Aircraft lessor Avolon Holdings Ltd. said it expects a rapid rebound for China’s aviation industry after the country scrapped its strict Covid travel restrictions ahead of the usually busy Lunar New Year holiday.
Monday, January 16, 2023
Muyuan Foods Selects CICC, JPMorgan for $1.5 Billion Swiss GDR Sale
- Shenzhen-listed firm may kick off offering as soon as March
- Muyuan has said it’s planning GDR offering in Switzerland
China’s Muyuan Foods Co. has selected China International Capital Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to arrange its planned global depository receipts sale in Switzerland, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The Shenzhen-listed hog breeder is looking to raise about $1.5 billion through the GDR sale in Zurich, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. An offering could happen as early as March, one of the people said.
Canada's Ontario to expand use of private healthcare providers
Canada's most populous province, Ontario, plans to significantly expand its use of private providers to perform public health services, the premier said on Monday, in a bid to deal with backlogs and delays in a healthcare system strained by the coronavirus pandemic.
Premier Doug Ford announced the planned expansion on Monday, saying: "The status quo is no longer acceptable. ... This is the best way to go to take the burden off the backs of the hospitals."
The announcement comes as Ontario and other Canadian provinces struggle to provide healthcare as the strain on hospitals and wait lists for non-urgent procedures - which lengthened during the pandemic - stay long.
Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston told Global News on Sunday that Canada’s healthcare system is "on the ropes."
Canada's publicly-funded healthcare system has in the past been seen by some as a model system. But critics say years of underinvestment and the strain from the COVID-19 pandemic have stretched it to a breaking point.
Asked about Ontario's plan Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he would "continue to watch" that the Canada Health Act is respected. Its tenets include public administration, universality and accessibility of health care.
Ford and his ministers have insisted the province's health insurance program will continue to cover healthcare.
But critics and public health advocates have argued expanding the use of private providers is a step towards privatizing the public health system and risks cannibalizing a healthcare workforce already facing a shortage. Health sector vacancy rates are the highest they have been in years.
The Ford government has said it has no plans to privatize the healthcare system.
'POTENTIALLY FATAL'
Ontario plans to add 14,000 cataract surgeries a year, about 25% of the current wait list, and invest C$18 million ($13.4 million) in existing private centres to fund medical imaging and certain surgeries.
The government also plans to introduce legislation early this year to expand the provision of certain services and surgeries in these clinics.
"We're rerouting … the easier surgeries that are taking up 50% of the capacity at the hospitals and causing people to wait for the serious surgeries as well," Ford said Monday.
Health Minister Sylvia Jones said patients could complain to the province if they felt they were not offered publicly covered services at the private clinics.
Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition advocacy group, said she was worried this opened the door to further privatization and that it was "laughable" to suggest it would not take health workers from the understaffed public system.
"This is potentially fatal to the public health system in our province and in our country, and we're going to fight it in every possible way," she said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/canadas-ontario-province-expand-private-154657996.html
Sweden, Finland must send up to 130 "terrorists" to Turkey for NATO bid
Sweden and Finland must deport or extradite up to 130 "terrorists" to Turkey before the Turkish parliament will approve their bids to join NATO, President Tayyip Erdogan said.
The two Nordic states applied last year to join NATO following Russia's invasion of Ukraine but their bids must be approved by all 30 NATO member states. Turkey and Hungary have yet to endorse the applications.
Turkey has said Sweden in particular must first take a clearer stance against what it sees as terrorists, mainly Kurdish militants and a group it blames for a 2016 coup attempt.
"We said look, so if you don't hand over your terrorists to us, we can't pass it (approval of the NATO application) through the parliament anyway," Erdogan said in comments late on Sunday, referring to a joint press conference he held with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson last November.
"For this to pass the parliament, first of all you have to hand more than 100, around 130 of these terrorists to us," Erdogan said.
Finnish politicians interpreted Erdogan's demand as an angry response to an incident in Stockholm last week in which an effigy of the Turkish leader was strung up during what appeared to be a small protest.
"This must have been a reaction, I believe, to the events of the past days," Finland's foreign minister Pekka Haavisto told public broadcaster YLE.
Haavisto said he was not aware of any new official demands from Turkey.
In response to the incident in Stockholm, Turkey cancelled a planned visit to Ankara of the Swedish speaker of parliament, Andreas Norlen, who instead came to Helsinki on Monday.
"We stress that in Finland and in Sweden we have freedom of expression. We cannot control it," the speaker of the Finnish parliament, Matti Vanhanen, told reporters at a joint news conference with Norlen.
Separately on Monday Swedish Prime Minister Kristersson said that his country was in a "good position" to secure Turkey's ratification of its NATO bid.
Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on Saturday that time was running out for Turkey's parliament to ratify the bids before presidential and parliamentary elections expected in May.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sweden-finland-must-send-130-142902242.html
6 dead in drug trade related California home shooting
Six people including a six-month-old baby cradled in the arms of her 17-year-old mother were shot dead at a home in California's main agricultural valley on Monday in what authorities called a targeted attack and "horrific massacre."
Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux linked the killings to the illegal drug trade, saying deputies had conducted a drug-related search warrant at the same home last week.
"We believe this was a message being sent," Boudreaux told reporters at the scene. "We believe that this was a targeted family."
Two suspects remained at large, he said.
Authorities responded early on Monday after multiple shots were heard. Some victims were found in the street while others were discovered in the house.
One victim was alive and wounded when authorities arrived but later died at a hospital, Boudreaux said.
The attacks occurred in Goshen, a farm community of 5,400 people about midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The bodies of the infant and 17-year-old mother were located in a ditch outside the home, Boudreaux later told the Los Angeles Times. Both had gunshot wounds to the head.
Several others were shot in the head, including an elderly woman. Two women survived by hiding in a trailer on the property.
"I think it's specifically connected to the cartel. The level of violence ... this was not your run-of-the-mill low-end gang member," Boudreaux told the newspaper.
"If (they) are specifically shooting everyone in the head, they know what they are doing ... (and) they are comfortable with what they are doing."
The newspaper reported that last week's search warrant resulted in one arrest and the seizure of guns, marijuana and methamphetamine.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/six-people-dead-california-home-174455126.html
BOJ's yield curve control in danger as policy backfires
The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is under pressure to change its interest rate policy as soon as Wednesday, after the central bank's attempt to buy itself breathing room backfired, emboldening bond investors to test its resolve.
Unlike other central banks that have been aggressively raising rates to battle inflation, the BOJ continues its decades-long attempt to stoke price rises in the world's third-biggest economy, even as inflation has exceeded the bank's target.
With investors pushing up Japanese government bond yields, testing the BOJ's policy of yield curve control (YCC), the central bank last month shocked markets by raising its cap on the 10-year yield to 0.5% from 0.25%, doubling the band it would permit above or below its target of zero.
"If bond market function continues to deteriorate ahead of the BOJ's policy meeting, the risk of an early end to YCC could heighten," said veteran BOJ watcher Naomi Muguruma, chief bond strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.
Policymakers had hoped December's sudden tweak would extend the lifespan of the BOJ's attempt to control interest rates along the curve, until they could gauge whether recent wage rises would take hold nationwide and Governor Haruhiko Kuroda's successor takes over in April.
The BOJ, they hoped, could then strategise an orderly unwinding of YCC under a new leader, pulling the trigger only when wages were rising enough to keep inflation sustainably around the bank's 2% target, according to five sources familiar with the bank's thinking.
Instead, the BOJ's tweak opened a flood of expectations that a major change was imminent. Less than a month later, bond sellers broke the 0.5% yield cap on Friday, forcing the BOJ into emergency bond-buying to bring the rate back down.
In a sign of its resolve to defend the yield cap, the BOJ on Monday announced plans to conduct additional, emergency bond-buying.
BOJ IN A BIND
"Wages are still low in Japan. Policy normalisation is hardly a done deal," one source said at the start of the year, a view echoed by two others.
Policymakers' thinking just before the two-day meeting from Tuesday was not clear, as they have entered a blackout period on discussing policy.
But it is clear the BOJ's plan is falling apart.
To be sure, with global commodity prices falling, private analysts agree with Kuroda that inflation will slow back toward the BOJ's target later this year. But markets likely will not buy Kuroda's assurances that rates will remain low, after he blindsided them with the December decision, analysts say.
Investors are pricing in a change this week, with bets on the BOJ raising the top of the 10-year target band to 0.75%, raising the centrepoint of the band from zero or ditching the target altogether.
The BOJ is in a bind. Further cosmetic tweaks could simply ignite market expectations of a near-term rate hike. But raising the yield targets would run counter to its narrative that stronger wage growth must accompany rising inflation before it can overhaul or phase out YCC.
Much will depend this week on whether the board sees the market distortions as serious enough to warrant additional action, the sources said.
"If yield curve distortions aren't fixed, the BOJ must consider what more it can do," a second source said before Friday's market rout, a view echoed by another source.
The board was already seen debating whether to keep its policy of applying a negative 0.1% rate to a small pool of excess reserves parked with the BOJ, targeting the 10-year yield around zero, and maintaining the target yield band it widened on Dec. 20.
