This week has been busy on all fronts. First off, the Republican National Convention (RNC) took place over four days. The RNC follows last weeks Democratic Nation Convention and saw speeches from Trump and his family, as well as many other Republican politicians [1]. The tone of the RNC was very positive around Trump’s handling of Covid-19 and seemed somewhat like they were trying to reframe history, despite the cases in the US has reached 6 million and the death toll rising to 185,000 [2]. As usual, more controversies came out of the RNC with claims that it broke the Hatch Act of 1939 which is to prevent politicians from using national resources for their own election campaigns [1].
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis released 2nd Quarter GDP results for the US, showing that GDP decreased at an annualised rate of 31.7% [3]. GPD changes have been 0-5% annualised for the past few years, except for the last two quarters, where GDP dropped 5% annualised last quarter. This makes the 32% drop seem very significant, but is must be noted that this is a lagging indicator- Q2 ended June 30th and we are almost two months on, and the economy has likely recovered significantly. Although, who knows how long the recovery will last given the continuing rise in Covid-19 cases.
On the home front, the NZ stock exchange has been hit with a series of cyberattacks [4]. The attacks were DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack, which means that hackers gained access to hundreds or thousands of computers and used them to send traffic to the NZX website. Due to the sheer volume of information that the NZX was then trying to handle, the website crashed. Because of this, the NZX decided to halt trading at times when the website went down over a period of four days [5]. I recommend you look at the references 4-5 below as they make for some interesting reading. We will just have to wait and see if the attacks continue Monday.
Finally, some more depressing news. Jacob Blake, a black man- not that it should matter- was shot seven times in the back by police officers in the US [6]. This has left him potentially paralysed and in hospital. This has led to yet more Black Lives Matter protests around the US. This, in turn, led to another shooting when a 17-year old ‘militia’ member (more like a gang member) killed two protesters [7]. The other piece of news in this vein is that the piece-of-trash that is the Christchurch mosque shooter has been sentenced to a well-deserved life-long jail term with no chance of parole- the harshest sentence possible in NZ and the first time it has been used [8].
References
[1] Yahoo! Finance, "Yahoo! Finance," YouTube, 24-27 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/c/YahooFinance/videos.
[2] Worldometer, "COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC," 29 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/.
[3] Bureau of Economic Analysis, "Gross Domestic Product, 2nd Quarter 2020 (Second Estimate); Corporate Profits, 2nd Quarter 2020 (Preliminary Estimate)," 28 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domestic-product-2nd-quarter-2020-second-estimate-corporate-profits-2nd-quarter.
[4] J. Tibshraeny, "NZX confirms offshore cyber attack led to trading halt on Tuesday afternoon, as the S&P/NZX All Index neared a record high," Interest.co.nz, 25 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.interest.co.nz/news/106730/nzx-confirms-offshore-cyber-attack-led-it-halting-trading-afternoon-spnzx-all-index-came.
[5] J. Anthony and P.-S. Tom, "NZX back online as Government assists in helping it address cyberattacks," Stuff, 28 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/122593041/nzx-back-online-as-government-assists-in-helping-it-address-cyberattacks.
[6] Yahoo! Finance, "Civil Rights attorneys and family of Jacob Blake hold press conference," YouTube, 26 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/p0ghRuABKko.
[7] NBC News, "Second-By-Second Breakdown Of The Deadly Kenosha, Wis., Shooting By Teen | NBC News NOW," YouTube, 29 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://youtu.be/EYjG4uequWQ.
[8] S. Robson, "Christchurch mosque shooter's sentence longest in New Zealand by far," Radio New Zealand, 27 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/chch-terror/424594/christchurch-mosque-shooter-s-sentence-longest-in-new-zealand-by-far.
