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Va. Republicans navigate Trumpism in 2021 governor’s race (nationthailand.com)

Va. Republicans navigate Trumpism in 2021 governor’s race

InternationalDec 06. 2020Del. Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, addresses a crowd in 2019 after his win against Democrat Sheila Bynum-Coleman. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Julia Rendleman. 

By The Washington Post · Laura Vozzella · NATIONAL, POLITICS 

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia Republicans, who haven’t won a statewide race in more than a decade, see 2021 as their best chance in years to reverse their losing streak – but they will have to wrestle with Trumpism to do it.

One of just two states (along with New Jersey) to pick a governor the year after the presidential election, Virginia has a habit of rebelling against the party in the White House. By Election Day 2021, President-elect Joe Biden will have been in power nearly a year – and Republicans are hoping the so-called “Virginia curse” will work in their favor as the state elects a governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates also will be on the ballot. 

“When a Democrat is in the White House, Virginia Republicans get bullish, because history shows that’s when the Republicans have the best chance to take back the governor’s mansion,” said Richard Cullen, a former Republican state attorney general and former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

That sense of opportunity means an unusually large pack of Republicans are eyeing the Executive Mansion. And the sheer size of the potential field could complicate how the party contends with Trumpism, which is expected to remain the party’s most animating and problematic force long after President Trump’s term ends.

Two are officially in the race: state Sen. Amanda Chase of Chesterfield and Del. Kirk Cox of Colonial Heights, the former speaker of the House of Delegates. 

Five others are actively exploring bids: Northern Virginia businessman Pete Snyder, who is expected to formally announce soon; former Carlyle Group co-chief executive Glenn Youngkin; state Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr. of Augusta; Charles “Bill” Carrico, a retired state trooper and former state senator from Grayson County, in the state’s far Southwest; and outgoing Rep. Denver Riggleman. 

Trump won Virginia’s 2016 presidential primary with just under 35% of the vote, but lost the general election here by five points. This year, he lost the state by 10 points. And in between, Democrats flipped three congressional seats plus the state House and Senate in blue waves widely seen as rebukes to the Republican president. 

While toxic to swing voters in the suburbs, especially in populous Northern Virginia, Trump remains highly popular with the Republican base. That puts the Virginia GOP in a pickle as it chooses its nominee in June, say Republicans and Democrats alike.

“In order to win the [Republican] Party nomination, you’ve got to appeal to the Trumpian right – but in order to win the general, you can’t lose Fairfax [County] by 36 points,” said Jared Leopold, Democratic strategist for one of three Democrats officially running for governor, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan of Richmond. 

The other two Democrats formally in the race are Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy of Prince William. Former governor Terry McAuliffe, who defied the Virginia curse by winning in 2013 while fellow Democrat Barack Obama was in office, is widely expected to seek a second term. The current governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, is prohibited by the state constitution from seeking back-to-back terms.

Former Republican governor George Allen said the party can best navigate those tricky politics by pursuing “kitchen table” issues, such as education and jobs, that have appeal across the aisle. A softer style, he said, wouldn’t hurt either.

“Most Republicans will not defend President Trump’s manners, but they love what he’s done on taxes, on energy, reasonable regulation, strong national defense, standing up to China and the judges he’s nominated,” Allen said. “Developers from New York City are not known for their hospitality. They’re pushy and all that. . . . I think we need to recognize there’s only one Donald Trump in this universe.” 

Some Republicans openly worry about the candidate who draws the most comparisons to Trump’s flamboyant style: Chase. They say that in a large field, she could emerge as the GOP nominee, alienating swing voters in the general election and dooming the party’s chances up and down the ballot. 

Chase, a senator since 2016, has drawn rebukes from her own party leaders for cursing out a Capitol Police officer over a parking spot and claiming on Facebook that Virginia Democrats “hate white people.” Chase strapped an assault-style weapon over her shoulder for a gun rights rally in July attended by “boogaloo boys,” a far-right anti-government group pushing for a second civil war. (Chase said she didn’t know who was in the crowd.) On Friday, she created a stir by posting side-by-side photos of herself and civil rights icon Rosa Parks on Facebook, with the message: “We never backed down.”

“I know a lot of people say I’m Trump in heels, and I’ve embraced it,” said Chase, who was a home-schooling mom when she got into politics and touts the criticism from fellow Republicans as proof that she’s shaking up the establishment in both parties. “Republicans keep talking about how they want to win the suburbs. I am the suburbs. And suburban women are sometimes a little bit sassy.”

Cox, a retired high school civics teacher and baseball coach who has served 30 years in the House, mostly tries to sidestep the polarizing national issues Chase plays up. He says his mantra – “practical solutions for everyday problems” – appeals to independents and Democrats as well as the blue-collar voters Trump brought in to the party.

“When you knock on a working-class family’s door and you ask them what’s on their mind, it’ s not what the pundits on TV are saying,” he said, adding that K-12 schools and more affordable higher education are more important to them.

Cox has tried to thread the needle when it comes to Trump. Where Chase has led “Stop the steal” rallies alleging, without evidence, voter fraud in Virginia, Cox has held off commenting on the presidential election results. He said he would wait until the electoral college votes in mid-December – an approach that has drawn criticism from Democrats, including Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, who tweeted that Cox and state party leadership have failed to push back on Chase’s “nonsense.”

Cox seemed to take pains to avoid using Trump’s name in August, when he issued a statement confirming he was exploring a run but saying he would hold off any announcement so the party could focus on its efforts to “defeat Joe Biden.”

While Chase has attacked Cox directly – slamming him, for example, for agreeing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act – Cox has pushed back more obliquely.

“Part of the appeal of the president is he’s authentic,” he said. “I’m going to be Kirk Cox. . . . They [voters] are not interested in imitations right now.”

Some Trump fans say Chase cannot win them over by mimicking his norm-shattering style.

“What I like about Donald Trump is my embassy’s in Jerusalem, I’ve got 300 judges, I got a tax cut,” said Matt Colt Hall, a Southwest Virginia native and political commentator for the conservative blog Bearing Drift. “There are people out there that can give the Trump policy without strapping an AR-15 across their chests in downtown Richmond.” 

John Fredericks, a conservative radio host and Trump backer who was chairman of his Virginia campaign in 2016, says Chase is not the automatic heir to the Trump vote.

“Just because you jump up and down and flail your arms doesn’t mean you’re inheriting the Trump votes. That’s what Corey Stewart did, running around with Confederate flags,” he said, referring to the Trumpian Republican who challenged Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in 2018 and lost by 16 points. “Trump expanded the party. Amanda shrinks the party.”

But even Chase’s critics think she has a good shot at the nomination. 

