September 16, 2021 Edition
-----
In the US we see the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, while the divisions in the US society seem to be just getting worse. Pleas for unity from both Bush and Biden seem to be largely unheeded so far – lets see if any change can emerge.
In the UK COVID19 it still edging up with deaths at about 1000 a week – hardly controlled just yet!
In OZ we are seeing keenness to open up with plans that it is hard to believe will work – as per our recent poll. Time will tell as always.
And in late breaking news we have the new AUKUS alliance where OZ will start building nuclear submarines from the US and UK rather than conventional ones from France. Huge news for all our futures!
-----
Major Issues.
-----
The 14 best quotes from a new interview with billionaire John Paulson
Theron Mohamed
Sep 3, 2021 – 9.01am
John Paulson dismissed cryptocurrencies as worthless, warned the SPAC market is overvalued, and sounded the inflation alarm in the latest episode of Bloomberg Wealth with David Rubenstein.
The billionaire investor is best known for betting against the housing bubble and making upwards of $US15 billion for himself and his clients – a wager chronicled in the book The Greatest Trade Ever.
Paulson reflected on his big short, explained why he’s excited about gold and credit, and offered advice to novice investors in the Bloomberg interview.
Here are Paulson’s 14 best quotes, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:
1. On his big short
“Mortgage-backed securities were viewed as the safest securities next to Treasuries, and that was essentially true up until that point. What they missed was the underwriting quality had never been as poor, so the fact that they hadn’t defaulted in the past had nothing to do with whether they would default in the future.” – explaining why other investors didn’t emulate his bet against the housing market.
-----
https://www.afr.com/wealth/superannuation/smsfs-with-more-than-5m-surge-30pc-20210903-p58ogw
SMSFs with more than $5m surge 30pc
Michael Roddan Senior companies reporter
Sep 6, 2021 – 5.00am
The number of SMSFs that have more than $5 million stuffed in the low-tax vehicles has jumped by 5000 in the past five years, increasing the share of rich nest-egg owners by a third, new data from the Australian Taxation Office reveals.
Figures released by the ATO on Friday show self-managed super funds with $5 million or more of assets accounted for 3.6 per cent of all SMSFs at the end of the 2020 financial year. That is up from 2.7 per cent at the end of fiscal 2016.
That means roughly 20,000 SMSFs were sitting on savings of at least $5 million in June 2020, up from about 14,800 five years ago. Due to the significant asset price inflation in the past 12 months, that figure is likely to have ballooned further.
The figures show there are now almost 600,000 SMSFs in Australia, managing a total of $822 billion on behalf of 1.1 million members.
“The overall number of SMSFs reporting total assets in excess of $5 million is slightly less than 20,000 based on the number of outstanding lodgements at the time the data was extracted,” a spokeswoman for the ATO confirmed. The figures are “based on SMSF returns that have actually been lodged for the 2020 income year and not on the total number of registered funds”.
-----
Alex Vynokur’s ETF provider Betashares hits $20bn milestone
5:10PM September 5, 2021
A year and a half after topping $10bn in funds under management, ETF provider Betashares has sailed past the $20bn mark. Founder and CEO Alex Vynokur is now eyeing the next big milestone, while also looking over his shoulder.
“The growth has been incredible. But relative to its potential, it still feels to me like we’re just getting started,” Mr Vynokur said.
“The last thing I want to do is to develop a sense of entitlement, or hubris, that we can just continue doing the same thing over and over again and still see growth.”
Mr Vynokur, who founded the business in 2009, said he spent a lot of time thinking about the evolving needs of his customers.
-----
Why self-managed super funds are half the size you think they are
James Kirby Follow @kirby_journo
September 8, 2021
The widespread use of misleading “average” figures for the amount of money held by individual self-managed super funds is finally being challenged inside the industry.
Put simply, the average amount held in the nation’s million-plus SMSF funds is almost twice as high as the “median” – a statistically more reliable estimate of the midpoint in a range of numbers.
The average figures are skewed by the unique distribution of money inside SMSFs where a small portion of funds have exceptionally high levels of wealth with around two dozen SMSFs holding more than $100m each.
With the release this week of the latest SMSF statistics from the Australian Tax Office, the debate over tax concessions in super is stoked again as the ATO bulletin published an average figure for an SMSF fund at $1.3m.
However, the ATO separately lists the median figure for SMSFs – which strips out the small number of high rollers in the system. It turns out the median figure at $733,000 is close to half the more widely reported average number. The statistics represent the three months to June 30, 2020.
-----
Defence must act on Peter Dutton’s new doctrine
9:46PM September 7, 2021
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has, without quite saying so, given us a new defence doctrine. For the first time, we are going to embrace asymmetric warfare as the offensive party rather than the defensive party. It’s a revolution.
Submarines and frigates and tanks and armoured vehicles are all very well – but Australia is now moving decisively into the era when missiles and drones count much more.
Australia, says Dutton, will increasingly invest in “long-range strike weapons, offensive and defensive cyber, and area denial systems”, as well as “capabilities which can be produced in bulk, more quickly and cheaply, and where their loss would be more tolerable, without significantly impacting our force posture”.
Dutton wants cheap weapons that can “swarm” an enemy. And in case we didn’t get the point, he is explicit: “I am referring to assets like autonomous craft and remotely piloted drones.”
-----
Media outlets lose liability fight over Facebook comments
Michael Pelly Legal editor
Sep 8, 2021 – 11.45am
The High Court has given the green light to Northern Territory youth detainee Dylan Voller to sue media outlets for defamation over comments on their Facebook pages under stories about his alleged mistreatment.
The court decided 5-2 on Wednesday that the outlets, including Nine, should be treated as having published the comments.
Mr Voller was a central figure in the ABC Four Corners program of 2016 on the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin, with images of him being restrained in a chair helping to prompt a royal commission.
A statement issued by the court said “the liability of a person as a publisher depends upon whether that person, by facilitating and encouraging the relevant communication, ‘participated’ in the communication of the defamatory matter to a third person.
-----
Media outlets lose High Court appeal over Facebook defamation ruling
September 8, 2021 — 11.19am
The High Court has ruled that media outlets are legally responsible as “publishers” for third parties’ comments on their Facebook pages, in a decision with implications for all social media users.
The NSW Court of Appeal ruled in June last year that news outlets including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian were liable as publishers of readers’ Facebook comments about former Northern Territory youth detainee Dylan Voller because they facilitated the comments by setting up and posting on public Facebook pages.
The media outlets lodged a High Court appeal. In a decision on Wednesday, the court dismissed the appeal and ordered the organisations to pay Mr Voller’s legal costs.
Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and Justices Patrick Keane and Jacqueline Gleeson said in a joint judgment that “the Court of Appeal was correct to hold that the acts of the [media outlets] in facilitating, encouraging and thereby assisting the posting of comments by the third-party Facebook users rendered them publishers of those comments”.
-----
It’s time for some answers on the housing crisis
While politicians, bureaucrats and developers have championed the cause of the first home buyer, prices have risen, housing costs as a proportion of income have increased and ownership has slipped,
Robert Harley Contributor
Sep 9, 2021 – 5.00am
If you have the answer to Australia’s housing crisis, Jason Falinski wants to know – and by Monday.
