Yes, I understand that doing the above would drive costs of pharma and other products way up.  OK, but look at what COVID-19 has done to us re driving up costs!  The above suggestions would also create a lot of good jobs, many of them just the sort of STEM jobs that we apparently really need in addition to safeguarding our security.

Rebuilding vital parts of our industrial base seems very important.  And time's a-wasting.  Let's get this started!

Build Infrastructure

"The key is not predicting the future, but to be prepared for it"

-- Pericles (500 BC)

Nobel Laureate Abhijeet Banerjee

Voice your opinion! Will be good or bad step for a diverse country like India?

The Nobel Prize (/ˈnoʊbɛl/, NOH-bel; Swedish: Nobelpriset [nʊˈbɛ̂lːˌpriːsɛt]; Norwegian: Nobelprisen) is a set of annual international awards bestowed in several categories by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural, or scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist, engineer and industrialist Alfred Nobel established the five Nobel prizes in 1895. The prizes in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine were first awarded in 1901.[1][3][4] The prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards available in their respective fields.[5][6][7]

In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The award is based on a donation received by the Nobel Foundation in 1968 from Sveriges Riksbank on the occasion of the bank's 300th anniversary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize

Six critically ill coronavirus patients in Israel who are considered high-risk for mortality have been treated with Pluristem’s placenta-based cell-therapy product and survived, according to preliminary data provided by the Haifa-based company.

The patients were treated at three different Israeli medical centers for one week under the country’s compassionate use program and were suffering from acute respiratory failure and inflammatory complications associated with COVID-19. Four of the patients also demonstrated failure of other organ systems, including cardiovascular and kidney failure.

Not only have all the patients survived, according to Pluristem, but four of them showed improvement in respiratory parameters and three of them are in the advanced stages of weaning from ventilators. Moreover, two of the patients with preexisting medical conditions are showing clinical recovery in addition to the respiratory improvement.

“We are pleased with this initial outcome of the compassionate use program and committed to harnessing PLX cells for the benefit of patients and healthcare systems,” said Pluristem CEO and president Yaky Yanay. “Pluristem is dedicated to using its competitive advantages in large-scale manufacturing to potentially deliver PLX cells to a large number of patients in significant need.”

Pluristem’s PLX cells are “allogeneic mesenchymal-like cells that have immunomodulatory properties,” meaning they induce the immune system’s natural regulatory T cells and M2 macrophages, the company explained in a previous release. The result could be the reversal of dangerous overactivation of the immune system. This would likely reduce the fatal symptoms of pneumonia and pneumonitis (general inflammation of lung tissue).

Previous preclinical findings regarding PLX cells revealed significant therapeutic effects in animal studies of pulmonary hypertension, lung fibrosis, acute kidney injury and gastrointestinal injury.

Pluristem plans to apply for initiation of a multinational clinical trial for the treatment of complications associated with coronavirus, the release said, noting that it will no longer report on its compassionate use trials but rather on the status and progress of its contemplated clinical trial.

The company is already in discussions with regulators in the United States and Europe to “define our clinical strategy for COVID-19,” Yanay added.

https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Israeli-COVID-19-treatment-shows-100-percent-survival-rate-preliminary-data-624058

Why is illiteracy gaining popularity in this world? how ashamed I am to read about all this.

So I guess,this news doesn't matter that much.We will have to wait for a year or two before an effective cure and a vaccine against coronavirus are successfully tested and launched in mass production.

This is one of the high-scoring protein designs that will be turned into an actual protein binder for testing as an coronavirus-blocking agent. (Stomjoh via Foldit / UW Institute for Protein Design)

Who would have thought a video game could identify potential treatments for COVID-19? Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design certainly thought so, and so far the game has produced 99 chances to win.

The game is a protein-folding puzzler called Foldit, which was created at UW’s Center for Game Science more than a decade ago and has attracted nearly more than 750,000 registered players since then.

