March 11, 2022

• Spring forward.

• Bent Crude is down from $137 to below $110 a barrel.
• Uranium prices are up to $60 from $45. Highest since Fukushima.
• All crypto exchanges show losses for the week in the 1-3% range.
• Institutional investors are in positive territory taking wealth from others.
• Credit is less available.

While not everyone on the left is enamored, Boric is a marked shift from previous administrations in Chile. The main thing is redrafting the constitution to eliminate market fundamentalism.

Gabriel Boric will be sworn in on Friday as Chile’s youngest-ever leader, a hero to the protesters who swept him to the presidency but a potential threat to the business community. The bearded and tattooed 36-year-old left-winger has promised a radical programme of social change to make Chile a fairer and more inclusive society while addressing demands made during street protests in 2019.

The use of finance in the war in Ukraine shows exactly how capital isn't independent of the State.

“The Chinese market is uninvestable from an ESG perspective,” said Félix Boudreault, managing director of Sustainable Market Strategies, an environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investment research group.

Many of the companies most popular with investors were subject to strict state controls, said Boudreault, adding that tech and media companies were “extremely vulnerable to the strike of a pen from a Chinese bureaucrat”.

Chinese tech stocks were popular among international institutional investors keen to tap into the world’s biggest consumer market until Beijing launched a crackdown on the sector in late 2020. The risk of more regulation and the threat of declining profits caused by Xi’s so-called common prosperity drive has rattled markets.

Johnny Patterson, policy director of Hong Kong Watch, a UK-based research group, said Ukraine was a “wake-up call” for investors with exposure to “expansionist authoritarian regimes”.

“This is not the first area where questions have been raised for investors considering the ‘S’ in ESG when it comes to Chinese technology companies,” he said. He added that investors had also largely ignored the sector’s alleged ties to surveillance in China’s western Xinjiang region where 1mn Muslims have been imprisoned.

The war is allowing a peek at the strangeness of the international labour and trade market:

• Ukraine and Russia account for 14 per cent of commercial seafarers
• Ukraine on its own provides 5.4 per cent of the officers that head crews on the 74,000 plus ships trading internationally.

Oleg Grygoriuk, chair of the Marine Transport Workers Trade Union of Ukraine, estimates that 55 to 60 per cent of Ukraine’s 80,000 or so seafarers are currently on ships and, of those at sea, roughly 20 per cent want to come back and fight. The union is advising them to stay on board for their own safety and to keep global logistics running.

Changchun, the capital of north-eastern Jilin province with 9mn people and an important manufacturing base, was ordered into lockdown on Friday after 23 new cases were reported.

Also, a Lancet report has shown the death that lax public health response to COVID has caused:

“At the global level, this is quite the biggest mortality shock since the Spanish flu,” said Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, where the study was conducted. Covid drove a 17% jump in deaths worldwide, he said in an interview. The flu pandemic that began in 1918 killed at least 50 million people.

• Covid Study Finds 18 Million Deaths, Three Times Official Tally

Mask-wearing, physical distancing and other public health measures led to a decline in other communicable diseases, which reduced mortality in some countries. Places with the lowest estimated excess mortality rate were Iceland, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.

Meta will allow Facebook and Instagram users in countries including Ukraine and Poland to call for violence against Russian soldiers, Reuters reported. Users can also demand the deaths of Putin and Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko. Calls for violence against Russians are only allowed when the post clearly references the invasion of Ukraine.