Falinski, the Liberal member for the Sydney seat of Mackellar, is the chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Tax and Revenue, which has been tasked by the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, with a new inquiry into the impact of tax and regulation on housing affordability and supply.
Submissions close on September 13 with the first public hearing on Tuesday and a report in early 2022. So far, despite the hand-wringing and outrage over house prices, only nine submissions have been lodged.
Perhaps we have had enough. I count five Commonwealth government and Productivity Commission inquiries into housing in the past 20 years, along with a pile of state reports, Reserve Bank analyses, and even dustier volumes dating back, in my library, to a report on Urban Land Prices 1968-74 commissioned by the Whitlam government.
-----
Are we really ‘all in this together’, Prime Minister?
Award-winning political commentator and author
September 9, 2021 — 5.00am
Early in the COVID pandemic, Scott Morrison and his ministers defended delays in producing a British -style wage subsidy scheme to protect devastated workers by saying they were working on a uniquely Australian solution.
On March 24 last year, after Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews united to force the country into lockdown, something which Morrison had also resisted, he warned it could be very “dangerous” to dream up other schemes, like the British one.
Once again, it wasn’t a race. Except for the hundreds of thousands of jobless who sprinted to the closest Centrelink office.
Announcing JobKeeper six days later, Morrison emphasised its Australianness.
“There is not more support for some than there is for others. That is not the Australian way,” he said. “If one person falls on a hard time, if anyone falls on a hard time, it is the same hard time. We are all in this together. That is what is fair. That is what is Australian.”
-----
‘Worst-case scenario’: UTS contingency plans if Australia-China relationship collapses
September 9, 2021 — 5.00am
One of Australia’s top universities for Chinese students began preparing for a worst-case scenario collapse in the bilateral relationship between the two countries last year, assessing the prospect of evacuating staff and the immediate loss of millions of dollars in student fees.
A confidential paper prepared for the University of Technology Sydney’s senior executive in November examined the impact of a “major disruption” in the Australia-China relationship “such that some or all UTS activities in China... may be forced to cease with or without notice.”
“Escalation of geopolitical tensions has the very real potential to make it difficult or impossible for Chinese prospective students to enrol in Australian institutions, creating significant financial loss [and] damage including loss of brand recognition,” the paper, obtained under freedom of information laws, said.
It found that a drop in student numbers “could lead to as much as a 50 per cent loss in commencing international student revenue”.
-----
Australia, Indonesia sign anti-terror pact as report warns of new attacks
By Chris Barrett and Anthony Galloway
September 9, 2021 — 5.34pm
Singapore: Australia has reaffirmed a joint commitment to fight terrorism with Jakarta as a new report warns pro-Islamic State cells in Indonesia are likely to try and launch attacks of their own in the wake of the deadly airport bombing in Taliban-held Kabul.
A new counter-terrorism pact between the neighbouring countries was announced in Jakarta on Thursday as Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton met with Indonesian counterparts Retno Marsudi and Prabowo Subianto on the first stop of a four-leg overseas tour.
Further enhancing security links, Prabowo revealed the Indonesian armed forces could soon begin training alongside the Australian military in Australia as part of an upgraded bilateral defence deal that has already sent Indonesian cadets to study at the Royal Military College at Duntroon and the Australian Defence Force Academy.
“I think this is a historical first,” the former Indonesian general said. “I think this is important to enhance our cooperation. Indonesia and Australia are important friends and partners in this region, we are close neighbours and we would like to be even closer friends.”
-----
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from-the-illiberal-left
The threat from the illiberal left
Don’t underestimate the danger of left-leaning identity politics
Sep 4th 2021
SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government. Yet a resurgent China sneers at liberalism for being selfish, decadent and unstable. At home, populists on the right and left rage at liberalism for its supposed elitism and privilege.
Over the past 250 years classical liberalism has helped bring about unparalleled progress. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.
Nowhere is the fight fiercer than in America, where this week the Supreme Court chose not to strike down a draconian and bizarre anti-abortion law. The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.
The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left. We describe this week how a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.
-----
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/september-11-attacks-reverberate-20-years-on-20210906-p58p81
September 11 attacks reverberate 20 years on
The attacks defined US foreign policy and the two-term presidency of George W. Bush - and reshaped the world, Australia included.
Phillip Coorey Political editor
Sep 10, 2021 – 4.02pm
Just before federal Parliament rose at the end of last month for a long break, a bill quietly passed the Senate with the support of both major parties.
The Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 gave the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission access to three new warrants, enabling them to tap into a suspected criminal’s computer or network and even take over somebody’s online account for the purposes of gathering evidence of criminal activity.
Only the Greens demurred about the powers being granted by the so-called “hacking bill”.
“Unsurprisingly, the two major parties are in complete lockstep with each other and are leading us down the road to a surveillance state,” Greens senator Lidia Thorpe said.
-----
Inflation of 3 to 4pc will be the new normal: AllianceBernstein
Cecile Lefort Markets reporter
Sep 10, 2021 – 2.26pm
Asset management giant AllianceBernstein warns that an era of 3 to 4 per cent inflation is around the corner and will be the new “normal” as policymakers around the world switch their priorities, even as Australia struggles to reach a rate of just 2 per cent.
Central banks and governments around the world have been injecting extraordinary amounts of money into the financial system since the onset of COVID-19, which has hammered economic activity. But consumer prices have barely bulged.
In Australia, core inflation has run stubbornly short of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s 2 to 3 per cent target band for more than five years. The central bank itself fears it will not reach 2 per cent until the middle of 2023 even with interest rates at record lows.
But Guy Bruten, Asia-Pacific chief economist at AllianceBernstein (AB), said this was bound to change.
“Inflation is always a political choice,” he said.
Mr Bruten spoke to The Australian Financial Review before superannuation fund consultant JANA Investment Advisors’ annual conference, where local and international fund managers present to institutional clients.
-----
How clashes with a minister helped get the future PM fired
September 11, 2021 — 12.01am
After his October 2004 federal election victory, John Howard made few changes for his fourth-term bench. He promoted two new junior ministers and seven new parliamentary secretaries but otherwise kept his Cabinet largely intact. One of the winners in the mini-reshuffle was Fran Bailey, who held the marginal seat of McEwen in Victoria. It was her second promotion in six months, having been elevated to employment services minister in 2003 – now she was in charge of small business and tourism.
Having run her own farm and retail enterprise, Bailey knew a lot about small business, but tourism – especially international tourism – was relatively new to her. She publicly confirmed this within days of her appointment, telling the Gold Coast Bulletin she had “no experience” with tourism at the national level. Bailey’s uncertainty about her new role was matched by tourism industry suspicion concerning their new minister. It was a bad start.
Meanwhile, after serving for four years as state director of the NSW Liberal Party, Scott Morrison was looking for a chance to return to the tourism sector. Howard had told him that if he did a good job, the next job would look after itself.
In late 2003, the Howard government announced that four existing tourism organisations would be merged to form Tourism Australia. And following a three-month hunt, Morrison was offered the $320,000-a-year role as managing director of the federally funded body – reporting to the TA board chairman (and former deputy prime minister) Tim Fischer and to the new minister for small business and tourism, Fran Bailey.