“She absolutely could get the nomination,” said Cole Trower, who represents the Young Republican Federation of Virginia on the State Central Committee. “When you have several other candidates who are mainstream splitting the vote up, then the path to victory becomes easier for her.” 

That anxiety was expected to spill over into the State Central Committee meeting Saturday, when members began meeting remotely at 10 a.m. to decide whether to nominate its slate of statewide candidates in a primary or a convention. The meeting will be streamed live on the party’s Facebook page. 

Conventions, typically day-long events with multiple rounds of voting, are more likely to favor far-right candidates, because often, only the most hardcore party activists are willing to travel across the state to participate. 

But the politics of the convention-primary choice were scrambled this year. Chase, who might be expected to fare well at a convention, said she feared it would be rigged by party leaders out to undermine her, and vowed to run as an independent if the committee chose that method. 

Meanwhile, some Republicans who typically favor primaries but oppose Chase considered voting for a convention because they doubted that she could garner the required majority vote – 50 percent plus one. In a primary, she could win with a plurality.

“She’s the favorite to be the nominee in a crowded primary. No question about it,” Fredericks said, estimating she might have support from 30 percent to 35 percent of Republicans. “Amanda is the one candidate that has a base that will come out for her. The problem for Amanda is, the base also has a ceiling, and it’s not 50 percent plus one.”

Trower feared Chase’s opposition to a convention might be a head fake. “You ever heard of the term reverse psychology?” he said. “Her supporters would definitely show up in a convention. They’re going to show up no matter what.”

Riggleman, who lost his nomination at a convention after he’d presided over a same-sex wedding, said a much broader and more representative slice of the electorate can participate in statewide primaries. 

“I don’t think the big-tent party should turn into the carnival-tent party,” said Riggleman, who is considering running as an independent. “The Republican Party just keeps spiraling. . . . If we double down on conventions, the Republican Party will eventually become a third party in Virginia.”

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The coronavirus has come roaring back into Brazil (nationthailand.com)

The coronavirus has come roaring back into Brazil

InternationalDec 06. 2020Rio de Janeiro Gov. Claúdio Castro 

By The Washington Post · Terrence McCoy, Heloísa Traiano · WORLD, THE-AMERICAS 

RIO DE JANEIRO – For weeks, it has seemed to Carla Santos de Lima that people here have been in the thrall of a collective delusion that the pandemic was on the way out. 

The beaches, bars and restaurants had filled. The message: Rio de Janeiro was back. 

The pleasant fiction held for weeks – even as people explained away surging coronavirus cases as a temporary blip. It finally unraveled late last month for Santos de Lima.

Her elderly father had fallen gravely ill with the coronavirus. The family had launched a desperate search to find an intensive care bed for him. But they were all full with other covid patients.

He died Nov. 28, inside an ambulance outside the hospital, just as his long-awaited bed opened up. 

“When the restrictions were relaxed, it resulted in this illusion that the problem was under control,” said Santos de Lima, 33,a public school teacher.”People believed it was possible to resume a certain normality. This ended up bringing about for us a false sense of security.” 

The city – and much of Brazil – is grappling with the sudden realization that there is nothing secure about this moment. The coronavirus has suddenly roared back.

And there’s now the chance that even in pandemic-battered Brazil – where more people have died of the virus than any other nation save the United States – things could soon become as bad, if not worse, than ever before.

In Rio de Janeiro, where the virus has already killed tens of thousands, upturned the economy and sent rates of homelessness soaring, moments that recall the darkest days of the pandemic are once more appearing in the news. 

Sick people, unable to get help in the medical system, are again being found dead at home. Lines stretching into the hundreds are forming for intensive care beds. Hospital officials are warning of supply shortages and an imminent collapse in medical services. 

Even the vaunted private heathcare system reached 98% capacity in its intensive care units this week, officials said. In states across the country, the situation wasn’t much better.

“Brazil has to be very, very serious,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, told reporters earlier this week. The situation is “very, very worrisome.”

But public health experts in Rio de Janeiro are expressing alarm over what they are seeing – both from officials and also from ordinary people. 

In May, during the worst weeks of the first wave, city life was vastly constrained. Even if Rio never fully locked down, shops and restaurants closed, people worked from home and several field hospitals were opened. 

This time is different. There is neither talk of field hospitals, nor restrictions on businesses. The streets and beaches remain full of unmasked people who are either unaware or unbothered by the alarming health warnings. 

“We are not going to take a step backward,” acting Rio de Janeiro Gov. Claúdio Castro said Thursday, conceding the difficulty of reinstating restrictions. “It’s no use to pass measures that the population won’t follow.” 

On Friday, Castro and Rio Mayor Marcelo Crivella announced the opening of more hospital beds and that city schools would halt classes. But health officials across the country are warning that such minor restrictions almost certainly won’t be enough. 

The most powerful weapon against the coronavirus – fear – has dulled. Many people either simply don’t care or no longer believe in the dangers posed by the coronavirus.

“We’re facing a campaign of disinformation and denial,” said Suzana Lobo, the president of the Brazilian Association of Intensive Medicine. “The impact in January will be very, very large. Our fear is that in January and February the health system won’t be able to bear it.”

In a fiercely individualistic society, where people have little trust in either government or each other, the pandemic has from the beginning been a mass social experiment in the limits of scientific persuasion. But now public health officials are increasingly worried that their warnings don’t matter. 

“It’s this story: ‘My life for a dip in the ocean,'” said Ligia Bahia, a public health professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “It’s as if we haven’t learned any lessons. For us, it’s very sad.”

“We’re completely defeated,” she added. “I don’t even want to talk about a vaccine.”

Now many Brazilians who have been victimized by the disease only see a year filled with mistakes, errors in judgment and confusion.

Santos de Lima, the teacher, said everyone in her family, who live in the impoverished and crime-plagued area of Pavuna, had been petrified by the disease. But as cases began to diminish, the city relaxed almost all of its containment measures. 

“Very, very, very irresponsible,” Santos de Lima now says of the decision.

But at the time, she, along with much of the city, was loosening up. Allowing herself to believe the worst had passed, she went back to the classroom. And her family started to get together once more, even though her 65-year-old father, Carlos Alberto Correia de Lima, was in poor health. Soon much of the family had the coronavirus.

Now many of them can’t look past the guilt.

“You ask whether we are responsible for what happened,” she said. “We keep asking if things could have been different, if our contact could have been avoided.”

But she can’t come up with any good answers.

“The guideline is to avoid contact, but are we supposed to stay in complete isolation for nine months?”

