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One of world’s richest nations taps wealth fund as cash dries up

InternationalFeb 04. 2021

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Fiona MacDonald

Kuwait’s government has transferred the last of its performing assets to the country’s sovereign wealth fund in exchange for cash to plug its budget deficit after a political dispute over borrowing left one of the world’s richest nations short of cash and prompted Fitch to cut its outlook to negative.

Fitch affirmed Kuwait’s AA rating but said “the imminent depletion of liquid assets” and “absence of parliamentary authorization for the government to borrow” was creating uncertainty. Its report follows S&P Global Ratings’ recent warning that it would consider downgrading Kuwait in the next six to 12 months if politicians do not overcome the impasse.

Though it’s a high-income country, years of lower oil prices have forced Kuwait to burn through its reserves. Desperate to generate liquidity, the government last year began swapping its best assets for cash with the $600 billion Future Generations Fund, which is meant to safeguard the Gulf Arab nation’s wealth for a time after oil. With those now gone, it’s not clear how the government will cover its eighth consecutive budget deficit, projected at 12 billion dinars for the fiscal year beginning April.

The assets include stakes in Kuwait Finance House and telecoms company Zain, a person familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the information is private. State-owned Kuwait Petroleum, which has a nominal value of 2.5 billion dinars ($8.3 billion), was also transferred from the government’s treasury in January, the person said.

The Finance Ministry declined to give details about the swaps. Responding to Fitch, however, Finance Minister Khalifa Hamada said Kuwait’s financial position remained “robust” because of the cushion provided by the FGF. The government’s priority would be to replenish the treasury, he said without specifying how.

“It’s a very immediate crisis now, not a long-term one like it was before,” said Nawaf Alabduljader, a business management professor at Kuwait University. “The Future Generations Fund is our life jacket, but we don’t have a boat to take us to shore, we have no vision. We need to restructure our economy and move away from the welfare state.”

Like its neighbors, Kuwait is contending with the twin pressures of the coronavirus pandemic and lower oil prices. Unlike Saudi Arabia and others, however, Kuwaiti lawmakers have blocked proposals to borrow on international markets to cover the fiscal shortfall. Kuwait has not returned to the market since its debut Eurobond issuance in 2017.

Although nearly three-quarters of the budget is dedicated to public-sector salaries and subsidies, parliamentarians have opposed any hint of spending cuts, saying the government must reduce waste and corruption before passing the burden on to the public or resorting to debt.

The FGF, meanwhile, cannot be touched without legislation, and the idea of dipping into the national savings pot is deeply unpopular. Parliament already passed a law last year exempting the government from transferring the usual 10% of revenue into the FGF during years of deficit.

The swaps have bought the government a few months to push through its borrowing law. If that fails, it could still take a loan from the FGF or a debt plan could be issued by decree, though both scenarios are unlikely.

“They’re just buying time,” said Jassim Al-Saadoun, head of Al-Shall Economic Consultants.

With 80% of government income based on oil, Kuwait needs crude to be $90 to balance the new budget. But benchmark Brent was trading at about $58 a barrel Wednesday while spending is projected to rise 7%.

Parliament’s finance committee began reviewing the borrowing bill again Tuesday, raising expectations of a thaw, but the brinkmanship has prompted warnings that repeated delays could carry long-term costs.

Kuwait would be looking at “the imposition of high taxes,” said Talal Fahad Alghanim, former CEO of Boursa Kuwait. “Or, if the government fails to convince parliament, the central bank will have to resort to devaluing the dinar.”

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Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine may help prevent transmission, study finds

InternationalFeb 04. 2021

By The Washington Post · Karla Adam, William Booth, Carolyn Y. Johnson

LONDON – The developers of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine report that it may help keep people from spreading the virus, offering a hopeful but uncertain answer to one of the great remaining questions of the pandemic.

Vaccines have produced evidence that they are effective at reducing the number of people who experience symptoms or suffer severe illness or die, but much less is known about whether any of the available vaccines can prevent asymptomatic infections that can pass from one person to another – thereby reducing the need for social distancing and allowing a return to more normal life.

In a preprint of an article under review at the Lancet medical journal, the Oxford University vaccine developers report that based on follow-up studies of their clinical trials, which found the vaccine safe and effective, there is also “the potential for the vaccine to reduce transmission of the virus.”

