David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - China

    Scientists Claim To Discover 'Unexpected' New Viruses in Wuhan

    This article from Futurism.com may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    A team of researchers claims that it found evidence of multiple viruses — including several brand-new coronaviruses — in agricultural genomes from labs in Wuhan and other Chinese cities.

    Genetic sequences of crops like rice and cotton released between 2017 and 2020 contained the entire genetic sequences of new viruses that seem to be related to human diseases like MERS and SARS, according to research the team shared in the preprint server ArXiv on Sunday.

    The “unexpected discovery,” as the team put it, of the presence of dangerous human diseases in these agricultural research facilities, suggests that safety protocols may not be up to par — and, as the team argues, that viruses may have accidentally been released as a result.

    It’s important to note that this is all coming from preprint research that hasn’t been vetted by an academic journal or other experts in the field. While four of the six study authors are affiliated with hospitals and universities in Spain, Canada, and Japan, the first two researchers listed in the paper are independent researchers without affiliations to any research institutes, and a third is affiliated with an LLC named after himself.

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    A Tiger Cub's Huge Margin Call Means More Pain Ahead

    This article by Shuli Ren for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    A market optimist might brush off Friday’s massive liquidation as a one-off event — a huge stumble by a fabled player now in decline. But this is no time to be optimistic. Hwang is representative of, not distinct from, the rest of the hedge fund crowd. His bets are also their bets. He may have gotten margin calls faster because he was more leveraged. But his positioning is by no means unique — and that commonality is where trouble may lie. 


    Take the trades involved. Media companies such as ViacomCBS and Discovery have net exposures that are the “highest level we have seen since 2016,” according to a recent note from the prime brokerage unit at Morgan Stanley, which, alongside Goldman, managed some of the block trades on Friday. Last week, when ViacomCBS was using the steep run-up in its stock to sell new shares and bolster its balance sheet, the pressure on leveraged hedge funds must have been intense. 

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    PBOC, BOJ May Be Driving Some of the Stock Rout Infecting Asia

    This article by Wes Goodman for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    China hasn’t been this frugal in its cash offerings to banks in almost a year.

    The People’s Bank of China has avoided net injections of short-term liquidity into the financial system since late last month, increasing concern that access to funds is becoming more difficult. The CSI 300 is headed for its steepest monthly loss in more than two years.

    Japan’s Nikkei is falling for a fourth straight day after the BOJ said last Friday that it’s scrapping its annual target for stock purchases.

    Stocks in both China and Japan had gotten used to these forms from the central banks. Now this backing, while not going away, is ebbing, and that could mean less central bank handholding for equities. 

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    Taiwan Raises Red Alert Over Water, Cuts Chipmakers' Supply

    This article by Debby Wu and Cindy Wang for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Taiwan stepped up its fight against its worst drought in decades, further reducing water supplies to areas including a key hub of semiconductor manufacturing in the central part of the island in an effort to stop reserves from running dry.

    The government issued its first red alert on water supply in six years Wednesday, warning that reservoirs in several parts of central Taiwan are running dangerously low. Authorities will cut the water supply to companies in two major science parks in Taichung by 15%, economics minister Wang Mei-Hua said at a briefing in Taipei.

    Water will also be cut to non-industrial users across Taichung and Miaoli County two days a week, Wang said. The measures will come into effect from April 6.

    While Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Micron Technology Inc. both have chip-making operations in Taichung, Wang said the restrictions would not affect their production. TSMC’s headquarters further north in Hsinchu has been spared further restrictions for now.

    TSMC says it plans to increase the amount of water it uses from tanker trucks but the new restrictions would not affect operations, according to an emailed statement. A Micron representative in Taiwan declined to comment, saying the company is now in a quiet period.

    The relative dry spell is putting pressure on the Hua said government to ensure continued supplies to water-intensive industries, such as its crucial semiconductor manufacturing, at a time when global companies are clamoring for computer chips. A shortage of semiconductors has slowed output at automakers worldwide, prompting TSMC and its peers to run their fabs at close to full capacity to try and keep up with demand.

    Taiwan’s usually ample supplies of water have plummeted after a significant drop in rainfall last year. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that no typhoons made landfall in Taiwan in 2020.

    Wang said earlier this month that Taiwan has sufficient water reserves to keep its technology companies operating smoothly until late May, when seasonal rains usually replenish supplies depleted during the drier winter months.

    The meteorological situation adds to a new challenge to TSMC just as it’s grappling with competition from Samsung Electronics Co. and Intel Corp., which has unveiled a $20 billion plan to create a foundry business that will make chips for other companies.

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    Tencent, Baidu Fined by Antitrust Regulator for Past Deals

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    “The message is clear that seeking government approvals in deals like these are a must.” said Ye Han, a partner at Beijing-based law firm Merits & Tree, who specializes in antitrust and M&A.

