Category: Breaking News

SHANGHAI, Dec 19 (Reuters) – COVID-19 is sweeping through trading floors in Beijing and spreading fast in the financial hub of Shanghai, with illness and absence thinning already light trade and forcing regulators to cancel a weekly meeting vetting public share sales. Many banks and asset managers have dusted off plans devised to cope with previous COVID crises, injecting another layer of unpredictability into currency and stock markets, where the outlook is clouded by a rocky exit from strict health curbs. With mass testing halted after abruptly dropped its zero-COVID policy earlier this month, official data no longer reliably capture new case numbers. Internal surveys by several big asset managers and banks suggest more than half of their employees in Beijing, the epicentre of the virus surge, have tested positive. “I would say more than half of colleagues in Beijing are sick, compared with 5%-10% in Shanghai,” said a fund manager at PICC Asset Management, declining to be named as he’s not authorised to speak to the media. NN: I am told this is the most deaths and infections the Chinese have seen to date. They cannot hide the elephant in the room.

China’s COVID surge hits Beijing trading floors, Shanghai finance hub

BEIJING, Dec 19 (Reuters) – China’s business confidence fell to its lowest since January 2013, a survey by World Economics showed on Monday, reflecting the impact of surging COVID-19 cases on economic activity with the abrupt lifting of many pandemic control measures. The index fell to 48.1 in December from 51.8 in November, showed the World Economics’ survey of sales managers at over 2,300 companies conducted Dec. 1-16. The index was the lowest since the survey began in 2013. The survey results were among the first indicators of how business sentiment has taken a hit in the world’s second-biggest economy, after the sharp relaxation of strict COVID containment measures on Dec. 7 triggered a still-growing wave of domestic COVID cases across China. “The survey suggests strongly that the growth rate of the Chinese economy has slowed quite dramatically, and may be heading for recession in 2023,” World Economics said. China’s GDP is expected to grow just 3% this year, its worst performance in nearly half a century. The survey showed business activity fell sharply in December with the sales managers indexes in Manufacturing and Service Sectors both below the 50 level. “The percentage of companies that claim to be currently negatively impacted by COVID has risen to a survey high, with more than half of all respondents now suggesting their operations are being harmed in one way or another,” the London-based data provider said. China has recently dismantled some key parts of the world’s toughest anti-COVID curbs and lockdowns. The measures were championed by President Xi Jinping but impaired the economy and sparked popular protests unprecedented in his decade-long rule. The top leaders and policymakers will focus on stabilising the economy in 2023 and step up policy adjustments to ensure key targets are hit, according to an agenda-setting meeting ended on Friday. “It may take at least another quarter before things turn around,” said Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank China. “Many small businesses have run out of liquidity, especially restaurants, gyms, hotels and other city services.” NN: Markets are not pricing in the coming crash in China. The worst of the COVID crises will hit after golden week in February. And it will not be a quick reversal out of it either…….

An Epic Stock Market Crash is More Likely Than Ever

The FED has raised rates 425 basis points and they ain’t done. In my mind a recession is a guaranteed event and an epic, generational stock market wipeout is a real possibility. You’ll never forgive yourself if you miss this.

