Notes From All Over -- Midnight Edition -- The Covid-19 Debacle In Sweden: Clogged British Ports; Mrs Bezos Giving Her Wealth Away As Fast As She Can -- Sets New Standard For Philanthropists -- December 17, 2020

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Dominion:

• Forbes, July 7, 2020: is there a merger in the cards? I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole but there's much to be learned from this debacle.
• Recently slashed its dividend by 33%: this picture says it all:

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Storm Hits Northeast

For the most part, it's been a nice winter so far. Link here. Warmest December on record until it wasn't.

ISO New England.     ISONY.  More here.

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The Boring Company

It appears another company is about to leave California and move to Austin, TX. 

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Mrs Bezos -- Yes, That Mrs Bezos -- Sets New Standard Of Philanthropy

$4.2 billion.

Plans to give her fortune away as fast as she can.

Link here. 

From the article:

Sager says it’s difficult to compare [Mrs Bezos'] donations with other gifts, since most gifts represent one donation to one organization, or to a handful of organizations. By comparison, the Gates Foundation gave away $5.1 billion in 2019. 

“Only the very largest foundations will give away anything near $4 billion in a year, much less $6 billion in six months,” Sager says.

Traditionally, women philanthropists tend to give anonymously, the Women’s Philanthropy Institute research shows. “Scott explicitly lists all the causes she supports—a balance between basic needs and systematic change—based on research and data. She’s really leading the way as a woman philanthropist,” Sager says.

[Mrs Bezos] did not specify the amount she donated to each organization, but some of the recipients quickly celebrated their grants after her announcement. Goodwill Industries International, which provides a breadth of services that range from job training and placement to housing and child care, and YMCA of the USA each received $20 million. 

Several historically-black colleges and universities received their largest single-donor gift in history, according to their news releases. Those include Texas’s Prairie View A&M University, which received $50 million; Virginia’s Norfolk State University, with a $40 million grant; and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, with a $20 million grant.

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British Ports Struggling With Too Many Container Ships

Link here. 

IKEA and Honda are among the prominent companies hit as a flood of pre-Brexit business floods major UK gateways. England's Port of Felixstowe is clogged with containers as the UK bids final farewell to the European Union in around two weeks (the never-ending story). But experts say that is not the only reason. 

The bottlenecks are triggered in part by preparations for Brexit, which have British companies trying to stockpile food, medicine and other goods ahead of the country’s divorce from the European Union at the end of the year.

But shipping experts say they are driven by far more. They point to an unusually strong seasonal rush to stock up for holiday sales, big imbalances in transport equipment created by pandemic-related disruptions and ongoing operational problems at the Felixstowe port that have pushed some ocean carriers to skip the U.K.’s main gateway and unload Britain-destined cargo at other ports.

A scramble among Western retailers to restock goods has clogged distribution channels in Asia, Europe and North America. Gateways including Los Angeles, Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan in China, Belgium’s Antwerp, Sri Lanka’s Colombo and Auckland in New Zealand have all been handling record container volumes since the end of the summer and shipping rates on major trade lanes have been skyrocketing. 

“We’re essentially in a triage situation,” Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka said Tuesday in announcing that inbound volumes at the largest U.S. gateway rose by more than 25% in November from a year ago. 

“This is a really big storm for global container flows,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of network for Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, the world’s biggest boxship operator by capacity. He said the restocking comes as “measures to contain the pandemic cause severe strain across the supply chain from lack of vessels, containers and trucking capacity as well as significantly reduced productivity across ports, warehouses and inland terminals.”

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Sweden: China Flu

So much for all those ZeroHedge stories telling us how Sweden's strategy for coping with Chinese flu was working out great. 

Link here.  Sweden's strategy has become a complete debacle.