•  U.S. Consumer sentiment ticked up a bit.

 

• Reuters: The Commerce Department said on Friday the currentaccount deficit, which measures the flow of goods, services and investments into and out of the country, jumped 52.9% to $170.5 billion last quarter. That was the biggest gap since the third quarter of 2008 when the economy was working its way through the Great Recession.

 

• The Fed said it would keep interest rates near zero for as long as it takes to get inflation back above 2%. The Fed seems to think that’ll be 2023 at the earliest.  

 

• Brazil buys Argentine soybean oil as tightness persists 

 

• Reuters: Trump announced a new round of pandemic assistance to farmers of about $13 billion at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Thursday night, delivering aid to an important sector in a crucial battleground state. (Not much money in beans I suppose - see above)

 

• The White House on Friday announced a $13 billion aid package for Puerto Rico, three years after the territory was hit by Hurricane Maria.

 

• Copper moving right along, on hopes that China's stimulus would spur demand.

 

• Reuters: Investment between the US and China tumbled to a nine-year low in the first half of 2020, hit by bilateral tensions that could see more Chinese companies come under pressure to divest U.S. operations, a research report said.
• Bloomberg: China’s trade surplus with the U.S. has grown almost 25% since the start of the Trump presidency, exceeding $300 billion on an annualized basis.

 

• How quickly, realistically, can a vaccine be produced and distributed in enough quantity to vaccinate 25 million Americans? The “super forecasters” of Philip Tetlock’s Good Judgment project see the probabilities like this.

More bad news for our planet, as Magazine covers are famously good contrarian indicators.

 

• Economist: The director of the FBI warned that Russia is actively interfering in America’s presidential election, with the Democratic party’s nominee as its primary target. Russian agents are producing what Christopher Wray called a “steady drumbeat of misinformation” intended to undermine Joe Biden and voters’ confidence in the results. President Donald Trump has continuously downplayed Russian interference.

 

• A German laboratory detected traces of Novichok on a water bottle apparently retrieved from the Siberian hotel room in which Alexei Navalny stayed before falling ill on a plane.

 

• Citigroup placed a senior member of IT staff on leave after revelations that he was running a website dedicated to QAnon. This conspiracy theory holds that President Donald Trump is battling a powerful paedophile ring enmeshed in American high politics. Jason Gelinas was disciplined for running an undisclosed side business; he is thought to have earned around $3,000 a month. AND QAnon conspiracy theory gaining ground in UK, per Guardian.
• The Guardian tracked five slogans associated with QAnon shared by UK-run Facebook..(AKA the plague on humanity)

 

• COVID Plans, Game Theory, and the Problem of A**holes
• In other words, the physicists made the same mistake as many attempts to model human behavior: they didn’t account for assholes.

•  Deaths per 1 Million Population (reminder)
• New Zealand    5
• South Korea     7
• Japan                12
• Austria             85
• Germany         113
• US                     613              ( 203,000 Total - so far)