Joe Biden’s U.S. presidential election win and a promising vaccine breakthrough have combined to propel global stock markets to record highs in the last week, upending the virus-led investment strategies that have been in play since March.
1/ A SHADE OF BLUE IN GREEN STOCKS
2/ BIDEN WAVE IN DEVELOPING WORLD
3/ CALMING NERVES
4/ EQUITY RECORD (with a value tilt)
5/ COMMODITY CURRENCIES
6/ DEBT DUMPED, YIELDS JUMPED

Where is rono and others who invest in gold ?

Hopes are soaring that a Covid vaccine is within reach, following news that an interim analysis has shown Pfizer/BioNTech’s candidate was 90% effective in protecting people from transmission of the virus in global trials.
The vaccine performed much better than most experts had hoped for, according to the companies’ analysis, and brings into view a potential end to a pandemic that has killed more than a million people, battered economies and upended daily life worldwide.
The data is from an interim analysis and the trial continues into December but the headline results were emphatic. Regulators will be looking to process an emergency licence application at record speed.
Manufacturing is already under way. Pfizer said they expect to supply globally up to 50m vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3bn doses in 2021. Countries will decide who they prioritise for vaccination.
The news comes too late to help Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in the US, but the vice-president, Mike Pence, tried to claim their administration’s Operation Warp Speed programme had helped the vaccine’s development.
Pfizer denied the suggestion:
“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice-president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”
BioNTech, the small biotechnology company that is the originator of the vaccine, was founded by two married German scientists, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, both born to Turkish immigrant parents, and the Austrian oncologist Christopher Huber. It originally set out to develop new types of immunotherapy for cancer, but has concentrated its capacities on the race for a Covid-19 vaccine.
There are so far no safety concerns around the vaccine, with the two companies reporting no serious side-effects. The high percentage of those protected makes it especially compelling. Regulators have previously said they would approve a vaccine that has just a 50% effectiveness rate – protecting half of those who get vaccinated.
“We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development programme at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen.”