June 03, 2021 Edition
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In the US we see the Biden Administration wanting to spend eye-watering amounts of money to support the US economy and the totally overhaul the US social safety net and the national infrastructure. It will be interesting to see how much is finally actually approved by Congress.
In the UK new variants of concern of COVID and causing some anxiety and the PM is in big trouble having a. got married and being amned by his previous lead advisor for stupidity and incompetence.
In OZ we were
hoping the lockdown in Vic will end tomorrow while testing and vaccinating
rates are high but we seem stuck for another week! Politically the blame game between the States and Feds is
running amok as finally the Feds start to help! Te Morrison Government have been just obdurate on helping!
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Major Issues.
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Upper Hunter byelection result sends fear through federal Labor
The federal Coalition is eyeing off three seats in the Hunter Valley area – Hunter, Paterson and Shortland – following a poor result for Labor in the NSW byelection.
Phillip Coorey Political editor
May 23, 2021 – 1.27pm
Under normal circumstances, Labor should have been a good chance to win the NSW state Upper Hunter byelection. Or at least come close.
Byelections are often used as an opportunity to “send the government a message”, especially given the Berejiklian government has been around for a while now and that this byelection was caused by the resignation of the incumbent following sordid allegations against him.
But these are not normal times and, at first blush, Saturday’s result was just another COVID-19 election in which the voters looked through all else, opted for stability and rewarded a government for doing a good job dealing with the pandemic. In this case, the NSW government has been a standout.
But that doesn’t mean there are not other interpretations. Labor was not just ignored but belted with a primary swing against it north of 8 percentage points. The sheer number of candidates was a factor, resulting in all major candidates sliding backwards on the primary, but nothing on the scale of Labor.
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Morrison is repeating Menzies’ Suez Crisis folly
In the PM’s toast to the US alliance as Australia’s ‘past, present and future’, there is more than a faint whiff of Menzies’ British imperial dreaming.
James Curran Columnist
May 23, 2021 – 1.13pm
Of all the questions raised by Max Suich’s ground-breaking series on Australia’s China policy in these pages last week, one remains elusive.
Suich asked what was the policy objective when Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison began not only to call out Chinese behaviour but to push back and go out in front?
Given the lamentable absence of considered policy development in Australian foreign affairs, that question will likely go unanswered.
To assert that “Australia changed because China changed” appears to have become the conventional mantra. Only the naive would deny that Xi Jinping’s ascension in 2012 and his suite of tough policies at home and assertive posture abroad from 2016-17 altered the calculus in the bilateral relationship.
But this mantra is akin to ritual absolution before getting on with the task of national self-worship over Canberra’s response.
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Free rein for Robinhoods, red tape for seasoned pros
Jane Hume’s newfound crypto-libertarianism is at odds with her insistence on state-mandated re-education for financial planners and stockbrokers.
Aleks Vickovich Wealth editor
May 23, 2021 – 1.27pm
Throughout the pandemic, as hundreds of thousands of mostly Millennial and Gen Z Australians entered financial markets for the first time, the Morrison government kept mum.
Asked numerous times by this publication and probably others what it thought about the so-called Robinhood phenomenon seizing headlines, baffling regulators and wrong-footing hedge funds, Financial Services Minister Jane Hume dodged the question.
Now, all of sudden, she has provided an answer in no uncertain terms.
“We have to back Australians to be sensible enough to judge for themselves whether to put their hard-earned money into higher-risk assets,” Senator Hume said on Thursday.
“The fact that some people make poor decisions does not justify restricting the ability for ordinary Australians to participate in investment.”
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‘Expect to see mortgage rates moving up’: Bank funding costs to rise as $200b scheme ends
May 23, 2021 — 7.45pm
The end of a $200 billion emergency Reserve Bank funding scheme put in place to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus crisis is expected to lift fixed mortgage rates from ultra low levels and dampen soaring demand for housing.
The country’s banks have about six weeks to draw down on $90 billion in cheap credit being provided under a central bank program that was designed to soften the blow from the coronavirus pandemic. The end of the program comes amid a broader economy recovery and surging real estate prices that have sparked concerns the property market is overheating.
The conclusion of the scheme, launched last year and known as the term funding facility (TFF), will leave banks more reliant on wholesale markets for their funding. Experts said this would increase banks’ funding costs, which would be passed on to customers via higher fixed rates, potentially taking some of the extreme heat out of the property market.
Under the Reserve Bank scheme, banks are able to borrow from the central bank at an interest rate of 0.1 per cent, which has helped drive fixed interest rates on mortgages under 2 per cent.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/how-the-bond-market-explains-the-economy-20210514-p57rwk
How the bond market is the economy’s fortune-teller
Since its first edition in 1951, reported the likely £40 million raising, the Financial Review has tracked the highs and lowest lows of a market predicted to top $1 trillion by next year.
Jonathan Shapiro Senior reporter
Updated May 25, 2021 – 8.42am, first published at 12.01am
″Projected rise in bond rate to 3 ¾ per cent on eve of loan council,” ran the front page headline of the first ever edition of The Australian Financial Review, published on August 16, 1951.
That week the federal Treasury’s Loan Council was preparing to float its 13th loan since the end of World War II. The editor of the newly created weekly publication, J.C. “Jack” Horsfall, speculated the rate it offered would have to go up to lure banks and life assurance companies to invest.
“By hook or by crook the government intends to get money for public works,” the front page article said. Sources would neither confirm nor deny the potential for a rate rise.
In the early days of the Financial Review, commentary on the bond market was a regular on the front page. Since then the path of the sovereign’s borrowing cost tracked the fortunes of a young nation as it fought wars, inflation, recessions and the threat it could descend into a third-rate economy.
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How a hedge can counter currency fluctuations in your portfolio
For those investors left wondering why the returns from their global shares failed to keep up with a spectacular recovery, there are three options.
James Weir Contributor
May 25, 2021 – 12.00am
In the darkest hours of the 2020 virus crisis, the Australian dollar collapsed to 55¢ against the US dollar as it was dumped in the rush to secure the safety of the default global currency. Once the panic was over, the Australian dollar began a revaluation journey that has seen it rise back to 78¢.
Over that same period of revaluation, overseas share markets staged a spectacular recovery, led by the US. Many Australian investors were left wondering why the returns from their international shares failed to keep up. The answer lies in what is referred to as “the currency effect” due to the rising Australian dollar.
There’s no question the diversification offered by investing in international assets provides enormous benefits to a portfolio, as well as opportunities that are simply not available in the Australian market. However, on top of the challenge of finding attractive investments, there’s the added obstacle that fluctuations in the currency can have a sizeable impact on returns.
