Demon in the Freezer
News Items. By John Ellis.
1. An explosion Monday caused a fire at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, a biological research facility in Siberia known for being one of the two centers in the world housing samples of live smallpox virus. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta is the only other place known to maintain live samples of the deadly pathogen. According to the head administrator of Koltsovo city, where the research center, commonly called the Vector Institute, is located, the explosion occurred during scheduled maintenance work. The incident doesn’t pose a threat to the surrounding community, Nikolai Krasnikov told the Russian TASS news agency. According to TASS, there were no biohazard substances involved. One worker was injured and taken to a hospital with burns. Russia Today reported that emergency responders were treating the explosion and fire as a major incident, given the sensitive work of the Vector Institute.
2. President Trump said Monday that Iran appeared to have been responsible for the weekend attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities. But he said he would “like to avoid” a military conflict with Tehran, emphasized his interest in diplomacy and played down the attack’s jolt to the global oil market. Asked at the White House whether Iran was behind the strikes on Saturday that crippled much of Saudi Arabia’s oil output, Mr. Trump said, “It’s looking that way.” But he stopped short of a definitive confirmation, adding, “That’s being checked out right now.”
3. U.S. intelligence indicates Iran was the staging ground for a debilitating attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, people familiar with the matter said, as Washington and the kingdom weighed how to respond and oil prices soared. Monday’s assessment, which the U.S. hasn’t shared publicly, came as President Trump said he hoped to avoid a war with Iran and as Saudi Arabia asked United Nations experts to help determine who was responsible for the airstrikes.
4. Iran won’t negotiate with the U.S. on any level neither in New York or anywhere else, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader said. “Sometimes they say negotiations without any precondition and sometimes with 12 conditions,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in comments published by semi-official ISNA news agency on Tuesday. “Such statements either come from their disheveled policies or are a ploy to confuse the other side.”
5. The oil market is facing a prolonged disruption to Saudi Arabia’s oil production with few options for replacing such huge output losses. The weekend attacks on the kingdom eliminated about 5% of global oil supply, propelling Brent crude to a record surge on Monday. Officials at state oil company Saudi Aramco have become less optimistic on the pace of output recovery, telling a senior foreign diplomat they face a “severe” disruption measured in weeks and months and informing some customers that October shipments will be delayed.
6. The latest drone strikes on Saudi Arabian oil-production facilities likely would have a limited direct effect on the U.S. economy, but could result in higher gas prices, potentially exerting an additional drag on slowing global growth, economists say. While the total impact of the Saturday attacks remains unknown, analysts say the U.S. economy is very different than it was in the 1970s, when surging oil prices tipped the economy into recession. Oil-price shocks no longer pack the same punch, they say.
7. President Trump repeated his sharp criticism of the Federal Reserve after an attack in Saudi Arabia over the weekend led to a major crude oil disruption. In a pair of tweets Monday, the president questioned whether the Fed would “ever get into the game” and said the central bank and its chairman, Jerome Powell, “don’t have a clue.” He again badgered the Fed to lower the interest rate, citing a strong dollar’s harmful effect on U.S. exporters.
8. China’s Finance Vice-Minister Liao Min will go to the United States for trade negotiations tomorrow, state-run news agency Xinhua has reported. Mr. Liao will lead a delegation to Washington in preparation for the face-to-face meeting to be held next month between Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. A diplomatic observer said that Liao would set out China’s agenda for the October talks, including items that were not negotiable, but added that his inclusion meant this week’s talks would have a focus much broader than only trade.
9. Moody’s has downgraded Hong Kong’s rating outlook to negative, citing growing risks to the Asian financial hub’s institutional strength, but maintained its current rating in a break with the recent downgrade by rival Fitch Ratings. Moody’s said the negative outlook “reflects the rising risk that the ongoing protests reveal an erosion in the strength of Hong Kong’s institutions, with lower government and policy effectiveness than Moody’s had previously assessed, and undermine Hong Kong’s credit fundamentals by damaging its attractiveness as a trade and financial hub."
