A long-shot bid to break the stimulus deadlock will come from a 50-member group of House Democrats and Republicans in the shape of a $1.52 trillion relief bill. The Problem Solvers Caucus plan has been developed for weeks with the knowledge of the government and the leadership of both parties, House aides said. Steven Mnuchin has hinted the White House may accept $1.5 trillion of spending. (Bloomberg)
Virus update:
Scientists discover antibody that ‘neutralizes’ virus that causes coronavirus
Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have isolated “the smallest biological molecule” that “completely and specifically neutralizes” the virus that causes coronavirus.
The antibody component is 10 times smaller than a full-sized antibody, and has been used to create the drug Ab8, shared in the report published by the researchers in the journal Cell on Monday. The drug is seen as a potential preventative against SARS-CoV-2.
According to the report, the drug has been “highly effective in preventing and treating” the SARS-CoV-2 infections in mice and hamsters during tests. The drug also reportedly does not bind to human cells, which suggests it will not have negative side-effects in people.
“Ab8 not only has potential as therapy for COVID-19, but it also could be used to keep people from getting SARS-CoV-2 infections,” said co-author John Mellors, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Pitt and UPMC. “Antibodies of larger size have worked against other infectious diseases and have been well tolerated, giving us hope that it could be an effective treatment for patients with COVID-19 and for protection of those who have never had the infection and are not immune.”
Researchers are also “thinking outside the box” for how the drug could be administered, stating it may be able to be inhaled or through a superficial injection, instead of an IV.
According to the report, the team at University of Texas Medical Branch Center for Biodefense and Emerging Diseases and Galveston National Laboratory tested Ab8 and found it blocked the virus from entering cells. In mice trials, those treated with Ab8 had 10-fold less of the amount of infectious virus compared to those that were untreated.
America’s wealthy likely to power pandemic-hit U.S. holiday sales: Deloitte
The wealthy in America are expected to splurge online for gifts and home decorations this holiday season, even as the COVID-19 pandemic erodes sales growth to the slowest in at least a decade, according to a forecast from Deloitte.
U.S. retail sales are expected to inch up 1% to 1.5% to as much as $1.15 trillion between November and January, led by a 25% to 35% rise in e-commerce sales, the consultancy firm said.
While the overall rise in sales would be slower than previous years, Deloitte’s U.S. retail and distribution leader Rod Sides said a surprise increase in back-to-school spending and higher savings rates than last year showed demand could be strong between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“We don’t see many of the higher and upper middle income folks being impacted by job losses, so we think for that group holiday sales go up as much as 2% to 3%,” Sides said.
Purchasing among lower income households will likely be flat to up just 1%, as the coronavirus lingers and the health crisis related government spending dries up.
China’s Economy Picks Up Speed as Shoppers, Moviegoers Return China’s economic recovery accelerated in August, with retail sales, the last noncooperative component, returning to pre-coronavirus levels by showing their first month of growth this year.
(…) For August [retail sales] they forecast a bare-minimum 0.1% rise, and were finally wrong on the low side: Sales were up 0.5% from a year earlier, a strong improvement from July’s 1.1% drop. (…)
Now, with no local cases reported in weeks, shopping malls, restaurants and gyms across the country are packed with consumers again. Movie theaters—the last major holdout among public venues—reopened in late July. During the last 10 days of August, official data showed box-office revenue returning to 90% of year-earlier levels. (…)
High-frequency data also showed rail and air travel inching closer to pre-virus levels in August, as families seized the last chance to travel before the new school year began in September. (…)
August industrial production was up 5.6% from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said, beating July’s 4.8% and the 5.2% forecast of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal. January-August fixed-asset investment was down 0.3% from a year earlier, narrowing the January-July decline of 1.6% and matching economists’ forecast.
Ding Shuang, an economist with Standard Chartered Bank, sees third-quarter growth accelerating to roughly 6%, on par with China’s pre-coronavirus trajectory.
ANZ, an investment bank, bumped up full-year GDP-growth to 2.1% from a previous prediction of 1.8%, citing the robust service-sector recovery and increasing hopes China will have an effective coronavirus vaccine this year.
IEA says oil demand recovery set to slow for rest of 2020 The International Energy Agency (IEA) trimmed its 2020 oil demand forecast on Tuesday, citing caution about the pace of economic recovery from the pandemic.
The Paris-based IEA cut its 2020 outlook by 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 91.7 million bpd in its second downgrade in as many months.
“We expect the recovery in oil demand to decelerate markedly in the second half of 2020, with most of the easy gains already achieved,” the IEA said in its monthly report. (…)
The agency now predicts implied stock draws in the second half of the year of about 3.4 million barrels per day, nearly one million bpd less than it predicted last month, with July storage levels in developed countries again reaching record highs.
As output cuts eased among producers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies such as Russia, global oil supply rose by 1.1. million bpd in August.
After two months of increases, recovery among countries outside the OPEC+ pact stalled, with production in the United States falling 400,000 bpd as Hurricane Laura forced shut-ins.
BP projects peak oil demand is very close or already happened
BP now sees this moment arriving a decade sooner than last year’s version of their long-term outlook for oil-and-gas, coal, renewables, cars and more.
- The new projection signals how the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping analysts’ views of the energy future.
- The timing of peak oil demand, and the slope of its decline, will affect carbon emissions, corporate strategies and the finances of oil-producing nations.
BP projects demand for liquid fuels (a rough oil proxy) entering a long plateau in the early 2020s in their “business as usual” (BAU) scenario.
- It assumes “government policies, technologies and social preferences continue to evolve in a manner and speed seen over the recent past.”
- Oil demand plateaus at roughly 100 million barrels per day — where it was before the pandemic drove it downward — for almost 20 years, and then declines slightly through 2050.
In other BP scenarios, oil demand never reaches pre-pandemic levels again and declines steeply by 2050, the end of its outlook period.
- BP’s “rapid transition” case assumes policies strong enough to slash energy-related CO2 emissions by 70% by 2050. It shows oil demand falling to roughly half of pre-COVID levels by 2050.
- Under its “net zero” scenario — which explores policies and behaviors aligned with holding temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — demand falls to about one-third of pre-pandemic levels.
- When it comes to transportation, the largest source of oil demand, all three scenarios see increasing efficiency, while the “rapid transition” and “net zero” cases both see much greater increases in electric cars and hydrogen fuels than BAU.
The report comes as BP is planning to diversify away from its dominant fossil fuel business in coming decades, including plans to cut aggregate oil-and-gas production by 40% by 2030.
Oil demand across the models is “significantly affected” by the pandemic, due in part to its economic effect in emerging economies that are centers of demand growth.
- “The experience of coronavirus also triggers some lasting changes in behavior, especially increased working from home,” the report finds.
“We can’t predict the future; all the scenarios discussed in this year’s Outlook will be wrong,” said BP chief economist Spencer Dale. Instead, BP uses these scenarios to “better understand the range of uncertainty we face as the energy system transitions to a lower-carbon world.”
An anonymous analyst writes in Institutional Investor (Why I Broke Wall Street’s Code of Silence)
(…) Placing anything other than a buy rating — even voicing the slightest criticism — can shut off access to the very management we depend on for critical information. We can be ostracized by our own firms for impeding their ability to conduct investment-banking business with the companies we cover. (…)
Yours truly can personally vouch for this. Been there, 45 years ago. There are things that don’t change much.
TRUMPISM
“It’ll start getting cooler,” he insisted. “You just watch.”
Thanks to Bob Woodward, we now know that this actually means the opposite. Trump simply and altruistically seeks to protect us all from panicking.