-----
https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-s-truest-enemy-its-own-complacency-20210910-p58qfm.html
Australia’s truest enemy: its own complacency
Political and international editor
September 11, 2021 — 5.00am
The US Congress set up a major investigation into al-Qaeda’s attack on America. The first page of the official findings of the 9/11 Commission report says: “September 11, 2001, was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the US. The nation was unprepared. How did this happen …?”
The report found many failings in the course of its 567 pages. But overarching all the specific failures was an attitude. Complacency. America had become complacent. It didn’t lack the information, the systems, the capacity to detect and defeat the terrorists. It knew who they were, it knew their histories, it even knew that many were inside America in the days before they struck. The commission’s report includes a pointed list of 10 specific failures – some of the CIA, some of the FBI, some of both. If any one of these 10 had been better handled, 9/11 might never have happened.
And America had plenty of hard-won experience of cataclysmic surprise attacks. The commission’s 2004 report notes: “Since the Pearl Harbour attack of 1941, the intelligence community has devoted generations of effort to understanding the problem of forestalling a surprise attack.” So why didn’t it succeed? “The methods for detecting and then warning of surprise attack that the US government had so painstakingly developed in the decades after Pearl Harbour did not fail; instead, they were not really tried.”
Osama bin Laden actually issued a “declaration of war” against the US in 1996, and made sure to have an American TV network on hand to broadcast the event.
-----
Beware the reckoning, warns Future Fund chair Peter Costello
11:23PM September 10, 2021
A world awash with debt, including $1 trillion with a Made in Australia brand, will produce a “reckoning” once interest rates and servicing costs inevitably rise, according to Future Fund chairman Peter Costello.
Despite the chairman’s sobering outlook, the $200bn sovereign wealth fund revealed on Monday that the most comprehensive strategic review since its 2006 inception had led to a modest swing up the risk curve in search of a healthier, sustainable return.
The fund also unveiled a spectacular 22.2 per cent annual return for the June financial year, with the Covid-19 economic recovery making a mockery of its mandated target of inflation plus 4-5 per cent.
Costello, the former treasurer in the Howard government, defended the Future Fund taking on greater risk, saying it followed “very careful analysis”, and the risk dial still pointed to conservative.
“The money belongs to taxpayers,” he tells The Weekend Australian.
-----
War-gaming tomorrow: ‘It’s possible this will end in an all-out invasion’
Australia is large enough and rich enough to defend itself in these frightening times; we just choose not to. What are the options if China succeeds in pushing the US and its allies out of the region?
By JIM MOLAN
From Inquirer
September 11, 2021
The biggest strategic challenge for Australia is not the Biden administration’s post-Afghanistan intent and competence – it is the state of the US military and the regional threat. Intent can change overnight. Military capability takes years to waste and years to rebuild.
Not much in the short to medium term can be done to balance up the Chinese advantage in military strength in China’s littoral.
Regardless of whether a US administration intends to come to the aid of its allies or help Taiwan, Japan or South Korea, the US now may not have sufficient military strength to be confident of winning. What would it matter how strong China was if the US and its allies were still able to deter China’s aggression or defeat China if deterrence fails? There is now serious doubt among US leadership that the US can do either.
China has one strategic aim: to be dominant, first in the region and then perhaps in the world. A high degree of consensus exists on this even on Capitol Hill. Being dominant is critical to the Chinese Communist Party. This is a zero-sum game. China must reduce US power to increase its own.
-----
Coronavirus And Impacts.
-----
The vaccinated economy will be very different
Contrary to how it sounds, the ‘vaccinated economy’ will ultimately have to be inclusive for all Australians, writes Grant Wilson.
Grant Wilson Contributor
Sep 5, 2021 – 12.47pm
The Prime Minister and the Premier of Victoria have teamed up to coin a new phrase: the “vaccinated economy”.
This is certainly the direction Australia is heading, with sticks framed as carrots, and governments collecting an amount of personal data that would make Google blush.
But for the delta variant, the looming social divide between the vaxxed and the unvaxxed would not be so stark. But as delta has much higher transmission potential, more heavy lifting needs to be done by what the Doherty Institute refers to as public health and social measures.
This is even more so in New South Wales, where contact tracing has been overwhelmed and appears set to be revamped by smartphone alerts for exposure sites. This will reduce the effectiveness of so-called test, trace, isolate, quarantine.
Helpfully, the Prime Minister also indicated on Friday that Professor Jodie McVernon, of the Doherty Institute, would provide a further briefing soon, including regarding vulnerable communities.
-----
Seven levers to make Australia the world’s most-vaccinated country
Politicians aren’t pushing vaccination harder because it could cost elections. But there are ways to throw everything at the vaccine hesitant without losing votes.
Chris Richardson Contributor
Updated Sep 5, 2021 – 12.43pm, first published at 12.22pm
There’s a well-known problem in politics: the majority struggles to get their way when the minority view is passionately held.
Politics bends in the direction of fired-up minorities because they often swing elections.
That’s why, for example, climate change policies in Australia are a mess. And the same problem is starting to have a negative impact on our COVID-19 response.
Australia needs many more vaccinations to get to a point where lockdowns are much less common.
So why aren’t our leaders pushing vaccination harder? Because that could well lose them their next election, given there’s a hard core of people who don’t want to get vaccinated.
-----
https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/new-modelling-says-85-vax-needed-herd-immunity
New modelling says 85% vax needed for herd immunity
A higher COVID-19 vaccination rate that includes children is needed against the Delta variant, shows research led by James Cook University
3rd September 2021
Australia needs to vaccinate 85% of its entire population, including children, to achieve herd immunity against the Delta COVID-19 variant, according to new modelling.
The nation's current plan of opening up when vaccination levels reach 80% of adults (or 65% of the total population) falls “far short” of herd immunity, say the authors from James Cook University in Queensland and Melbourne's Monash University.
Their modelling shows the current mixed vaccine program - immunising over 60s with AstraZeneca and under 60s with Pfizer - will not achieve herd immunity unless 85% of the population, including 5-15 year-olds, are fully vaccinated.
Nevertheless, if herd immunity is not achievable, high rates of vaccination still provide protection against hospitalisation and death, the model shows.
“Australia is unlikely to achieve herd protection unless vaccination is extended to younger ages or combined with other measures,” they wrote in this week's Medical Journal of Australia.
-----
We need to talk about death so we can live with COVID-19
Contributor
September 6, 2021 — 5.00am
It is not possible to eradicate COVID-19 from the globe, nor is it possible to keep it out of Australia. We need to start talking about the likely outcomes of COVID-19 circulating in the community. We need to start talking about accepting death as an outcome of disease.
As a doctor, I accept death as an outcome every day. I discuss it with patients on a one-on-one basis. I discuss it with their families when treatment is futile, or when I know a patient could have a disease to which they will succumb. Our politicians and health leaders need to start to speak this way to the whole population.
About 1200 people died from influenza in 2017 and people were not especially worried. We did not shut down the economy, nor close schools, nor even institute any of the simple manoeuvres that would probably have prevented many of those deaths (wearing masks, hand washing, and social distancing). It is time our political leaders started to listen to balanced advice.
There is no solution that will not entail deaths. It may be deaths from COVID-19, or deaths of young women who could not access breast cancer screening. Or patients with brain aneurysms that sustain a stroke, or die from the aneurysm rupturing. Or patients with colon cancer who could not access treatment when the disease could have been cured at a younger age. These are just some examples.