One million Chinese people are at risk of dying from Covid-19 during the coming winter months if President Xi Jinping pursues his pivot to remove strict pandemic controls, new modelling shows. In a stunning reversal after protests against Xi’s zero-Covid policy, Chinese officials have begun dismantling the pandemic control system of lockdowns, mass testing, state quarantine and electronic contact tracing.On Wednesday, authorities for the first time announced that coronavirus patients who were either asymptomatic or had only mild symptoms could isolate at home rather than at hospitals or centralised quarantine facilities, while public venues in many cities would no longer have to check for negative Covid tests. Removal of the restrictions risks sparking an unparalleled “winter wave” of Covid infections that would rapidly overwhelm China’s healthcare system, according to projections by Wigram Capital Advisors, an Asia-focused macroeconomic advisory group that has provided modelling to governments during the pandemic. The models have been reviewed by the Financial Times. Under a scenario where China’s leadership continues to roll back zero-Covid – as it has been doing in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou among other cities in recent days – daily fatalities may reach as high as 20,000 in mid-March. Demand for intensive care units would peak at 10 times higher than capacity by late March and daily hospitalisations would hit 70,000. The winter wave would be exacerbated by the likelihood of the lunar new year holiday, the world’s largest annual human migration, becoming a super spreader event. The projections highlight Beijing’s failure to administer full vaccine courses to tens of millions of elderly Chinese and address the country’s ICU shortage nearly three years since the first Covid cases emerged in Wuhan, central China, in late 2019. It also returns focus to the Xi administration’s refusal to import superior messenger RNA vaccine technology. That is despite months of warnings from health experts as well as modelling by researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University, released in May, which estimated that an unchecked surge of the Omicron variant in the country of 1.4 billion people could lead to almost 1.6 million fatalities within about three months.

“The current propaganda messaging is that a reopening will be costless,” said Rodney Jones, principal at Wigram. “The risk is that they are underestimating just how much work – and cost – the rest of the world has done and borne to get to the point of living with Covid.”

The Wigram models use vaccination and age data, the effect of public health measures and the real-time effective “R value”, a measure of a disease’s ability to spread between people. It also uses the experiences of Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. For China to also achieve hybrid immunity from infection and vaccinations, which would allow the economy to operate freely, 20 per cent of the population or 290 million people would have to be infected. Given the lack of reporting for positive cases, infections would in reality be 50 per cent higher, at about 30 per cent of the population or 435 million people. Under a scenario of a more gradual and controlled reopening, the process of reaching hybrid immunity would take until August next year, the Wigram modelling showed. This would help cap hospitalisations and deaths until mid-2023.  “China has done nothing to prepare for this step, and Xi appears to be doing so on impulse as a reaction to the protests, rather than as part of a careful policy programme,” Mr Jones said. “It would be easier to have confidence in a reopening strategy if it was happening as part of a careful policy strategy, not on impulse, with no preparation.” Goldman Sachs’s baseline scenario is that Beijing will only meaningfully relax Covid controls from around the second quarter of next year, after completing medical preparations including vaccinating the elderly. NN: I stand on my analysis. This will end in tears. Their is no herd immunity, little vaccinations and 1.3 billion people packed tighter then sardines in a can.

China’s retail sales down 5.9% in November

China will stop collecting and reporting comprehensive Covid case data after it ended mandatory testing for the virus. The move comes amid a general relaxation of Covid-related restrictions as Beijing adjusts its zero-Covid policy following a wave of protests against the restrictions in large Chinese cities. Bloomberg reports from now on the Chinese authorities will only report symptomatic cases of the viral infection as the non-symptomatic ones would be impossible to record without mandatory tests. The country’s reconsideration of its zero-Covid policy has been seen by most as a strong bullish factor for oil prices and benchmarks have been trending higher since China began relaxing the restrictions.

Covid cases explode in Beijing leaving city streets empty

Empty streets, deserted shopping centers, and residents staying away from one another are the new normal in Beijing – but not because the city, like many Chinese ones before it, is under a “zero-Covid” lockdown. On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) gave up trying to keep track of all the new Covid cases, announcing it would no longer include asymptomatic infections in its daily count. It had previously reported these cases, albeit in a separate category from “confirmed,” or symptomatic ones. “It is impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infections,” the NHC said in a notice, citing reduced levels of official testing. Authorities on Wednesday morning reported 2,249 symptomatic Covid cases nationally for the previous day, 20% of which were detected in the capital. Those figures are also thought to be impacted by reduced testing. CNN reporting from Beijing indicates the case count overall in the Chinese capital could be many times higher than recorded. In a Twitter post, Beijing-based lawyer and former American Chamber of Commerce in China chairman James Zimmerman said about 90% of people in his office had Covid, up from around half a few days ago. “Our ‘work at home’ policy is now ‘work at home if you’re well e nough.’ This thing came on like a runaway freight train,” he wrote on Wednesday. Experts have said the relatively low number of previously infected Covid-19 patients in China and the lower effectiveness of its widely-used inactivated-virus vaccines against Omicron infection – as compared with previous strains and mRNA vaccines – could enable the virus to spread rapidly. “The current strains will spread faster in China than they have spread in other parts of the world because those other parts of the world have some immunity against infection from previous waves of earlier Omicron strains,” said University of Hong Kong chair professor of epidemiology Ben Cowling. The extent of severe disease or death in Covid-19 outbreaks typically takes time to become clear, but there are signs of an impact on the health care system – with authorities in Beijing urging patients who are not seriously ill not to seek the help of emergency services. The city’s major hospitals recorded 19,000 patients with flu symptoms from December 5 to 11 – more than six times that of the previous week, a health official said Monday.

