Economy
GameStop investor battle moves on to silver as prices surge
Silver prices have hit an a eight-year high after calls to buy the metal on social media sparked a trading frenzy.
It comes a week after amateur investors piled into shares in the games retailer GameStop, causing them to jump 700%. On Monday silver rose by as much as 11% to $30 an ounce, while shares in some mining firms were up as much as 60%.
Finance and economic expert Alasdair Macleod says watch interest rates and the U.S. dollar set the direction for the markets in 2021. Macleod explains, “You can see how, through interest rates, the future of the dollar is actually tied to the future of financial asset markets. If you get a pop in the bubble, and there is no doubt equity prices are wildly overvalued compared to the economic outlook. . . . Quite honestly, there is no alternative but for markets to correct very, very heavily. When that happens, you are going to have portfolio outflows out of the dollar. . . . The effect of that will be to take the dollar down along with financial asset prices. . . . We can get the collapse of the dollar happening very, very rapidly.”
Social media platform Reddit hit by outages in U.S.
Social media company Reddit was experiencing problems on its website briefly on Saturday, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.com.
Customers reported trouble logging in and sending messages on its website. The outage affected regions such as New York, Boston and Washington in United States and Toronto in Canada, according to an outage map on Downdetector’s website.
WHO team, on tightly controlled China mission, visits hospital
WUHAN, China (Reuters) – The World Health Organization-led team investigating the origins of COVID-19 during a mission that has been tightly controlled by its Chinese hosts visited a hospital on Saturday in the central city of Wuhan that treated early coronavirus patients.
On its second day after two weeks in quarantine, the team went to Jinyintan Hospital, where doctors had collected samples from patients suffering from an unidentified pneumonia in late 2019.
Exports empty Canada’s canola bins, driving prices to near records
Canada, the world’s biggest canola grower, is running short of the oilseed six months before the next harvest, with strong export demand driving prices to nearly 13-year highs last week.
Supplies of major commodity crops are dwindling worldwide as buyers hoard food supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic. China is loading up on grains and oilseeds that it can feed to animals, raising food inflation and causing some nations to restrict exports of their crops.
To the brink and back on GameStop – Wall Street vs Reddit
On three hours of sleep a night and with no time to eat, one New York-based hedge fund manager overseeing billions in assets called last week the most stressful of his life.
“Nothing was making sense anymore,” he said, as he watched the stock of GameStop Corp soar, while he bet it would fall.
Wednesday was the worst. Fueled by chatter on Reddit and other social media to take on Wall Street, investors used venues like online trading app Robinhood to bid up the brick-and-mortar retailer. GameStop surged 135%, on its way to gaining more than 1,500% in January without any change in its business outlook. Hedge funds scrambled. By this point trading had become so unpredictable across all sectors that funds were forced to dump their winning stocks to balance out their portfolios.
CLAIM: Analysis Proves COVID is Lab-Made Virus
The 193-page paper published January 29th is titled “A Bayesian analysis concludes beyond a reasonable doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived.”
“The purpose of the analysis was to determine the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Beginning with a likelihood of 98.2% that it was a zoonotic jump from nature with only a 1.2% probability it was a laboratory escape, twenty-six different, independent facts and evidence were examined systematically. The final conclusion is that it is a 99.8% probability SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory and only a 0.2% likelihood it came from nature,” a summary notes.
Banks brace for tougher rules under Biden on consumer protection, fair lending
After the 2008 financial crisis, regulatory reform efforts sought to make the system safer. This time, the goal will be to make it fairer.
In keeping with President Biden’s focus on helping minorities and people with low and moderate incomes — groups hit hardest by the coronavirus-induced downturn — financial regulators are expected to emphasize racial equity as they focus on consumer protection and expanding access to financial services.
Nor’Easter Expected To Blanket Northeast With Up To 2 Feet Of Snow
New York, Boston and other cities in the northeast could be blanketed with nearly two feet of snow on Monday, as a “long duration” major winter storm headed toward the U.S. coast, the National Weather Service said.
Snow is expected to begin late Sunday night across a wide swath of the northeast, with “in excess of 20 inches of snow in parts of eastern Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey, southern New York, and into southern New England,” the NWS said.
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