-----
Jabs for teenagers needed for herd immunity, Queensland modelling shows
By Stuart Layt
September 6, 2021 — 12.01am
New modelling put together by independent experts suggests vaccination efforts against COVID-19 should now move from targeting vulnerable groups to prioritising those aged 12 to 40.
The modelling, developed by researchers from James Cook and Monash universities, was headed by Professor Emma McBryde from JCU’s Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine.
Professor McBryde said the modelling indicated Australia could achieve herd immunity even against the more infectious Delta strain of the virus, but to do so, 85 per cent of the total population would need to be vaccinated.
“To achieve that level of vaccination, you would have to vaccinate teenagers,” she said. “We can achieve that, but it would require a huge uptake of vaccination across the community.”
-----
NSW cases to peak next week at 2000 daily cases
David Marin-Guzman Workplace correspondent
Sep 6, 2021 – 1.20pm
NSW Health is bracing for close to 1000 patients in intensive care by early November as a peak in daily coronavirus cases next week is expected to risk overwhelming the hospital system.
Modelling by NSW Health dated August 25 and released on Monday estimates that cases will continue increasing in the 12 Sydney local government areas of concern until they reach a peak of up to 2000 cases a day next week, at which point vaccines will kick in.
However, it estimates a peak of 3434 people, both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients, will then require hospitalisation at the end of October and up to 947 patients will need ICU beds by early November, including 560 cases of COVID-19, before declining.
It comes as the state recorded 1281 new cases in the 24 hours to Sunday 8pm, more than 200 cases fewer than the 1485 reported the previous day.
------
Here’s what the seven stages of severe COVID-19 look like
Here’s what to expect if you are hospitalised for a serious case of COVID-19.
Karen Gallardo
Sep 6, 2021 – 8.53am
I’m a respiratory therapist. With the fourth wave of the pandemic in full swing, fuelled by the highly contagious delta variant, the trajectory of the patients I see, from admission to critical care, is all too familiar.
When they’re vaccinated, their COVID-19 infections most likely end after Stage 1. If only that were the case for everyone.
Get vaccinated. If you choose not to, here’s what to expect if you are hospitalised for a serious case of COVID-19.
Stage 1
You’ve had debilitating symptoms for a few days, but now it is so hard to breathe that you come to the emergency room.
-----
Promising drug a new weapon in curbing COVID’s worst effects
Neurologist and writer
September 7, 2021 — 5.00am
Yesterday 1281 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in NSW. By October many of these will be seriously ill in hospital, some in intensive care, and a few will die. Others will progress to indefinite multifaceted illness called “Long COVID”.
Can this miserable trajectory be modified, while we wait for the vaccination drive to “stop the spread”?
Clinical trials and overseas experience with a class of therapeutic drugs called monoclonal antibodies suggests that it can – but only when they are given early. COVID-19 patients treated in a trial of one such drug called Sotrovimab exhibited an 79 per cent relative reduction in hospitalisation and deaths. In March, the independent regulator halted patient recruitment because of “profound efficacy”. Even with small numbers, before the Delta outbreak, the statistics were persuasive.
-----
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/the-retro-threat-haunting-markets-20210907-p58pge
The retro threat haunting markets
Investors are beginning to worry that post-pandemic, the global economy will experience a doleful period of stagflation, reminiscent of the 1970s.
Karen Maley Columnist
Sep 8, 2021 – 5.00am
US central bank boss Jerome Powell remains adamant that this year’s surge in inflation is a fleeting fad, but a growing cohort of analysts argue that the US economy is taking on a decidedly retro feel.
Indeed, they argue that, post-pandemic, the US economy will bear a marked resemblance to that of the 1970s, with its stubbornly high inflation, feeble economic growth, and elevated levels of unemployment.
Not surprisingly, this economic backdrop of stagnant growth and high inflation - or stagflation - is also associated with a flailing sharemarket.
The “1970s redux” thesis was reinforced last Friday after the release of figures provided further confirmation that the US economy was losing steam.
-----
https://www.afr.com/world/europe/welcome-to-denmark-where-covid-is-over-20210909-p58q45
Welcome to Denmark, where COVID is ‘over’
Richard Orange
Sep 9, 2021 – 9.28am
Denmark | No wonder many Brits are still anxious about COVID-19. More than 41,000 positive tests were reported in the UK on Monday. There has been talk of a “firebreak” at half-term - a partial lockdown, perhaps.
Schools are operating with twice-weekly testing, air-con and hand gel stations. The debate over who to vaccinate next rages fiercely: should it be a booster jab for the elderly or do we want 12 to 15-year-olds to line up?
Meanwhile, the University of Cambridge is estimating only 30 per cent of the population has been infected so far. It’s worrying stuff.
Well worrying for you, but over here in Denmark, just a few hundred miles away, we’re not so troubled. In fact, for Danes, COVID-19 is officially over, done and dusted.
On Friday, the country will lift all its last COVID-19 restrictions after the government declared the virus “no longer a critical threat to society”, thanks to having vaccinated 72 per cent of the population (the UK is at 62 per cent).
-----
The world is still short of everything — get used to it
The Great Supply Chain Disruption is a central element of the extraordinary uncertainty that continues to frame economic prospects worldwide.
Peter S. Goodman and Keith Bradsher
Sep 8, 2021 – 1.39pm
Like most people in the developed world, Kirsten Gjesdal had long taken for granted her ability to order whatever she needed and then watch the goods arrive, without any thought about the factories, container ships and trucks involved in the delivery.
Not anymore.
At her kitchen supply store in Brookings, South Dakota, Gjesdal has given up stocking placemats, having become tired of telling customers that she can only guess when more will come.
She recently received a pot lid she had purchased eight months earlier. She has grown accustomed to paying surcharges to cover the soaring shipping costs of the goods she buys and has already placed orders for Christmas items such as wreaths and baking pans.
-----
NSW shuts the unjabbed out of society
Finbar O'Mallon Reporter
Updated Sep 9, 2021 – 5.41pm, first published at 1.46pm
NSW will shut the unvaccinated out of society as it prepares to embark on a nation-leading experiment on how to live with COVID-19 in just over a month.
Pubs, gyms, stadiums and homes will be among the places in NSW to reopen to people who are fully vaccinated on the Monday after 70 per cent of its 16-year-olds and older receive two doses of vaccine.
Thursday, September 9: NSW's roadmap out of lockdown has been revealed, with restrictions easing once 70 per cent of the state has been fully vaccinated.
Hundreds of new cases are still expected each day until then and the reopening is expected to push up the number of cases.
Once NSW reopens, economic support for business would continue, people could still work from home, intrastate travel would be allowed and the 5-kilometre limit on movement would be lifted.
-----
Payne and Dutton will also fly to Delhi on Saturday before stops in Seoul and Washington DC.
We could have had 48,000 dead, report finds
12:00AM September 10, 2021
A new report card on Australia’s health during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic has found that if we had experienced the same crude case and death rates as Canada, Sweden or the UK, by early this year the nation would have suffered between 15,570 and 48,145 deaths.
The startling finding comes in report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare on the direct and indirect health effects of Covid-19 covering 2020 and the first half of 2021, but not the latest wave of Delta cases since June.