Foldit’s fans find ways to twist virtual protein structures into all sorts of contortions. Some of those contortions turn out to have therapeutic value, which can raise a player’s score in the game. And that can have real-world implications for countering the coronavirus.

On the cellular level, protein structures can switch on biological processes, or act as keys to spring open the locks that protect cells from harm. For example, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, known as SARS-Cov-2, has a spike-like protein structure that’s particularly well-shaped for unlocking a cell’s defenses and getting inside to do its dirty work.

Once researchers mapped the virus’ shape, the Institute for Protein Design set up a challenge for Foldit’s players. They were tasked with folding virtual proteins into shapes that could latch onto the coronavirus’ skeleton key and gum it up, rendering it useless for a cellular break-in.

Thousands of designs were submitted and scored over the course of three rounds of competition. Now the institute’s researchers have selected 99 designs, 33 from each round, that will be turned into real-world proteins known as binders for testing as antiviral agents.

“It will be a few more weeks before genes arrive and we can begin experiments on the Foldit designs,” Brian Koepnick, a UW biochemist who focuses on Foldit, told players in blog post. “In the meantime, we’ll continue to work on designing better binders in Foldit.”

Coronavirus Live Updates: The latest COVID-19 developments in Seattle and the world of tech
In an earlier blog post, Koepnick cautioned players that the synthetic proteins don’t always work as well in the real world as they do in Foldit’s computer-generated chemistry lab.

“Protein binder design is a very hard problem — one at the forefront of computational biology — and there are other physical factors that are difficult to account for,” he wrote. “Even if our metrics look good on paper or on a computer, only laboratory testing will tell us whether these designer proteins actually fold and bind to the target.”

But if the institute can turn one of the 99 designs into a workable drug that can stop coronavirus in its tracks, Foldit players won’t be the only winners.

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/protein-puzzle-game-called-foldit-turns-99-promising-ways-confound-coronavirus/

....

can anyone suggest how to start trading stock market and which app's are the best?

Does Pandemic Coronavirus open the door for the decentralized economy? Please justify your answer.

We needed to rescue the financial system in 2008, and we need to support sectors like airlines and aerospace now—but TARP is the wrong model.

At the center of the Senate Republicans’ version of the emergency aid bill, which Democrats opposed on Sunday and Monday, is $500 billion in money for big corporations that is to be entrusted to one public official—the Secretary of the Treasury—with no oversight of his decisions and no strong rules laying down how corporations should, and should not, use those funds. The ostensible reason for this is to protect jobs, yet the GOP bill’s job language is more of a suggestion than a mandate.

The coronavirus has crippled major sectors of our economy—including airlines, hotels, aviation, aerospace manufacturing, and small business. Just as the federal government needed to intervene in the financial sector in 2008, the federal government needs to help these sectors of our economy now. But a lot of people are asking, didn’t we just do that in the bank bailout? And should we repeat the bank bailout, this time with Donald Trump and Steve Mnuchin in charge?

To understand the answer, and where a TARP-style bailout will lead, we need to go back to 2008.

That September, global stock markets were in free fall. Credit markets had frozen. Major financial institutions—AIG, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers—had gone bankrupt. Theoretically risk-free money markets were losing money. Confronted with this financial meltdown, the Congress passed, after much struggle, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Otherwise known as the bank bailout.

One lesson of 2008 clearly applies: If you give vast amounts of public money to a single person with no real accountability, you won’t like what happens next.

Then as now, big banks and big companies wanted money without conditions. Everything seemed so much easier that way. Government officials wanted flexibility, and no unpleasantness. But the result was that Wall Street and company executives got what they wanted, and the public, and anyone else who was supposed to be helped, like homeowners in 2008, and workers today, ended up with crumbs, or worse.

