WSJ : CDC to Allow Cruise Trips After Ban Expires

CDC to Allow Cruise Trips After Ban Expires
U.S. health officials will let cruise ban expire on Oct. 31, setting new requirements for future voyages amid a global surge in coronavirus infections

Federal U.S. health officials are lifting their ban on cruise sailings in U.S. waters Saturday, allowing the industry to prepare to restart voyages amid a surge in coronavirus cases around the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decided to let its “no sail” order expire on Saturday, after imposing the ban amid Covid-19 outbreaks on dozens of cruise ships in the spring.

The regulator’s conditional order presents cruise operators’ the opportunity to generate revenue after they reported billions of dollars in losses this year when the pandemic put brakes on the tourism industry.

The U.S. has set new records for positive coronavirus cases this week and governments around the world are deciding how to manage their economies and the pathogen. On Thursday, Canada extended its sailing ban through the end of February for overnight cruises carrying more than 100 people.

Large operators Carnival Corp. CCL 5.62% , Royal Caribbean Group RCL 4.81% and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. NCLH 5.45% have scrapped their U.S. sailings through the end of November. Royal Caribbean on Thursday posted a quarterly loss of more than $1.3 billion as revenue turned negative.

To restart carrying passengers, cruise operators would first need to conduct simulated voyages demonstrating their ships’ safety, the CDC said.

Itineraries can’t be longer than a week, and operators must test all passengers and crew for Covid-19 on embarkation and disembarkation, the CDC said. Crew members transferred from other ships in the 28 prior days have to test negative for Covid-19, it said.

Ship operators would need agreements with port authorities to determine the number of cruise ships allowed at any port, so as “to not overburden the public health response resources of any single jurisdiction in the event of a Covid-19 outbreak,” the agency added.

The CDC director, Robert Redfield, determined that measures taken by local and state authorities in dealing with Covid-19 cases on cruise ships have been inadequate in preventing the interstate spread of the disease, requiring federal intervention, it said.

Dr. Redfield had recommended in September extending the no-sail order into February but was overruled at a White House meeting of the Coronavirus Task Force, the Journal reported. White House officials didn’t want to see the cruise industry further damaged and lose more jobs in hubs like Miami, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The leveling up of restrictions in Europe has also threatened cruise operators’ ability to sail there. On Thursday, Carnival’s Aida Cruises said it was pausing sailings for November after the German government ordered a one-month partial lockdown starting Monday. Costa Cruises, Aida’s sister brand in Italy, on Wednesday canceled a few sailings and cut short others due to Covid-19 restrictions still in place in Europe.

In Singapore, Royal Caribbean is starting a “cruise-to-nowhere” sailing without ports of call in December. The company plans to return to service gradually in the first half of 2021.

“The cruising without going into new ports is the way we are starting up everywhere,” Royal Caribbean Chief Executive Richard Fain said in an interview.

A cruise industry trade group in September said its members would test all passengers and crew for Covid-19 before embarkation and require the wearing of masks and physical distancing on board, among other measures. Passengers would only be able to go on shore excursions on agreed-upon protocols, the group said.

FT : BA boss hits out at Heathrow plan to increase charges

BA boss hits out at Heathrow plan to increase charges
Sean Doyle says regulator should block airport’s proposal to recoup pandemic losses

British Airways’ new chief executive on Friday urged the aviation regulator to block Heathrow airport’s attempt to increase its landing fees for airlines in order to claw back losses run up during the coronavirus crisis.

The UK’s largest airport is seeking the Civil Aviation Authority’s permission to increase the fees it charges airlines by 5 per cent to help offset a dramatic fall in flights after governments imposed restrictions on travel in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Heathrow already has some of the highest fees in the world, and the charges — the airport’s most important source of revenue — are typically passed by airlines straight to passengers in ticket prices. 

The airport’s move to increase the fees has sparked a furious dispute with airlines including BA, Virgin Atlantic and United Airlines, which are nursing large losses because much lower numbers of people are flying during the pandemic.

Sean Doyle, who this month took over as chief executive of BA, part of International Airlines Group, said the CAA should reject Heathrow’s push to add £1.20 to the landing fee to offset the impact of the crisis.