The report shows Australians were drinking and snacking more, while dying less from flu and road accidents, but were profoundly affected by the physical and mental impacts of the pandemic.
“As the Covid-19 situation continues to evolve rapidly and we face challenges such as the emergence of new variants of the virus, it is important we look holistically at the direct and indirect health effects of the pandemic on Australians,” AIHW spokesperson Lynelle Moon said.
-----
Berejiklian rides roughshod over the Doherty plan
The NSW Premier is playing fast and loose with the meaning of the Doherty vaccination thresholds. And now she won’t be taking questions either.
Laura Tingle Columnist
Sep 10, 2021 – 3.36pm
Amid the tumult of daily press conferences, conducted at the same time by different states and territories, with the occasional appearance by the Prime Minister to mix things up a bit, it might have been hard to hear something decisively snapping in the past week.
It was the sound of the last vestiges of any national policy coherence breaking; the sound of growing blind political panic consuming the federal government; the sound of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian abandoning any semblance of accountability to the people of her state just when it is facing the worst of its COVID-19 crisis.
Friday, September 10: NSW has recorded 1542 locally-acquired cased of COVID-19 overnight, as Premier Gladys Berejiklian outlined additional freedoms when restrictions ease next week.
There was plenty of outrage on Friday about the NSW Premier’s announcement that she was not going to front daily press conferences from now on but instead leave it to health officials on a video link to brief journalists.
-----
Sydney in real danger of a once-in-a-century setback
Columnist
September 11, 2021 — 5.30am
Can Australia prosper without Sydney? It’s the diabolical question Gladys Berejiklian is asking of the national economy as she conducts one of the most challenging policy experiments in our history.
There is no margin for error in the NSW Premier’s plan to begin easing health restrictions once the state has vaccinated 70 per cent of its adult population. If she reopens too soon, the remainder of the year will be a write-off. The double dip recession that began in July could easily spill over into 2022, returning us to where we were at the bottom of the lockdown cycle in 2020.
We would truly be in uncharted territory at this point because Melbourne, not Sydney, has traditionally been the epicentre of our biggest economic shocks, from the land bust and depression of the 1890s to the recession of the early 1990s. Sydney emerged from those episodes with its economic power enhanced at the expense of its southern rival. Now it confronts the real danger of a once-in-a-century setback, which reinforces the shift of population, and wealth, to the frontier states of Queensland and Western Australia.
Berejiklian’s fellow premiers and chief ministers do not begrudge her desire to live with COVID-19. Daniel Andrews has reluctantly accepted that he can’t eliminate the virus in Victoria, and is sounding more like his NSW sparring partner as he charts a more cautious path to reopening once his state reaches the 70 per cent vaccination threshold.
-----
Covid-19: Threat of exodus by burnt-out health workers
9:36PM September 10, 2021
State governments have been warned they risk an exodus of public health workers after a groundbreaking study into the experience of frontline employees during last year’s second wave revealed a surge in unpaid hours and mental illness symptoms.
In the world’s largest multi-professional study into the pandemic’s impact on primary and secondary care health workers, Monash University and Royal Melbourne Hospital researchers surveyed 7846 frontline staff. A large number said they were redeployed or took on new roles last year, despite limited confidence in their ability to switch positions.
Lead researchers Natasha Smallwood, from Monash University’s Central Clinical School and The Alfred hospital, and Karen Willis, from the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Victoria University, said almost half the workers reported their paid or unpaid hours rose last year and two-thirds reported an increase in symptoms of mental illness.
With NSW and Victoria bracing for a surge in Covid hospitalisations, Professor Smallwood said while it was expected that frontline workers would be working more hours during a crisis, she was disturbed that 21.5 per cent said they worked more unpaid hours.
-----
Vaccination rates may have peaked: what Scott Morrison does next is critical
By Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden
September 12, 2021 — 5.00am
Credit where it’s due: the Commonwealth has stepped up to the plate in recent months, doing the leg work to secure additional vaccine doses at any cost, as it should have all along. Millions of additional doses from Poland, Singapore and Britain have given the rollout the shot in the arm it needs – so much so that soon supply will outstrip demand.
But the risk now is that the government rolls out the “mission accomplished” banner, passing the buck to Australians to turn up for a jab. In fact, the government’s role is far from over, and what it does next is every bit as critical as anything that came before.
Not helping matters is our current national obsession with specific vaccine targets which seems to have created a false impression of a finish line at 80 per cent vaccinated (either of the population or those over 16, depending whom you ask), beyond which we can all take a seat, relax and enjoy the summer. Indeed, worryingly, the Prime Minister himself this week described 40 per cent of those eligible (around a third of the population) as the “halfway mark”.
In fact, there’s no such finish line. The only thing we know for sure is more is better – the higher the vaccination rate, the less likely an outbreak will occur and the less severe it will be if it does occur. When Australia gets to 80 per cent of those eligible (around two-thirds of the population), we won’t have won the race, we’ll have qualified for the final. Winning the race requires doing all we reasonably can short of physically pinning people down.
-----
Climate Change.
-----
Taylor adds carbon capture and storage to clean energy agency’s plans
By Mike Foley
September 9, 2021 — 12.01am
Australian clean energy investment arm is including for the first time a commitment to fund carbon capture and storage projects, following the federal government’s controversial change to the agency’s remit in August.
Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor passed new regulations through Parliament to expand ARENA’s investment mandate to include carbon capture and storage and more uses of gas power.
The former Labor government established ARENA in 2012 to invest in renewable energy technology to make it cost-competitive with established technologies like coal and gas.
Mr Taylor will launch ARENA’s new investment plan on Thursday. He said the remit needed expansion beyond renewable energy to develop emissions reduction technology across more sectors of the economy.
-----
Royal Commissions And The Like.
-----
No entries in this section.
-----
National Budget Issues.
-----
Investors get ready for 11pc return from property stocks
Nick Lenaghan Property editor
Sep 5, 2021 – 3.38pm
Traditional real estate investment trusts could deliver a total return to their investors of as much as 11 per cent over the next 12 months, as confidence firms for a reopening rebound from retail landlords such as Westfield-owner Scentre, say Jarden analysts.
The listed landlords, or REITs as they are known, have outperformed the S&P/ASX200 by 8.5 percentage points over the past six months, driven by consensus earnings upgrades and strong growth in their net tangible assets.
But there is more of that outperformance to come, say Jarden’s Lou Pirenc and Andy MacFarlane, who forecast total returns of 11.2 per cent and a 5.1 per cent distribution yield for the more passive-style REITs.
“We appreciate the structural pressures from online and cost inflation but believe the market is underestimating the growth and rerating potential from gross [rent] collection levels to return to pre-COVID levels,” the analysts wrote in their wrap-up of earnings season.
-----
https://www.afr.com/politics/frydenberg-pushes-business-to-double-down-on-china-20210905-p58oyo
Frydenberg pushes business to adopt ‘China-plus’ plan
Jacob Greber Senior correspondent
Sep 6, 2021 – 5.00am
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will urge Australian business to bolster its resilience against increasingly aggressive strategic competition from China, even as he cheers the economy’s ability to withstand Beijing’s trade attacks.
In a speech that directly challenges critics of the government’s approach to China, Mr Frydenberg will on Monday declare that the world has changed dramatically from the now unthinkable early 2000s when US president George W. Bush and China’s president Hu Jintao addressed Parliament on successive days.
