U.S. Reports First Coronavirus Death, Imposes New International Travel Restrictions
The patient who died Saturday night didn’t have any travel history to areas where virus was circulating
Health officials in the state of Washington reported the first coronavirus death in the U.S. on Saturday, as the White House imposed additional international travel restrictions on people who traveled to Iran.
Vice President Mike Pence, head of a government’s task force on the virus, said Saturday that the U.S. will bar foreign nationals who have traveled to Iran in the past 14 days.
Speaking at a White House news conference alongside Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence said that the U.S. is raising its travel advisory to urge Americans not to travel to virus-hit parts of Italy and South Korea.
In response to a reporter’s question, Mr. Trump said the U.S. is considering restrictions at the Mexican border as well.
The patient in Washington died after test results confirmed the infection Saturday night, according to a letter from the EvergreenHealth health-care system. The patient didn’t have any travel history to areas where the virus was circulating. A second patient at the hospital also tested positive and remains in isolation.
Last night, health officials in Washington, Oregon and California reported three new infections of the novel virus in patients who currently have no clear path of exposure, signaling the possibility of wider spread of the virus within those communities.
The patients were tested following a change in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guideline, which the agency expanded on Thursday to include people with recent travel history to Japan, Italy, Iran and South Korea as well as people with severe respiratory illnesses and a fever without a clear cause of infection.
The agency expanded the guideline after a patient in California wasn’t tested right away because the woman didn’t meet the stricter guidelines but ended up testing positive.
The novel coronavirus has quickly spread to disparate places around the world, increasingly with no clear links to China, where the outbreak began. Public-health officials say the illness is likely to spread in the U.S. as well, in part because many mild cases appear to be contributing to the spread without officials being aware of them.
So far, roughly 80% of the cases are mild, with the most common symptoms being a fever and a dry cough. Many patients recover within a few weeks. But the rapidly spreading virus can also be deadly, especially among older adults and those with underlying health conditions.
On Saturday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it would allow some 300 to 400 academic-hospital labs to begin testing for the virus, allowing for checks of thousands of people rather than the few hundred already tested.
“We believe this policy strikes the right balance during this public health emergency,” FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn said in a statement. “We will continue to help to ensure sound science prior to clinical testing and follow-up with the critical independent review from the FDA, while quickly expanding testing capabilities in the U.S. We are not changing our standards for issuing Emergency Use Authorizations. “
Until Saturday’s announcement, there were relatively few diagnostic tests conducted in the U.S., with most state and local health departments sending patient samples to the CDC and waiting days for results. Even those initially had some accuracy problems, though the CDC has said those problems have been remedied.
The president said he would meet with drugmakers on Monday as work continues on a vaccine.
Mr. Trump also continued his criticism of the Federal Reserve, saying interest rates remain too high and should go lower as in other countries. “We need a Fed that is going to be a leader,” he said.
France has seduced Jamie Dimon. JPMorgan Chase last month acquired a seven-storey building in Paris to house hundreds of traders. The deal was announced to coincide with an initiative at Versailles led by President Emmanuel Macron, entitled “Choose France”.
JPMorgan did — and so have other banks. They are shifting some business from London as Brexit inhibits their ability to operate across the continent.
But le tapis rouge is not laid out for just any foreign financier. Even as France tries to attract banks, insurers and clearinghouses, it is trying to repel hedge funds, activists and short-sellers.
The most fearsome layer of deterrence comes from the French regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers, which has recently proposed swingeing fines for activist Elliott Management, probed short seller Muddy Waters and even penalised Bloomberg for publishing a story based on a fake press release.
Viewed individually, none of the interventions looks arbitrary. Elliott has been accused of misleading the market by failing to properly disclose its stake-building in Norbert Dentressangle, a French logistics firm. Muddy Waters was suspected of market manipulation over its attack on the Casino supermarket chain. Bloomberg’s sin was not to verify a document that purported to contain bad results from Vinci and sent the construction group’s shares sharply lower.
