February 21 2024
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1 Investors plough record amounts into US farmland
2 Bad property debt exceeds reserves at largest US banks
3 Musk’s SpaceX becoming major government contractor
4 Massive US survey of human genomes aims to make healthcare personalized
5 Nuclear-armed Pakistan teeters on brink of political crisis
2/21/1972 President Nixon arrives in China for talks
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1 Investors plough record amounts into US farmland
Investors are pouring record amounts of money into US farmland as they snap up an asset expected to outperform as the world’s population grows sharply while natural resources become scarcer. The value of farmland held by investment groups has more than doubled over the past three years, according to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF).
The average value of US cropland has also swelled in recent decades, rising to $5,460 per acre last year from $1,270 per acre in 1997.
FT
2 Bad property debt exceeds reserves at largest US banks
Bad commercial real estate loans have overtaken loss reserves at the biggest US banks after a sharp increase in late payments linked to offices, shopping centres and other properties. The average reserves at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have fallen from $1.60 to 90 cents for every dollar of commercial real estate debt on which a borrower is at least 30 days late, according to filings to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The sharp deterioration took place in the last year after delinquent commercial property debt for the six big banks nearly tripled to $9.3bn.
Across the wider US banking sector the value of delinquent loans tied to offices, malls, apartments and other commercial properties more than doubled last year to $24.3bn, up from $11.2bn the year before. US banks now hold $1.40 in reserves for every dollar of delinquent commercial real estate loans, down from $2.20 a year ago, according to the FDIC data, and the lowest cover banks have had to absorb potential commercial real estate loan losses in more than seven years.
FT
3 Musk’s SpaceX becoming major government contractor
SpaceX is deepening its ties with U.S. intelligence and military agencies, winning at least one major classified contract and expanding a secretive company satellite program called Starshield for national-security customers. The Elon Musk-led company entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government in 2021, according to company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. SpaceX said in the documents that funds from the contract were expected to become an important part of its revenue mix in the coming years. It didn’t disclose the name of the government customer. The size and secrecy of the agreement illustrate a growing interdependence between SpaceX—a dominant force in the space industry—and the national-security establishment. SpaceX’s work for U.S. defense clients has long included blasting off classified and military satellites. The Pentagon has more recently done business with SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service, including agreements to pay for Ukrainian internet links during Ukraine’s war with Russia. Less is known about SpaceX’s Starshield unit, which is tailored for government clients and counts a former Air Force general among its leaders. Starshield won a $70 million award from the military last August to provide communications services to dozens of Pentagon partners. However, the group has largely operated out of the public eye.
WSJ
4 Massive US survey of human genomes aims to make healthcare personalized
A massive US programme that aims to improve health care by focusing on the genomes and health profiles of historically underrepresented groups has begun to yield results.
Analyses of up to 245,000 genomes gathered by the All of Us programme, run by the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, have uncovered more than 275 million new genetic markers, nearly 150 of which might contribute to type 2 diabetes. The work has also identified gaps in genetics research on non-white populations. The findings were published on 19 February in a package of papers in Nature1,2, Communications Biology3 and Nature Medicine4. They are a “nice distillation of the All of Us resource — what it is and what it can do”, says Michael Inouye, a computational genomicist at the University of Cambridge, UK. “This is going to be the go-to data set” for genetics researchers who want to know whether their findings are generalizable to a broad population or apply to only a limited one, he adds.
The All of Us programme, which has received over US$3.1 billion to date and plans to assemble detailed health profiles for one million people in the United States by the end of 2026, aims to bridge that gap, says Andrea Ramirez, the programme’s chief data officer. It began enrolling people in 2018, and released its first tranche of data — about 100,000 whole genomes — in 2022. By April 2023, it had enrolled 413,000 anonymized participants, 46% of whom belong to a minority racial or ethnic group, and had shared nearly 250,000 genomes. By comparison, the world’s largest whole-genome data set, the UK Biobank, has so far released about half a million genomes, around 88% of which are from white people.
In addition to the genomes, the database includes some participants’ survey responses, electronic health records and data from wearable devices, such as Fitbits, that report people’s activity, “making this one of the most powerful resources of genomic data”, Martin says.
Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00502-0
5 Nuclear-armed Pakistan teeters on brink of political crisis
Pakistanis went to the polls for the first time since Mr. Khan fell out with the military and was ousted by Parliament in 2022. Most had expected an easy victory for the [other] party backed by the country’s powerful military, but instead, candidates aligned with Mr. Khan won more seats than any other party, though they fell short of a simple majority. Mr. Khan was not on the ballot, being imprisoned and disqualified from running for office after convictions for crimes his supporters called trumped-up, yet the victory was clearly his. It was one of the biggest upsets in electoral history in Pakistan, where the military has typically engineered election results by winnowing the field of candidates using intimidation, clearing the way for its preferred party to win.
The success of candidates aligned with Mr. Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., upended that playbook and pushed the country’s political scene into uncharted territory.
A senior Pakistani official confessed on Saturday to helping manipulate results in the country’s elections — a startling claim strengthening a sense that the vote was among the least credible in Pakistan’s history, and deepening the turmoil that has seized the country ever since people went to the polls this month.
NYT
More than 10 days after Pakistan's elections, two key parties are struggling to finalize a power-sharing arrangement that would allow them to form a coalition government and fend off a large group of independent candidates backed by the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
As the pressure builds amid huge protests over alleged election tampering, experts fear the nation of over 240 million may be headed for emergency rule if a government cannot be formed soon.
Nikkei Asia
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