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Asian stocks set to extend gains as stimulus fans recovery hopes

Stronger appetite for riskier assets is set to lift Asian equities on Thursday, as government stimulus expectations support investor confidence in an economic recovery from the coronavirus.

E-mini futures for the S&P 500 were up 0.05% and Australian S&P/ASX 200 futures rose 1.23% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei futures rose 1.1%.

While President Trump and his allies in Congress seek to tighten access to food stamps, they are showing compassion for one group: zillionaires. Their economic rescue package quietly allocated $135 billion — yes, that’s “billion” with a “b” — for the likes of wealthy real estate developers.

My Times colleague Jesse Drucker notes that Trump himself, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may benefit financially from this provision.

The fine print was mysteriously slipped into the March economic relief package, even though it has nothing to do with the coronavirus and offers retroactive tax breaks for periods long before Covid-19 arrived.

The disappointing election results also raise doubts about a widespread belief among Democrats that they are on the side of history because the population of non-whites — who tend to vote for Democrats — is growing faster than the population of whites. Therefore, many Democratic leaders have assumed that they do not have to worry about losing white working class voters to the Republicans because whites will be less important in the future.

First, the often-cited numbers are misleading in and of themselves. The well-known New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote: “sometime in the 2040s, whites will make up 49% of the U.S. population, and Latinos, Blacks, Asians and multiracial populations 51%.”

But Friedman, like many other political analysts, errs when he classifies the largest minority subgroup, Latin-Americans, as “not white.” In fact, at least 65% consider themselves racially “only” white. Thus, if Latino-Americans are correctly classified (by their self-identification), whites will still make up 69% of the U.S. population by 2060. So, if racial identity really determines voting behavior, then U.S. politics will be dominated by white people for a long time.

The notion of price control is anathema to health care companies. It threatens their basic business model, in which the government grants them approvals and patents, pays whatever they ask, and works hand in hand with them as they deliver the worst health outcomes at the highest costs in the rich world.

The American health care industry is not good at promoting health, but it excels at taking money from all of us for its benefit. It is an engine of inequality.

the virus also provides an opportunity for systemic change. The United States spends more than any other nation on health care, and yet we have the lowest life expectancy among rich countries. And although perhaps no system can prepare for such an event, we were no better prepared for the pandemic than countries that spend far less.

As an immense new surge in coronavirus cases sweeps the country, President Trump is closing his re-election campaign by pleading with voters to ignore the evidence of a calamity unfolding before their eyes and trust his word that the disease is already disappearing as a threat to their personal health and economic well being.

The president has continued to declare before large and largely maskless crowds that the virus is vanishing, even as case counts soar, fatalities climb, the stock market dips and a fresh outbreak grips the staff of Vice President Mike Pence

Mr. Trump has attacked Democratic governors and other local officials for keeping public-health restrictions in place, denouncing them as needless restraints on the economy

The drugmaker Moderna announced on Monday that its coronavirus vaccine was 94.5 percent effective, based on an early look at the results from its large, continuing study.

Moderna is the second company to report preliminary data on an apparently successful vaccine, offering hope in a surging pandemic that has infected more than 53 million people worldwide and killed more than 1.2 million. Pfizer, in collaboration with BioNTech, was the first, reporting one week ago that its vaccine was more than 90 percent effective.

“I had been saying I would be satisfied with a 75 percent effective vaccine. Aspirationally, you would like to see 90, 95 percent, but I wasn’t expecting it. I thought we’d be good, but 94.5 percent is very impressive.”

The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch, in the American desert. The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system. A so-called "15-minute city design" will allow residents to access their workplaces, schools and amenities within a quarter-hour commute of their homes.

Although planners are still scouting for locations, possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region, according to the project's official website.

The first phase of construction, which would accommodate 50,000 residents across 1,500 acres, comes with an estimated cost of $25 billion. The whole project would be expected to exceed $400 billion, with the city reaching its target population of 5 million within 40 years.

It was as if the story were floating in the air, waiting to be rediscovered. And by coincidence, a handful of writers came across it at the same time.

Montagu Brownlow Parker. Known as “Monty,” he was my great-great-uncle.

That was nearly everything I knew of him. All my family had left of his adventure in Jerusalem was a black box of papers telling a captivating tale.

The government hasn’t embraced MMT. But important elements of it are now accepted by much of the economic and financial establishment, with major implications for how the economy is run.

The most important claim of MMT is that a government need never default on debt issued in its own currency. The lesson of 2020 was that MMT is right.

“We got five or six trillion dollars of spending and tax cuts without anyone worrying about payfors, so that was a good thing,” says L. Randall Wray, an economics professor at Bard College in New York and a leading MMT academic. “In January [2020], MMT was a crazy idea, and then in March, it was, OK, we’re going to adopt MMT.”

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all.

according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.