LESSONS FROM DOWN UNDER
An uncomfortable parallel for the BOJ is the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which underestimated inflation risks and then abruptly ditched its three-year yield target in November 2021, an episode it conceded was "disorderly."
"Things are looking similar to when the RBA was forced to abandon its three-year target," said Muguruma at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley.
Kuroda said in July the BOJ would not be in the RBA's position as the Japanese bank targets the 10-year yield, which is less affected by changes in market perceptions of future rate moves than three-year notes.
But market expectations of an early rate hike have boosted Japanese yields broadly, with the eight-year around 0.6% and the nine-year 0.7%, above the 10-year target.
"As interest rates rise, we're seeing the limits of YCC," said Mari Iwashita, chief market economist at Daiwa Securities.
"Widening the band again won't fix distortions in the yield curve. It's better to remove the 10-year yield target, but overhauling YCC would raise questions of accountability."
Even if the BOJ weathers the storm this week, it will remain under market pressure. Data on Friday will likely show Japan's core consumer prices rose 4.0% in December, double the BOJ's target and a fresh 41-year high, a Reuters poll showed.
After Wednesday, Kuroda chairs one more meeting on March 9 and 10, before his term ends on April 8.
"The BOJ is paying the price for yielding to market pressure in December," a third source said. "If markets continue to ask more from the BOJ, YCC may not last that long."
https://news.yahoo.com/analysis-bojs-yield-curve-control-012229625.html
Ukraine demands speedier weapons deliveries from West to confront Russian pressure
Ukraine insisted the West must speed up its supply of weapons, with the city of Dnipro reeling from a Russian missile strike that killed at least 40 people in an apartment block and Ukrainian troops under increased pressure on the eastern front.
Ukraine's army General Staff said on Monday that Russian artillery pounded about 25 towns and villages around Bakhmut and Avdiika, the two focal points of Russian attempts to advance in the strategic eastern industrial Donbas region.
It said Russia also kept up shelling of more than 30 settlements in the northeast Kharkiv and Sumy areas near the Russian border. In the south, Russian mortar and artillery fire hit several towns, including the regional capital, Kherson, which Russian forces abandoned in November.
Reuters was not able to verify battlefield reports.
"Very heavy fighting is continuing in the two key sectors of... Bakhmut and Avdiivka," Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said on YouTube. "The enemy is attacking constantly and around the clock. And we are trying to maintain our positions. Russian troops are active at night - we are in great need of night vision equipment."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his Monday night video address that the attack on Dnipro and Russia's attempts to gain the initiative in the war underscored the need for the West "to speed up decision-making" in supplying weapons.
Western countries have produced a steady supply of weapons to Ukraine since Russian forces invaded last Feb. 24 but Zelenskiy and his government are insisting they need tanks.
Britain confirmed on Monday it was going to send 14 Challenger 2 tanks and other hardware, including hundreds more armoured vehicles and advanced air defence missiles.
Germany is under pressure to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, but its government says such tanks should be supplied only if there is agreement among Kyiv's main allies, particularly the United States.
Oleskiy Danylov, Secretary of Ukraine's Security Council, also mentioned on Monday night the need for an acceleration in weapons supplies because the government expected Russia "to attempt to make a so-called final push."
Danylov told Ukrainian television that could take place on the invasion's anniversary or in March.
"We must prepare for such events every day. And we are preparing ... The first and last question is always about weapons, aid to help us defeat this aggressor that invaded our country," Danylov said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was to host allies at an air base in Germany on Friday to discuss further aid for Ukraine.
'DEPORTATIONS'
Russia calls its actions a "special military operation" to protect its security because its neighbour grew increasingly close to the West. Ukraine and its allies accuse Moscow of an unprovoked war to grab territory and to erase the independence of a fellow ex-Soviet republic.
Russia's invasion has displaced millions, killed thousands of civilians and left Ukrainian cities, towns and villages in ruins. Kyiv and its allies have also accused Russia of the large-scale deportation of Ukrainians.
Zelenskiy called on the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) on Monday to do more about Ukrainians he says have been forcibly taken to Russia.
The OSCE is the world's largest regional security organisation, consisting of 57 states, such as the United States, all European states, including Russia and all states of the former Soviet Union.
"No international organisation has found the strength to gain access to the places of detention of our prisoners in Russia yet. This must be corrected," he said.
The U.S. State Department estimated last year that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, have been forcibly deported into Russian territory.
Russia denies deportations and says those arriving are war refugees. In November, the country's emergency ministry said that some 4.8 million Ukrainians, including 712,000 children, had arrived in Russia since February.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/ukraine-demands-speedier-weapons-deliveries-001201723.html
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