In a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official says their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to get a boost.
Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
The first observation in the United States motivating the GSG hypothesis is the protracted decline in long-term real interest rates, as shown in figure 1. This figure depicts both a Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) rate and an expected long-term real interest rate, computed by subtracting from the nominal yield on ten-year Treasury securities the measure of ten-year expected inflation from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF).8 From 2003 on, the TIPS rate is for the ten-year TIPS. Before 2003, we use a 30-year TIPS rate, data for which are available starting in 1998, subtracting 40 basis points from it to reflect the average term premium observed in the years when both the ten-year and 30-year TIPS are available. At the time Bernanke first articulated the GSG hypothesis, much of the focus was on Greenspan’s conundrum—that is, the continuing drop in long-term rates in 2004–05 despite repeated hikes in short-term rates during a strong economy. However, with the benefit of hindsight, the much longer-run, apparently secular nature of the drop in long-term real interest rates is evident. Very roughly, it seems fair to say that the ten-year real interest rate in the United States declined about 150 basis points between the latter half of the 1990s (when it averaged around 3.5 percent) and the prelude to the global financial crisis (when it averaged around 2 percent), and then it fell another 200 basis points commencing with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and continuing to the present. While the first drop of 150 basis points is very plausibly a consequence of capital inflows, the post-crisis drop of 200 basis points is unlikely to be attributable primarily to the GSG;9 instead, that second drop suggests a somewhat parallel story of weak domestic investment in the United States.
Using molecular dating tools and epidemiological simulations, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues at the University of Arizona and Illumina, Inc., estimate that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was likely circulating undetected for at most two months before the first human cases of COVID-19 were described in Wuhan, China in late-December 2019.
Writing in the March 18, 2021 online issue of Science, they also note that their simulations suggest that the mutating virus dies out naturally more than three-quarters of the time without causing an epidemic.
That’s a reasonable theory: other bat coronaviruses have jumped to humans the same way. In fact, it was the origin of SARS, a similar coronavirus that panicked the world in 2003 when it spread out of southern China and sickened 8,000 people. With SARS, researchers tested caged market animals and quickly found a nearly identical virus in Himalayan palm civet cats and raccoon dogs, which are also eaten locally.
This time, though, the intermediate-host hypothesis has one big problem. More than a year after covid-19 began, no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus. That’s despite efforts by China to test tens of thousands of animals, including pigs, goats, and geese, according to Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese side of the research team. No one has found a “direct progenitor” of the virus, he says, and therefore the pandemic “remains an unsolved mystery.”
ON MARCH 5TH at its annual parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s government revealed an economic-growth target of “more than 6%” for this year, a bar it is expected to clear with ease. Take the latest data. China’s key economic indicators for January and February, published on Monday, were buoyant. Industrial production and retail sales, for example, are soaring—35.1% and 33.8% higher than a year ago, respectively, beating consensus forecasts. Fixed-asset investment surged by 35% year on year, but still fell below expectations.
This year’s rocket-fuelled figures are even harder to decipher than usual because they are compared with record lows last year, during the first wave of covid-19 outbreaks. Macquarie, a bank, says that if you remove the effect of the pandemic, underlying retail sales were up by 3.1% for the first two months of 2021. This implies consumption accelerated after a few small outbreaks were brought under control in Beijing in January. Oxford Economics, a research group, says it expects household consumption to become the main engine of economic growth from the second quarter of 2021, as travel restrictions are eased. But in the first quarter, growth will remain sluggish.
Chinese regulators attempting to rein in Ant Group Co. and a swelling online-lending industry have a target in their sights: the excessive, debt-fueled lifestyles of the country’s youth.
Leading up to last year’s coronavirus pandemic, a new generation of tech-savvy and free-spending citizens helped power rising consumption, a growing driver of China’s economy.
Many used short-term loans to pay for expenses such as prestige cosmetics, electronic gadgets and costly restaurant meals. They found credit easy to obtain, thanks to Ant and other Chinese financial-technology companies that provided unsecured loans to millions of people who didn’t have bank-issued credit cards. In 2019, online loans accounted for as much as half of short-term consumer loans in China, according to estimates from Fitch Ratings.