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Just 25 congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s win, Washington Post survey finds (nationthailand.com)

Just 25 congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden’s win, Washington Post survey finds

InternationalDec 06. 2020

Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler share the stage with President Trump during a rally Saturday night in Valdosta, Ga. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford

By The Washington Post · Paul Kane, Scott Clement · NATIONAL, POLITICS, CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON – Just 25 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Donald Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally. 

Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 222 GOP members of the House and Senate – nearly 90% of all Republicans serving in Congress – will simply not say who won the election.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president. 

A team of 25 Post reporters contacted aides for every Republican by email and phone asking three basic questions – who won the presidential contest, do you support or oppose Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory and if Biden wins a majority in the electoral college, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president – and also researched public statements made by the GOP lawmakers in recent weeks to determine their stance on Biden’s win. 

The results demonstrate the fear that most Republicans have of the outgoing president and his grip on the party, despite his new status as just the third incumbent to lose reelection in the last 80 years. More than 70% of Republican lawmakers did not acknowledge The Post’s questions as of Friday evening. 

They are largely hiding from answering questions about the election, neither congratulating Biden nor embracing Trump’s most strident positions and false claims. Just eight Republicans, 3% of all GOP lawmakers, voiced support for Trump’s current strategy of claiming victory and asking state legislatures to declare him the victor in states that he lost. 

This GOP nonresponse stands in stark contrast to Democrats in 2016. The morning after media outlets called Trump the winner, Hillary Clinton conceded and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N. Y., fielded a call from Trump. Schumer issued a statement shortly thereafter congratulating the president-elect and calling for Americans to “come together.”

Today, most Republicans just want to avoid the Trump question altogether, following the lead of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whose office pointed to his recent comments about the election and declined to participate in the survey. 

On Tuesday, McConnell ducked questions about Trump’s claim of fraud and refused to take any leadership role in acknowledging Biden’s victory. 

“The future will take care of itself,” he told reporters. 

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., would not even consider how he would fight executive orders in Biden’s first days in office, leaving open the idea that someone else could be sworn in on Jan. 20. 

“Let’s wait until [we see] who’s sworn in,” McCarthy said, “and we can discuss that.”

Today’s reactions – or, mostly, non-reactions – mirror how many Republicans handled four years of Trump’s intemperance: A few predictable Trump critics would condemn his actions, such as the decision to use tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear Lafayette Square in June so Trump could walk across the park, but most would try to avoid the subject. 

Their complicit silence now comes as Trump continues to mount an unfounded campaign against the democratic outcome of an election, leaving them isolated as other federal, state and local Republican officials have rejected Trump’s false assertions. 

Even Kellyanne Conway – Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and longtime adviser, who famously coined the phrase “alternative facts” – went further than most Republican members of Congress. She admitted Friday that it looked like Biden “will prevail” and called for a “peaceful transfer of democracy.”

On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr declared that the Justice Department had not found any evidence of voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election, following the top election cybersecurity official’s declaration that the election had been safe from any hacking. 

The president summarily fired that official, Christopher Krebs, and is said to be weighing action against Barr.

The Trump campaign has suffered multiple losses in their post-election legal challenges to overturn the results, with stinging defeats Friday in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin.

In Arizona and Nevada, judges tossed full-scale challenges to the states’ election results filed by the Republican Party and the campaign, respectively.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit to block the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results, and in a scathing opinion, wrote that the campaign had “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” in its effort to throw out millions of votes.

“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” Brann wrote.

Two Michigan Republican legislative leaders, after being summoned to the White House, announced they would not intervene to block Biden’s relatively comfortable win there. In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed election results Monday certifying Biden’s narrow victory there, saying a bipartisan collection of local officials oversaw a clean election. 

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, certified Biden’s slender victory there and have resisted calls from Trump and his supporters to throw out the results. 

One of Raffensperger’s deputies implored the state’s U.S. senators, Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, to oppose Trump’s efforts, warning of potential violence to civil servants.

Instead, Perdue’s public and private actions are emblematic of how many Republicans feel. 

With him and Loeffler facing Jan. 5 runoff elections that will determine the Senate majority, the two have publicly embraced Trump’s baseless claim that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia were rigged as part of a global conspiracy, hoping to retain support among the president’s strongest backers. Both also have called for Raffensperger to resign.

Yet, in a video obtained by The Post, Perdue privately acknowledged the reality that Trump lost and that Republicans needed to focus on those Georgia races to save the Senate majority. 

“We can at least be a buffer on some of the things that the Biden camp has been talking about,” he told donors on a video conference.

Other highlights from the survey found that:

– 11 of the 52 Senate Republicans acknowledge Biden’s victory;

– Of the 14 House Republicans who recognize the true winner, six are retiring from politics at the end of this month and two more represent districts that Biden won convincingly.

Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., went as far as any Republican in embracing Biden. The two worked together on the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot” proposal, named for Biden’s son who died of brain cancer in 2015, turning it into a massive 2016 medical research bill.

Within hours of the Nov. 7 declaration of Biden’s victory, Upton vowed to work with the new administration. 

“I am raising my hand and committing to work with President-elect Biden and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle,” he said. 

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., held out until Nov. 21 when a federal judge, ushered to confirmation by the staunch conservative senator, issued a scathing rebuke of Trump’s legal challenges in Pennsylvania and gave a legal seal of approval to Biden’s win there.

“Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States. I congratulate President-elect Biden,” Toomey said in a statement. 

Judges in other states have repeatedly rebuffed the Trump campaign’s legal challenges, and on Friday the effort suffered losses in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.

Reps. Paul Gosar of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama are the only Republicans in Congress who have publicly insisted Trump is the winner. Gosar has spent several weeks embracing the disproved conspiracy theory that the Dominion voting machines used in Arizona, Georgia and some other states manipulated the results and stole the election for Biden. Dominion has called the claims unfounded. 

He said he will never accept the Democrat as the legitimately elected president. “No, never. Too much evidence of fraud,” he said.

But Brooks and Gosar are extreme outliers on Capitol Hill, with the overwhelming majority of Republicans content to avoid the question. Many have stated that somehow the Dec. 14 meeting of the electoral college, in all 50 states, will provide a clear winner – perhaps naively expecting Trump to concede that point.

Still, as enough states have certified the results to make Biden the winner, Republicans still won’t publicly commit now to considering the Democrat the legitimately elected president when he wins the majority in the electoral college.

No one has a trickier task than Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.,, who is chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, which is in charge of all events on Capitol grounds for the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Committee staff have acknowledged that Biden is the winner and begun working with the president-elect’s team to plan the event, with much of the usual pomp and circumstance getting a new look for social distancing during the pandemic. 