The study found that after people received two doses of the vaccine, they were 54% less likely to have an infection confirmed by a nasal swab, regardless of whether they had symptoms.

In addition, the researchers said a single dose of the vaccine was 76% effective against symptomatic virus infection, for up to three months.

Independent scientists who were not involved in the Oxford study called the data intriguing but incomplete. They warned that results were preliminary, that the sample size was too small to make bold claims, and that there could be alternative explanations for the findings, such as that the group receiving a single dose included more women, younger people and health workers.

But British officials on Wednesday hailed the report on the homegrown vaccine. They promoted the findings as a vindication for their controversial decision to delay second doses – from four weeks to 12 weeks – while trying to get first shots to as many people as possible.

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the research results were “absolutely superb.”

“It categorically supports the strategy we’ve been taking on having a 12-week gap between the doses,” Hancock told Sky News.

Pfizer-BioNTech scientists have warned that they do not have evidence to support the British dosing strategy for their vaccine, also in wide use in Britain.

Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said the report by the Oxford researchers seemed to support the idea that efficacy of the vaccine was improved by having a long stretch between first and second doses.

“Taking all this evidence together, the 12-week gap between first and second dose is clearly the better strategy, as more people can be protected more quickly and the ultimate protective effect is greater,” Hunter said.

Hunter noted, however, that the Oxford vaccine seemed “quite poor at preventing asymptomatic infection.”

Andrew Pollard, the chief investigator of the Oxford vaccine trial, said the results support the British government’s decision to give one dose followed by a second booster shot 12 weeks later. Pollard called it “an optimal approach” that “reassures us that people are protected from 22 days after a single dose of the vaccine.”

Pollard also told the BBC on Wednesday: “We found that there was a big reduction in people being infected with coronavirus and, because they were not infected, they can’t go on and transmit to other people. That is really important in potentially curbing the pandemic.”

Natalie Dean, a biostatistics expert at the University of Florida, said: “If you think about the way that vaccines work, they can work in two major ways: one is by preventing infection entirely and the other by taking someone who is infected and preventing them from getting symptoms.”

The data suggest that “there were some infections that were prevented, but there were some that were bumped down in severity,” Dean said.

Oxford is eager to further establish the credibility of its vaccine after inconsistent dosing in its clinical trials muddied assessments of its effectiveness and a lack of data on the efficacy in people 65 and older has given some public health officials pause.

The European Union’s regulator of medicines has authorized the vaccine for use in all adults, but officials in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and Belgium have cautioned against using it in older populations. Switzerland on Wednesday rejected the vaccine, saying it wanted to see more data. The United States, too, is waiting for more clinical trial data before an authorization decision.

French President Emmanuel Macron last week criticized the Oxford vaccine for use among those older than 65. Macron told the news media that the British vaccine “doesn’t work the way we were expecting to.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, defending the European Union’s regulatory approach, implied that Britain may have cut corners in its coronavirus vaccine rollout.

She told Le Monde that the bloc “agreed not to compromise with the safety and efficacy requirements linked to the authorization of a vaccine.”

Britain, von der Leyen said, was able to start its mass inoculation program earlier because it had taken “emergency, 24-hour marketing authorization procedures.”

A spokesman for the British prime minister’s office responded that all of the vaccines approved for use in the United Kingdom – Oxford-AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – are “safe and effective.”

Britain has one of the highest per capita coronavirus death tolls in the world. More than 108,000 people have died after being diagnosed with virus, with a more contagious variant propelling the latest wave.

The vaccine manufacturers have said their formulas are effective against the variant.

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Myanmar military coup sparks resistance – with boycotts, noise and digital activism

InternationalFeb 04. 2021

By The Washington Post · Shibani Mahtani, Andrew Nachemson

HONG KONG – Lynn Nu, an assistant surgeon at a government hospital in northern Myanmar, did not show up to work on Wednesday. Neither did 36 other assistant surgeons, almost the entire medical staff at the 500-bed facility, leaving one nurse to tend to patients.

The “military says they rule Myanmar, and are in charge of the government now,” he said. “But we are refusing to work under them and their dictatorship.”

