What we’re reading (12/20)
“Omicron Sweeps Across Nation, Now 73% Of New US COVID Cases” (Associated Press). “Omicron has raced ahead of other variants and is now the dominant version of the coronavirus in the U.S., accounting for 73% of new infections last week, federal health officials said Monday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers showed nearly a six-fold increase in omicron’s share of infections in only one week.”
“Behind A New Pill To Treat Covid: A Husband-And-Wife Team And A Hunch” (Wall Street Journal). “The Holmans say they risked their own money on an unproven molecule that other potential investors had shown little interest in, and developed it in record time. ‘This was a compound nobody else really wanted to develop,’ said Dr. Holman, who declined to say how much money the Holmans have put into molnupiravir’s development. Ridgeback’s profits from molnupiravir will be put toward more biomedical research or companies, he said.”
“A Davos Deferred” (DealBook). “The World Economic Forum said this morning that it was postponing its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, from next month to “early summer,” citing the spread of the Omicron variant. The move suggests new uncertainties for business travel, yet another headache for C.E.O.s amid rising case counts and new questions about government efforts to contain the coronavirus. Meanwhile, U.S. stock futures are down sharply, following European and Asian markets.”
“In The Stock Market, The New Year May Start With A Bang” (MarketWatch). “With tumultuous declines in the past month, is this a contrarian ‘all-clear’ signal for further gains? Or, with the Federal Reserve accelerating its tapering of quantitative easing and potentially raising official interest rates in 2022, is this the end of the bull run that started in early 2020? For answers, we look to the major players: “passive” investors and the Fed.”
“Wonking Out: What Would A Hard Landing Look Like?” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). “It’s not totally clear whether this huge wave of unemployment [in the 1980s] was necessary [to bring down inflation]. Influential research using state-level data argues that the main factor in the Volcker disinflation was a big change in public expectations that could conceivably have happened without such a severe recession. But for now the working hypothesis for most economists is still that it took a nasty, sustained slump to end the inflation of the 1970s. Are we looking at something similar in our future? Probably not, for several reasons.”