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Crypto is the canary in the financial coal mine
Investors are showing more caution, as they rein in some of their more speculative bets such as bitcoin, and show a stronger appetite for ‘safe haven’ assets such as gold.
Karen Maley Columnist
May 25, 2021 – 12.01am
Investor appetite for risk-taking appears to be ebbing back from the high watermark reached earlier this year.
But while investors are winding back some of their more audacious bets, they’re far from adopting a defensive stance. They’re fully aware that the ultra-easy monetary policy on the part of the world’s major central banks, combined with massive government stimulus, will likely continue to buoy global equity and bond markets.
Investors’ growing restraint is evident in the share price of electric-vehicle maker Tesla, which briefly traded as high as $US900 ($1164) in January this year. It closed last week at $US580.288, which still represents a gain of just over 250 per cent in the past year.
And there’s a tinge of caution in the performance of star fund manager Cathie Wood’s flagship fund, the ARK Innovation exchange-traded fund.
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The bright young things have lost interest, but there’s more to say on one of the budget’s very big deals
Economics Editor
May 25, 2021 — 11.30am
Budgets come and, all too soon, budgets go. A big deal in the latest one was the government’s response to the royal commission’s report on the scandal-plagued aged care system. We were told lots of changes will be made, at an extra cost of “$17.7 billion over five years”. Problem solved. Now we can all move on.
Sorry, not so fast. The bright young things of the media may have lost interest, but I’d like a closer look. You can put that down to my advancing years if you wish.
I’m old enough to have stopped deluding myself I won’t be ending up in any aged care home. Both my brother and elder sister are there already. My sister-in-law was too before, as the Salvos say, she was “promoted to Glory”.
I’ve looked at the government’s response and, though it wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been, it’s better than I feared.
To borrow a cliche from the interest groups – who always hope that if they sound grateful, they might get a bit more – it was “a good first step”. But, as Dr Stephen Duckett and Anika Stobart, of the Grattan Institute, put it less diplomatically, “even an investment of this scale does not meet the level of ambition set by the commission”.
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Bottlenecks will persist, and so inflation will ‘stick’
Global supply chain disruptions will make it hard for the US Federal Reserve to maintain that “transitory” price increases will just be temporary and reversible.
Mohamed El-Erian Contributor
May 25, 2021 – 11.27am
What a difference a year makes for many corporate bosses in advanced economies. Some 12 months ago, they were dealing with the sudden and brutal disappearance of demand for their products.
Today, demand is not a problem for most of them; it is surging. Rather, they are struggling to secure supplies, including the raw material inputs and workers needed to meet this demand – the consequences of which will determine much more than corporate success.
Strong consumption and investment, enabled by economic reopenings and solid corporate and household balance sheets, are bolstering aggregate demand to a degree that has surprised many, be they executives, economists, policy makers or Wall Street analysts.
It is a phenomenon that is likely to persist in the months and quarters ahead, especially in those countries that are able to contain COVID-19 infections, vaccinate many citizens and guard against new variants of the virus.
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Italian bank collapses on exposure to Greensill and GFG
Robert Smith, Kaye Wiggins and Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli
May 25, 2021 – 9.18am
London/Milan | An Italian bank has collapsed through exposure to Greensill Capital and GFG Alliance, as the shockwaves from the failure of the British finance company claimed another casualty.
Milan-based Aigis Banca, a specialist lender to small and medium-sized businesses, was ordered into liquidation by the Bank of Italy at the weekend, with larger peer Banca Ifis buying its assets and liabilities for the symbolic price of €1 ($1.60).
“The intervention of Banca Ifis makes it possible to avoid the severe social and economic consequences of the situation that has arisen in Aigis Banca as a result of the latter’s exposure towards Greensill Bank,” Banca Ifis chief executive Frederik Geertman said.
Before its collapse in March, Greensill lent money to companies including Sanjeev Gupta’s metals group. GFG Alliance, taking invoices in exchange for cash. The loans were then bundled into notes and sold on to banks and other investors.
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Why inflation is higher than the headline figures suggest
Ronald Mizen Economics correspondent
May 25, 2021 – 6.33pm
The price of goods and services needed to meet people’s basic needs grew more than double optional expenditure over the past 15 years, highlighting growing pressure on household budgets compared to headline inflation.
The price of non-discretionary “must-have” purchases increased by 44 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, compared to 32 per cent for discretionary “nice-to-have” buys.
However, when tobacco was excluded from the discretionary list, the overall increase was just 18 per cent; this reflected an increase in tobacco prices of more than 400 per cent over the reference period.
Increases in non-discretionary purchases, such as bread, milk and rent, are more likely to be absorbed into household budgets, while increases in optional expenditure, such as dining out, will be deferred or reduced.
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The ALP and the uncomfortable nothingness of waiting at the departure gate
Nine News Political Editor
May 26, 2021 — 5.30am
What does “Go to Gate” mean? For those who have forgotten, it is a message that often flashes against your flight on departure boards at those once-familiar places known as airports.
Alas, I have recently been forcibly re-exposed to interstate travel and, through a series of long delays, have had much time to contemplate everything I hate about flying. Well, not the flying part, more the multiple points at which your plans can be derailed, from catching the Uber at one end to arriving at the hotel bar – or, far better, home – at the other.
“Go to Gate” is a holding pattern instruction. Like the gentle jilt of “let’s just be friends”, it is an invitation to frustration.
“Boarding” means something. It means you must go to the gate or you will miss your plane. “Delayed” means something. It means not to waste your time going to the gate if you can waste it somewhere more comfortable because your plane isn’t going anywhere right now and, maybe, not ever.
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Blowing off steam: China wants commodity prices to tumble but its hands may be tied
Senior business columnist
May 25, 2021 — 11.54am
China’s efforts to drive the speculative element of soaring commodity prices are working, at least initially and to a degree.
After China’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission called in the senior executives of companies in its metals industry at the weekend and warned them of severe punishment for excessive speculation, fake news, hoarding, price-fixing and other “illegal” activity, iron ore prices fell sharply.
The “zero tolerance” approach from the officials at the meeting with the executives from iron ore, steel, copper, coal and aluminium companies was in response to a boom in commodity prices that saw iron ore and copper prices at record levels.
The ultimatum had an immediate effect, with the key iron ore price tumbling below $US200 ($258) a tonne. Only a fortnight ago the price hit a record $US237.57 a tonne.
