News Burst 17 March 2020 – Live Feed

News Burst 17 March 2020

• [Global Financial Reset] Following two weeks of relentless market turmoil, traders were wondering which country’s stock market would be shut down first. Moments ago we got the answer when the Philippine Stock Exchange announced it is suspending trading “until further notice” after the country’s President Rodrigo Duterte expanded a month-long lockdown to the entire main island of Luzon.

• [Global Financial Reset] Earlier on Monday, the CEO of Borsa Italiana, Raffaele Jerusalmi, denied rumors that Italy’s stock market would shut even as the rest of the country is effectively on lockdown, when Ansa quoted him as saying that future decisions on closing stock markets “at aggregate level” are in theory possible but would be up to governments acting collectively. Jerusalmi did not say any such moves were imminent or comment on whether they’ve been discussed at any level.

• Ayatollah Bathaee, representative of Tehran in the Assembly of Experts, died age 78 on Monday morning, according to the semi-official Tasnim newsagency. The cleric, who had been infected with coronavirus died at a hospital in Qom, the city where the first cases of coronavirus in Iran were detected.

• A cargo ship carrying 193 illegal migrant invaders from Turkey ran aground in rough weather conditions not far from the port of the Cycladic island of Kea (Tzia), near Athens, early Monday morning, according to the Greek coast guard. The ship began its journey from the Turkish port of Canakkale and is said to have planned to head for Italy when rough weather conditions in the maritime area forced it to run aground on the Greek island, the Greek City Times reports. According to the Greek coast guard, all illegal migrants were able to disembark from the cargo tanker after it hit the outside of the breakwater at the port amid gale-force winds and rough seas.

• The leading cryptocurrency by market cap is down 30% in the past five days, and now down 50% in the past month. On Friday, bitcoin tanked 25% in just 24 hours, bringing it below $6,000 for the first time since May 2019, 10 months ago. Bitcoin rose 87% in 2019, and it had been having a very strong 2020 until mid-February; now it’s down 30% for the year. What happened to the idea of crypto as a safe haven asset, a hedge against economic uncertainty?

• Two of Germany’s largest banks have temporarily shut hundreds of branches, while Italian lenders have shortened opening hours as they grapple with staff shortages and the spread of coronavirus. Commerzbank (CBKG.DE) said it will close several hundred of its roughly 1,000 branches in Germany, with the exact number yet to be determined, while HVB said it plans to close 101 of its 337 branches during Monday.

• France’s national competition regulator announced on Monday it has fined American tech giant Apple a record €1.1 billion ($1.23bn) for anti-competitive practices after nearly a decade of investigations. The decision comes over Apple’s alleged anti-competitive behavior in its distribution and sales networks. The authority said that two of Apple’s wholesalers, Tech Data and Ingram Micro, were fined €63 million and €76 million respectively for unlawfully agreeing on prices. According to the French regulator, “Apple and its two wholesalers have agreed not to compete with each other and to prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products.”

• A Japanese man was sentenced to death [which in Japan is carried out by hanging] on Monday over a 2016 stabbing rampage at a care home near Tokyo for people with mental disabilities that killed 19 residents and injured 26 others, in one of post-war Japan’s worst mass killings. Satoshi Uematsu, 30, a former employee of the care facility in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, had admitted to the killings during hearings at the Yokohama District Court, insisting that people with disabilities who are unable to communicate well had no human rights. Uematsu told the court last month he would not appeal the ruling, no matter what it may be. The defence said the defendant’s personality had drastically changed since 2015 due to his use of marijuana, which it claimed triggered his mental disorder and the attack.

• Chief of The Greater Tehran Intelligence and Public Security Police on Monday said five individuals whose funny video clip made with special effects showing eggplants raining down from the sky in Tehran have been arrested. The video clip went viral on Iranian social media on Sunday. Brigadier General Ali Zolqadri, the official who announced the arrests, did not say why a non-political video clip is cause for detention, but it appears that the quite credible-looking video showing surreal scenes of large eggplants raining down from the sky and falling on cars and people’s heads could have evoked “end of the world” images in some people’s minds.

• One of the reactors at the Sendai nuclear plant here was shut down March 16 after the plant’s operator failed to meet the deadline to complete an anti-terror facility. It is the first time a reactor has been halted for this reason in Japan. The plant’s No. 2 reactor is also expected to go offline in May due to delays in constructing the emergency facility. Reactors operated by Kansai Electric Power Co. and Shikoku Electric Power Co. will also be forced to shut down later this year for the same reason. The anti-terror facilities are designed to allow nuclear plant operators to manage the cooling of reactors and other operations through remote control in an emergency such as terrorists crashing an aircraft into a nuclear complex.

• Demand for dollars has spiked in Azerbaijan amid fears of another currency devaluation following a plunge in oil prices. The government maintains a de facto peg of the currency, the manat, against the US dollar, and can prop up its budget in times of low international oil prices by devaluing the manat. It did so twice in 2015, creating substantial hardship for ordinary Azerbaijanis who held their savings in manats.

• Saudi authorities have detained 298 government employees, including military officers, and will indict them on crimes such as bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power involving a total of 379 million riyals ($101 million). Last week, two senior princes, Prince Ahmed Bin Abdulaziz, King Salman’s brother, and Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, the former crown prince and interior minister, were detained in a corruption probe. Both were considered potential rivals to Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and their arrests were seen as an effort to send a message to other members of the royal family that any signal of disloyalty towards Bin Salman would not be tolerated. [chop-chop square?]

• “Russian interference” with any defense is now being dismissed by DOJ because prosecutors knew they couldn’t win at trial. Repeat: the DOJ could not find a single case they could successfully prosecute to prove any act of “Russian interference.”

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