“We are working with the Biden administration, likely administration, on both the transition and the inauguration,” Blunt said Sunday on CNN, catching himself after he declared Biden the winner. 

He paused and tried to explain how he still is awaiting the electoral college decision in a few days. 

Is Joe Biden the president-elect? 

“Well, the president-elect will be the president-elect when the electors vote for him. There is no official job president-elect,” he said. 

Blunt’s office did not answer The Post’s question on whether he would accept Biden as the legitimately elected president if he wins the majority in the electoral college.

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Deflation alarm in Spain tests Lagarde’s optimism on prices (nationthailand.com)

Deflation alarm in Spain tests Lagarde’s optimism on prices

InternationalDec 05. 2020Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, speaks during a live stream video of the central bank’s virtual rate decision news conference in Frankfurt, Germany, on Oct. 29, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Chris Ratcliffe. Photo by: Chris Ratcliffe — Bloomberg /Location: Danbury, United Kingdom 

By Syndication The Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jeannette Neumann 

When the coronavirus hit Europe this year, Manuel Vegas asked his Spanish association of hotel directors to avoid cutting room costs by more than 25%. Instead, they plunged as much as 60%, and he reckons “we won’t get back to 2019 prices until at least 2023.”

Falling prices can be found across the continent as economic restrictions and job insecurity deter spending. But in some quarters it’s the fear of steep and entrenched declines — a deflationary trap that drags wages and ultimately brings the whole economy down — that has people like Vegas worried most.

Weaker economies, and those more reliant on services such as tourism, are at the greatest risk, putting much of southern Europe once again in danger. Of the seven euro-area nations on the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, only France and Malta have positive rates of inflation. Spain’s is -0.9%, Greece’s is -2%.

Policymakers in Madrid are also making the case that the rest of the bloc isn’t immune though. Subzero inflation in places such as Germany may be largely explained by tax cuts and lower energy bills, but the perception of falling prices can take hold if it persuades consumers to put off spending now in the hope of a better deal later.

“We are seeing an increase in the portion of goods whose prices are increasing very little or falling, which is a sign of the risk” in the euro zone, Oscar Arce, the Bank of Spain’s chief economist, said in an interview last month.

So far, the European Central Bank isn’t too worried. While it will almost certainly boost monetary stimulus next week, that’s to counter the shock of the second wave of the pandemic. It projects inflation — currently the weakest since 2016 at -0.3% — will turn positive next year.

President Christine Lagarde declared on Oct. 29 that she didn’t foresee deflationary threats “at all.” Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel said this week the aim of stimulus should be to maintain current financial conditions, not make them even looser.

That’s a view shared by some economists, who say a swift growth rebound after the crisis subsides will kill any deflationary pressures.

“When the economy is back in shape, we’ll see prices increase again,” said Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “People will realize there is a lot of accumulated demand.”

Even Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras is banking on such a bounceback. While acknowledging that his nation’s price declines have postponed spending and deepened the recession, he said in an interview that “with the recovery of the economy next year, the inflation rate will become positive again.”

One factor that could help southern Europe in particular is the European Union’s 1.8 trillion-euro ($2.2 trillion) enhanced budget and recovery fund, which will disburse grants and cheap loans to countries to aid the recovery from the pandemic.

That spending, though temporary, counters an underlying weakness in the euro zone. While the ECB strives to stabilize inflation at just under 2%, that’s an average for the bloc as a whole, risking some countries being left behind. Fiscal support can help plug that gap — one reason why the ECB has long argued for a permanent such facility.

Still, Jordi Gali, an economist at Spain’s Research Center for International Economy, wonders if the pandemic might have had a deeper impact by permanently instilling caution in consumers, with consequences for prices.

“We may be in a situation — and this is extremely uncertain because we don’t have a precedent in recent times — in which savings remain abnormally high,” Gali said. “The concern is that we may get trapped in this very low level of inflation that could be negative or slightly negative like in Japan over much of the past three decades.”

Such a risk is what officials such as Arce, and his boss, Bank of Spain Governor Pablo Hernandez de Cos, warn the euro region is facing if the ECB doesn’t act decisively enough.

Even if their colleagues in Frankfurt don’t buy into that argument next week, it could factor into future decisions both on easing and on the redesign of its monetary policy framework.

The central bank is already discussing shifting the definition of its price-stability goal in a way that could allow for overshooting on inflation after long periods of weakness. It is mulling a new target of 2%, rather than “close to but below 2%.”

For Athanasios Orphanides, a former ECB Governing Council member, that last change is a no-brainer — and should be enacted immediately rather than when the strategic review ends around the second half of next year.

“If the average is too low, as the ECB has been maintaining after the euro crisis, then more states actually enter into deflation territory,” he said. “That’s one reason it’s bad policy for the ECB to be maintaining this ‘lowflation’ regime.”

It’s a view Spain’s hotel managers would recognize, even if they don’t follow the details of the ECB’s policy debates.

“We will be living with the scars from this crisis for some time,” Vegas said. “Not just in Spain, but across Europe.”

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Arlington Memorial Bridge reopens after two-year rehab (nationthailand.com)

Arlington Memorial Bridge reopens after two-year rehab

InternationalDec 05. 2020Vehicles cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge and, in the foreground, wait to enter Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia in May 2015. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford 

By The Washington Post · Michael E. Ruane

WASHINGTON – The Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River reopened Friday after a two-year, $227 million rehabilitation project that had disrupted traffic on one of D.C.’s most heavily used and historic spans.

Workers walk the Arlington Memorial Bridge just before it opened to traffic Friday. The bridge over the Potomac River between Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Va., reopened after a two-year, $227 million rehabilitation project that had disrupted traffic on one of Washington’s most heavily used and historic spans. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson

The bridge, which had seen many months of closed and shifted lanes, reopened fully, with all six lanes, at 11:30 a.m.

Jonathan Shafer, a spokesman for the National Park Service, called it the completion of a project “that’s been years in the making. It’s exciting that this bridge that’s been here for 88 years is ready for service in its second century.”

Some work will continue on the bridge, he said. And some landscaping won’t take place until next spring.

The crumbling landmark underwent a thorough facelift. Using construction cranes and barges, workers removed the old draw section and its rusted machinery, and replaced it with a new non-opening segment.

The roadway was resurfaced. And the decorative stone balustrades and flower-style fascia were refurbished or replaced.

The project, overseen by the Park Service and the Federal Highway Administration, began in 2018 after the highway administration found that – without the work – the bridge would have to close by 2021.

The structure had never undergone a complete rehabilitation, the Park Service said.

Designed in the neoclassical style in the 1920s by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, the 2,100-foot-long bridge has borne generations of motorists, Arlington National Cemetery mourners and the feet of myriad pilgrims and protesters since it opened in 1932.