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Future Fund warns of inflation risk to markets
John Kehoe Economics editor
May 26, 2021 – 2.06pm
A potential significant increase in inflation is a risk for financial markets and rising interest rates would make it difficult to generate investment returns, the head of the country’s $179 billion sovereign wealth fund has warned.
Future Fund chief executive Raphael Arndt said if inflation began to rise and governments and central banks failed to unwind their extraordinary stimulus, inflation could run too hot.
To prepare for “fundamentally changed” market conditions, Dr Arndt said the fund would hire more than 150 extra staff to deal with the challenges of COVID-19 and following an extended period of ultra-low interest rates. This included plans to employ an additional 70 investment staff, almost double the current level of about 80 investment managers.
Since the Future Fund’s inception under the Howard government in 2006, high returns have been made easier by falling global interest rates inflating asset values.
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Financial advice gets sliced from the menu for all but richest Australians
Financial advice for all but the richest Australians is in serious jeopardy.
The advice sector is shrinking, the majority of students in existing courses are not becoming planners and now evidence is accumulating that the best advisers are cutting off anyone who is not officially “wealthy”.
The concerns are echoed across the financial planning industry with the issue at its most severe where advisers cut a whole layer of clients leaving them to find their own way through a forest of financial products and social welfare legislation.
Fearing a backlash, the majority of advisers refuse to comment publicly on the shift but are debating the issue furiously on a range of industry chat forums.
As one top adviser – who has regularly featured among the top ranks of The List: The Top 100 Top Advisers – suggests: “It’s all too much trouble and it’s not economic to service clients who are not sophisticated investors – the whole thing is a lot easier if we just concentrate on them.
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https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/why-we-didn-t-go-nuclear-20210527-p57vlr
Why Australia didn’t go nuclear
The Financial Review’s take on the principles at stake in major domestic and global stories.
May 27, 2021 – 5.57pm
With the end of coal-fired power generation now on the visible horizon, remember that coal was the future once.
In Australia, it trounced the most futuristic energy of them all: nuclear. “Forward into the nuclear age!” The Australian Financial Review enthused in an editorial in October 1956.
This was at the same time as Britain became the first of many developed nations to switch on nuclear power for its domestic grid, ahead of Australia’s Lucas Heights research reactor being completed.
By the early 1960s however – when nuclear was still viewed as “the ultimate successor” power source, including nuclear-generated electricity for big mining projects in the north – the Financial Review also highlighted the main obstacle.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/open-australia-in-a-messy-world-20210527-p57vos
Australians have never been so fearful and insular
How Australia has dealt with COVID-19 and the rift with China underscores changes in the national psyche.
Herve Lemahieu Contributor
Updated May 28, 2021 – 5.42pm, first published at 5.18pm
Emigration requires a leap of faith. The light on the other side of the ocean inspires the journey. But once ashore, it can be the ambiguities of an adopted country that truly fascinate.
A central motif of Australian public discourse is the dance between competing desires for security, because the world is threatening, and openness, because engagement with the world brings prosperity.
Wrestling with this tension is not unique to Australia. But our history and geographic isolation, set against the wider geopolitical instability of the Indo-Pacific region, means the stakes are higher. The challenge is to reconcile two powerful and often opposing ways in which we relate to the world. Too much of one or too little of the other will harm us either way.
When I arrived in Australia in 2016, my image was of an open and confident country. I had two reference points to support my view.
The Australians I came across in Myanmar, where I spent my teenage years, were a genial bunch of diplomats, UN staffers and eccentrics. Many had a practical intelligence and familiarity with the region that stood out. They were also the life of the party. The Australian Club on Sundays was the place to be for the small Yangon expat community.
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https://www.afr.com/world/asia/every-day-is-a-new-low-point-with-china-20210519-p57t6r
Every day is a new low point with China
Michael Smith China correspondent
May 28, 2021 – 2.04pm
It was almost a year ago when ASIO launched dawn raids on the homes of four Chinese journalists based in Australia.
One account published later by a reporter working for state-controlled news agency Xinhua said 10 ASIO officers spent seven hours searching his apartment and confiscated his laptop and mobile phone as his traumatised child watched on.
Although the Australian media were tipped off about a related raid taking place on NSW Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane on the same day, the action taken against the journalists remained secret until revealed by the Chinese media months later.
Those raids, carried out under Australia’s new foreign interference laws, triggered a series of events that led to the evacuation of the last two journalists working for Australian media outlets in China at the time.
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https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/last-best-chance-to-mend-broken-defences-20210528-p57vy3
Last best chance to mend broken defences?
Peter Dutton is the most powerful defence minister in a long time. He is going to need all his clout in the next few months.
Andrew Tillett Political correspondent
May 28, 2021 – 3.25pm
Well, at least one group has made it to the first major defence trade show held since the pandemic began, and that’s the protesters.
Promising a “week-long festival of resistance”, anti-war activists have attempted to blockade Brisbane’s Convention & Exhibition Centre to stop armoured cars being wheeled in for the Land Forces expo, which gets under way on Tuesday.
Land Forces is meant to be the premier forum for the army’s defence contractors, but a scheduling clash means many among the military’s top brass are missing the event or limiting their attendance because they have to go to Senate estimates instead.
Victoria’s COVID-19 lockdown has also affected participation, with the army’s land systems division located in Melbourne, although Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price, after initially thinking she may not be able to attend because she had transited through Melbourne, may get a last minute reprieve.
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Albanese’s challenge: putting the labour back in Labor
While federal caucus members back Albanese and his strategy, the doubters worry the party has lost too many blue-collar workers and is not trying hard enough to bring them back.
By David Crowe
May 29, 2021
Labor leader Anthony Albanese rubbished talk this week of a crisis for his party in winning back the workers he will need on his side when the next election comes. Declaring full confidence in his ability to triumph in that contest, Albanese said he was ready to “kick with the wind” in the football game of federal politics.
No rush, he said. The policies were coming. He argued a decisive clash with Prime Minister Scott Morrison was only just about to commence: “The fourth quarter is beginning now.”
Outside Canberra, however, some Labor supporters fear the party is not ready to run onto the field. While federal caucus members back Albanese and his strategy, the doubters worry the party has lost too many blue-collar workers and is not trying hard enough to bring them back.
“I think the biggest problem the Labor Party suffers at the moment is that its message is not cutting through,” says Graeme Middlemiss, a party member, former union official and now a councillor on the Latrobe City Council in regional Victoria.
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Reform of ‘human services’ sectors another example of magical thinking
Ross Gittins
Economics Editor
May 28, 2021 — 3.30pm
Those leftie academics who keep accusing Scott Morrison and his government of being “neo-liberal” aren’t keeping up. This government’s neo-liberal days are long gone. But “micro-economic reform”, on the other hand, is alive and well.