10. Ever since Britons voted to leave the EU, one of the biggest worries has been what will happen to the UK’s prized role as a preeminent global hub for trading. So far, when it comes to the $6.6 trillion-per-day market for currencies, London is increasing its lead versus New York and other global centers. The UK’s market share for foreign-exchange trading increased to 43.1% in April 2019, compared to 36.9% in 2016, according to preliminary results of the Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) triennial survey. The share of the US shrank three percentage points to 16.5% during that span, while Hong Kong’s rose by just under a percentage point to 7.6%.
11. The cost of borrowing surged yesterday in a short-term lending market of more than $2 trillion that Wall Street banks and hedge funds rely to finance their trading. Borrowers in the market for repurchase, or repo, agreements briefly had to pay an annual rate of more than 4 percent, after weeks of paying just above 2 percent, according to Bloomberg data.
12. Parts of Wall Street’s debt securitization engine are back running at levels not seen since the pre-financial crisis boom. Data group Dealogic’s indices of US securitization activity show that issuance of collateralized debt obligations — structured products made up of bundles of bonds and loans — rose above its pre-crisis peak late last year and is currently back close to those levels this year.
13. President Trump said on Monday that his administration had reached an initial trade agreement with Japan and would announce a deal in the coming weeks. The trade pact, while limited, is expected to increase access for American agricultural products like beef and chicken to the Japanese market. That would provide some relief to farmers who have been hurt by Mr. Trump’s trade war with China.
14. The former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has announced he is leaving the centre-left Democratic party (PD) to form his own party, potentially destabilizing the days-old ruling coalition. “I have decided to leave the PD and to build together with others a new house to do politics differently,” Renzi wrote on Facebook, barely a week after the PD’s unlikely coalition with the Five Star Movement (M5S) won a confidence motion in parliament.
15. Canada's two biggest political parties are in a statistical dead heat five weeks out from election day. An aggregate of polls that Abacus Data compiled puts Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives at 35 percent and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals at 34 percent — well within the margin of error. Two minority parties are also showing strong, with the New Democratic Party at 12 percent and the Green Party at 11 percent.
16. Swedbank has told Swedish and Estonian regulators it still has “shortcomings” in its anti-money laundering work as Sweden’s oldest lender attempts to overcome a $135 billion (not a typo) dirty money scandal. The largest bank in the Baltics released part of its response to a joint Swedish-Estonian investigation on Tuesday, saying it still had problems with know-your-customer and risk-assessment practices in both countries.
17. Least surprising news of the day: WeWork’s parent is expected to postpone its initial public offering after investors questioned how much the company is worth and raised concerns about its corporate governance. The shared-workspace company—which had planned to begin a roadshow to market the shares as early as Monday ahead of a trading debut next week—is likely to shelve the offering until at least next month, people familiar with the matter said.
18. Lyft is facing a flood of lawsuits from women around the country who say the ride-hailing company has known for years — and failed to stop — what they describe as an epidemic of sexual assault and rape involving some of its drivers. "This is out of control. And this needs to stop," says attorney Laurel Simes, a partner in a San Francisco firm representing several dozen women who are suing the company.
19. Disabling a single, apparently noncritical protein in cells may foil replication of the viruses that cause half of all common colds, polio and other diseases, according to researchers at Stanford and UCSF. Temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells might be able to protect us from the common cold and other viral diseases, according to a study led by researchers at Stanford University and University of California-San Francisco. The findings were made in human cell cultures and in mice. “Our grandmas have always been asking us, ‘If you’re so smart, why haven’t you come up with a cure for the common cold?’”said Jan Carette, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology. “Now we have a new way to do that.”
20. It’s well known that the production of cement — the world’s leading construction material — is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 8 percent of all such releases. If cement production were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter. A team of researchers at MIT has come up with a new way of manufacturing the material that could eliminate these emissions altogether, and could even make some other useful products in the process. The findings are being reported today in the journal PNAS in a paper by Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, with postdoc Leah Ellis, graduate student Andres Badel, and others.
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