 other confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the health ministry.
The woman’s husband and daughter are among those hospitalised with coronavirus but their conditions are not critical. Other family members, including the woman’s two sons, have not been infected.
“What we feared over the last few days has come about. We have our first death from the coronavirus,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters.
“I offer my condolences to her close ones.”
STATE OF EPIDEMIC THREAT
Poland plans to announce a state of epidemic threat, health minister Lukasz Szumowski said on Thursday.
“Yesterday, the WHO announced a pandemic. Today we will release a decision by the Health Minister regarding the introduction of a state of epidemic threat,” Szumowski told a press conference.
This will allow the government to close chosen places of work or institutions and direct medical workers to places of need, he added.
It is known that the woman has not recently been abroad and had no contact with a person who would have been suspected to have or having been diagnosed with COVID-19 disease. According to preliminary findings, several days ago she had contact with a person who returned from Italy.
For the first time, the World Health Organization called the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, a pandemic. Meanwhile, the United States now has more than 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus — but testing in the country is still ramping up, meaning that number could continue to climb.
WHO defines a pandemic as the worldwide spread of a new disease for which most people do not have immunity.
On Wednesday, the governor of New York questioned the number of people who have been tested for the virus in the U.S.
“When they do the retrospective on this one, they are going to say, ‘Why did it take the Unites States so long to bring up the testing capacity?’” Gov. Cuomo said on “TODAY.” On Tuesday, Cuomo announced that he was implementing a “containment area” around a one-mile radius in the city of New Rochelle, home to one of the largest clusters of coronavirus cases in the country.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 11 March 2020 07:45.
The Fed’s Baffling Response to the Coronavirus Explained
Man wearing mask in front of New York Stock Exchange buildingA man taking precautions amid the coronavirus outbreak walks past the New York Stock Exchange. (Mark Lennihan / AP)
When the World Health Organization announced on Feb. 24 that it was time to prepare for a global pandemic, the stock market plummeted. Over the following week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by more than 3,500 points, or 10%. In an attempt to contain the damage, the Federal Reserve on March 3 slashed the fed funds rate from 1.5% to 1.0%, in its first emergency rate move and biggest one-time cut since the 2008 financial crisis. But rather than reassuring investors, the move fueled another panic sell-off.
Exasperated commentators on CNBC wondered what the Fed was thinking. They said a half-point rate cut would not stop the spread of the coronavirus or fix the broken Chinese supply chains that are driving U.S. companies to the brink. A new report by corporate data analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet calculates that some 51,000 companies around the world have one or more direct suppliers in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus. At least 5 million companies globally have one or more tier-two suppliers in the region, meaning that their suppliers get their supplies there; and 938 of the Fortune 1,000 companies have tier-one or tier-two suppliers there. Moreover, fully 80% of U.S. pharmaceuticals are made in China. A break in the supply chain can grind businesses to a halt.
So what was the Fed’s reasoning for lowering the fed funds rate? According to some financial analysts, the fire it was trying to put out was actually in the repo market, where the Fed has lost control despite its emergency measures of the last six months. Repo market transactions come to $1 trillion to $2.2 trillion per day and keep our modern-day financial system afloat. But to follow the developments there, we first need a recap of the repo action since 2008.
Repos and the Fed
Before the 2008 banking crisis, banks in need of liquidity borrowed excess reserves from each other in the fed funds market. But after 2008, banks were reluctant to lend in that unsecured market, because they did not trust their counterparts to have the money to pay up. Banks desperate for funds could borrow at the Fed’s discount window, but it carried a stigma. It signaled that the bank must be in distress, since other banks were not willing to lend to it at a reasonable rate. So banks turned instead to the private repo market, which is anonymous and is secured with collateral (Treasuries and other acceptable securities). Repo trades, although technically “sales and repurchases” of collateral, are in effect secured short-term loans, usually repayable the next day or in two weeks.
The risky element of these apparently secure trades is that the collateral itself may not be reliable, because it may be subject to more than one claim. For example, it may have been acquired in a swap with another party for securitized auto loans or other shaky assets — a swap that will have to be reversed at maturity. As I explained in an earlier article, the private repo market has been invaded by hedge funds, which are highly leveraged and risky; so risk-averse money market funds and other institutional lenders have been withdrawing from that market. When the normally low repo interest rate shot up to 10% in September, the Fed felt compelled to step in. The action it took was to restart its former practice of injecting money short-term through its own repo agreements with its primary dealers, which then lent to banks and other players. On March 3, however, even that central bank facility was oversubscribed, with far more demand for loans than the subscription limit.
The Fed’s emergency rate cut was in response to that crisis. Lowering the fed funds rate by half a percentage point was supposed to relieve the pressure on the central bank’s repo facility by encouraging banks to lend to each other. But the rate cut had virtually no effect, and the central bank’s repo facility continued to be oversubscribed the next day and the following. As observed by Zero Hedge:
This continuing liquidity crunch is bizarre, as it means that not only did the rate cut not unlock additional funding, it actually made the problem worse, and now banks and dealers are telegraphing that they need not only more repo buffer but likely an expansion of QE [quantitative easing].
The Collateral Problem
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of thirteen books including “Web of Debt”, “The Public Bank Solution” and her latest, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.”
As financial analyst George Gammon explains, however, the crunch in the private repo market is not actually due to a shortage of liquidity. Banks still have $1.5 trillion in excess reserves in their accounts with the Fed, stockpiled after multiple rounds of quantitative easing. The problem is in the collateral, which lenders no longer trust. Lowering the fed funds rate did not relieve the pressure on the Fed’s repo facility for obvious reasons: Banks that are not willing to take the risk of lending to each other unsecured at 1.5% in the fed funds market are going to be even less willing to lend at 1%. They can earn that much just by leaving their excess reserves at the safe, secure Fed, drawing on the Interest on Excess Reserves it has been doling out ever since the 2008 crisis.