With its elegance and multiple arches, it symbolically links North and South – the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial – according to the Park Service.

But it was in poor condition, with much of its massive understructure corroded.

The bridge was originally built as a draw span and was said to be one of the longest and fastest openings in the world. But it was last raised in 1961 because other low bridges on the river prevented navigation by taller ships.

Over this span walked President Herbert Hoover and first lady Lou Hoover, inspecting the just-finished bridge on Jan. 16, 1932, as the country fell deeper into the Great Depression.

The bridge opened to traffic the next day, when more than 30,000 vehicles crossed, according to a news report. The speed limit was 22 mph.

The first funeral procession to the cemetery crossed the day after that.

The deceased was Alexander M. Harvey, a Canadian veteran of World War I who had worked on the bridge during its construction.

He had fallen from a building site in Washington five days before and was buried in the cemetery’s section for Canadian war veterans.

His was one of many such send-offs.

Famed World War I Gen. John Pershing’s funeral cortège crossed the bridge in July 1948.

President John Kennedy’s cortège, watched by millions on television, crossed after his assassination in 1963. The procession of his brother Robert crossed by moonlight after his assassination in 1968.

The bridge has witnessed protest marches during the Vietnam War, commemorative walks to mark the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the armies of motorcycle riders who turned out for the annual Memorial Day rally.

“This is a hallowed gateway to Arlington National Cemetery and is the crossroads between Virginia and Washington D.C.,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said Friday.

“This is more than just a bridge,” he added. “It is a monument to our veterans … it’s a symbol of a country brought back together after the Civil War.”

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As first Pfizer vaccine doses arrive in U.K., officials tell doctors and nurses they won’t get priority (nationthailand.com)

As first Pfizer vaccine doses arrive in U.K., officials tell doctors and nurses they won’t get priority

InternationalDec 05. 2020

By The Washington Post · William Booth, Karla Adam

LONDON – The first doses of the newly approved coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer arrived in Britain on Thursday night, the shipment packed in dry ice and traveling by truck from the company’s manufacturing plant in Belgium through the Eurotunnel to England.

Yet excitement over next week’s planned launch of a mass immunization program was tempered Friday by frustration over a late decision to exclude front line health workers from the first round – though many had already booked appointments.

Priority will go to people over 80 years old and to nursing home caregivers, and public health officials conceded that demand could quickly outstrip supply in the early months, even for those groups. The 800,000 doses Britain expects to get this month “could be the only batch we receive for some time,” warned Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers.

Britain’s early launch makes it the first country to confront the challenges of rolling out a vaccine that uses revolutionary technology and requires extremely careful handling.

The United States isn’t far behind in its approval decision, and experience here could inform U.S. efforts – though the United Kingdom’s universal health-care system allows a more centralized approach.

The U.S. government plans to ship 6.4 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to states within 24 hours after an expected emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, Army Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operations officer for Operation Warp Speed, said this week.

While the United States may also start slow in the early weeks, like Britain, Perna told reporters the numbers will quickly grow. The White House vaccine czar predicted the United States should be able to distribute enough vaccine to immunize 100 million people by the end of February.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel on Tuesday voted to recommend prioritizing health-care workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. That’s in line with the priority lists in many countries around the world. But Britain shocked its National Health Service medical workers Thursday evening by revealing that, contrary to long-held assumptions, they would not be among the first to get an injection.

Frontline nurses and doctors have been regularly hailed as national heroes in Britain. In the early months of the cresting pandemic, citizens filled the streets banging pots and pans, blowing horns and clapping in weekly displays of appreciation for their courage.

But now, along with much of the country, they will be expected to wait.

Mike Adams, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing, said that in the past few weeks, “the messaging from politicians has been focused on ‘the NHS staff will get it,’ and so some of the narrative from politicians has been unhelpful in raising expectations.”

Adams told The Washington Post, “We want to see our members have access to it for their own safety and to prevent further outbreaks in the areas they are working, but we appreciate that with limited supply of vaccine, you understand why the most vulnerable are being prioritized. But the confusion is the most unhelpful part.”

Instead of ICU nurses, ventilator specialists and emergency room physicians, NHS officials and vaccine task force members said they wanted to prioritize the elderly and nursing home caregivers – because the highest mortality and the largest number of hospitalizations have come from that age group and sector.

Unfortunately, however, NHS officials conceded they do not yet have a protocol nor approval from drug regulators to offer Pfizer injections within nursing homes.

The vaccine, developed by the German company BioNTech and produced by Pfizer, is built on tiny bits of messenger RNA, which encourage the body to produce antibodies to repel the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus. RNA vaccines need to be stored and shipped at seriously cold, sub-Antarctic temperatures of minus 75 Celsius, and so they require special handling.

British regulators, in granting emergency approval for the Pfizer vaccine, said it cannot be moved more than four times and that the trays of 975 doses cannot be split apart – meaning a tray cannot at this time be broken up to give injections in the typically smaller nursing homes caring for a fewer patients.

“It’s not like taking a six pack of yogurt out of your home fridge, breaking it up on the kitchen work top, putting one in your bag, taking it to work and then storing it in the work fridge,” Hopson said.

So while the NHS figures out how to get into nursing homes, the first jabs will be injected at one of the 50 hospitals serving an immunization hubs. Next year, the government plans to open mass immunization centers in conference centers, sport arenas, and schools.

Overall, Britain has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, enough to vaccinate 20 million people, as each requires two shots, three weeks apart.

Business minister Alok Sharma told Sky News on Friday that he hoped the country would get “some millions” of doses from Pfizer this month, “but, of course, what we also always said is that the vast majority of this vaccination program will take place in the new year.”

The initial 800,000 doses promised from Pfizer won’t go far to cover the 3.2 million Brits aged 80 and above and the at least 300,000 caregivers working in nursing homes.

All of those people will be in line before the more than 1.4 million NHS workers.

Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, the main doctors union, said that with limited supplies, it was important that those deemed most at risk were prioritized, but he criticized the government’s inconsistent messaging.

“During the first wave, we saw far too many health- and social-care workers become incredibly sick with covid – with many tragically dying – and therefore those working on the front line need to be given the opportunity to get protected early,” Nagpaul said.

“It’s crucial now that there’s absolute consistency and clarity, as more vaccines become available, for both the public and health care staff about when and where they can expect to be vaccinated,” he said.

Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said the deployment will be a “big challenge,” but added that U.K. hospitals and labs were well equipped for handling samples that need low temperatures, including using liquid nitrogen and dry ice.

