Author: BlackMask Financial

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World’s Richest Have Lost Over $1 Trillion In Stock Market Crash

The old adage “the rich keep getting richer” no longer holds true. The rarefied world of the extravagantly wealthy has lately come under serious assault with the billionaires club seeing its fortunes rapidly shrink in the ongoing stock market rout. About ten days ago, South China Morning Post reported that the world’s 500 richest people had collectively lost $950 billion in the stock markets since the beginning of the year.
The stock selloff has accelerated since then with the MSCI World Index–a market-cap-weighted stock market index of 1,644 stocks from companies across the globe–dropping another 320 points, or about 15 percent of its value. This implies losses by the billionaires have likely now crossed the $1 trillion mark.  It also means the world now has only one centibillionaire, Jeff Bezos, after Bill Gates and the club’s latest entrant, Bernard Arnault, saw their fortunes slip below the $100-billion mark. Arnault, chairman of French luxury goods titan LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, became the world’s third centibillionaire after LVMH stock climbed nearly 40 percent in 2019. LVMH is down 27.7 percent in the year-to-date.

Source: MSCI

Warren Buffett was the biggest victim of the rout, with the Oracle of Omaha seeing his net worth drop by $9.6 billion to $66.4 billion after Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A) Class A shares dropped 8.6 percent on Wednesday alone. BRK.A shares are down a whopping 25 percent in the year-to-date with the vehicle’s top holdings Delta Airlines (NYSE:DAL) and American Airlines (NYSE:AAL) down 63.5 percent and 63.8 percent YTD, respectively.  Airline stocks have been particularly badly hit as governments everywhere urge citizens to keep travelling to a minimum while others have placed an outright ban on international travel. Many large U.S. airlines spent most of their free cash flow on share buybacks over the past decade in a bid to goose their earnings even as profits soared. Unfortunately, this left them exposed with many facing bankruptcy in lieu of a government bailout.

Facebook Inc.’s (NASDAQ:FB) Mark Zuckerberg has taken a $6.8 billion hit in the stock markets,  after FB stock dipped 27.1 percent YTD on concerns about lower ad revenues from retail, travel and recreation clients.  Zuckerberg’s net worth has now shrunk to $55.7 billion though he seems to be taking it on the chin after  Facebook announced a $100 million grant for small businesses impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

After a bright start to the year, Microsoft Inc.(NASDAQ:MSFT) has not been spared the latest bloodbath with the stock dropping nearly 14 percent over the past week and taking down Bill Gates’ and Steve Ballmer’s net worth $6.6 billion and $5.7 billion, respectively.   Gates’ net worth of $96.3 billion still places him as the world’s second-richest person, a position he had previously ceded to Bernard Arnault. Meanwhile, Arnault’s riches have shrunk to $80.7 billion after LVMH’s poor stock performance.

Amazon Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) relatively tame -0.14 percent YTD return means that Jeff Bezos has lost far less than most of his super-rich peers, with his net worth estimated at $113.9 billion.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO, Elon Musk, however, has not been so lucky.

After previously dismissing the coronavirus panic as “dumb,” Musk has been forced to eat humble pie after Tesla was deemed “not an essential business” by the sheriff’s department and forced to close both its Fremont, California, and Buffalo, New York, factory factories where it assembles EVs.  Musk, however, has pledged to make ventilators if there was a shortage, joining GM and Ford. The Trump administration has already handed the three automakers the green-light to make ventilators and other metal products. Whereas retooling an auto assembly line could be a tough call, the auto companies do have 3D printers for components; Tyvek suits used in paint shops that could be repurposed as well as “clean rooms” in other plants that could meet FDA standards.

Market in Tailspin

The US stock market has gone into a tailspin over the past two weeks as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc everywhere with three states locking down more than 70 million people.  Meanwhile, a much-anticipated government bailout failed to materialize after the senate failed to advance a third economic stimulus package meant to help the American economy weather the coronavirus pandemic. Hot on the heels of passing an $8.5 billion bill, congressional lawmakers proposed yet another coronavirus “rescue” package dubbed The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) with a running price tag of $1.5 to $2 trillion.  Although the bill passed with overwhelming support in the House of Representatives, the Senate was unable to vote because several Republican senators are currently self-quarantining. Senator Rand Paul has already tested positive for the disease while another four senators have self-quarantined after possible exposure. Nick Note: they are scared and will step up to the plate

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Coronavirus Traces Lingered in Vacated Cruise Cabins for 17 Days