At the start of this year the fee stood at £22.64 per passenger, and the regulator said this month that Heathrow had failed to make a convincing case to increase the expected level of the charge in 2022 by 5 per cent because of losses stemming from the pandemic.

“We would urge the regulator to stick to its position,” said Mr Doyle.

Airline groups including IAG have raised billions of pounds from their shareholders during the crisis, and want Heathrow’s group of largely overseas investors to share the industry’s pain rather than pass the losses on to carriers. 

Luis Gallego, IAG chief executive, said Heathrow’s proposal to increase landing fees “does not make any sense”.

BA regularly clashes with Heathrow over the fees — typically about every five years when the CAA sets the level of the charges.

The UK flag carrier has long complained about the level of the fees and how Heathrow wants to increase them to help pay for a third runway at the airport.

But the stakes are now higher as the pandemic has ripped a hole in the finances of both companies.

IAG on Friday reported an operating loss of €5.95bn for the first nine months of the year, while Heathrow on Wednesday revealed it had been overtaken by Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris as Europe’s busiest hub by number of passengers.

With only a very limited number of flights coming in and out of Heathrow, the airport reported an operating loss of £746m for the first nine months of the year.


As a result, Heathrow’s bosses want to claw back £1.7bn of the £2.2bn of revenue they estimate the airport will forgo this year and next through increases in landing fees.

Heathrow’s executives are this weekend finalising new evidence to present to the CAA. 

The airport argues that its shareholders, which include Spanish infrastructure group Ferrovial and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, have been attracted by a low-risk model that has been blown up by the pandemic, and that the company’s finances are tightly regulated meaning that unlike airlines it cannot just dial up and down prices at will. 

Without raising landing fees, Heathrow’s owners warn billions of pounds of future investment at the airport is at risk.

Javier Echave, Heathrow’s finance director, said the regulator needed to “crack on” with approving an increase in landing fees and insisted the company’s operating licence allowed it to increase prices under exceptional circumstances. 

“If the CAA is allowed to not enforce the rules of the game, it is terrible for consumers, but also sets a dangerous precedent,” he added, saying that international investors could end up turning their backs on UK infrastructure projects. 

While the CAA is still considering Heathrow’s plea to increase its landing fees, the regulator has strongly rejected Mr Echave’s claim that it has a statutory duty to allow the airport to raise its charges.

It highlights how the spat between Heathrow, airlines and the CAA is turning into one of the bitterest since the airport was taken private by a consortium led by Ferrovial in a highly leveraged takeover in 2006.

Heathrow is already asking the regulator to be allowed to increase landing fees from 2022 to claw back £500m of costs related to its third runway plans, which were derailed in February by a court ruling that the £14bn project was unlawful on environmental grounds. Heathrow is appealing against the ruling.

Heathrow’s push to increase its landing fees has led airlines to raise new questions over the airport’s large debt load, which has allowed it to pay billions of pounds in dividends to shareholders.

Airlines have told the CAA they were particularly incensed by Heathrow’s decision to pay £100m to its shareholders in February, although the airport in its accounts noted this was before the impact of Covid-19 became clear.

One of Heathrow’s international shareholders, who declined to be identified, defended the airport, saying it had been able to invest billions of pounds into its facilities since it was taken private, and that its passenger approval ratings had gone up in that time.

Mr Echave said he was comfortable with Heathrow’s finances going into the crisis, adding the airport had £4.5bn in liquidity that could last into 2023 based on current passenger forecasts.

Reuters - Italian payments firm Nexi leads race for $10 billion Nets takeover -

Italian payments firm Nexi leads race for $10 billion Nets takeover - sources - https://reut.rs/35VlAhk

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Italian payments technology firm Nexi NEXII.MI is leading negotiations to buy Nordic rival Nets in an all-stock deal worth about $10 billion after trumping competition from U.S. firm Global Payments GPN.N, four sources told Reuters.

The deal would transform Nexi, which has a market value of 8.4 billion euros ($9.93 billion), into a European payments powerhouse, allowing it to build a footprint in key regions such as the Nordics and Central and Eastern Europe.

U.S. private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which took control of Nets in 2017 and subsequently delisted it from the Copenhagen stock exchange, is working with Credit Suisse CSGN.S on the sale and wants to clinch a deal by the end of the year, two of the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity as the matter is confidential.