It’s working out just fine for the financial institutions that manage assets in IRAs and 401(k)s. The combined amount in those vehicles reached $21.6 trillion at the end of 2021 — up fivefold since 2000 — and the more money that pours in, the more that managers collect in fees

The sharp pullback came with an implicit promise that as factories reopened and planes returned to the air, the oil industry would revive, too, gradually scaling up production to help economies return to prepandemic health.

Members of the cartel OPEC Plus, which agreed to cut output by about 10 million barrels a day in early 2020, are routinely falling well short of their rising monthly production targets.

Production in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, has also been slow to recover from its one-million-barrel-a-day plummet in 2020, as companies and investors are wary of committing money amid climate change concerns and volatile prices.

n a case that exposed Silicon Valley’s culture of hubris and hype, Elizabeth Holmes was convicted Monday of duping investors into believing her startup Theranos had developed a revolutionary medical device that could detect a multitude of diseases and conditions from a few drops of blood.

A jury convicted Holmes, who was CEO throughout the company’s turbulent 15-year history, on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud after seven days of deliberation. The 37-year-old was acquitted on four other counts of fraud and conspiracy that alleged she deceived patients who paid for Theranos blood tests, too.

The verdict came after the eight men and four women on the jury spent three months sitting through a complex trial that featured reams of evidence and 32 witnesse

The identity of the Facebook whistleblower who released tens of thousands of pages of internal research and documents — leading to a firestorm for the social media company in recent weeks — was revealed on "60 Minutes" Sunday night as Frances Haugen.

The 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company says the documents show that Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation

Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Haugen told "60 Minutes."

China’s boom was underpinned by unusually high levels of domestic investment in infrastructure and other hard assets, which accounted for about 44% of GDP each year on average between 2008 and 2021. That compared with a global average of 25% and around 20% in the U.S., according to World Bank data.

Such heavy spending was made possible in part by a system of “financial repression” in which state banks set deposit rates low, which meant they could raise funds inexpensively and fund building projects. China added tens of thousands of miles of highways, hundreds of airports, and the world’s largest network of high-speed trains.

About one-fifth of apartments in urban China, or at least 130 million units, were estimated to be unoccupied in 2018,

Michael Burry is the latest seer with a shaky encore. His early but successful bet on the 2007-08 housing bust made him rich and—after Christian Bale played him in the Hollywood adaptation of Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short”—famous. But he has also made at least five dire predictions about stocks in just the past four years with comments such as “could be worse than 2008” and “greatest speculative bubble of all time.”

Buying the S&P 500 instead would have made an investor money each time in the six months after his views became public. The average annualized gain was 34%—about four times the index’s long-run appreciation. His latest public warning was a one-word tweet this January from a frequently deleted account called Cassandra BC: “SELL.” 

To the uninitiated, the notional value of the derivatives makes it look as though he bet nearly everything on a crash. That isn’t the case at all, but Burry has done nothing to disabuse his 1.4 million followers on X (formerly known as Twitter) of that idea.

At a 2014 aerospace event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Musk indicated that he was hesitant to build A.I himself.“I think we need to be very careful about artificial intelligence,” he said while answering audience questions. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

That winter, the Future of Life Institute, which explores existential risks to humanity, organized a private conference in Puerto Rico focused on the future of A.I. Mr. Musk gave a speech there, arguing that A.I. could cross into dangerous territory without anyone realizing it and announced that he would help fund the institute. He gave $10 million.

OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit, with Mr. Musk and others pledging $1 billion in donations. The lab vowed to “open source” all its research, meaning it would share its underlying software code with the world. Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman argued that the threat of harmful A.I. would be mitigated if everyone, rather than just tech giants like Google and Facebook, had access to the technology.

Under his leadership, though, the S.E.C. has made crypto a priority, nearly doubling its enforcement team to 50 members. In February, the agency levied a $100 million fine on the crypto lending company BlockFi over registration failures; BlockFi suspended operations this month as a result of its ties to FTX.

According to public filings, the agency is also investigating the process by which Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, chooses which cryptocurrencies to offer.

“There were a lot of entrepreneurs that grew up in this field and chose to be noncompliant,” Mr. Gensler said in an interview last month at the S.E.C. headquarters in Washington. “We will be a cop on the beat.”

They describe someone whose closest friendships (many of them longstanding) are with other wealthy tech luminaries of middle age.

He regularly takes meetings until 9 or 10 p.m., but when he goes out, he does so with frenetic bombast, almost as if live-action role-playing a billionaire playboy

A fan of lavish costume parties, Mr. Musk revels in settings, like the desert art festival/rave Burning Man, where he can take on a role outside himself.

Creating a Chinese version of the World Bank, Mr. Xi inaugurated the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Instead of the American dream, he speaks of the “Chinese dream,” which describes the collective pride that people feel when they overcome a century of disorder and colonial humiliation to reclaim their status as a great power.

I asked half a dozen scholars who study China what lessons Americans should draw from Mr. Xi’s tenure so far. Here’s a summary of what they told me.