The number of patients visiting fever clinics was 16 times greater on Sunday than a week prior. In China, where there isn’t a strong primary care system, visiting the hospital is common for minor illness.

So far, however, there were only 50 severe and critical cases in hospitals, most of whom had underlying health conditions, Sun Chunlan, China’s top official in charge of managing Covid, said during an inspection of Beijing’s epidemic response on Tuesday. “At present, the number of newly infected people in Beijing is increasing rapidly, but most of them are asymptomatic and mild cases,” said Sun, who also called for more fever clinics to be set up and made assurances that supply of medicines – which have been hit by a surge in purchases in recent days – was being increased. Prominent Shanghai physician Zhang Wenhong warned that hospitals should do everything they could to ensure that health workers were not getting infected as quickly as the people in the communities they serve. Such a situation could result in a shortage of medical staff and infections among patients, he said, according to local media reports. Concerns about scarcity and access to medicines and care have been palpable in public discussion, including on social media. There, a Beijing reporter’s account of her time in a temporary hospital for Covid-19 treatment triggered a firestorm on social media, with a related hashtag getting more than 93 million views on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo since Monday. Social media users questioned why the reporter, who showed her two-bed room and access to fever medicine in a video interview posted by her employer Beijing Radio and Television Station on Sunday, received such treatment while others were struggling. “Awesome! A young reporter gets a space in a temporary hospital and takes liquid Ibuprofen for children that is hard-to-find for parents in Beijing,” read one sarcastic comment, which got thousands of likes. Another popular response complained that “ordinary people” stay at home with kids and elderly with high fevers. “Could you give (her) bed to me if I called (the hospital)?” the Weibo user asked. Amid fears of the virus, residents have rushed to buy canned peaches, following rumors the vitamin C-loaded snack could prevent or treat Covid. Chinese state media has since warned people the preserved fruit is not a Covid remedy nor a substitute for medicine. NN:  My firm belief is China is shutting down. I an convinced as they TRY to open up COVID will cases soar. Consider golden week is coming, where a billion people come in close contact with each other. It is obvious to me a severe COVID crises is here and will get worse through January and February. And i believe their economy will suck shut.

BEIJING (AP) — A rash of COVID-19 cases in schools and businesses were reported by social media users Friday in areas across China after the ruling Communist Party loosened anti-virus rules as it tries to reverse a deepening economic slump. Official data showed a fall in new cases, but those no longer cover big parts of the population after the government on Wednesday ended mandatory testing for many people. That was part of dramatic changes aimed at gradually emerging from “zero-COVID” restrictions that have confined millions of people to their homes and sparked protests and demands for President Xi Jinping to resign. Social media users in Beijing and other cities said coworkers or classmates were ill and some businesses closed due to lack of staff. It wasn’t clear from those accounts, many of which couldn’t be independently confirmed, how far above the official figure the total case numbers might be. “I’m really speechless. Half of the company’s people are out sick, but they still won’t let us all stay home,” said a post signed Tunnel Mouth on the popular Sina Weibo platform. The user gave no name and didn’t respond to questions sent through the account, which said the user was in Beijing. The reports echo the experience of the United States, Europe and other economies that have struggled with outbreaks while trying to restore business activity. But they are a jarring change for China, where “zero COVID,” which aims to isolate every case, disrupted daily life and depressed economic activity but kept infection rates low. Xi’s government began to loosen controls Nov. 11 after promising to reduce their cost and disruption. Imports tumbled 10.9% from a year ago in November in a sign of weak demand. Auto sales fell 26.5% in October.