(Bloomberg) — Traces of new coronavirus were found on surfaces in cruise-ship cabins for as many as 17 days after passengers left, researchers said, though it wasn’t possible to determine whether they caused any infections. Researchers looked at the rooms of infected passengers aboard the Diamond Princess, both those who showed symptoms and those who didn’t, according to a study Monday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The ship, operated by Carnival Corp.’s Princess Cruises, had more than 700 coronavirus cases. It was quarantined for a time off of Yokohama, Japan, and was the largest outbreak outside of mainland China at one point. A previous analysis found that the virus remained viable on plastic and stainless steel for up to three days, although levels fell dramatically over time. It was less stable on copper, where no viable virus was found after 4 hours, and cardboard, which was clean after 24 hours, according to the report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The latest study looked at uncleaned rooms, but other research has found that cleaning the rooms of Covid-19 patients was highly effective at killing the virus. Coronavirus has forced the U.S. cruise industry to shut down after a series of outbreaks at sea, and policymakers are looking for clues about the safety of the vessels going forward. The episodes have caused cruise line stocks to crater. The industry has been hurt in the past by outbreaks of norovirus, sometimes called stomach flu. The CDC report also said that passengers on the Diamond Princess mainly spread the virus before the ship went into quarantine, but infections among the crew peaked afterward. Nick Note: We have tried all disinfect systems. Including bleach, alcohol, pressure sterilization, gamma ray radiation and UV radiation. When then tested samples in our lab for traces. We found that for many different reasons the common sterilization systems DID NOT WORk 100% OF THE TIME. Then I discover in a old journal a report on Ozone Gas O3. Holy shit bat man. It really really works. We put in a simple Ozone chamber EVERYTHING that comes into the compound. We disinfect every single room daily with Ozone gas. And it really really works. Its easy to use, the machines cost virtually nothing. We are prepairng a video to show how these amazing systems work. Nothing and i maen NOTHING ELSE WORKS. The problem with other systems like bleaching and UV light radiation is that the bleach has to contact everything and its impossible. With UZ the surfaces have to exposed to the light again impossible. Ozone on the other hand is a gas and it goes EVERYWHERE. A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of a cure. Prevention is sterilization and a cure is a strong dose of the FDA approved chloroquine and the common antibiotic azithromycin. So why is this not the standard protocol treatment. Why? now that you are getting over your naive stage the answer is painfully obvious. These FDA approved drugs have been around for decades. They are off patent, cheap to make and sold as generics. SO SO that means they sell for pennies a pill. Big pharma especially in America can not make more billions off them. So they are looking for the thousand dollar a pill solution. And in the meantime the body count keeps climb.ing

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They are starting to figure out there is a cure.

As we have previously published months ago, for the record, hydroxychloroquine, sold under the trade name plaqenuil and a common antibiotic azithromycin, is stopping the infection dead in its tracks. be smart and get some.

According to the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, they have found early evidence that the combination of hydroxycholorquine, a popular anti-malarial drug known under the trade name Plaqenuil, and antibiotic azithromycin (aka Zithromax or Azithrocin) could be especially effective in treating the COVID-19 coronavirus and reducing the duration of the virus in patients.

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Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: ‘We’re going to be fine’

https://youtu.be/Ls4HVzUYavU

Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted. Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.

While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.

“What we need is to control the panic,” he said. In the grand scheme, “we’re going to be fine.” Here’s what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before. Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. Essentially, although the car was still speeding up, it was not accelerating as rapidly as before.

Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing turning points in other nations, even ones that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did. He analyzed 78 countries with more than 50 reported cases of COVID-19 every day and sees “signs of recovery.” He’s not looking at cumulative cases, but the number of new cases every day — and the percentage growth in that number from one day to the next.

“Numbers are still noisy but there are clear signs of slowed growth.”In Iran, for instance, the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases remained relatively flat last week, from 1,133 on Monday to 1,148 on Friday. Of course, recovering from an initial outbreak doesn’t mean the virus won’t come back: China is now fighting to stop new waves of infection coming in from places where the virus is spreading out of control. Other countries are bound to face the same problem as well.

Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy, and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, “a consistent decline means there’s some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers,” he said.

The trajectory of deaths backs up his findings, he said. So do data from outbreaks in confined environments, such as the one on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Out of 3,711 people on board, 712 were infected and eight died. In his view, this unintended experiment in coronavirus spread will help researchers estimate the number of fatalities that would occur in a fully infected population.

Levitt said the social-distancing mandates are critical — particularly the ban on large gatherings — because the virus is so new that the population has no immunity to it and a vaccine is still many months away. “This is not the time to go out drinking with your buddies.”