“There can be no doubt that strategic competition is back,” he will say as keynote speaker at the ANU’s Crawford Leadership Forum.
“It is a defining feature of the economic and security landscape we face,” he says of China targeting Australia’s economy in response to so-called “grievances” on everything from foreign investment laws to Canberra’s willingness to call out cyber-attacks.
-----
Smaller Government turns out to be penny wise, pound foolish
Economics Editor
September 6, 2021 — 5.00am
Our problems responding to the pandemic are just the latest, most acute demonstration of the failure of the decades-long pursuit of Smaller Government. It was intended to leave us better off by rooting out waste and inefficiency, so we’d get government services of unchanged – maybe better – quality at less cost to taxpayers.
You’d have to say the project has limited the rise in government spending – after allowing for inflation and population growth – despite politicians on both sides being willing to increase the services provided. The Libs on defence and security; Labor on the Gonski school education funding reforms and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
There’s little reason to believe we’ve seen much improvement in the efficiency with which government services have been delivered. Rather, there are numerous examples of reductions in the quality of services and a decline in the policy capability of public service – evident in the need to bring in military generals and the small fortune being spent on management consultants from the big four accounting firms.
This failure isn’t surprising when you remember the Smaller Government project is based on prejudice rather than evidence – the public sector is always inefficient; the private sector is always efficient – and on using the crudest measures to achieve greater efficiency.
-----
Why this lockdown exit will be worse than you think
The economy is not going to snap back from the delta hit on NSW and Victoria as it did earlier. And when it does, there are now big questions to be answered.
Gareth Aird
Sep 6, 2021 – 4.00pm
Economists try to predict the future. But if you project too far ahead, then you are in danger of missing the present.
The future almost always looks good because the problems of the present have essentially been assumed away.
My overriding sense is that most economists are currently so fixated on the medium term that they are unwittingly downplaying what is an extraordinary negative near-term shock for the Australian economy.
To be clear, the medium-term prospects for Australia look very good. But the near-term outlook is bleak, as extended lockdowns in NSW and Victoria cripple economic activity.
Familiarity can lead to complacency. The economic commentariat are at risk of normalising or trivialising what is happening in Australia’s two largest states because we have been here before. But these extended lockdowns are far from normal. And they carry large economic and social consequences.
-----
https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2021/mr-21-19.html
Statement by Philip Lowe, Governor: Monetary Policy Decision
Number 2021-19
Date 7 September 2021
At its meeting today, the Board decided to:
· maintain the cash rate target at 10 basis points and the interest rate on Exchange Settlement balances of zero per cent
· maintain the target of 10 basis points for the April 2024 Australian Government bond
· purchase government securities at the rate of $4 billion a week and to continue the purchases at this rate until at least mid February 2022.
Prior to the Delta outbreak the Australian economy had considerable momentum. GDP increased by 0.7 per cent in the June quarter and by nearly 10 per cent over the year. Business investment was picking up and the labour market had strengthened. The unemployment rate had fallen below 5 per cent and job vacancies were at a high level.
The recovery in the Australian economy has, however, been interrupted by the Delta outbreak and the associated restrictions on activity. GDP is expected to decline materially in the September quarter and the unemployment rate will move higher over coming months. While the outbreak is affecting most parts of the economy, the impact is uneven, with some areas facing very difficult conditions while others are continuing to grow strongly.
This setback to the economic expansion is expected to be only temporary. The Delta outbreak is expected to delay, but not derail, the recovery. As vaccination rates increase further and restrictions are eased, the economy should bounce back. There is, however, uncertainty about the timing and pace of this bounce-back and it is likely to be slower than that earlier in the year. Much will depend on the health situation and the easing of restrictions on activity. In our central scenario, the economy will be growing again in the December quarter and is expected to be back around its pre-Delta path in the second half of next year.
-----
This is a recession - we are just not calling it one
The ‘two quarters of GDP decline’ definition has never accurately plotted Australia’s ups and downs. The trick is to err in the right direction in dealing with downturns.
Saul Eslake Contributor
Sep 8, 2021 – 2.05pm
Following the release of the better-than-expected GDP figures last week, which showed that Australia’s economy expanded by 0.7 per cent in the June quarter, it now seems that Australia may avoid a “technical recession” if NSW and Victoria are able to reopen soon enough to rebound in the December quarter, after the inevitable contraction in the current quarter.
The stipulation that a recession is necessarily delineated by consecutive quarterly contractions in real GDP is lazy, silly and misleading. Does anyone remember the “recession” of 1977? No, I don’t either – even though real GDP contracted by 0.4 per cent and 0.3 per cent in the September and December quarters of that year.
But I do remember the recession of 1974 – even though real GDP only contracted in one quarter, the June quarter, of that year (albeit by 2 per cent, which until last year was the largest single-quarter contraction in Australia’s real GDP to be reported).
It’s inevitable that a government or central bank will – at least initially – do either too much, or too little, in response.
-----
Health Issues.
-----
NYU accuses Resmed of patent breach over popular sleep apnoea product
September 6, 2021 — 5.15am
Medical devices giant Resmed has been hit with a major patent infringement claim by the prestigious New York University, which alleges the Australian company illegally used the university’s science to create one of its best-selling products used to treat sleep apnoea.
The stock market darling, which is listed on both the ASX and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and sports a $58 billion market capitalisation, was hit with the suit over its AirSense10 and other science used by the company in June.
According to NYU’s complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, the university sent Resmed chief executive Michael Farrell a letter in early June demanding the health group disable key features of its device within 24 hours. The company did not accede to NYU’s request.
Resmed sells a range of products and masks that help treat sleep apnoea and other conditions. This includes its hugely successful machine to treat sleep apnoea, the AirSense10 -- the device at the centre of the NYU lawsuit.
-----
International Issues.
-----
https://www.afr.com/world/asia/japan-on-a-taiwan-china-tightrope-20210905-p58ova
Japan on a Taiwan-China tightrope
China is one of Japan’s biggest trading partners, but Tokyo’s alliance with the US means it could be dragged into escalating tensions over disputed Taiwan.
Sheila A Smith Contributor
Sep 5, 2021 – 3.26pm
Beijing has far greater military resources to bring to bear on its relations with its neighbours, and increasing pressure on Taiwan’s defences by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has many in Washington and Tokyo worried about Beijing’s intentions.
China is now the top priority for the US–Japan alliance, as the foreign and defence secretaries and cabinet ministers of both nations made clear in their joint statement for the Japan–US Security Consultative Committee in March.
A month later, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and US President Joe Biden also called out China for its behaviour, raising concerns about human rights issues, maritime challenges across the region and economic coercion imposed on trading partners. Their statement suggests renewed allied concern about rising tensions there.
Japan will have no choice but to prepare to defend itself in the case of a conflict across the Taiwan Strait.
Proximity to Taiwan – only a hundred or so kilometres separate Taiwan from Japan’s southern-most islands – makes the possibility of conflict there of deep interest to Japan’s Self-Defence Forces.
-----
While the world was watching Kabul, Beijing set the scene for the next US humiliation
Political and international editor
September 7, 2021 — 5.00am
One of Joe Biden’s main justifications for pulling out of Afghanistan was that America needed to concentrate its resources on China. The US, he said, had to win the “competition for the 21st century”. So how’s that going?