He said if the aim is to reduce the death toll, it made sense to prioritize nursing homes, which were hit “really badly” in the first wave.

After that, he said, the next on the list could be health care workers, “not only because they’re more at risk themselves, but they care for a lot of the people in the extremely vulnerable older age group.”

This is also important if there isn’t widespread uptake in those over 80 years old.

“If you target the upper 80s, and if they don’t take it up like you hoped, then the next best thing is to vaccinate people who come into close contact with them, which will be the health-care workers.”

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ECB urged to extend bank dividend ban six months by watchdog (nationthailand.com)

ECB urged to extend bank dividend ban six months by watchdog

InternationalDec 05. 2020European Union flags fly outside the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, on July 16, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Alex Kraus. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Nicholas Comfort

Europe should extend its de-facto ban on bank dividends by six months, a top official at the European Central Bank’s supervisory arm said, casting a shadow over investors’ hopes for a return to payouts early next year.

The comments come as big banks across Europe are facing fraught times, with regulators at the ECB and the Bank of England preparing to decide in coming weeks whether and how to lift their recommendations on payouts. Shareholder dividends were effectively frozen in March in a trade-off for unprecedented regulatory relief and government loan guarantees, yet bankers have subsequently slammed them as doing more harm than good.

Speaking in an interview ahead of the long-awaited decision this month, Ed Sibley, a member of the ECB’s supervisory board, said continued uncertainty, a need to preserve capital for lending and reputational issues for banks all speak in favor of extending the regulator’s existing recommendation. The question is how to implement it in practice, because the ECB doesn’t have the powers to enforce a blanket ban over mounting objection by lenders.

“Overall, we would be better if we were to hold off for another six months,” said Sibley, who is also a deputy governor at the Central Bank of Ireland. “Whether we can practically do that is a real challenge.”

European banking stocks pared gains on Friday, with the 22-member Euro Stoxx Banks Index up 0.9% as of 4:52 p.m. in Frankfurt after earlier rising 2%. The index has fallen 19% this year with Banco de Sabadell SA, ABN Amro Bank NV and Societe Generale SA among the biggest losers.

The BOE and ECB have said they will announce their decisions on dividends by the end of the year. The ECB will release its economic projections on Thursday, providing a key input for regulators, alongside its latest monetary policy decision. The BOE publishes its Financial Stability Report the next day.

“That will factor into our thinking, but there are lots of other things we need to think about as well,” said Sibley. “There are significant weaknesses in lots of banks’ ability to demonstrate to us that their planning is effective from a capital management perspective.”

The ECB recommended earlier this year that banks not pay dividends or buy back shares at least through the end of 2020. The central bank doesn’t have the legal basis to issue a blanket ban, yet big banks fell in line after chief watchdog Andrea Enria said he could impose legally-binding measures on an individual basis.

As the pandemic progressed and lenders largely managed to deal with the fallout, some of the banks hardest-hit by the dividend suspension have become more vocal in demanding a return to payouts. Many have seen their share prices erode this year, especially when compared with the U.S., where the Federal Reserve only demanded a cap on capital returns.

“We didn’t ban dividends, we expressed our view on them and I think that’s as far as we can go this time,” Sibley said. “You have to think about how would we implement something that is practical and will stand some degree of challenge. I think that’s where we’re having the debate.”

Other options floated by central bankers have been to allow only the strongest banks to return funds to shareholders.

That approach is also complicated, according to Sibley. It encourages banks to prioritize investors’ short-term interests over their longer-term financial health and risks disclosing non-public information about how the ECB views the governance failings of certain lenders, he said.

“That leads to another collective action problem or system-wide problem versus the individual incentive,” he said. “Overall, I think we’d be better off waiting. Practically, I don’t know how that’s going to be achievable so we’re going to have to come up with something that sits in the middle.”

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Canada’s job market shows surprising strength amid new lockdowns (nationthailand.com)

Canada’s job market shows surprising strength amid new lockdowns

InternationalDec 05. 2020Bakers wearing protective masks shape and roll out loaves of bread dough at Portofino Bakery in Saanichton, British Columbia, on Nov. 19, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by James MacDonald. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Shelly Hagan

Canada’s job market remained surprisingly resilient in November despite a new surge in covid-19 cases.

The country added 62,100 jobs in the month, Statistics Canada said Friday in Ottawa, triple the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey and down only modestly from the 83,600 gain in October. The unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to 8.5%, from 8.9% previously.

Employment was relatively robust even as a new wave of covid-19 cases forced local authorities to impose targeted restrictions on businesses to curb the spread.

“Canada’s labor market was able to outrun Covid again,” Royce Mendes, an economist at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, said in a report to investors.

Construction, wholesale and retail trade and the public sector led the increase. Employment fell the most in two industries — accommodation and food services, and information, culture and recreation.

Hours worked rose 1.2% in November, and are down 5% since February. The labor market has recovered 81% of the 3 million positions lost during March and April.

Economists were expecting a gain of 20,000 jobs in November, the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey.

Still, November’s gain was the slowest since the recovery began in May, and sharply below the average increase of 395,000 over the previous six months. A slowdown has been widely expected with the economy entering a prolonged recuperation phase that could take years to play out.

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History of bribes weighs on China’s Sinovac as it speeds toward coronavirus vaccine (nationthailand.com)

History of bribes weighs on China’s Sinovac as it speeds toward coronavirus vaccine

InternationalDec 05. 2020

By The Washington Post · Eva Dou

Chinese coronavirus-vaccine maker Sinovac Biotech is good at getting its products to market. It was first to begin clinical trials of a SARS vaccine in 2003 and first to bring a swine flu vaccine to consumers in 2009.

Its CEO was also bribing China’s drug regulator for vaccine approvals during that time, court records show.

Sinovac is now seeking to supply its coronavirus vaccine to developing nations, from Brazil to Turkey to Indonesia. While graft and weak transparency have long plagued China’s pharmaceutical industry, seldom has the reliability of a single drug vendor from the country mattered this much to the rest of the world.

Sinovac is one of China’s two coronavirus-vaccine front-runners, with its clinical testing in the same final stage as Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s. Domestically, Sinovac’s vaccine is in second place, with state-owned Sinopharm’s vaccines more widely administered under an emergency-use program. Another Chinese vaccine, developed by CanSino and a military research institute, is approved for emergency use by China’s military.

Sinovac’s vaccine, Coronavac, may end up adopted in a number of developing markets. Officials in Brazil and Indonesia – the most populous nations in Latin America and Southeast Asia – say Coronavac could be approved in coming weeks. In Brazil, São Paulo Gov. João Doria has called it the safest vaccine the country has tested.