The coronavirus crisis is different from the 2008 panic. The economic crisis is worse, and the public-health threat has no modern precedent. The primary goal in anything that is done now has to be to preserve employment, and health care, and living businesses. But one lesson of 2008 clearly applies. If you give vast amounts of public money to a single person with no real accountability, you won’t like what happens next. It does not really matter who that person is, but it really does not help if that person, or that person’s boss, has an agenda other than the public interest.

The bank bailout was a grant of authority to one person, the Treasury Secretary. At the time the TARP statute was passed, President Bush was in office, and the Treasury Secretary was Hank Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and the man who managed to get the Bush administration to support action to stabilize the financial markets. There is a famous picture of Paulson on his knees begging Congress to act. Later in the history of TARP, the Treasury Secretary was Timothy Geithner, who served under Barack Obama.

The TARP statute provided that the Treasury Secretary made all the decisions involving $700 billion in public money. There was no board, and no requirement of congressional approval. There was an inspector general—SIGTARP. The inspector general could issue subpoenas, and make recommendations to the Justice Department and to Congress. But the inspector general could not stop the Treasury Secretary from acting as the Treasury Secretary pleased.

Then there was the Congressional Oversight Panel, the COP, chaired by Elizabeth Warren (then a private citizen), on which I served. This is remembered as an effective body, but that was due really only to the enormous work put into it by Warren, my fellow board members, and the staff.

The truth is that the panel had no power at all. It was purely advisory. It had no subpoena power, and it could not swear in witnesses. Officials came in front of us and lied with impunity. The one I could never get over was the panel of Treasury Department witnesses who denied that Citigroup was bankrupt in the week before Thanksgiving 2008. They said that though they knew that Citi officials had called Treasury the Friday before Thanksgiving and told them they would be out of cash the following Tuesday.

With no conditions on how they employed the public’s dollars, the banks were allowed to bleed homeowners to rebuild their capital, and ten million American families were foreclosed on.

And what was the outcome? The COP did a study, which was all we could do, of the TARP transactions. We hired a top-flight independent valuation firm and recruited a team of finance professors to oversee them. They found that the government got securities-preferred stock and warrants—worth between 61 cents and 71 cents on the dollar—in exchange for the hundreds of billions of public money it had turned over to the big banks. Why? The Treasury had not asked for enough equity in return. When the program ended, TARP’s investments in the big banks and AIG did slightly better than break even, which is a terrible return for the risk that was taken with the public’s money. Small banks had to prove they were solvent to get help; bankrupt big banks didn’t. And with no conditions on how they employed the public’s dollars, the banks were allowed to bleed homeowners to rebuild their capital, small-business lending dried up for years, and ten million American families—40 million people, millions of children—were foreclosed on and driven from their homes. The beneficiaries—Citibank and Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and AIG and JPMorgan Chase—are all fine. But “bank bailout” is a curse word in American politics, public confidence in government has never recovered—and Donald Trump is president.

What are the lessons? Give no one person control over a public bailout—which is exactly what the Republicans’ legislation confers on Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Have an independent board make those decisions. If the goal is maintaining employment, have workers on that board. If at all possible, use the money directly to accomplish the intended goals, rather than give general financing to companies. In this situation, that means subsidize payrolls first, then only if necessary give capital to firms. If we give capital to firms, insist on a fair equity return on the back end for the people of the United States. And any oversight body must have subpoena power and the ability to swear in witnesses and an adequate budget.

The American economy needs huge help now—trillions of dollars to support employment and keep broad swaths of otherwise healthy American business from collapsing. That help should first and foremost take the form of direct employment support and help for those who nonetheless end up without work. Yes, some help for severely affected industries is needed. We need to give it in a way that strengthens the public’s faith in our democracy and achieves the public purposes that the money was intended to achieve. That requires real accountability, real oversight. And that means doing a lot better than we did in the bank bailout.