If neo-liberal has any meaning, it’s a belief in free-market capitalism, privatisation and smaller government. It’s a presumption against government intervention in markets.
But that’s just what Morrison keeps doing: intervening to prop up the Portland aluminium smelter, intervening to keep oil refineries open and, of course, spending $600 million-plus to build a government-owned gas-fired power station no one in the industry wants.
By contrast, it’s clear from Treasury secretary Dr Stephen Kennedy’s big speech last week that he’s hot to trot with a new round of economic-rationalist inspired micro reform. The good old days are back.
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Coronavirus And Impacts.
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True cost of pandemic and policy failure to leave finances in the red
By Shane Wright
May 23, 2021 — 8.00pm
The pandemic’s devastation of the nation’s finances will be laid bare along with past policy mistakes in next month’s delayed intergenerational report, revealing huge levels of debt over the next 40 years, a less productive economy and a smaller, older population.
Amid warnings it will be a wake-up call for both sides of politics, the next intergenerational report from the federal government will also have to correct issues created by the last report, carried out by then treasurer Joe Hockey, and account for a ramp-up in spending in areas such as aged care and health.
The report, started by Peter Costello when he was treasurer, is aimed at measuring the long-term sustainability of government policies and how changes to the population and productivity levels affect the budget bottom line.
Due last year, the latest report was delayed because of the pandemic.
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Did Covid-19 escape a lab? Scientists no longer immune to the idea
· The Times
We know this all started with a bat. We know it ended with a pandemic. What we don’t know is what happened in between.
Who was the first human to provide a home for Sars-CoV2? And, the question scientists are finding the courage to ask: were they standing by a bat or by a freezer door?
Did the three members of the Wuhan virology laboratory who, we learnt on Sunday, went to hospital in November 2019, do so because they had Covid-19?
This is not merely a scientific question nor a geopolitical one. It is also a personal one: the answer will explain much of the past year for every human being.
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Wuhan lab leak mystery: a disused Chinese mine takes centre stage
It isn’t the predominant hypothesis for Covid’s origins, yet prominent scientists are calling for a deeper probe and clearer answers from Beijing.
By Jeremy Page, Betsy McKay, Drew Hinshaw
· From Dow Jones
May 25, 2021
On the outskirts of a village deep in the mountains of southwest China, a lone surveillance camera peers down toward a disused copper mine smothered in dense bamboo. As night approaches, bats swoop overhead.
This is the subterranean home of the closest known virus on Earth to the one that causes Covid-19. It is also now a touchpoint for escalating calls for a more thorough probe into whether the pandemic could have stemmed from a Chinese laboratory.
In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.
Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine, identified several new coronaviruses.
Now, unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have elevated into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases were found in December 2019.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/tax-rises-are-inevitable-after-covid-19-20210525-p57uvi
Tax rises are inevitable after COVID-19
Not many politicians will admit it before the next federal election, but it is inevitable that taxes will rise in coming years to pay for the financial hangover of COVID-19.
John Kehoe Economics editor
May 26, 2021 – 10.53am
Not many politicians will admit it before the next federal election, but it is inevitable that taxes will rise in coming years to pay for the financial hangover of COVID-19.
Well after the “temporary” fiscal stimulus fades, Treasury’s long-term budget projections show that government spending will remain elevated at above 26 per cent of gross domestic product and revenue will be about 24 per cent of GDP in five to 10 years from now.
That 2 per cent of GDP fiscal shortfall equals at least $40 billion a year in today’s dollars.
The estimate is built on rosy assumptions that flat productivity growth gradually recovers to its 30-year annual average of 1.5 per cent and real spending growth is contained at 1 per cent a year from 2025 onwards.
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https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/ramsay-s-1-8b-pandemic-opportunity-20210526-p57vei
Ramsay’s $1.8b pandemic opportunity
Private hospital operator Ramsay Health Care is seeking to buy growth in the UK with the $1.8 billion purchase of Spire Healthcare. But it must navigate a strict competition review that will delay synergy benefits for a year.
May 26, 2021 – 8.08pm
Ramsay Health Care chief executive Craig McNally says he has been working on the takeover of Spire Healthcare Group in the UK for about 10 years.
COVID-19 presented the opportunity to buy the business for $1.8 billion and more than double the size of Ramsay’s hospital network in the UK.
McNally is bullish about the transaction. He says it will transform Ramsay’s UK business, which includes 34 acute hospitals and day procedure centres, by adding Spire’s 39 hospitals and eight clinics across England, Wales and Scotland.
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The hidden and mounting costs of life in our Hermit Kingdom
Senior economics writer
May 27, 2021 — 5.30am
At times of considerable stress, it is only human to yearn for the hermit lifestyle: a life of solitude and silence, allowing space for contemplation and communion with nature. Deep breaths. Aaaaaah.
And yet it is possible to get too much of a good thing. And the Australian economy is very definitely at risk of getting it.
Australia’s splendid isolation from the rest of the world during the COVID pandemic has, it must be said, served us admirably so far, helping economic activity to rebound much faster than expected. Not to mention it has saved lives.
But it has also dealt body blows to our international tourism and education industries. Less obviously, but no less importantly, continuing restrictions on the free flow of our citizens, both abroad and between states, is likely exacting a much longer-term toll, with which economists are only beginning to grapple.
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The virus lab theory’s new credibility
· The Wall Street Journal
President Biden on Wednesday ordered U.S. intelligence to dig deeper into the origins of Covid-19, a reversal after he reportedly ordered a State Department investigative unit shut down. Mr. Biden is trying to cover for his embarrassing closure of the investigation because the dam has finally broken on the evidence that the virus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The shame is that it took so long because the suspicious facts have been apparent from the start.
***
In January 2020, international media began reporting about a virus spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan. “The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic,” said Sen. Tom Cotton on Jan. 30, 2020. “I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
The world would learn more about Covid-19 — and the WIV. But it was always reasonable to ask if the virus came from a nearby lab that handled dangerous viruses. On Feb. 6, 2020, Botao Xiao of the South China University of Technology posted a paper concluding the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” But the Chinese government strictly controls research into Covid-19’s origins, and the molecular biomechanics researcher withdrew his publication.
The Communist Party then went on offense, with Beijing’s ambassador to the U.S. declaring that lab-leak theories were “absolutely crazy” and could “fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia.” After Mr. Cotton responded by calling on China to “open up now to competent international scientists,” the media chose denial: “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” (Washington Post) and “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins” (New York Times).