Sinovac has not yet released efficacy data, making it unclear whether its vaccine can protect recipients as successfully as the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, which were more than 90% effective in preliminary analyses.

Sinovac has acknowledged the bribery case involving its CEO, saying in regulatory filings that he cooperated with prosecutors and was not charged. The CEO said in testimony he could not refuse demands for money from a regulatory official.

Sinovac has not been involved in safety scandals, and there is no evidence that any of the vaccines approved in cases involving bribery were faulty. But some medical experts say that extra scrutiny of Sinovac’s drug claims is justified, given its record of moral flexibility.

“The fact that the company has a history of bribery casts a long shadow of doubt over its unpublished, non-peer-reviewed data claims about its vaccine,” said Arthur Caplan, medical ethics division director at New York University Langone Medical Center. “Even in a plague, a company with a morally dubious track record has to be treated with great caution concerning its claims.”

While Sinovac’s history of bribery has raised concerns among investors of the Nasdaq-listed company, only in recent months has its record taken on such global implications. Governments are weighing the risks of new vaccines from companies like Sinovac against the certainty of more deaths if the pandemic continues.

A review of public records and trial testimonies by The Washington Post reflects that Sinovac’s rise to the front ranks of China’s vaccine industry took place with the help of priority projects from Beijing and kickbacks to officials who assisted in regulatory reviews and sales deals. A number of details from the court cases have not been reported previously, in part because of China’s censored media.

In 2016 court testimony, Sinovac’s founder and chief executive, Yin Weidong, admitted to giving more than $83,000 in bribes from 2002 to 2011 to a regulatory official overseeing vaccine reviews, Yin Hongzhang, and his wife. Yin Hongzhang confessed to expediting Sinovac’s vaccine certifications in return.

Those years corresponded to Sinovac’s breakout period, when the biotech start-up founded in 2001 was handpicked by Beijing officials to lead development of vaccines for SARS, avian flu and swine flu.

Yin Hongzhang, who shares a surname with Sinovac’s CEO but is no relation, was sentenced in 2017 to a decade in prison for taking bribes from Sinovac and seven other companies. Sinovac’s Yin Weidong, now 56, was not charged and continues to oversee the company’s coronavirus-vaccine drive this year.

For Sinovac, that case was not a one-off: At least 20 government officials and hospital administrators across five provinces admitted in court to taking bribes from Sinovac employees between 2008 and 2016.

– – –

Sinovac said in 2017 it had launched an internal investigation in response to the bribery cases. It has yet to announce the investigation’s result.

In its latest annual report, released in April, Sinovac said that Yin Weidong “was not charged with any offense or improper conduct and he cooperated as a witness with the procuratorate. To our knowledge, the Chinese authorities have not commenced any legal proceedings or government inquiries against Mr. Yin.”

The annual report said that Sinovac maintained strict anti-corruption policies but that “these policies may not be completely effective.”

In a statement to The Post, a Sinovac spokesman said the company had entrusted the legal system to handle the past bribery cases appropriately. He said the CEO’s ability to do his work was unaffected. Sinovac did not make Yin Weidong available for an interview.

Corruption in China’s pharmaceutical industry is a long-running scourge. Dali Yang, a University of Chicago political scientist, said China’s shift from decentralized drug approvals in the 1990s to centralized reviews in the 2000s created opportunities for graft.

But corruption is no longer as rampant as it once was, after several high-profile crackdowns sparked by drug-safety scandals, Yang said. In 2007, China executed Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, in a grim warning to the industry. China’s President Xi Jinping launched another broad anti-corruption drive in 2012.

Vaccine mishaps continued to occur in recent years. In 2018, Sinovac’s larger rival Sinopharm recalled 400,000 shots of diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccines for substandard quality.

In a Beijing court in 2016, Yin Hongzhang, the former deputy director of the China Food and Drug Administration’s drug-testing center, said Sinovac’s Yin Weidong gave him cash bribes over nine years as he sought regulatory approval for the company’s vaccines for hepatitis A, SARS, avian flu, foot-and-mouth disease and influenza A.

In exchange, Yin Hongzhang said he helped “accelerate the approval process” for Sinovac’s vaccines.

Sinovac’s CEO said in his testimony that he “could not refuse” requests from a regulator.

Peter Humphrey, a British corporate investigator who has probed pharmaceutical corruption cases in China, called it “a bit extraordinary” that Sinovac emerged unscathed in 2017, despite its CEO confessing to bribery.

China previously punished only the party that accepted the bribes, he said, but this changed in 2014 with a case involving GlaxoSmithKline. GSK was fined $490 million for bribing doctors and officials to bolster sales, and its top China executive given a suspended prison sentence.

For Sinovac, the bribery cases have had little visible impact except to exacerbate an acrimonious shareholder struggle that has frozen trade of its stock on Nasdaq since February 2019. This ownership battle has taken dramatic turns, including a physical fight for the company seal – a stamp used by Chinese firms for legalizing documents – that Sinovac said resulted in a factory power outage and ruined vaccines. Sinovac has otherwise continued business as usual.

– – –

In a 2012 interview with state-run China Youth Daily, Yin Weidong said that after a less-than-rigorous early education, he flunked his college entrance exam. He found his calling in a vocational epidemiology program: “I suddenly turned into the student asking the most questions in school.”

A few years later at age 21, he was hailed as the first person in China to isolate the hepatitis A virus. He would spend the next decade and a half developing and testing his hepatitis A vaccine – China’s first domestically developed one for the liver disease – before founding Sinovac in Beijing in 2001.

His big break came in April 2003: As SARS spread, Yin Weidong phoned municipal officials and volunteered to help develop a vaccine, according to the state-run Guangming Daily. Days later, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology named him the leader for a national project to fast-track a SARS vaccine, with government funding and researchers at his assistance.

While the project fizzled out along with SARS, it gave Sinovac’s team crucial practice in developing a vaccine for a coronavirus. As with this year’s plan, the SARS vaccine plan called for production to begin before testing finished.

Sinovac also received Beijing’s support for developing vaccines for avian flu and H1N1, with its team getting more experienced and faster.

When SARS hit, Sinovac’s Yin Weidong had already been bribing regulator Yin Hongzhang for a year.

In his court confession, Yin Hongzhang said he mentioned to Yin Weidong in 2002 that he wanted to buy a car, drawing a $15,200 cash gift from the executive. That same year, Sinovac’s first flagship product, the Healive hepatitis A vaccine, was approved for sale.

A few years later in 2006, Yin Weidong gave Yin Hongzhang and his wife $7,600 in cash, saying it was to help them furnish their new apartment, according to testimony by Yin Hongzhang’s wife. Yin Weidong said in testimony that when he was invited to their newly furnished home months later, he gave them another $15,200 in cash, which he expensed.

