Though this be madness, yet there is method in it

24/01/2022

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24/01/2022

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said China’s anti-COVID vaccine did not fully work and questioned whether Russia’s Sputnik jab would ever get approval from European regulators.
'The Chinese vaccine... has shown itself not to be adequate. You can see that from Chile’s experience of tackling the epidemic,' Draghi told reporters at the end of a European Union summit.
Chile has relied heavily on the COVID-19 shot developed by China’s Sinovac, but health authorities in the South American country have questioned how effective it is against more transmissible virus variants and are also looking into how long it remains effective once injected.
A study published in April said the Chinese vaccine proved minimally effective at preventing illness after one dose. With a second jab, it was 67% effective in preventing symptomatic infection, 85% effective in preventing hospitalizations and 80% in preventing deaths.
Draghi also questioned Russia’s Sputnik vaccine.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) had been expected to conclude its review of the Russian jab and issue a decision in May or June. However, approval was delayed because the makers missed a June 10 deadline to submit data, sources told Reuters earlier this month.
“The Russian vaccine Sputnik has never been able to get approval from EMA and perhaps it never will,” Draghi said.

22/01/2022

Chile’s air force said it lost radio contact with a transport plane carrying 38 people on a flight Monday evening to the country’s base in Antarctica.
It said the military had declared an alert and activated search and rescue teams.
The C-130 Hercules carried 17 crew members and 21 passengers, including three civilians. The personnel were to check on a floating fuel supply line and other equipment at the Chilean base.
President Sebastian Pinera said via Twitter that he was with his defense and interior ministers at the air force headquarters monitoring developments

21/01/2022

Nigerians have been justifiably confused by conflicting poverty data presented by the Muhammadu Buhari administration and the World Bank. According to Buhari, his administration has lifted 10.5 million Nigerians out of poverty within the past two years. But no sooner had he made the statement than the World Bank asserted that inflation has plunged seven million Nigerians into poverty.
These statements might seem to be contradictory to non-economists. But closer analysis suggests that Buhari and the World Bank are right - depending on how poverty is measured.
The first is income or monetary measure of poverty, what economists refer to as the 'headcount index'. It measures the proportion of the population that is poor based on a minimum personal income - for example $1.90 per day. This minimum amount is deemed adequate to maintain an acceptable living standard, given the cost of living in a given country.
Based on this measure, Buhari is right to claim that - by transferring cash to 12 million households during the past five years - a majority of these Nigerians have exceeded the income threshold. Therefore, they have escaped poverty.
The other measure is known as the multidimensional poverty measure. It measures poverty by income, and by the access people have to health, education and living standard indicators. These include sanitation, drinking water, electricity, and housing. It is therefore possible for someone to be regarded as non-poor under Buhari's calculations, but poor when this measure is used.
This is the measure the World Bank appears to be applying. By this measure 47.3% Nigerians, or 98 million people, live in multidimensional poverty. Most of them are located in northern Nigeria. This poverty rate does not include Borno State, where insurgency has prevented data collection.
Aware of this, the Buhari administration has set the very ambitious goal of lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty by 2030. This is a tall order, considering that another five million more Nigerians are expected to become poor as a result of COVID-19 in 2020.
The administration's cash transfer programme is commendable. But Buhari should turn his focus more on promoting structural transformation. This would move millions of poor Nigerians from low-productivity agricultural and informal-sector activities to high-productivity sectors such as manufacturing, agro-processing, as well as information and communication technologies.

20/01/2022

Digital payments
As well as offering passengers more information through mobile phone applications, operators are also looking to make payments more efficient and COVID-safe through contactless options. Some Latin American cities already offer the option to pay using debit and credit cards, like Rio de Janeiro and Guatemala City, and others like Panama City and San José, Costa Rica are working to implement pilots. Cashless payments aim to simplify and streamline the experience for users by reducing the purchase and entry queues at transport hubs, minimising crowds at peak hours and increasing customer satisfaction using ‘tap and go’.
“The future is new Mobility-as-a-Service applications and there will be more integration in travel within the city and metropolitan regions without the need for interruptions to buy a new ticket,” said Fernanda Caraballo, Director of Business Development for Latin America at Mastercard. “This is a benefit for the frequent, infrequent and tourist travellers because they save time by paying with a debit or credit card and, in the case of tourists, the language barrier and doubts are eliminated, if they are in an unknown city.”
Caraballo says Mastercard’s aim is to transform the collection schemes for transportation systems to generate savings and efficiency for the city and for transportation operators, and to improve the quality of life for citizens.
“Mastercard seeks to offer the best solution that suits the specific needs of each city,” she added.