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PM’s complacency is infectious. It’s time he caught the quarantine fever
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
May 29, 2021 — 5.30am
Complacent, adjective: A feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.
The shutdown of Australia’s second biggest state, representing 24 per cent of the national economy, was a shock, right?
Wrong. Jane Halton knew it was inevitable. That’s why she recommended improvements to the quarantine system in her report to the national cabinet last year. They’ve mostly been ignored.
“It was predictable,” says the former secretary of the federal Department of Health and co-chair of the international vaccine distribution facility for poor countries, COVAX . How? “Several things,” she tells me.
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Climate Change.
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Why the Hunter Valley gas plant is bad policy
The Kurri Kurri gas fired power station will neither cut power prices nor add useful capacity. But it will push energy investment risk back onto the taxpayer.
Tom Parry Contributor
May 24, 2021 – 1.44pm
It’s been more than 30 years since the National Electricity Market was put in place. The reforms included the separation of the ownership of generation from networks. And, importantly, the privatisation of most of the electricity businesses that had been in the hands of mainly state and in some cases local governments for generations.
It was generally accepted that governments weren’t the best owners of these businesses and taxpayers shouldn’t face the emerging risks in the evolving energy market. The reforms to energy markets arising from the seminal Hilmer review saw the Commonwealth and states implement good bipartisan economic policy.
All this has been turned on its head with increasing moves by the Commonwealth government – and therefore taxpayers – towards owning more energy assets. This is via the government’s now 100 per cent ownership of Snowy Hydro, which is a significant player in east coast energy generation and, through its subsidiary Red Energy, a significant player in energy retailing.
The latest development is the government’s announcement that Snowy Hydro will build a new 660 megawatt, $600 million gas-fired plant at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley. This further increases government involvement in and ownership of energy businesses. And it further distorts the operations of the energy market as it continues to evolve away from the original NEM.
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‘We’re burying banknotes’: Ross Garnaut rubbishes government’s $600m gas plant
By Latika Bourke
May 27, 2021 — 12.00am
Ross Garnaut has slammed the federal government’s $600 million backing of a new gas-fired plant as a “waste of money” and likened it to the exercise of burying money and asking the unemployed to dig it up as a way of keeping them productive.
The eminent Australian economist and author of the Garnaut Climate Change Review made the comments to opposition climate spokesman Chris Bowen and former Labor candidate Sam Crosby on their podcast Rekindling Hope.
Last week, the federal government said it would instruct the Commonwealth-owned Snowy Hydro company to build a $600 million gas-fired power plant in the NSW Hunter Valley.
The 660-megawatt plant will operate just two per cent of the time and employ just 10 full-time workers.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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No entries this week.
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National Budget Issues.
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https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/education-centre/en/insights-article/retirement-outcomes
Budget 2021: Retirement Outcomes
The 2021-22 Federal Budget unveiled a range of initiatives aimed at providing additional flexibility across the retirement savings system.
18 May, 2021
By Tony Kaye, Senior Personal Finance Writer, Vanguard Australia
The 2021-22 Federal Budget unveiled a range of initiatives aimed at providing additional flexibility across the retirement savings system.
While the majority centre on retirees and those nearing retirement, the Budget also contains key measures focused on improving retirement outcomes for low income earners and broadening the rules around using personal superannuation contributions towards purchasing a first home.
Below is a summary of various changes announced:
Removing the $450 per month superannuation threshold
Included within the Federal Government's Women's Budget Statement is an announcement that the $450 minimum monthly threshold for employees to be paid the compulsory Superannuation Guarantee levy, will be scrapped. This change is earmarked to start on 1 July 2022, subject to the passing of legislation.
The change will help improve retirement outcomes for all Australians on very low incomes, including older workers with part-time jobs as well as younger 'gig economy' workers, the majority of whom are women.
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Why the government should ditch ‘stage 3’ tax cuts to repair the budget
Economics Editor
May 24, 2021 — 5.00am
Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg won’t admit it. But most economists agree that at the right time, the government should take measures to hasten the budget’s return to balance, even – to use a newly unspeakable word – “surplus”.
Economists may differ on what they consider to be the right time. But, if we’re to avoid repeating the error the major economies made in 2010 by jamming on the fiscal (budgetary) policy brakes well before the recovery was strong enough for the economy to take the contraction in its stride, the right time will be when the economy has returned to full employment, with no spare production capacity.
At that point, the inflation rate’s likely to be back within the Reserve Bank’s 2 to 3 per cent target range, with wage growth of 3 per cent or more. Any further fiscal stimulus from a continuing budget deficit would risk pushing inflation above the target, and could induce a “monetary policy reaction function” where the independent Reserve countered that risk by raising interest rates.
So, better for the government to act before the Reserve acts for it. And if you take the econocrats’ best guess at the level of full employment – when unemployment is down to between 5 and 4.5 per cent – and take the budget’s forecasts at face value (itself a risky thing to do) the right time will be in the middle of 2023.
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Budget 2021: This debt-funded modern entitlement culture will backfire
It is too early to be definitive about the political and economic consequences of the pandemic. However, one aspect seems already clear, and painfully so for those who believe true prosperity and liberty can only come with a small state that sticks to the basics of government.
It is that the excessive increases in public spending most governments in the developed world chose to make, to cushion the economic effects of closing down large parts of their economies, show alarming signs of becoming permanent. This is not necessarily in the same form as during the Covid crisis, but in new social spending that shifts yet more of the financial risks of everyday life from the individual or family to the public purse.
True, the monetarist, free-market ideas that once defined liberal and conservative governance in Australia, the UK and the US had been largely abandoned during the past decade. However, since the Covid crisis began in March 2020, there has been a renewal of the long-lapsed faith in the power of the state all across the Western world. It is fair to say this political transformation is due to cynicism rather than a genuine shift of principle.
Even supposedly right-of-centre governments, such as Boris Johnson’s Conservative and Scott Morrison’s Coalition governments, are embracing the political left’s economic credentials as interventionists and big spenders. Borrowing remains at astronomical levels. Taxes are rising, and set to rise further. And a debt-funded modern entitlement culture has taken hold, now tinged with the politics of identity and inclusion.
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Debt problem? Not even a big rate rise will hurt the budget
By Shane Wright
May 25, 2021 — 7.30pm
Not even a 3 percentage point jump in global interest rates would derail the federal government’s budget, with research suggesting the national interest bill is affordable despite record levels of debt.