Now, new financial regulations are forcing lenders to reassess their business strategies and have sparked a reckoning about the American-style borrowing and spending habits of China’s younger population. Starting in 2022, Ant and its peers will have to fund at least 30% of the loans they make together with banks, a rule designed to make online lenders bear more risk.
At first the Chinese hackers ran a careful campaign. For two months, they exploited weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange email servers, picked their targets carefully, and stealthily stole entire mailboxes. When investigators eventually caught on, it looked like typical online espionage—but then things accelerated dramatically.
Around February 26, the narrow operation turned into something much bigger and much more chaotic. Just days later, Microsoft publicly disclosed the hacks—the hackers are now known as Hafnium—and issued a security fix. But by then attackers were looking for targets across the entire internet: in addition to tens of thousands of reported victims in the US, governments around the world are announcing that they were compromised too. Now at least 10 hacking groups, most of them government-backed cyber-espionage teams, are exploiting the vulnerabilities on thousands of servers in over 115 countries, according to the security firm ESET.
From what I know, which is (if I’m being generous) 10% of the available information:
zoonotic origin (animal to human) is not off the table. This is a plausible theory. Also, we have no hard evidence supporting it. In fact, there is a frustrating lack of evidence supporting it.
lab escape is not off the table. This is a plausible theory with precedent. We have no hard evidence supporting it. But also, the CCP has closed the door on investigating this possibility so we are unlikely to learn any new information on this absent a defection from a Chinese scientist or researcher.
lab manipulation is unlikely, though “manipulation” is a really generous term. It could mean anything from “the virus mutated in the lab to become more dangerous” to “they used some intentional genetic manipulation technology to make it more dangerous”. Again… I find this unlikely and we absolutely zero evidence that this was done.
Author(s): PoliMath
Publication Date: 9 March 2021
Publication Site: Marginally Compelling at Substack
The world economy is likely to grow by around 6% this year, according to Oxford Economics, the fastest rate in almost half a century, as vaccine campaigns allow pandemic restrictions to be lifted and businesses to snap back.
For the first time since 2005, the U.S. is expected this year to make a bigger contribution to global growth than China, said the research firm. After the 2008 financial crisis, the global economic recovery was powered by China, as the U.S. experienced the weakest revival since the Great Depression.
You said raising the retirement age in a gradual manner is a major decision made upon China’s overall economic and social development, which will improve the use of China’s human resources, enhance the sustainability of the social insurance system and ensure basic living of the people.
Currently, in China, the retirement age for men is 60, while for women it is 55 for white-collar workers and 50 for blue-collar employees.
With great social and economic progress taking place in China, the retirement age, which was set in the 1950s, is relatively low, according to You, who cited longer average life expectancy as well as changes in demographic structure and the supply and demand of labor.
Hong Kong moved unexpectedly to raise taxes on share trading by 30%, putting a damper on the city’s stock-exchange operator just as it was unveiling record annual sales and profits.
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Paul Chan, the city’s financial secretary, proposed lifting the so-called stamp duty on stocks to 0.13% from 0.1%, as part of Hong Kong’s annual budget. The increase, which is the first in nearly three decades, would effectively add $3 to the cost of each $10,000 of stock traded, for both buyers and sellers. Some securities are exempt.
The looming tax increase pummeled Hong Kong Exchanges shares, even as it reported the equivalent of $1.48 billion in net profit for 2020, a 23% increase and its biggest-ever haul. The company’s stock, which has recently hit record highs, fell as much as 12% before paring some losses to close 8.8% lower. The city’s benchmark Hang Seng Index fell 3%.
New evidence from China is affirming what epidemiologists have long suspected: The coronavirus likely began spreading unnoticed around the Wuhan area in November 2019, before it exploded in multiple different locations throughout the city in December.
Chinese authorities have identified 174 confirmed Covid-19 cases around the city from December 2019, said World Health Organization researchers, enough to suggest there were many more mild, asymptomatic or otherwise undetected cases than previously thought.
Many of the 174 cases had no known connection to the market that was initially considered the source of the outbreak, according to information gathered by WHO investigators during the four-week mission to China to examine the origins of the virus. Chinese authorities declined to give the WHO team raw data on these cases and potential earlier ones, team members said.
Author(s): Betsy McKay in New York, Drew Hinshaw in Warsaw and Jeremy Page in Beijing