https://prospect.org/economy/repeating-the-mistakes-of-the-2008-bailout/

Cramer stated that everything he did was legal, but that illegal activity is common in the hedge fund industry as well. He also stated that some hedge fund managers spread false rumors to drive a stock down: "What's important when you are in that hedge-fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful because the truth is so against your view, that it's important to create a new truth, to develop a fiction."[34] Cramer described a variety of tactics that hedge fund managers use to affect a stock's price. Cramer said that one strategy to keep a stock price down is to spread false rumors to reporters he described as "the Pisanis of the world," in reference to CNBC correspondent Bob Pisani, who Cramer insinuated was able to be manipulated, saying "You have to use these guys." He also discussed giving information to "the bozo reporter from The Wall Street Journal" to get an article published.[35][36] Cramer said this practice, although illegal, is easy to do "because the SEC doesn't understand it."[37] During the interview Cramer referred to himself as a "banking-class hero."[38]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Cramer#Admission_of_market_manipulation

I think this crash better parallels 1987 than 2008 but it's not because of the policies mounted in response. Trump and Obama's stimulus policies are almost exactly the same. It's a matter of circumstance. 2008 resulted from systemic failures, not an external catalyst like 2020.

Pretty much everyone who makes < $99,000 a year and has a Social Security number will get a check. Even Social Security beneficiaries who already get government checks will get one. The expansion of unemployment benefits is a separate thing. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/congress-to-send-taxpayers-1200-checks-in-the-wake-of-coronavirus.html

I'm amazed at the resilience of stock markets in the face of 3.3 million American jobless claims. I had been predicting a relief rally but I had almost stopped believing it could actually happen! I don't expect this exuberance to last for too long.

The Fed caused 93% of the entire stock market's move since 2008: Analysis

The bull market just celebrated its seventh anniversary. But the gains in recent years – as well as its recent sputter – may be explained by just one thing: monetary policy.

The factors behind that and previous bubbles can be illuminated using simple visual analysis of a chart.

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) doubled in value from November 2008 to October 2014, coinciding with the Federal Reserve Bank’s “quantitative easing” asset purchasing program. After three rounds of “QE,” where the Fed poured billions of dollars into the bond market monthly, the Fed’s balance sheet went from $2.1 trillion to $4.5 trillion.

This isn’t just a spurious correlation, according to economist Brian Barnier, principal at ValueBridge Advisors and founder of FedDashboard.com. What’s more, he says previous bull runs in the market lasting several years can also be explained by single factors each time.

Barnier first compiled data on the total value of publicly-traded U.S. stocks since 1950. He then divided it by another economic factor, graphing the ratio for each one. If the chart showed horizontal lines stretching over long periods of time, that meant both the numerator (stock values) and the denominator (the other factor) were moving at the same rate.

“That's the beauty of the visual analysis,” he said. “All we have to do is find straight, stable lines and we know we've got something good.”

Scouring hundreds of different factors, Barnier ultimately whittled it down to just four factors: GDP data five years into the future, household and nonprofit liabilities, open market paper, and the Fed’s assets. At different stretches of time, just one of those was the single biggest driver of the market and was confirmed with regression analyses.

He isolated each factor in a separate chart, calling them “eras” for the stock market.

From after World War II until the mid-1970s, future GDP outlook explained 90% of the stock market’s move, according to statistical analysis by Barnier.

GDP growth lost its sway on the market in the early 1970s with the rise of credit cards and consumer debt. Household liabilities grew with plastic first, followed by home mortgages, until the real estate crash of the early 1990s. Barnier’s analysis shows debt explained 95% of the entire market’s move during this time.

The period between the mid- to late-1990s until 2000 was, of course, marked by the tech bubble. While stocks took much of the headline, that time also saw heightened activity in the commercial paper market. Startups and young companies sought cash beyond their stratospheric share values to fund their operations. Barnier’s regression analysis shows commercial paper increases could explain as much as 97% of the tech bubble.

Shortly after the tech bubble burst, a housing bubble began, once more in the form of mortgages and other debt. That drove 94% of the market’s move for the first several years of the current century.