Two weeks ago, while Biden was sweating on the evacuation of Kabul, his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, travelled to south-east Asia to affirm American solidarity: “We need to find ways to pressure and raise the pressure, frankly, on Beijing to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and to challenge its bullying and excessive maritime claims.”
Not fast enough. Just a few days later, while the world was still busy debating the last US humiliation in Afghanistan, Beijing quietly was constructing the next. Thumbing its nose at the US, at its neighbours, at the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. And daring the world to do something about it.
China’s Maritime Safety Administration announced the unilateral imposition of a new law requiring foreign shipping to give notice before entering any waters that it claims as its own. It purports to apply not only to military but also commercial shipping in all of China’s “territorial waters”.
-----
Wall Street’s bull market is running out of puff
By Louis Ashworth
September 7, 2021 — 8.33am
Overheated markets are poised for a retreat amid concerns about inflation and flagging growth, according to signals from Wall Street.
Bank of America’s sell-side indicator - a contrarian measure of bullishness on stocks - was unchanged in August, holding at the closest to an overall “sell” indication since the financial crisis.
The gauge measures the average Wall Street recommendation for how much of investors’ portfolios should be held in stocks. It stood at 59.5 per cent in August for the second month running.
That left the measure - which BofA says is “far more predictive than many other vaunted market timing models” - the closest to the “sell threshold” since May 2007, after which the benchmark S&P 500 index fell 7 per cent on a total return basis.
Savita Subramanian, a strategist at the bank, said: “The continued pause in sentiment may reflect the mixed market data that includes a drop in consumer sentiment to the lowest levels since 2011, rising inflationary pressure posing risks for margins, and peak profit growth.”
-----
Taliban victory signals a defeat for global jihadism
If the US continues to pull back from the 9/11 wars, and declines to be provoked into open-ended conflicts with foggy goals, jihadis will find it more difficult to bring the killing fields of the East to the West.
David Gardner Contributor
Updated Sep 8, 2021 – 9.43am, first published at 9.40am
Twenty years on, the US and its allies’ response to the outrage of the 9/11 attacks is back where it started: with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan.
The 21st-century crusade against Islamist jihadis would seem to have changed little. Yet a lot is different, although little of it for the better.
There has been no repeat of that breathtaking atrocity on US soil that seared itself forever into the consciousness of Americans and the world, and anything similar is rated most unlikely. Europe — from London to Madrid, Paris to Istanbul, and Brussels to Nice — experienced major attacks inspired by the jihadist challenge to the West and its interventions in Muslim lands.
These too have wound down.
Al-Qaeda’s apocalyptic Twin Towers assault was probably the high-water mark of millenarian jihadism. The cross-border caliphate of Isis in Syria and Iraq was horrendous but ephemeral. The Taliban comeback is more a tribal phenomenon than a triumph of universalist Islamism that unites the umma or global community of Islam — the almost mystic goal of Osama bin Laden.
-----
Failure to comprehend the mistakes that led up to September 11, 2001 helps to explain the mistakes the West has made since, culminating in the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Tim Stanley
Sep 7, 2021 – 5.00am
This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and to mark the occasion the BBC produced a documentary telling the story from the point of view of White House staff.
It was compelling, but, as is always the case with television, the medium shapes the message. By focusing on the shock and anger of America’s leadership as the atrocity unfolded, it inadvertently reinforced the narrative that 9/11 came out of nowhere.
This is untrue. The hijackers – psychopaths all – were responsible for the slaughter, but Americans also had every right to be angry with their government for not preventing it.
Failure to comprehend the mistakes that led up to 9/11 helps to explain the mistakes the West has made since, culminating in our wounded withdrawal from Afghanistan.
-----
Warren Buffett’s global market indicator hits record, signalling crash
Theron Mohamed
Sep 8, 2021 – 8.17am
Warren Buffett’s favourite market indicator has surged to a record high of 142 per cent, signalling US and international shares are heavily overpriced and could plummet in the months ahead.
The global version of the “Buffett indicator” takes the combined market capitalisation of the world’s publicly traded shares and divides it by global gross domestic product. A reading above 100 per cent indicates the global stock market is overvalued relative to the world economy.
“BOOM! Global stocks have gained another $US1.6 trillion [$2 trillion] in market capitalisation this week,” Welt market analyst Holger Zschaepitz tweeted on Sunday. “Equities now worth $US120.3 trillion, highest in history.”
“Global stock market cap now equal to 142 per cent of world GDP, an all-time high as well,” he added.
-----
Seoul puts Pyongyang on notice with missile
By Richard Lloyd Parry
The Times
7:49AM September 8, 2021
South Korea has joined the small group of countries with the technology to fire missiles from a submarine, a breakthrough that will alter the power balance in east Asia and encourage North Korea to pursue the same goal.
A Dosan Ahn Changho-class submarine succeeded in an underwater ejection test last week, according to local media, after similar tests from a submerged launch barge. The missile, the Hyunmoo 4-4, has a 310-mile reach, putting all of North Korea within range.
The advance will allow commanders to launch surprise missile attacks with conventional or, potentially, nuclear warheads, as well as “second-strike capacity” – the ability to fire back if a nuclear attack destroys the country’s ground-based missiles.
The breakthrough will pressure the North to present its own submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which it has been developing for several years.
-----
How 9/11 will be remembered a century later
The attacks could be viewed as a historical turning point - or entirely insignificant. It will depend on what happens in the next few decades.
Stephen Walt
Sep 9, 2021 – 5.58am
How will 9/11 be remembered on its 100th anniversary? Will it be seen as a dramatic but ultimately minor tragedy, or as a turning point that altered the United States and the trajectory of world politics in fundamental ways?
Will future generations see that day as a telling reflection of underlying trends, the catalyst for a series of catastrophic foreign policy blunders, or as an isolated one-off event whose long-term impact was relatively modest?
It is impossible to predict exactly how 9/11 is going to be interpreted; perhaps all we can say with confidence is that the meaning attached to it will vary depending on who is doing the interpreting.
Americans will view 9/11 differently than Afghans, Iraqis, Saudis, or Europeans, and for many people around the world it is likely to be little more than a historical footnote.
-----
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/the-dangerous-groupthink-stalking-wall-street-20210909-p58q48
The dangerous groupthink stalking Wall Street
Richard Henderson Markets reporter
Sep 10, 2021 – 10.27am
For decades, David Woo, one of Wall Street’s top analysts, rankled the investment world with bold, contrary calls on politics and the global economy.
From his commanding perch setting the house view on economics and foreign exchange for Bank of America, the second-largest US lender and one of the world’s biggest banks, he predicted Donald Trump’s shock win five years ago and correctly anticipated a knife-edge result in the November election for Joe Biden, when many predicted a landslide for the Democrat.
His energetic on-air sparring with hosts from CNBC and Bloomberg, staples of the business media, amplified his profile and the world’s largest insurers and fund managers sought his counsel. In 2013, he was listed among the dozen smartest minds on Wall Street and two years ago his team topped a ranking of analysts compiled by Institutional Investor magazine.
But in March, he gave it all up. A new, politicised culture has infected Wall Street, he fears, stunting debate and marginalising thinkers like himself who have staked their careers on out-of-favour views that can move markets.