Global rating agency S&P Global, in work released on Tuesday, said interest rates were so low that a sizeable increase would be manageable for almost every rich country and most large emerging economies.
This month’s budget confirmed the four largest consecutive deficits on record, including an all-time high of $161 billion in 2020-21, that will drive gross debt beyond $1.2 trillion by the middle of the decade.
The large debt has increased Australia’s interest bill, which is forecast to reach a record $21 billion by 2024-25. It is an issue facing all countries in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, with most running very large deficits and near-record high levels of debt.
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Construction up 2.4% in March quarter
Construction work done in Australia for the March quarter rose slightly more than expected.
The total value of construction work rose 2.4 per cent to $51.98bn after falling by a downwardly revised 1.5 per cent in the December quarter, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
It comes as record low interests rates have pushed down mortgage servicing costs to the lowest level in almost two decades.
The March quarter increase exceeded a 2.0 per cent rise expected by economists.
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Health Issues.
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The labyrinth of bureaucracy behind our country hospitals’ horror stories
Visiting medical officer at Coonabarabran District Hospital
May 25, 2021 — 5.30am
After 25 years as a doctor in rural NSW hospitals, I can attest to the scandals and horror stories emerging from a state parliamentary inquiry into regional, country and remote health services: a teenager with an infected toenail dies of septic shock after being turned away three times from an an emergency department; “tea ladies” check in on newborn babies because there are not enough nurses; doctors threaten to quit en masse because their working conditions are so dangerous.
Naturally, it is the alarming stories from the front line – from the patients, families, doctors and nurses – that capture the headlines. Now we must address the causes.
Chief among them, I have come to learn, is the labyrinthine bureaucracy running NSW Health and the local health districts. The inquiry has come about because communities and health workers are sick and tired of managers in NSW Health and the LHDs stubbornly denying there is a problem.
That is why, when the inquiry came to Wellington, I testified that the principal problem is one of governance. Until that is cleaned up, nothing will improve.
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Governments must make emergency triage rules public, experts say
By Stuart Layt
May 24, 2021 — 7.49pm
Australian health workers dealing with emergency patients face a legal minefield because triage rules are either non-existent or not being communicated clearly by health authorities, experts say.
The group of experts published an article in the Medical Journal of Australia this week calling on governments around the country to state clearly what triage frameworks were in place to deal with patients when a disaster, such as a pandemic, overwhelmed the hospital system.
Triage in a hospital setting refers to the process of determining the order in which patients are seen. Patients with the most life-threatening conditions are usually seen first.
But in emergency scenarios, such as a global pandemic, frontline health staff can be forced to prioritise patients who are more likely to benefit from treatment, in an effort to conserve medical resources.
That can cause issues for clinicians, who may be sued by the families of patients who die during the triage process.
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Psychedelics are psychiatry’s new hope
Once-demonised hallucinogens such as psilocybin are showing astonishing promise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Psilocybin is the psychedelic found in “magic mushrooms” such as psilocybe semilanceata.
Andrew Jacobs
May 28, 2021 – 9.37am
It’s been a long, strange trip in the four decades since Rick Doblin, a pioneering psychedelics researcher, dropped his first hit of acid in college and decided to dedicate his life to the healing powers of mind-altering compounds. Even as anti-drug campaigns led to the criminalisation of ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and drove most researchers from the field, Doblin continued his quixotic crusade with financial help from his parents.
Doblin’s quest to win mainstream acceptance for psychedelics took a significant leap forward last week when the journal Nature Medicine published the results of his lab’s study on MDMA, the club drug popularly known as ecstasy or molly. The study, the first Phase 3 clinical trial conducted with psychedelic-assisted therapy, found MDMA paired with counselling brought marked relief to patients with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.
The results – coming weeks after a New England Journal of Medicine study highlighted the benefits of treating depression with psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms – has excited scientists, psychotherapists and entrepreneurs in the rapidly expanding field of psy–chedelic medicine. They say it is only a matter of time before the Food and Drug Administration grants approval for psychoactive compounds to be used therapeutically — for MDMA as soon as 2023, followed by psilocybin a year or two later.
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International Issues.
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‘Woke capitalists’ provoke backlash from US conservatives
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
May 23, 2021 – 12.15pm
New York | Why, a shareholder asked at Goldman Sachs’ annual meeting last month, was the bank supporting Marxists against the capitalist policies that had made it such a powerhouse? Had its board been taken over by “the far-left woke mob”?
David Solomon, Goldman’s chief executive, replied equably to the demand to explain why he had joined hundreds of his peers in opposing legislation being pushed by Republicans that makes it harder for eligible voters to cast a ballot in US elections, and the meeting moved on.
But the exchange captured a shift in the politics around corporate America as chief executives used to being lambasted by the left as tax-dodging contributors to inequality and environmental degradation find themselves attacked from the right as “woke capitalists”.
A conservative backlash against companies’ responses to the 2020 election, voting battles, racial equity protests and other issues dividing Americans is becoming increasingly visible at shareholder meetings and in Congress and the media.
A right-leaning group called Consumers Research this week announced a $US1m-plus ($1.3m-plus) advertising campaign targeting companies that, it said, were “putting woke politics over consumer interests”.
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‘Hijacked’: President uses fighter jet to force Ryanair flight to land in Belarus
May 24, 2021 — 2.20am
Moscow: Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko personally ordered a fighter jet to intercept a Ryanair flight carrying a young opposition blogger, forcing it to redirect and land in Belarus.
The Boeing aircraft, flying on Sunday local time from the Greek capital Athens to Vilnius, had almost reached Lithuania when it changed direction and was escorted to the Belarusian capital of Minsk.
On arrival, police detained activist Roman Protasevich, 26, who had been on a wanted list after last year’s mass street protests in the wake of an election in which Lukashenko claimed a landslide but disputed victory.
Ryanair released a statement saying the plane crew had been notified by Belarus of a “potential security threat on board” and were insttructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk.
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Belarus kidnapping sets a dangerous global precedent
The disturbing reality is that authoritarian countries are increasingly resorting to what Freedom House, a US-based pro-democracy organisation, calls in a report released in February, ‘transnational repression’.
Gideon Rachman Columnist
May 25, 2021 – 9.47am
The “rules-based international order” is a dull phrase beloved by diplomats that can sound like a meaningless cliché. Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, even briefly considered instructing his officials to stop using the term.
But if anyone doubts the need for a rules-based international order, they should consider what has just happened to Ryanair flight FR4978 from Greece to Lithuania. The plane was crossing Belarus when it was forced to land in Minsk — allowing the government there to detain Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian journalist, who has chronicled the brutal repression in his home country.