But surely the Fed knew that. So why lower the fed funds rate? Perhaps because it had to do something to maintain the façade of being in control, and lowering the interest rate was the most acceptable tool it had. The alternative would be another round of quantitative easing, but the Fed has so far denied entertaining that controversial alternative. Those protests aside, QE is probably next after the Fed’s orthodox tools fail, as the Zero Hedge author notes.
The central bank has become the only game in town, and its hammer keeps missing the nail. A recession caused by a massive disruption in supply chains cannot be fixed through central-bank monetary easing alone. Monetary policy is a tool designed to deal with demand — the amount of money competing for goods and services, driving prices up. To fix a supply-side problem, monetary policy needs to be combined with fiscal policy, which means Congress and the Fed need to work together. There are successful contemporary models for this, and the best are in China and Japan.
The Chinese Stock Market Has Held Its Ground
While U.S. markets were crashing, the Chinese stock market actually went up by 10% in February. How could that be? China is the country hardest hit by the disruptive COVID-19 virus, yet investors are evidently confident that it will prevail against the virus and market threats.
According to recent reports from Italy the coronavirus patient zero in the Pavia area is a Pakistani immigrant who refused to self-isolate after testing positive for the virus.
The EU Times reported that the Pakistani man continued to cook and deliver Chinese food and infected an entire region of Italy.
Mainstream Italian news outlets, such as Il Giornale and ADNKronos are reporting the news.
According to Il Giornale the police intervened following an anonymous tip.
Paul Joseph Watson at Summit News reported:
The man believed to be coronavirus patient zero in Italy is a Pakistani migrant refused to self-isolate after testing positive for the virus and continued to deliver food.
Health authorities asked the man to quarantine himself at his home in the Pavia area for two weeks, but he ignored the request and continued to work at a Chinese restaurant.
He then compounded the risk of spreading the virus by making home deliveries of Chinese food.
Authorities were alerted to the situation and the military intervened to return the man to his home.
“The Carabinieri have been busy reconstructing all the movements of the young man, in order to identify as many people as possible with whom he came into contact. In the meantime, the military has closed the Chinese restaurant,” reports Free West Media.
The migrant now faces up to 3 months in jail for failing to self-isolate under article 650 of the Italian penal code.
Italy has recorded a total of more than 3,000 cases of coronavirus and 148 people have died. The country was the primary source of the virus spreading to numerous other European countries.
An elderly cancer patient became the third person known to be infected with the coronavirus to die in Italy, health officials said on Sunday, as the number of people contracting the virus continued to mount.
The death of the woman in a hospital in the small city of Crema in Lombardy, the centre of Italy’s coronavirus scare, followed that of a 77-year-old woman on Saturday and a 78-year-old man on Friday, the first European victim of coronavirus.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte urged people “not to give in to panic and follow the advice of health authorities”.
“We should not be afraid because of the rising numbers,” he told public radio station Rai Uno, adding in another interview that cases were being discovered “because we are carrying out thousands of checks”.
The head of Italy’s civil protection department, Angelo Borrelli, told a news conference that 152 people had now tested positive for the virus in the country, including the three deceased.
The cancer patient had been hospitalised for a few days, said Lombardy’s health chief, Giulio Gallera. “She’d been tested and they already knew she had the coronavirus,” Gallera said, adding that it was too early to know whether the virus was the actual cause of death.
The deaths, and steadily rising number of cases of infected people, have prompted a series of security measures to try to check the spread of the contagion.
Eleven towns—10 in Lombardy and one in neighbouring Veneto—are under lockdown, with some 50,000 residents prohibited from leaving.
Regional authorities have ordered gathering spots, such as bars, restaurants and discos to close. Schools throughout the affected areas are to remain closed.
An Austrian train from Venice bound for Munich was stopped on Sunday on the Italian side of the Brenner Pass border crossing with Austria because of two possible cases, the Austrian interior ministry said.
It later announced that the passengers had tested negative and train services resumed.
Cultural fallout
The spread of the virus has disrupted high-profile events including Milan Fashion Week and the Venice Carnival while Serie A football matches were postponed. Operas have also had to be cancelled at Milan’s famed La Scala.
Most of the cases in Italy are in Lombardy, a prosperous region in the country’s north, and can be traced back to a 38-year-old man whom authorities have called “patient one”.
The man, who is intensive care, dined last month with another man who had visited China in January. He exhibited flu-like symptoms at the time of the dinner, but has since tested negative for the virus, media reports said.
Health officials are still puzzled over certain cases with no obvious links with infected persons.
“The rapid increase in reported cases in Italy over the past two days is of concern,” World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said on Sunday.
“What is also worrying is that not all reported cases seem to have clear epidemiological links, such as travel history to China or contact with a confirmed case,” he added.
Experts from WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control plan to arrive in Italy on Tuesday, he said.
Conte’s government moved on Saturday to set up checkpoints in the region affected to ensure that nobody leaves the contaminated zone without special permission. Sunday saw police checking all vehicles travelling in and out of the area along Codogno’s main highway.
One police officer told AFP that “we’re going to quickly enforce a total blockade” and that those who had made it into the area in recent days would be unable to leave.
Conte has said that residents could face weeks of lockdown, enough time for any potential infection to incubate.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of thirteen books including “Web of Debt”, “The Public Bank Solution” and her latest, “Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.”