But the decisions to even open those cases were not clear cut. Each company denies wrongdoing. And some of the proposed fines look out-sized: €20m for Elliott and a staggering €5m for Bloomberg’s failure to detect what the media group called a “sophisticated hoax”.
Some foreign investors accuse the French regulator of discrimination, arguing that the AMF has not been so quick to examine stakebuilding from homegrown corporate raiders such as Vincent Bolloré.
Elliott’s general counsel Richard Zabel popped up in the French press this week to criticise the AMF and implicitly contrast its heavy-handed policing of investors with Mr Macron’s.
“The French have every right to choose not to be a major financial centre,” he told Les Echos. “And for people who expect stable and predictable rules from a jurisdiction, it is more difficult to do business in France than elsewhere.”
However aggrieved by the AMF’s investigations, Elliott is undaunted. This week it emerged that it had built a new position in Arkema, the French chemicals group, to complement its stakes in Pernod Ricard and IT services company Altran. If France wants to fend off activists, it needs something else.
Conveniently, this week the government announced that Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala would provide €1bn to pour into a French state-backed “lac d’argent”, “lake of cash”, that would eventually reach €10bn and would be used to take strategic investments in French companies.
This follows a government report in October, which recommended a variety of steps to “level the playing field” between activists and companies — incredibly that apparently translates to giving more power to management, not less.
In many ways, all this is par for the course. It is 15 years since France declared yoghurt a natural security issue when it thwarted Pepsi’s takeover interest in Danone. But the activists and hedge funds have since started knocking on the door in greater numbers. If France really does want a vibrant global financial centre, it should let them in
Early premarket gappers
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- Gapping down:
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Crispin Odey profits as investors stampede for exits over coronavirus
Hedge fund manager’s bets against oil stocks and Tesla come good amid deep sell-off
Crispin Odey, one of Europe’s most high-profile hedge fund managers, has emerged as a winner in a brutal week for equity investors as the fallout from the coronavirus outbreak sends markets plunging.
Mr Odey, founder of London-based Odey Asset Management, posted a 5 per cent gain in his European fund this week, he told the Financial Times. He has profited from bets against electric carmaker Tesla, which has partially reversed its rapid rally after sentiment soured, and US shale oil stocks, which have tumbled with the price of crude.
Stock markets are on course for their worst week since the 2008 financial crisis. The S&P 500 registered its fastest correction since the Great Depression on Thursday, taking just six trading days to topple more than 10 per cent from its record high on February 19.
While the full effects of the market falls on hedge funds and other investors are yet to be seen, Mr Odey’s performance is likely to be a rare profit in an industry that looks set to finish the week well into the red. Despite the gains, Mr Odey’s fund is still down about 5 per cent for 2020.
“We went into coronavirus with the market incredibly bullish, everyone was long,” Mr Odey said in an interview. “I’m more cautious than most people.”
He said that last year’s rally in markets — the S&P 500 delivered a return of 29 per cent — was driven by the expansion of price/earnings multiples rather than earnings, which meant that investors were paying more for the same streams of profits.
“What you really needed for this year [2020] was for earnings to come through,” he said. “Earnings are just not coming through — it’s going to be the opposite. The question is, does another dose of monetary madness offset the willingness of the market to really look at what’s really going on?”
Mr Odey is a longtime critic of the effects of trillions of dollars of central bank stimulus. This week’s big slide has raised expectations among investors that central banks will come up with new ways to inject life into global markets.
Mr Odey’s gains come after a tough run of performance, including an 11 per cent drop in January as the spike in Tesla’s shares caused him to rue a bet that the price would fall. But those paper losses are now shrinking, as Tesla shares have dropped by a quarter so far this week.
Mr Odey, whose fund lost 10.1 per cent last year after gaining 53 per cent in 2018, said he remained bearish on the carmaker’s prospects.
He also continues to worry about the amount of debt that companies have been accumulating, saying that borrowed funds have not been used to invest in projects that could pay back that money at a later stage.
“We [the economy] have long ago stopped allocating capital efficiently,” he said. “A long time after savings have gone, credit will still be there, and it’s horrible.”