During that period, Sinovac gained approvals to sell influenza, avian flu and swine flu vaccines in China. Sinovac’s swine flu vaccine was approved for sale in China just half a year after the virus was detected in Mexico.

In 2011, Yin Hongzhang asked Yin Weidong to lend him around $45,600 to buy a villa on Beijing’s northern outskirts, according to his testimony.

Yin Weidong said in court that he arranged the cash drop-off through an intermediary, wary of repercussions if he handled it personally.

Yin Hongzhang’s wife, identified in court testimony only by her surname, Guo, told the court that she and her husband picked up the cash in a hotel lobby and never volunteered to repay the loan.

– – –

At lower levels, at least 20 officials and hospital employees confessed in Chinese courts between 2015 and 2018 to taking bribes from Sinovac employees, according to the court judgments.

“In the vaccine industry, we usually give a commission to the person in charge to encourage them to use our vaccines,” one Sinovac salesperson, identified only by the surname Yang, said in a 2017 case in the southern province of Guangdong.

Yang admitted to giving a hospital employee $2,441 in kickbacks – “always through envelopes of cash” – as a reward for the hospital purchasing 5,351 doses of Sinovac’s hepatitis A vaccine from 2011 to 2015.

Caplan, the medical ethics professor, said Sinovac’s history of bribery would alienate some potential customers. But some countries may still prefer Sinovac’s vaccine, as it can be stored closer to room temperature than the ones from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. And some may lack other options.

“When there are no options and you’re in a plague, you tend to take what you can get,” Caplan said. “Sketchy history or not.”

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Mortgage industry roars to best year ever, courtesy of the Fed (nationthailand.com)

Mortgage industry roars to best year ever, courtesy of the Fed

InternationalDec 05. 2020A home stands under construction in Oakland, Calif., on June 23, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris. 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Prashant Gopal, Christopher Maloney, Shahien Nasiripour

The Federal Reserve has handed U.S. mortgage lenders their best year ever. Nobody knows that better than Shant Banosian, the industry’s first billion-dollar salesman.

By his own count, the loan officer is personally set to originate a staggering $1.5 billion of home loans by year’s end from his office outside of Boston, a record in a year of records for the mortgage business.

Set alight by the Fed’s low interest rates and bond purchases, the mortgage industry is on fire. Lenders this year are projected to originate $4.1 trillion of loans, eclipsing the 2003 high, thanks mostly to borrowers refinancing to reduce their house payments, according to Fannie Mae.

With profit margins the widest on record, mortgage lenders are on a hiring spree and taking advantage of the pandemic housing boom to raise money from investors. At least nine have either gone public this year, such as Rocket Cos., or are planning to do so in coming months.

But like all booms, this one won’t last forever. By next year, mortgage volumes could decline by a third as refinancings drop, according to a Fannie Mae forecast. Even if rates stay flat, the number of homeowners motivated to lock in savings will decline.

“Today’s market is like riding a giant rollercoaster — the higher it goes, the more dramatic the decline,” said Jim Cameron, senior partner with STRATMOR Group, a mortgage advisory firm based in Greenwood Village, Colorado. “You could argue, when you know the rates will eventually turn and you’ll lay a bunch of people off, why hire? But quite frankly, the profits are there now.”

For now, the industry is adding staff to handle all the business. Recruiters are in an all-out “firefight,” Cameron said. Firms are offering signing bonuses to steal underwriters and processors from competitors or giving retention payments to keep them from leaving.

Lenders increased their headcount by 25% in July and 40% in August on an annualized basis, according to Bank of America researchers. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest there are now more than 100,000 mortgage brokers in the U.S., the first time it’s cracked six figures since 2007.

Banosian, who runs a branch for Chicago-based Guaranteed Rate, increased his staff by half to 40, just to keep up with the flood of applications from buyers upgrading to bigger suburban homes or saving a bundle by refinancing. Nationally, the company is advertising more than 400 open positions on its website.

“I presume rates will remain low next year,” Banosian, 40, said in an interview, alone in his 4,000-square-foot office in Waltham, Massachusetts, while his employees work remotely. “We’re planning to staff up.”

Last year, Banosian originated a record $916 million in mortgages, according to Scotsman Guide, which began producing its rankings in 2009. This year, he says he reached $1 billion in September. He expects to make 3,000 loans this year under his name, totaling at least $1.5 billion. And he plans to expand to other states.

Guild Holdings, which focuses on providing mortgages to homebuyers, sold shares to the public in October and wants to expand its business in Florida, the northeast and across the center of the country, Guild Chief Executive Officer Mary Ann McGarry said in an interview. And they’re staffing up quickly.

United Wholesale Mortgage, the nation’s largest lender for mortgages initially handled by brokers, now employs more than 7,000 people, up by about 40% from last year. NewDayUSA, a mortgage lender that focuses on veterans, has nearly doubled its workforce since March with plans to grow even more in the coming months, CEO and founder Rob Posner said in an interview.

While mortgage rates have never been this low, they could be lower. Most loans are sold and then packaged into bonds. The Fed has bought more than $1.3 trillion in mortgage bonds since March, driving up prices and enabling lenders to sell their loans at a hefty premium. Lenders say that to avoid being overrun with business they’ve kept rates elevated, padding profits.

The average lender originated $1.34 billion of mortgages in the third quarters, up 33% from the prior three months and as much as a typical company would produce in a year, said Marina Walsh, vice president of industry analysis at MBA. The profit-per-loan in the third quarter hit a record $5,535, up 22% from three months earlier, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday.

Next year may tell a different story, depending on the pandemic. A successfully deployed vaccine might bring back a semblance of normality to the economy. If employment recovers, that could push more people in the housing market. But if rates climb, even slightly, that could snuff out the refinancing boom.

Fannie Mae, which projects borrowing costs to remain flat, said mortgage volumes for home purchases will grow by about 4% next year. That won’t make up for an expected plunge in refinanced loans to $1.1 trillion next year from $2.6 trillion in 2020.

So far, lenders haven’t run out of consumers who can refinance. There are still nearly 20 million homeowners out there who could shave about $300 on average off their monthly mortgage payment at today’s rates, according to Black Knight Inc.

But if refinancings drop as predicted, lenders will be looking to homebuyers to make up the difference. And that will depend on the strength of a housing market that has been running hot, pushing prices out of reach for some Americans.

“The Fed has delivered a windfall to the mortgage industry,” LendingTree Chief Economist Tendayi Kapfidze said. “But demand from borrowers is going to be less. The low hanging fruit is gone.”