17/01/2022

German automaker Porsche is investing about $24 million in the development of “e-fuels,” which officials say is a climate-neutral fuel to replace gasoline in nonelectric vehicles.
Production of such a fuel would allow the company and potentially other automakers a way to continue producing vehicles such as Porsche’s iconic 911 sports car with a traditional engine alongside, or rather than, a new electric model. While electric vehicles can offer outstanding performance, the driving dynamics of the vehicles are different than traditional engines.
“We would like and love cars like the 911 with high-rev combustion engines or turbocharged engines still as cars you could drive in the future without having the burden of a CO2 footprint, an unnecessary CO2 footprint,” Michael Steiner, Porsche’s director of research and development, said Wednesday during a virtual media event.
Officials said e-fuels can act like gasoline, allowing owners of current and classic vehicles a more environmentally friendly way to drive. It also could use the same fueling infrastructure as current fuels rather than billions in investments for new infrastructure for electric vehicles.
The announcement does not change Porsche’s target to have half of Porsche models sold by 2025 to be electrified, including all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

16/01/2022

We know that hedge funds generate strong, risk-adjusted returns over the long run, therefore imitating the picks that they are collectively bullish on can be a profitable strategy for retail investors. With billions of dollars in assets, smart money investors have to conduct complex analyses, spend many resources and use tools that are not always available for the general crowd. This doesn't mean that they don't have occasional colossal losses; they do (like Melvin Capital's recent GameStop losses). However, it is still a good idea to keep an eye on hedge fund activity. With this in mind, as the current round of 13F filings has just ended, let’s examine the smart money sentiment towards Banco de Chile (NYSE:B*H).
Is Banco de Chile (NYSE:B*H) a good investment today? Investors who are in the know were betting on the stock. The number of long hedge fund positions improved by 2 recently. Banco de Chile (NYSE:B*H) was in 5 hedge funds' portfolios at the end of March. The all time high for this statistic is 10. Our calculations also showed that B*H isn't among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q1 rankings). There were 3 hedge funds in our database with B*H positions at the end of the fourth quarter.
Hedge funds' reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn't keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Hedge funds have more than $3.5 trillion in assets under management, so you can't expect their entire portfolios to beat the market by large margins. Our research was able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the S&P 500 ETFs by more than 115 percentage points since March 2017 (see the details here). So you can still find a lot of gems by following hedge funds' moves today.

15/01/2022

This week we will take a look at prices and volumes of kiwifruit in the U.S. market.
In a recent article, we discussed how Chilean kiwifruit production had decreased due to labor shortages as a result of the pandemic, and how Northern California, whose season has already ended, also saw a drop in production. Add this to the increase in consumption of fruits rich in vitamin C, and you get high kiwifruit prices in the market.
To the above, we must add the fact that kiwifruit stocks in the Northern Hemisphere (United States, Italy, Greece, France) are lower compared to previous years, and that there are also delays in Chilean production. Let us also remember that the majority of kiwifruit volumes from New Zealand go to the Asian market and to Europe.
As we mentioned, and as can be seen in the graph below, the reported average prices of kiwifruit in the North American market have been the highest in recent years. The average reported price in May was US$25.68 for containers of nine kilograms or 19.8 pounds, which represents a 15 percent increase year-on-year.

13/01/2022

The result, 78 percent in favor of a new constitution, is a damning indictment on the neoliberal system adopted under the right-wing junta in 1973 that was used as a launch pad for similar programs around the world.
On Sunday, almost exactly a year after protests over inequality erupted in the country, Chileans voted in a landslide to adopt a new constitution that will ditch the one enshrined in 1980 under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
As Robert Packenham and William Ratliff wrote in a 2007 Hoover Institution paper, “The first country in the world to make that momentous break with the past – away from socialism and extreme state capitalism toward more market-oriented structures and policies – was not Deng Xiaoping’s China or Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s United States in 1981, or any other country in Latin America or elsewhere. It was Pinochet’s Chile in 1975.”