The virus can grow exponentially only when it is undetected and no one is acting to control it, Levitt said. That’s what happened in South Korea, when it ripped through a closed-off cult that refused to report the illness. “People need to be considered heroes for announcing they have this virus,” he said. The goal needs to be better early detection — not just through testing but perhaps with body temperature surveillance, which China is implementing — and immediate social isolation. Based on the experience of the Diamond Princess, he estimates that being exposed to the new coronavirus doubles a person’s risk of dying in the next two months. However, most people have an extremely low risk of death in a two-month period, and that risk remains extremely low even when doubled. “The real situation is not as nearly as terrible as they make it out to be,” he said. Nick Note: I cannot be any clearer here. this will go away real soon.  My projection is that 1 S&P500 position pyramided like the spread sheet i published will make you 2 million dollars  and this will happen by the 4th quarter. Nine months to be a multi millionaire. I said it… I meant it and i signed my name to it… NICK!

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Fed will make up to $4 trillion in loans to businesses to rescue the U.S. economy, Mnuchin says

Treasury secretary says Fed will play key role in helping businesses hurt by coronavirus

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday that the Federal Reserve will play a key role in lending funds to businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. “Working with the Federal Reserve — we’ll have up to $4 trillion of liquidity that we can use to support the economy,” Mnuchin told Fox News on Sunday. “Those are broad-based lending programs. … We can leverage our equity working with the Federal Reserve,” he said. The Treasury secretary said the plan is broad-based to help small and large businesses “get through the next 90 to 120 days,” he said.  Mnuchin said he thought the bill would be finished Sunday and ready for a vote on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill would also include: • Small-business retention loans aimed at helping companies keep workers on their payrolls. This will cover about half the workforce, Mnuchin said. Payments will include two weeks’ worth of cash flow and some overhead. The loans will be forgiven if workers are not laid off. Checks for Americans. The average check for a family of four will be $3,000, the Treasury secretary said. Enhanced unemployment insurance for people who are laid off due to the pandemic. Some Fed watchers expressed caution about the $4 trillion estimate. Mnuchin said that if the virtual shutdown of the American economy lasts longer than expected, Congress would pass another rescue package. Emerging from a meeting with Mnuchin on Saturday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, told reporters that Congress would appropriate up to $500 billion to the Treasury Department to provide a capital buffer to the Fed, according to the Hill newspaper. The central bank would be able to lend multiples of any buffer, with Mnuchin’s having put the estimate at $4 trillion. The program is similar to the Fed’s recently announced commercial-paper facility, Crapo told reporters. “So they can do this and get a significant boost of leverage into the marketplace,” he said. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said the lending under the Fed program would be temporary credit that needs to be paid back. “None of this is free money. This is all going to be liquidity that is provided to fundamentally solvent companies to get them through this time,” Toomey said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The bill would separately give Mnuchin funds for direct lending to “really seriously distressed and absolutely essential companies” that impact U.S. national security, Toomey said. That is going to be a short list, he added. U.S. equity benchmarks suffered a bruising week as a near–market panic over the pandemic refused to abate. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -4.54% lost 17% on the week.

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Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government

https://youtu.be/Rp_umWoSZj4

Even as President Trump says he tested negative for coronavirus, the COVID-19 pandemic raises the fear that huge swaths of the executive branch or even Congress and the Supreme Court could also be disabled, forcing the implementation of “continuity of government” plans that include evacuating Washington and “devolving” leadership to second-tier officials in remote and quarantined locations. But Coronavirus is also new territory, where the military itself is vulnerable and the disaster scenarios being contemplated — including the possibility of widespread domestic violence as a result of food shortages — are forcing planners to look at what are called “extraordinary circumstances”.

Above-Top Secret contingency plans already exist for what the military is supposed to do if all the Constitutional successors are incapacitated. Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.

According to new documents and interviews with military experts, the various plans – codenamed Octagon, Freejack and Zodiac – are the underground laws to ensure government continuity. They are so secret that under these extraordinary plans, “devolution” could circumvent the normal Constitutional provisions for government succession, and military commanders could be placed in control around America. “We’re in new territory,” says one senior officer, the entire post-9/11 paradigm of emergency planning thrown out the window. The officer jokes, in the kind of morbid humor characteristic of this slow-moving disaster, that America had better learn who Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy is. He is the “combatant commander” for the United States and would in theory be in charge if Washington were eviscerated. That is, until a new civilian leader could be installed.