The sources said Nexi, advised by Centerview Partners, was waiting for market volatility to ease in November after the U.S. presidential election before entering a binding agreement with Nets.

They added that any takeover of Nets wouldn’t endanger Nexi’s ongoing merger with Italian rival SIA - a deal announced on Oct. 5 and expected to close by the summer of 2021.

Global Payments dropped out of the process after the sale of its $2 billion Netspend unit was pulled earlier this week, two of the sources said.

Nexi, Hellman & Friedman and Global Payments declined to comment while Nets was not immediately available.

WSJ : Mystery Stalks a Haunting Dream

Mystery Stalks a Haunting Dream
Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ bewitches the observer with its unnerving ambiguity.

‘The Nightmare’ (1782), by Henry Fuseli
When the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” struggles to describe a style of painting, he resorts to a comparison and cites the “concrete reveries of Fuseli.” This is a reference to Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), and it begs a question: How does anybody describe “The Nightmare,” the artist’s best-known work?
Sigmund Freud didn’t even try. He apparently kept a reproduction of “The Nightmare” in his study in Vienna, yet he never wrote about it. Mary Shelley knew the painting, and a menacing line in her 1818 novel, “Frankenstein,” may owe something to Fuseli’s strange vision: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Horace Walpole, author of “The Castle of Otranto,” which is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, saw Fuseli’s painting at its debut in 1782. He had one word for it, which he scribbled in his catalog: “shocking.”
Born in Switzerland, Fuseli chose to pursue painting only as an adult. In Rome, he would lie on his back and gaze at the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling to study Michelangelo, whose influence may be seen in the bulky bodies that populate Fuseli’s paintings and illustrations. Although he lacked technical training, Fuseli went on to establish himself as a mainstream figure in London’s art world and won election to the Royal Academy. The subjects of his paintings tend to draw from familiar literary and mythological sources. The stories of Shakespeare were a favorite inspiration as he rendered the ghost from “Hamlet,” the witches from “Macbeth,” and Falstaff from “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
“The Nightmare” is different. It has no obvious source, nor does it have a clear meaning. Much of its enduring appeal comes from its unnerving ambiguity. The painting’s most basic question is impossible to answer: Whose nightmare is it? It could belong to the woman as she dreams of the terror on her torso. Or it could be our own, as we watch an incubus assault a defenseless victim.

Other aspects add to the mystery. The full-figured woman who reclines in her form-fitting dress is both provocative in pose and innocent in white. Bottles on the table beside her may contain sleeping drugs, perhaps of the sort that conjure hallucinations of unwelcome visitants. The crouching imp is at once a pointy-eared demon with a cruel gaze and a pudgy dwarf who looks like he could sit on a bookshelf as a plush doll.

The horse is an odd element. It thrusts its oblong head through a red curtain in a manner that would have intrigued Freud. The beast is blind, too. Eyes are a striking feature in many of Fuseli’s paintings, but this animal has no pupils in its milky orbs. Its presence evokes folklore about monsters and midnight rides. It also suggests a pun. The words “mare” and “nightmare” share no connection in etymology. Here, however, they combine in a bizarre and perhaps comic union.
Commentators often interpret “The Nightmare” as a portrayal of illicit desire or subconscious fear. For this reason, art historians have tended to see it as both an early expression of Romanticism and a forerunner of 20th-century Surrealism.
The secret to Fuseli’s purpose, and possibly the picture’s meaning, may lie literally beneath its surface. After the Detroit Institute of Arts acquired the work in 1955, a conservator removed a piece of canvas covering the back of the painting, revealing a hidden portrait of an attractive young woman. Nobody knows her name, but one theory holds that she is Anna Landolt, the niece of a friend of Fuseli’s.
On a visit to Switzerland in 1779, Fuseli had become infatuated with her. “She is mine, and I am hers. And have her I will,” he wrote in a letter. “What God or Nature hath joined, let no man—let no business-man sunder.” This last statement pulls from the Gospel of Matthew but probably refers to the merchant who married Landolt, who seems not to have felt about Fuseli the way the painter felt about her.
The woman on the bed in “The Nightmare” looks like the one who had been concealed, from the big hair to the plunging neckline. The face of the fiend who squats on her, some observers have noted, bears at least a passing resemblance to the artist. “The Nightmare” could depict the pain of an unrequited love or, more disturbingly, a fantasy of revenge.
“One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams,” Fuseli wrote in a book of aphorisms. As for the undiscovered country of “The Nightmare” and its inscrutable meaning, the artist was like one of his painting’s speechless onlookers: He never said.