Across Myanmar, a campaign of civil disobedience is swelling in response to this week’s military coup, which ousted the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD). Unlike past resistance movements, notably the 1988 pro-democracy uprising that made Suu Kyi a national icon, Myanmar’s new dissenters are keeping their activism off the streets – finding safer, digitally driven ways to reject military rule.

“We want to make our feelings heard, but at the same time to do what we could without being rash and demonstrating on the streets,” Lynn Nu, 32, added. “We thought this movement was the safest bet.”

The campaigns have targeted institutions directly run by the military and government-run hospitals. Staffers at 70 hospitals and medical departments across 30 towns and cities in Myanmar are refusing to go into work at government-run hospitals, treating patients in private facilities instead. Others quit their jobs at Mytel, a telecommunications company run by the military. And some are calling for a boycott of goods made by military-linked companies, which include Myanmar Beer and Red Ruby cigarettes, ubiquitous in the country’s tea shops.

Earlier this week, Myanmar’s military, led by commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing, detained Suu Kyi and her ministers and declared they had taken over the government. NLD lawmakers were barricaded inside their guesthouses in the capital, Naypyidaw.

On Wednesday, Suu Kyi was charged with possessing electronic equipment allegedly imported illegally, while ousted civilian president Win Myint was charged with breaching coronavirus rules that ban gatherings – allowing the military to keep the pair detained for another two weeks.

The spark for the coup was the military and its proxy party’s refusal to accept the results of November elections that Suu Kyi’s party won in a landslide. But tensions between Suu Kyi’s civilian government and the generals had been building over five years of a fragile power-sharing agreement.

Since the coup on Monday, some level of normalcy has returned to Myanmar. Communications are functioning. Chief ministers and NLD lawmakers have returned to their homes.

But public anger appears to be growing.

It started with the faint, tinny sound of tapping around 8 p.m. Tuesday, as residents in Yangon, the largest city, began to bang on pots and pans from their balconies to register their disgust with the military’s actions.

Whole streets and neighborhoods joined in, following a local tradition to ward off evil spirits with drums, eventually reaching a crescendo as people made noise any way they could. Some whooped and cheered, banging on tables and the roofs of their cars, while taxi drivers sounded their horns.

The campaign is gaining momentum; more honking and banging again erupted on Wednesday night, this time even louder and more sustained than before, with more people out on the streets. Some also sung a revolutionary anthem from 1988 after lyrics circulated earlier in the day.

Doctors, celebrities and NLD politicians are also raising the three-finger salute of defiance popularized by the Hunger Games trilogy, also a symbol of resistance in neighboring Thailand against the monarchy and the army-backed government

Kyaw Thu Win, of the punk band Rebel Riot, said the group is recording a new song called “One Day” in solidarity with the growing resistance. Similarly, their fight for injustice will be kept off the streets for now, in fear of what might come next.

“Right now we are showing solidarity online, from home,” he said. “No one is going out yet, so we are showing we do not agree with the new law and new system.”

Despite their caution, pushback from the authorities has already begun. A 35-year old resident of South Okkalapa, a neighborhood in east Yangon, said soldiers and community leaders visited their houses Tuesday night, complaining about the pot-and-pan protest.

“They said, ‘this is none of your business, do you all want to be captured?’ ” said the resident, who declined to give her name for safety reasons. Soldiers, she added, warned them that they would patrol the streets and arrest anyone who participated.

The military ruled Myanmar for half a century until a quasi-democratic transition began in 2010. Its brutal reign was defined by its brutality: arbitrary arrests, torture and ill-treatment. There was no free speech or free assembly, and residents who lived through those times describe a police state, where neighbors would snitch on each other and where fear was prevalent.

Even under the NLD-led civilian government, which took power in 2015, the military remained powerful. The army has continued to wage wars against ethnic militias and minorities – most notably, the Rohingya, more of a million of whom were driven from their homes in a scorched-earth campaign in 2017.

The military’s record is on the minds of resistance campaigners and organizers, worried that a wrong move could herald a wider crackdown.

“We don’t want to give them any excuse to crack down on us more, and say there is instability,” said Lynn Nu, the assistant surgeon. “We have fear, because they have guns, and we have no guns. But we will do our best.”