‘We’re in territory we’ve never been in before’

What happens, government expert Norman Ornstein asked last week, if so many members of Congress come down with the coronavirus that the legislature cannot meet or cannot muster a quorum? After 9/11, Ornstein and others, alarmed by how little Washington had prepared for such possibilities, created a bipartisan Continuity of Government Commission to examine precisely these and other possibilities. It has been a two-decade long futile effort, Ornstein says, with Congress uninterested or unable to either pass new laws or create working procedures that would allow emergency and remote operations. The rest of the federal government equally is unprepared to operate if a pandemic were to hit the very people called upon to lead in an emergency. That is why for the first time, other than planning for the aftermath of a nuclear war, extraordinary procedures are being contemplated. In the past, almost every imagined contingency associated with emergency preparedness has assumed civil and military assistance coming from the outside. One military officer involved in continuity planning calls it a “cavalry” mentality: that military assistance is requested or ordered after local civil authority has been exhausted. “There might not be an outside,” the officer says, asking that she not be named because she is speaking about sensitive matters. In recognition of the equal vulnerability of military forces, the Pentagon has instituted unprecedented restrictions on off-base travel. Last Wednesday it restricted most overseas travel for 60 days, and then on Friday issued supplemental domestic guidance that essentially keeps all uniformed personnel on or near military bases. There are exceptions, including travel that is “mission-essential,” the Pentagon says. Mission essential in this regard applies to the maze of more than a dozen different secret assignments, most of them falling under three larger contingency plans:

Continue reading “Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government”

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UK government plans to buy into airlines

https://youtu.be/e2nryqPGEF8

(Reuters) – The British government is planning to buy equity stakes in airlines and other companies affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the Financial Times reported. The government plans to invest billions of pounds in companies including IAG-owned British Airways (ICAG.L) in return for shares that would eventually be sold back to private investors, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The move comes after the government was warned that its economic support packages, including a 330 billion-pound ($385 billion) lifeline of loan guarantees, will not be enough to save companies from collapse, the paper reported. Transport Minister Grant Shapps spoke to major airports and airlines on Wednesday about how the government could support the industry. Discussions about a support package for airlines and airports are ongoing. The United Kingdom has reported 3,983 coronavirus infections and 177 deaths.

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Fed’s Bullard: Coronavirus shutdown not a recession but an investment in survival

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In normal times massive unemployment and a collapse in economic output would be tragic. This time, as the coronavirus cloisters millions of Americans and shuts down the U.S. economy, it should instead be saluted as an investment in public health that lays the groundwork for a rapid rebound. That is the view of St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard, who argues that a potential $2.5 trillion hit coming to the economy is both necessary and manageable if officials move fast and keep it simple. It may seem an unconventional view in a moment of global anxiety, but Bullard argues the shutdown measures now being rolled out are essential to shortening the course of the pandemic. They must also be coupled with massive federal government support to sustain the population through its coming isolation and prime the economy to pick up where it left off. Nick Note: the economy will recover in 90 days. nothing has been lost permantely  but the millennial’s innocence.

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US coronavirus relief package worth over $2T – Kudlow

The coronavirus stimulus package being negotiated by the U.S. Senate would be worth more than $2 trillion

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow arrives for a meeting on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2020. © Susan Walsh White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow arrives for a meeting on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2020.

“The package is coming in at about 10 percent of GDP,” Kudlow told reporters. Asked if that amounted to more than $2 trillion, Kudlow said: “That’s correct.” “We’re just trying to cover the right bases,” Kudlow said as he entered the talks. “It’s a problem of weeks and months, not years. We just want a bridge.” Kudlow also said lawmakers are considering a payroll tax holiday for small businesses.  Nick Note: What is going on in the markets. Simple they are herding in the sheep to the slaughter… in record numbers getting them to buy on the bottom. FOR THE RECORD: you about to see the fastest greatest stock market rally ever. They will throw how ever much money as  it takes. They are fueling the stock market rocket with the suckers money

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ITS NO ACCIDENT YOU HAVE NOT BEEN TOLD OF THE CURE

Antiviral Res. 2008 Feb;77(2):150-2. Epub 2007 Nov 20.

Inhibition of human coronavirus 229E infection in human epithelial lung cells (L132) by chloroquine: involvement of p38 MAPK and ERK.

Kono M1, Tatsumi K, Imai AM, Saito K, Kuriyama T, Shirasawa H.

Abstract

The antiviral effects of chloroquine (CQ) on human coronavirus 229E (HCoV-229E) infection of human fetal lung cell line, L132 are reported. CQ significantly decreased the viral replication at concentrations lower than in clinical usage. We demonstrated that CQ affects the activation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK). Furthermore, p38 MAPK inhibitor, SB203580, inhibits CPE induced by HCoV-229E infection and viral replication. Our findings suggest that CQ affects the activation of MAPKs, involved in the replication of HCoV-229E. Nick Note: they new 10 years ago. Now they are pretending they just found out and still are not sure. They are trying to screw you out of your money. NOW its your life they are taking from you!