    “While we haven’t seen cases where companies got broke up or mergers got unwinded, such evaluations are likely going on behind the scene.”

    Didi Mobility Pte, a unit of ridehailing giant Didi Chuxing, and Japan’s SoftBank Corp. were also issued fines of 500,000 yuan each -- the maximum penalty possible -- for setting up a joint venture without permission. A ByteDance unit and its partner Shanghai Dongfang Newspaper Co. were also penalized the
    same amounts for a 2019 partnership that created a video-copyright venture. ByteDance said the joint venture has since been canceled.

    Technology companies like Tencent had previously carried out mega mergers and acquisitions through so-called Variable Interest Entity structures, which operate on shaky legal grounds. The new antitrust rules, accompanied by the fines handed down by the regulators, are a signal VIEs are now under
    their oversight.

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    Email of the day on China and the coronavirus:

    I am shocked at your remarks about China. It is not the China I know, and have seen develop over the last 40 years. A country where Harvard (Ash Center 9 July 2020) surveys found 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied" with their government compared with 38% in the US.

    The article from Politico is am interesting read, but does not mention that a partner of the Wuhan Institute was the US Galveston National Laboratory, of whose activities we know very little too.

    Bad things happen in every country, including China and the US, but it behooves us to have a sense of proportion and get the facts both right and complete. Take one example: you mention a man in China who altered a gene to suppress HIV - he ended up in jail for breaking the rules.

    I am sure you would embrace Deng Xiao Ping's instruction "find the truth through facts", and please recognize that most of the almost 1.5 billion people in China have just finished a perfecting satisfactory day!

    And this from David Brown:                 

    Thank you for this article and comment Eoin. On February 13 2020 I gave a presentation at my company's All Hands meeting about the viral epidemic in China. I made slides describing the evidence trail going back many years that indicated it was manufactured in the Wuhan lab. I removed those slides at the last moment as the meeting organiser gave me just 10 minutes for a 30 minute presentation - as you can imagine, the remaining content of the 1 hour meeting was trivia. Staff reaction to my presentation could be described as 'has he gone crazy!' They thought I was exaggerating. Nevertheless, I had them practice 3 days working from home, and we have not returned to the office since those days. I am sad to say that woke culture has come into the company as it has expanded over the past year with naive virtue-signalling new recruits, and I would be causing a storm if I now presented those slides showing the likely origin of the virus or showed them your comments. It's a sad world that has emerged in the past couple of years. I am glad I do not have many years to live.
     

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    In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened

    This article by Josh Rogen appeared in Politico and may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    A little-noticed study was released in early July 2020 by a group of Chinese researchers in Beijing, including several affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. These scientists said they had created a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2 by creating mice with human-like lung characteristics by using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to give the mice lung cells with the human ACE2 receptor — the cell receptor that allowed coronaviruses to so easily infect human lungs.

    After consultations with experts, some U.S. officials came to believe this Beijing lab was likely conducting coronavirus experiments on mice fitted with ACE2 receptors well before the coronavirus outbreak—research they hadn’t disclosed and continued not to admit to. In its January 15 statement, the State Department alleged that although the Wuhan Institute of Virology disclosed some of its participation in gain-of-function research, it has not disclosed its work on RaTG13 and “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” That, by itself, did not help to explain how SARS-CoV-2 originated. But it was clear that officials believed there was a lot of risky coronavirus research going on in Chinese labs that the rest of the world was simply not aware of.

    “This was just a peek under a curtain of an entire galaxy of activity, including labs and military labs in Beijing and Wuhan playing around with coronaviruses in ACE2 mice in unsafe labs,” the senior administration official said. “It suggests we are getting a peek at a body of activity that isn’t understood in the West or even has precedent here.”

    This pattern of deception and obfuscation, combined with the new revelations about how Chinese labs were handling dangerous coronaviruses in ways their Western counterparts didn’t know about, led some U.S. officials to become increasingly convinced that Chinese authorities were manipulating scientific information to fit their narrative. But there was so little transparency, it was impossible for the U.S. government to prove, one way or the other. “If there was a smoking gun, the CCP [Communist Party of China] buried it along with anyone who would dare speak up about it,” one U.S. official told me. “We’ll probably never be able to prove it one way or the other, which was Beijing’s goal all along.”

    Back in 2017, the U.S. diplomats who had visited the lab in Wuhan had foreseen these very events, but nobody had listened and nothing had been done. “We were trying to warn that that lab was a serious danger,” one of the cable writers who had visited the lab told me. “I have to admit, I thought it would be maybe a SARS-like outbreak again. If I knew it would turn out to be the greatest pandemic in human history, I would have made a bigger stink about it.”

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