-----
https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/no-more-us-intervention-tell-me-another-one-20210909-p58q4p
No more US intervention? Tell me another one
America is said to be on the verge of something called ‘isolationism’. The record, by contrast, tells us to expect another show of force in some remote trouble spot or other by mid-decade. Go with the record.
Janan Ganesh Contributor
Sep 9, 2021 – 10.11am
In 1993, a botched intervention in Somalia seemed to put the US off such projects for good. Three years later, it sent more than 16,000 troops to Bosnia. The failure to avert mass killings there revived the trope of a halfhearted superpower.
Three years later, it led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The reluctance to commit ground forces there was final proof of an inward-turning nation. Four years later, it was occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq.
As those twin missions faltered, wars of choice in half-understood parts of the world became unthinkable at last. In 2011, the US joined the bombing of Libya. When the ensuing void there produced two governments, even two central banks, such well-meaning intervention was discredited once and for all.
Three years later, the US bombed Syria. The failure to act earlier confirmed the decadence of this bloat
You will understand, won’t you, if I don’t take obituaries for the US empire at face value? For the fourth or fifth time in my life, America is said to be on the verge of something called “isolationism”. The record, by contrast, tells us to expect another show of force in some remote trouble spot or other by mid-decade. Go with the record.
-----
https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/america-can-find-unity-in-9-11-scars-20210909-p58q3x
America can find unity in 9/11 scars
There seems to be a straight line between September 11 and the polarisation of Donald Trump. But American history revolves around conflict, compromise and repair.
Lydia Khalil Contributor
Sep 10, 2021 – 11.34am
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, enough time has passed for us to move on from reverential remembrances to a more sober assessment of the political and societal legacies of the American response.
There have been many such reflections this month – including one edited by yours truly for the Lowy Institute examining how September 11 changed our world. Many of these retrospectives focus on the failures of Bush-era foreign policy, the many negative consequences of the global war on terror, the normalisation of mass surveillance, growth in Islamophobia, lack of trust in the efficacy and capabilities of democratic leaders and greater societal polarisation. The failures of the war on terror and US-led military interventions justified on the back of the threat of jihadist terrorism are more apparent than ever in the face of the Taliban’s recent return to power in Afghanistan.
Many of these retrospectives on the legacy of September 11 draw a straight line from the assaults on New York and Washington to the election of Donald Trump, and the erosion of American democracy and polarisation of American society that followed. One such retrospective produced by the American public television program Frontline explains that September 11’s legacy is that a war from abroad turned into a domestic war on America’s own streets, built on differences and frustration with US governance that has been building for years. Journalist Spencer Ackerman’s recently published book has a title that explains it all – Reign of Terror: How 911 destabilised America and Produced Trump.
And let’s not forget, the United States fought an actual civil war. America’s current moment is not unique.
-----
US stocks decline amid mixed messages on recovery
Richard Richtmyer and Vildana Hajric
Sep 11, 2021 – 6.20am
US equities notched their biggest weekly decline since mid-June in volatile trading as investors assessed the latest read on the economy after more strategists weighed in with cautious comments on the market.
The S&P 500 fell 0.8 per cent, pushing its loss for the holiday shortened week to 1.7per cent.
Apple was the biggest decliner in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday, after a court ordered the iPhone maker to make a change to the way it generates money from its App Store.
Gold posted its first weekly decline since early August after data on US producer prices rekindled debate over when the Federal Reserve will pull back on stimulus.
-----
September 11: Back to square one 20 years after
September 11, 2021
Twenty years after 9/11 the terrorism threat is larger and more widespread, the Western alliance is weaker, and the US is in sharp decline relative to its rivals. Democratic societies are less free, stunted by “safetyism”, less resilient and more divided.
The abandonment of Afghans amid the return of an unreformed triumphant Taliban just in time for the 20th anniversary of 9/11, underlines the failure of the global war on terror and the need for a radical rethink. This is particularly true for Australia, which faces the most threatening geopolitical environment in a century.
In one respect – and one only – the war on terror was a success: no country has suffered another attack on the scale of 9/11. But this is cold comfort against the costs of two decades of conflict. These have been enormous: researchers at Brown University calculate the financial bill at $US8 trillion ($11 trillion) for the US, not counting coalition, NATO and UN spending. The same researchers estimate up to 929,000 direct war deaths, but the true toll is far higher if we include deaths from disease, famine and social collapse in war-affected societies.
Global terrorism looms larger and threatens more countries today than in 2001. Al-Qa’ida on 9/11 had about 25,000 members, mostly in Afghanistan, Africa and Southeast Asia. In 2021 the organisation is on the point of regaining its Afghan sanctuary, has expanded into other countries and is at least double its pre-9/11 size.
-----
China is shaping up as the next Afghanistan
Will we look back 20 years from now and say that the world became a more dangerous and less prosperous place because of the breakdown in US-China relations?
Thomas Friedman Contributor
Sep 8, 2021 – 12.24pm
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan after a failed 20-year nation-building exercise has left many Americans and analysts saying, “If only we knew then what we know now, we would never have gone down that path”.
I am not sure if that’s true, but it nevertheless raises this question: What are we doing today in foreign policy that we might look back 20 years from now and say, “If only we knew back then what we know now, we would never have gone down that path”?
My answer can be summed up in one word: China.
And my fears can be summed up in just a few paragraphs: The 40 years from 1979 to 2019 were an epoch in US-China relations. There were many ups and downs, but all in all it was an epoch of steady economic integration between our two countries.
-----
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/i-m-still-on-team-transitory-20210911-p58qrt
I’m still on Team Transitory
I think things are looking more like 1951, when inflation briefly hit 9.3 per cent, than 1979.
Paul Krugman
Sep 11, 2021 – 10.24am
US consumer prices have risen 4.4 per cent over the past six months; that’s an annualised inflation rate of almost 9 per cent, which puts us almost back into 1970s territory. And there are plenty of people out there proclaiming the return of stagflation.
But the people in a position to do something about it — above all, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve — are fairly serene. They insist that we’re looking at only a transitory blip driven by the disruptions associated with America’s emergence from the pandemic. But are they right? How can we tell?
To answer those questions, we need to back up and ask what it means to say that inflation is transitory, anyway. And to do that, it helps to take a long view.
My sense is that many people believe that inflation wasn’t something that happened in America before the 1970s. But that isn’t true. Consumer price data go back more than a century, and there were several episodes of high inflation over that period. The ’70s weren’t even the peak.
-----
Terry McCrann: US inflation has reached boiling point
7:21PM September 11, 2021
Inflation is up, up and away in the US and the Fed – their version of our Reserve Bank – is in utter, desperate, utterly pathetic, and yet inevitably disastrous denial.
The greediest people on the planet who infest the lower part of Manhattan and try to cram into the other end of Long Island are caught between their ‘trust in the Fed greed’ and the increasingly undeniable inflation reality.
They ‘balanced that’, so to speak, with Wall St falling nervously but still only relatively marginally overnight Friday.
Inflation? Inflation? What inflation? That’s been the pathetically desperate response from the Fed as the ever-mounting evidence has rolled out from month to every month.
-----
I look forward to comments on all this!
-----
David.
No comments:
Post a Comment