When the coronavirus paralyzed China’s economy last year, Rao Yong needed cash to bridge his online craft business. But he was afraid of spending long, boring hours in the bank.
The outbreak had messed up delivery services and slowed customer payments, so Mr Rao, 33, used an app called Alipay to get early payment on his bills. With his Alipay account already tied to his digital storefront in Alibaba’s Taobao Bazaar, getting the money was quick and painless.
Alipay had also helped Mr. Rao a few years ago when his business was just starting to expand and it took him $ 50,000 to build a supply chain.
“If I had gone to a bank at this point, they would have ignored me,” he said.
China has pioneered new ways to bring money to underserved people like Mr. Rao. Tech companies like the owner of Alipay, an Alibaba spin-off called Ant Group, have turned finance into a kind of digital plumbing: something so thoroughly and invisibly embedded in people’s lives that they hardly thought about it. And they did so on a whopping scale, turning tech giants into influential lenders and money managers in a country where smartphones became ubiquitous before credit cards.
But for much of the past year, Beijing has been building new regulatory walls around what is known as fintech, or financial technology, to contain the country’s internet industry.
The campaign ensnared Alibaba, which was fined $ 2.8 billion in April for monopoly behavior. It tripped Didi, the ride-hailing giant, who was hit by an official investigation into its data security practices just days after its shares were listed on Wall Street last month.
Around this time last year, Ant was also preparing the world’s largest initial public offering. The IPO never happened, and today Ant is reworking his business so regulators can treat it more like they believe it to be: a financial institution, not a tech company.
In China, “the reason fintech has grown so much is because of the lack of regulation,” said Zhiguo He, who studies Chinese finance at the University of Chicago. “It’s just so clear.”
The question now arises: what will regulation do to an industry that is thriving precisely because it has offered services that China’s state-dominated banking system could not?
With Ant and other major platforms cornering the market, investment in Chinese fintechs has declined in recent years. So chastising Ant could make the industry more competitive for startups. But if running a large fintech company means being regulated like a bank, will the founders of future Ants even care?
Professor He said he was mostly confident that Chinese fintech entrepreneurs would keep trying. “Whether it is enormously profitable,” he said, is another question.
For much of the past decade, if you wanted to see where smartphone technology made China look so different from the rest of the world, you would have looked inside people’s wallets. Or rather, the apps that replaced them.
The rich and poor used Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat messaging app to buy snacks from street vendors, pay bills, and zap money to their friends. State media hailed Alipay as one of China’s four great modern inventions, taking it and bike sharing, e-commerce and bullet train with compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing to extremes.
But the tech companies didn’t get into the financial business to make paying for coffee easier. They wanted to be where the real money was: granting loans and credits, managing investments, offering insurance. And with all of their data on people’s spending, they believed they were much better at handling the risk than old-fashioned financial institutions.
With the blessing of the Chinese leadership, financial weapons began to sprout from Internet companies of all kinds, including the search engine Baidu, the retailer JD.com and the food giant Meituan. Between 2014 and 2019, online lenders’ consumer credit increased nearly quadruple on average every year, according to one estimate. According to iiMedia Research, almost three quarters of the users of such platforms were under 35 years of age.
When Ant went public last year, the company said it had provided more than $ 260 billion in consumer credit through Alipay. That meant Ant alone was responsible for more than 12 percent of all short-term consumer credit in China, according to research firm GaveKal Dragonomics.
Then, in November, officials torpedoed Ant’s IPO and went to work dismantling the lines that had connected Alipay to China’s banks.
They urged Ant to make it less convenient for users to pay for purchases on credit – loans largely funded by banks. They prevented banks from offering deposits through online platforms and restricted how much banks could lend through them. At some banks, deposits offered through digital platforms made up 70 percent of their total deposits, a central bank official said in a speech.
In a press conference last week, Fan Yifei, deputy governor of the central bank, said regulators would soon apply full ant treatment to other platforms.
“On the one hand, the speed of development was amazing,” said Fan. “On the other hand, the pursuit of growth has created monopolies, disorderly capital expansion and similar behaviors.”
Ant declined to comment.
As Ant and Tencent strive to meet regulatory requirements, they have scaled back credit services for some users.
A big blow to Ant’s bottom line could come from new requirements that it put more of its own money into lending. Chinese regulators have disliked the idea of Alipay competing with banks for years. Instead, Ant played his role as a partner to the banks, using his technology to find and rate borrowers while banks staked the funds.
Now, however, this model in Beijing seems like a convenient way for Ant to place bets without facing downside risks.
“If problems arise, it would be safe, but its partner banks would take a blow,” said Xiaoxi Zhang, an analyst in Beijing at GaveKal Dragonomics.