The arrest was apparently made on the direct orders of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s president — who has been fighting for his political life since stealing his country’s presidential election last year.
Belarus is a small country with a population of just under 10m. But this hijacking and kidnap by the Lukashenko regime sets a dangerous global precedent. It will be watched closely by much larger countries that also like to pursue their domestic enemies overseas — in particular Russia (which is Belarus’s closest ally), China and Iran.
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Joe Biden is gathering his friends close as he prepares to confront China
Political and international editor
May 25, 2021 — 5.30am
In the four months he’s been US President, Joe Biden has held only two face-to-face summits. His choice of leaders to invite to Washington is a clear and deliberate framing for his presidency and for global power politics.
The first summit was with Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. The second was held on the weekend when South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in stepped into the White House.
So why Japan and South Korea? They are the two US treaty allies nearest China. In the meantime Biden is keeping China’s President Xi Jinping waiting. Biden is gathering his friends close as he prepares to confront his rival, exactly as he said he’d do on taking the presidency.
“They have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world,” Biden said of China. “That’s not gonna happen on my watch.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/24/inflation-risk-is-real/
Opinion: The inflation risk is real
Opinion by
Contributing columnist
May 25, 2021 at 4:09 a.m. GMT+10
The covid-19 chapter in U.S. economic history is coming to a close more rapidly than almost anyone expected, including me. Within weeks, gross domestic product will reach a new peak, and it is likely to exceed its pre-covid trend line before year’s end, as the economy enjoys its fastest year of growth in decades. Job openings are at record levels, and unemployment may well fall below 4 percent in the next 12 months. Wages and productivity growth are increasing.
This is both very good news and a tribute to the aggressive covid-19 containment policies of recent months, as well as to strong fiscal and monetary policies since the onset of the pandemic. Our economy has outperformed those of other industrial countries. U.S. policymakers can take satisfaction from that.
But new conditions require new approaches. Now, the primary risk to the U.S. economy is overheating — and inflation.
Prosecutor convenes grand jury to weigh criminal charges for Donald Trump
By Michael R. Sisak
May 26, 2021 — 10.04am
New York: New York prosecutors have convened a special grand jury to consider evidence in a criminal investigation into former president Donald Trump’s business dealings.
The development signals that the Manhattan district attorney’s office was moving toward seeking charges as a result of its two-year investigation, which included a lengthy legal battle to obtain Trump’s tax records.
The person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity becasue they weren’t authorieed to speak publicly. The news was first reported by The Washington Post.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance jnr is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into a variety of matters such as hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf, property valuations and employee compensation.
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We are all at odds over China because we don’t have a plan
The events of the past few years have demonstrated that our strategy for dealing with the rise of China is out of date. It requires a serious and systematic rethink.
We cannot go back to the halcyon days of Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and John Howard. We can’t go on improvising in an ad hoc manner. Nor can we move forward safely on the lines urged by those, such as Hugh White, who assert that China’s dominance is inevitable and the end of US hegemony in East Asia at hand.
Rather, we need to reframe our strategic planning and diplomacy in Indo-Pacific terms. Xi Jinping has demonstrated that misgivings about his regime and his overweening strategic ambitions are warranted. He has shown that China under his aegis is not our friend. A trusting relationship with Xi’s China is next to impossible.
He requires acquiescence and submission.
That’s the context for Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo’s remarks about the drums of war. We don’t want and won’t accept subordination to Beijing. None of our substantial Asian neighbours, from Delhi to Tokyo, wants subordination either. We handled relations with China well during the past 40 to 50 years, including disagreements over various things. We have profited handsomely from its long boom. We are still so profiting. Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox urges that we bear this in mind and tread carefully.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/rbnz-signals-rate-hike-in-2022-20210526-p57v6k
RBNZ projects rate hike in 2022
Sarah Turner Reporter
May 26, 2021 – 12.42pm
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand kept its policy settings on hold in May but projects that the cash rate will start to rise in the second half of 2022, in a move that could make it one of the first advanced economy central banks to raise rates.
The New Zealand central bank, headed by governor Adrian Orr, kept its official cash rate at 0.25 per cent in May and maintained its large scale asset purchase program at $NZ100 billion. The bank’s funding for lending program was also unchanged in May.
“The global economic outlook has continued to improve, with ongoing fiscal and monetary stimulus underpinning the recovery. New Zealand’s commodity export prices have benefited from this rise in global demand,” the minutes of the meeting showed.
“The committee agreed to maintain its current stimulatory monetary settings until it is confident that consumer price inflation will be sustained near the 2 per cent per annum target midpoint, and that employment is at its maximum sustainable level. Meeting these requirements will necessitate considerable time and patience.”
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China’s challenges show Xi has only limited control over its economic levers
Stephen Bartholomeusz
Senior business columnist
May 27, 2021 — 12.02pm
China’s attempt to crack down on commodities speculation, cryptocurrencies, grain purchases and property bubbles and its efforts to slow capital inflows and the appreciation of its currency are indicators of stresses and conflicting challenges within its economy.
It has been notable in recent weeks that China’s authorities have been very active on a wide range of issues and there is a sense of urgency in their response to the surge in commodity prices, a flood of capital inflows and financial and currency markets risks.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that they are concerned about imbalances and bubbles, or potential imbalances and bubbles, within their economy and are acting to try to prevent them from destabilising the economy and/or forcing them to take more dramatic steps.
The attempt to reduce speculative activity in commodities – China’s metals industry executives were threatened with punishment last weekend if they engaged in excessive speculation, hoarding or price-fixing – is, along with a squeeze on grain imports, clearly related to concerns about inflation and competitiveness.
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https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/ghost-of-the-70s-haunts-us-fed-20210526-p57vfo
Ghost of the ’70s haunts US Fed
The world has played a heavy price before for cavalierly dismissing inflationary costs as ‘transitory’.
Stephen Roach Contributor
May 27, 2021 – 12.13pm
Memories can be tricky. I have long been haunted by the inflation of the 1970s. Fifty years ago, when I had just started my career as a professional economist at the Federal Reserve, I was witness to the birth of the Great Inflation as a Fed insider. That left me with the recurring nightmares of a financial post-traumatic stress disorder.
The bad dreams are back. They centre on the Fed’s legendary chairman at the time, Arthur F. Burns, who brought a unique perspective to the US central bank as an expert on the business cycle.
In 1946, he co-authored the definitive treatise on the seemingly rhythmic ups and downs of the US economy back to the mid-19th century. Working for him was intimidating, especially for someone in my position. I had been tasked with formal weekly briefings on the very subjects Burns knew best. He used that knowledge to poke holes in staff presentations. I found out quickly that you couldn’t tell him anything.