BreakingViews : Mind the gap ; Lufax slips softly priced IPO past Ant hullaballo

Lufax’s humble market debut is worth a closer look. The Chinese financial technology outfit has priced its $2.4 billion New York initial public offering at a much lower valuation than rival Ant. It may not be growing as fast, but its online lending unit is profitable and established. A $33 billion valuation makes for a compelling option.

The Ping-An backed company’s rocky path to the public markets has included a change of venues and an entire reinvention of its peer-to-peer lending business model after a regulatory crackdown. Similar to Jack Ma’s financial services colossus, Lufax now operates a marketplace for small businesses and consumers to borrow from third-party lenders. Whereas Ant’s sheer size and blistering revenue growth has garnered much attention, its smaller peer’s comparable operating margins and stable business has attracted far less.

The offering will be the biggest Chinese listing in New York in more than two years, though that pales in headline-grabbing terms next to rival Ant’s record-shattering $34 billion share sale this week in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Lufax shares are set to debut at $13.50 each on Friday in New York, the top of the indicative price range, according to industry publication IFR, or 13 times forecast 2021 earnings. Include some 170 million additional shares from options and optional convertibles, the bulk of which are not profitable to convert at its IPO price, and Lufax’s multiple would reach about 15 times. That’s still lower than the 31 times 2021 forecast earnings Ant shares will trade at, Reuters reported on Oct. 27, citing sources.

Lufax’s debut will also be a so-called downround: it was last valued at $39 billion in a 2018 funding round. That compares with Ant’s massive jump, from $150 billion two years ago to $312 billion. Even so, for Ant to live up to its rosy valuation, it will have to double its earnings in two years, while Lufax’s multiple implies net profit will rise a much more feasible 25% next year. While Ant wins the headline battle, the valuation gap suggests Lufax may offer investors more upside.

BreakingViews : Dollars and Tencents, Naspers finds one bargain internet stock

Naspers has found a reasonably priced internet investment: its own stock. The $84 billion South African technology investor and its Amsterdam-listed offshoot, Prosus, have lagged behind big tech companies in this year’s pandemic-induced surge. A $5 billion share buyback highlights the valuation disconnect and carries a message to other money managers.

Naspers owes much of its current heft to a prescient early investment in Tencent. However, shareholders have long been reluctant to recognise the full value of its 31% stake in the Chinese web giant. In an attempt to close the gap, Chief Executive Bob van Dijk last year created Prosus to house the Tencent shares and other internet investments, including listed stakes in Germany’s Delivery Hero, Russia’s Mail.ru and a portfolio of private holdings. The idea was that international investors would be more willing to buy shares in the European company than its Johannesburg-listed parent.

Though the plan initially worked, the gap has opened up again. Tencent shares have surged 57% this year, while Naspers and Prosus are up 38% and 31%, respectively.

As of Friday morning, Prosus’ shareholdings in Tencent, Delivery Hero and Mail.ru had a combined market value of around $232 billion, according to Breakingviews calculations. Yet the Dutch company’s equity is worth just $165 billion. Meanwhile Naspers’ market value was a hefty 30% less than the implied value of its 73% stake in Prosus.

The enduring discount is partly due to Naspers’ dominance of South Africa’s exchange. It’s such a large component of the benchmark index that local institutions bump into their limits on single-stock exposures. The share buyback announced on Friday morning should ease some of that pressure. Prosus will spend up to $3.63 billion on its parent’s shares, and the rest on its own.

The move also signals a broader wariness about tech valuations. In the past year, Prosus has lost out to more aggressive rivals when bidding for UK food delivery group Just Eat and eBay’s $9 billion classified advertising unit. It continues to make smaller venture capital investments in online startups specialising in areas such as payments and education. But the buyback suggests van Dijk doesn’t see much value in listed stocks, other than his own.