Chinese authorities appeared to bend to the will of the people on Wednesday by easing some of the harshest COVID-19 restrictions, but a new study showed the high price the country will pay if it tries to reopen too fast. Asian macroeconomic advisory firm, Wigram Capital Advisors, is warning of a “winter wave” of COVID infections that could swamp the healthcare system, according to a report in the Financial Times, which reviewed the firm’s models. Wigram, which takes into account vaccinations and age data in its modellings that it has provided to governments throughout the pandemic, is predicting a death toll of 20,000 a day by mid-March in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with daily hospitalizations peaking at 70,000.

TOKYO/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Oil jumped on Tuesday, buoyed by hopes that China would relax its COVID-19 controls after rare protests against the country’s zero-COVID strategy over the weekend in big Chinese cities. Brent crude futures advanced $1.4, or 1.7%, and traded at $84.57 a barrel at 0645 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose $1.17, or 1.5%, to $78.39 a barrel. Both benchmarks gained more than $2 earlier in the day. China held a news conference on COVID prevention and control measures at 3 p.m. (0700 GMT) on Tuesday amid record COVID infections and protests in Shanghai and Beijing.

Asian shares also rallied as unsubstantiated rumours swirled that the unrest might prompt a loosening of the COVID restrictions. Similar rumours have caused markets to zig-zag in recent weeks.

The rare street protests in cities across China over the weekend were a vote against President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy and the strongest public defiance during his political career, China analysts said. Beijing has stuck with the zero-COVID policy even as much of the world has lifted most restrictions. Oil prices are also supported by the expectation that major oil producers would adjust their production plans at the upcoming meeting. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies including Russia, known as OPEC+, are set to hold a meeting on Dec. 4. Analysts at Eurasia Group suggested in a note on Monday that weakened demand out of China could spur OPEC+ to cut output. “Although this is merely a guess … not the official statement from the OPEC, it still reflects the near-term market sentiment and is likely to be the turning point of the oil prices,” analysts from Haitong Futures said in a note. OPEC+ started to lower its output target by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) in November, aiming to shore up oil prices. Markets are also assessing the impact of an upcoming Western price cap on Russian oil. Group of Seven (G7) and European Union diplomats have been discussing a cap of between $65 and $70 a barrel, with the aim of limiting revenue to fund Moscow’s military offensive in Ukraine without disrupting global oil markets. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine “a special operation”. But EU governments failed to agree on Monday on the cap, with Poland insisting the cap should be set lower than proposed by the G7, diplomats said. The price cap is due to come into effect on Dec. 5, when an EU ban on Russian crude also takes effect.

China registered 27,095 new COVID-19 cases on November 20, surpassing the number reported the previous day by 2,660, the country’s National Health Commission stated on Monday. The country also saw two new deaths, raising the total toll to 5,229 since the beginning of the pandemic. The latest statistic comes as the Baiyun district in the port megacity of Guangzhou entered a five-day COVID-19 lockdown, having registered 296 new locally transmitted symptomatic and 7,885 asymptomatic infections. The Baiyun district in the Chinese city of Guangzhou has entered a five-day COVID-19 lockdown, local authorities announced on Sunday. They described the prevention and control situation as “grim,” as China continues to pursue its zero-COVID policy. Guangzhou has seen over 8,000 daily cases for five days in a row, with 8,181 cases in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, the city of Shijiazhuang advised its residents to remain at home amid rising infection numbers. Its officials stated mass COVID-19 testing will be conducted in some parts of the city. Continue reading “China’s COVID-19 cases jump by 27,095…. China announces first COVID-19 death in almost 6 months”