Yet Burns, who ruled the Fed with an iron fist, lacked an analytical framework to assess the interplay between the real economy and inflation, and how that relationship was connected to monetary policy.
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Markets could be about to get a rude shock as China hits the brakes
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
May 28, 2021 — 7.45am
What happens when torrid monetary and fiscal reflation in the West meets tighter credit and evaporating liquidity in China?
We will find out soon enough who calls the shots for world inflation in a globalised economy dominated by cross-border capital flows. We will also find out whether these two colliding forces moderate each other, or set off the sort of wild ructions in currency, commodity, and bond markets that make hedge funds salivate.
“We have an incredible situation where the US is throwing the kitchen sink at its economy but China is over the peak and hitting the brakes,” said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics.
“They began to rein in the property sector last September and were very quick to pivot from worrying about growth to worrying about debt. The post-Covid investment boom has mostly run its course,” he said.
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Despite grand jury threat, Donald Trump can still aim for presidency
· AFP
No charges have been filed, but a grand jury may bring findings this year that put Donald Trump in legal jeopardy and pose grave risks to his 2024 ambitions.
Headlines about Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance launching a six-month grand jury, ramping up the years-long investigation into the business dealings of Mr Trump and the Trump Organisation, sparked a flurry of speculation over the one-term president’s political future.
Mr Trump is facing investigations by federal and New York state authorities into whether he or his company lied about the value of assets to defraud banks and insurance companies, or to obtain tax benefits illegally.
Indictments, a conviction or even prison time would not bar any American from seeking the highest office, as there is nothing unconstitutional about a convicted criminal winning the White House, experts say.
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Ex-adviser Dominic Cummings lashes Boris Johnson over Covid-19 strategy
Former key adviser Dominic Cummings has insisted that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would rather “let bodies pile high” than enter a third national lockdown last October.
In seven hours of riveting, controversial and at times awkward testimony before Westminster’s health and science joint committee, Mr Cummings — famously exposed as breaking lockdown rules to travel to a family property hundreds of kilometres away and for taking a trip to Barnard Castle — launched an extraordinary broadside at the Prime Minister.
He called for an immediate statutory inquiry into the government’s pandemic response because “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die” and accused Mr Johnson of constantly switching his views “like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”.
A group called Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK said Mr Cummings’ evidence was clear: that “the government’s combination of grotesque chaos and uncaring flippancy was directly responsible for many of our loved ones not being with us today — and the refusal to have an urgent statutory inquiry risks others joining them.”
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Divided states of America: can Biden heal the rifts?
For all the hopes of radical reforms among the woke Democrat rank and file, it’s hard to see the Biden era leaving a lasting legacy.
May 29, 2021
In 1996, US president Bill Clinton declared the era of big government was over.
“We know big government does not have all the answers … a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government,” he said in his state of the union address, delivered at the midpoint of an administration that paid down public debt, slashed welfare and toughened up policing.
Big government is well and truly back, 25 years later, under his successor Joe Biden. “America is rising anew, choosing hope over fear, truth over lies, and light over darkness,” the new Democrat president said optimistically last month during his first big speech to both houses of congress.
But, for all the spin, it’s hard not to see the reality of a diminished nation: more unequal, more divided, less confident, as it is losing its relative economic and geopolitical clout to China. In foreign policy the new Democrat administration has proved conventional – multilateralist, sprinkled with Obama-era senior officials, and alert and accommodating to Australia’s interests.
But domestically, underpinned by a Democratic Party radically different from Clinton’s, it promises to be the most progressive administration the US has seen, sustained by an intellectual elite increasingly beholden to a “woke” ideology far removed from ordinary Americans’ hopes and aspirations.
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https://www.afr.com/world/middle-east/anti-zionism-equates-with-anti-semitism-20210525-p57uz5
Anti-Zionism equates with anti-Semitism
The latest Gaza conflict has allowed progressives to indulge an anti-Israel movement that keeps descending into the crudest forms of anti-Semitism.
Bret Stephens
May 25, 2021 – 1.44pm
In recent years it has become an article of faith on the progressive left that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism and that it’s slander to assume that someone who hates Israel also hates Jews. Not everyone got the memo.
Not the people who, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Jews,” according to a witness, assaulted Jewish diners at a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. Not the people who threw fireworks in New York’s diamond district. Not the people who brutally beat up a man wearing a yarmulke in Times Square. Not the people who drove through London slurring Jews and yelling, “Rape their daughters.” Not the people who gathered outside a synagogue in Germany shouting slurs. Not the people who, at a protest in Brussels, chanted, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The army of Muhammad is returning.”
Also not getting the memo are the people who have tweeted the hashtag #HitlerWasRight (including someone who now works for the BBC), along with the hashtag #Covid1948, a suggestion that Israel is a virus that needs the cure of Hamas’ rockets as a “vaccine.” Apparently, these hashtags count as legitimate political speech at Twitter, a company whose objections to bigotry are otherwise so strong that it once banned a Canadian feminist for the sin of tweeting remarks about transgender women like “men aren’t women.”
In this storm of hate, political leaders such as Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain have issued appropriate statements of condemnation. On CNN, correspondent Bianna Golodryga called out the anti-Semitism of Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, when he cited “deep pockets” and “control (of) media” in terms of Israel’s influence on public opinion. Good for her.
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Why Taiwan’s drought means you can’t have a new smart TV
By Eryk Bagshaw
May 30, 2021 — 5.00am
Singapore: The chips that drive your smartphones, laptops and cars need water - lots of water.
This might sound curious - given their propensity to fail after water damage - but this is not your average water. It’s 1000 times purer than regular water. It is used to cleanse these technical marvels of any impurities before they land in your Tesla, iPhone or Samsung Galaxy.
Thirsty work
Right now, the world’s largest manufacturer of these chips, Taiwan’s TSMC, is about to hit a deadline. On Tuesday, if Taiwan has not received more than 100 millimetres of rain in its reservoir catchment, some of the world’s largest semiconductor factories will have to scale back water consumption.
Taiwan’s crippling drought is hitting the world’s electronics supply, just as COVID-19 lockdowns send the demand for gadgets to record heights.
“The rain is simply not enough to support the ongoing growth of the industry,” said Natixis Asia Pacific economist Gary Ng.
“If this situation continues, and if it reaches a stage where the water supply is actually affecting TSMC’s production, I think it will have a spillover effect in the world.”
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