As the financial crisis reached a fevered pitch in 2008, the Federal Reserve took to flooding the financial market with dollars by buying up bonds. Simultaneously, interest rates fell dramatically, as bond yields move in the opposite direction of bond prices. Barnier sees the Fed as responsible for over 93% of the market from the start of QE until today. During the first half of 2013, the Fed caused the entire market’s growth, he said.
Since the Fed stopped buying bonds in late 2014, the S&P 500 has been batted around in a 16% range and is more or less where it was when the QE came to a close. Investors need to anticipate the next driver, said Barnier.

“Quantitative easing has stopped, but now we're into the interest rate world,” he said. “That means for any investor trying to figure out what to do, step one is starting with a macro strategy.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-fed-caused-93--of-the-entire-stock-market-s-move-since-2008--analysis-194426366.html

I’m already getting tired of all these. The truth is that none of you even knows why the cryptocurrency market fell.

The United States will be in a recession. The question is, will this be a 1987 type of recession or a 2008/2009 type of recession.

North Dakota and Texas won't have oil jobs anymore with how low the price is now.

Unemployment insurance filings have got up 200-1000% within the last week for some states from the lock down.

Their is a 2 trillion dollar stimulus package but I'm not entirely sure how that will help for the most part. Involves giving everyone around 1,200 USD and 500 USD a child.

This definitely didn't help bitcoin or gold in the short term but mid-term as in 6 months to 12 months should.

China appears to actually be ahead in the stock market for the month of March compared to all the other nations.

By the way, do you consider the urgency of the moment? I mean, do we have to stick to our paradigm in times like these? Or is this a time to appreciate the pros of centralization? Admit it or not, centralization and decentralization have their own fair share of pros and cons.

Of course, needs, circumstances, ground situations, and so on are never centralized; they vary from one local to another. But then the central bank or government is the sole source of a much-needed stimulus when a crisis like this happens. And to make sure the smaller government units remain functional and the people themselves are kept protected, the central authority will have to decide on injecting huge amount of money from god knows where.

Who else thinks that this is a very well thought out Chinese move to finally shift the center of global power decisively in its favor.

The actions of the Chinese always remind me of Talia-Al-Ghul in Dark Knight rises:

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The chinese knife has been waiting for over a century now since the humiliation of the opium wars and the "Cutting of the Chinese melon". You guys really think the people who invented gunpowder, rocketry, paper and gave the British the idea of a Civil Services were actually going to let it go?

The Banks That Helped Danske Bank Estonia Launder Russian Money

Money laundering is a multi-bank phenomenon. Danske Bank Estonia has been revealed as the hub of a $234bn money laundering scheme involving Russian and Eastern European customers. But Danske Bank Estonia couldn’t do this by itself. Much of the money was paid in U.S. dollars, and for that, it needed help from other banks. Banks that had access to Fedwire, the Federal Reserve's electronic settlement system. Big banks, in other words.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/09/30/the-banks-that-helped-danske-bank-estonia-launder-russian-money/

 This article is more than 3 years old
British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money

Britain’s high street banks processed nearly $740m from a vast money-laundering operation run by Russian criminals with links to the Russian government and the KGB, the Guardian can reveal.

HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Barclays and Coutts are among 17 banks based in the UK, or with branches here, that are facing questions over what they knew about the international scheme and why they did not turn away suspicious money transfers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/20/british-banks-handled-vast-sums-of-laundered-russian-money

Halkbank accused of scheme to circumvent Iran sanctions

The U.S. brought a criminal case against one of Turkey’s largest banks for aiding a scheme to evade sanctions against Iran, a move that carries political overtones as tensions build over Turkey’s military offensive in Syria.

In an indictment filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, prosecutors accused government-owned Halkbank of participating in a wide-ranging plot to violate prohibitions on Iran’s access to the U.S. financial system. The conspiracy involved high-ranking government officials in Iran and Turkey, the U.S. said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-15/halkbank-charged-in-six-count-indictment-with-fraud-laundering