When Chinese regulators think about such risks, they think of people like Zhou Weiquan.
Mr. Zhou, 21, earns about $ 600 a month from his desk job and wears his hair in a swaying auburn mullet. After he turned 18, Alipay and other apps offered him thousands of dollars in credit every month. He took full advantage of it, traveling, buying equipment and generally not thinking about how much he was spending.
After Alipay cut its credit limit in April, the first thing he did in panic was to call customer service. But he says he has now learned to live with his means.
“For young people who really like to spend too much money, this is a good thing,” said Mr. Zhou of the crackdown.
China’s brisk economic growth recently has most likely made it easier for officials to curb fintech, even at the expense of some innovation, consumer spending and borrowing.
“When you consider that household debt as a percentage of household income is currently among the highest in the world” in China, “then higher household debt is probably not a good idea,” said Michael Pettis, finance professor at Peking University.
Qu Chaoqun, 52, got hooked a few years ago when he had access to $ 30,000 a month through multiple apps. But he wanted more. He started buying lottery tickets.
Soon, Mr. Qu, a delivery driver in the metropolis of Guangzhou, borrowed an app to pay his bills with someone else. He borrowed money from friends and relatives to repay the apps and then borrowed the apps again to repay his friends and relatives.
When his loan was cut by nearly half in April, he fell into what he calls an “abyssal abyss” as he struggled to pay off his outstanding debt.
“People inevitably have mental fluctuations and impulses that can cause great harm and instability to themselves, their families and even society,” said Mr. Qu.
A GameStop store in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles. Jim Bell, the company’s chief financial officer, who joined the company in mid-2019, is leaving.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times
GameStop’s chief financial officer, Jim Bell, is leaving the company in late March, following a stock-trading frenzy that briefly sent shares in the video game retailer surging.
The company gave no reason for Mr. Bell’s departure in its announcement on Tuesday, but noted it would look for a successor “with the capabilities and qualifications to help accelerate GameStop’s transformation.” Mr. Bell joined GameStop less than two years ago.
GameStop jumped into the headlines in late January when amateur investors used trading apps to buy options and pump up its share price, defying hedge funds that had bet the price would fall. The chaotic trading led to congressional hearings last week, but executives from GameStop, which was essentially caught in the middle, were not called to testify.
GameStop’s share price closed at about $45 on Tuesday. It reached $483 on Jan. 28 after starting the year at $19.
The wild swings in share price were detached from what was happening at the company, where a major stockholder has been trying to force a turnaround. In early January, Ryan Cohen, the manager of RC Ventures and a large stockholder, joined the GameStop board. He has been pressuring the company’s executive team to overhaul GameStop’s strategy and focus on digital growth. The company has more than 5,000 stores, many in American malls and shopping strips, but has steadily lost sales to major online retailers like Amazon.
Mr. Bell joined the company in June 2019 at the age of 51 from Wok Holdings, which owns the restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s. In a short statement, GameStop thanked Mr. Bell “for his significant contributions and leadership, including his efforts over the past year during the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said the central bank would keep buying bonds until it saw “substantial further progress” toward full employment and stable inflation.Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh
Stocks on Wall Street were set to open slightly higher on Wednesday, and most commodities prices were rising, after the Federal Reserve chief on Tuesday reiterated the need to provide plenty of support for the economic recovery from the pandemic.
“The economic recovery remains uneven and far from complete, and the path ahead is highly uncertain,” Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. He will speak to lawmakers in the House later on Wednesday.
The S&P 500 index reached record highs earlier in the month as traders bet on the recovery and a successful vaccine rollout. Easy-money policies has also helped push asset prices higher. But fears that stronger economic growth and higher inflation would prompt the Fed to withdraw some monetary support have caused bond prices to fall, pushing up yields. This temporarily unsettled stock markets.
On Wednesday, yields on U.S. bonds resumed their march higher, after falling the previous day. The yield on 10-year notes was at about 1.38 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr. Powell tried to reassure investors. He said that the central bank planned to keep buying bonds until it saw “substantial further progress” toward its twin goals of full employment and stable inflation. The United States can “expect us to move carefully, and patiently, and with a lot of advance warning” when it comes to slowing that support, Mr. Powell said.
Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude oil benchmark, rose more than 1 percent to $62 a barrel, the highest in 13 months. This week, for the first time since 2011, copper prices climbed above $9,000 a metric ton in London.
Elsewhere in markets
Bitcoin prices rose on Wednesday, helping lift the share price of Tesla, which recently invested $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency, and the shares of other blockchain-based companies, such as Riot Blockchain and Marathon Patent Group, in premarket trading.
Most European stocks indexes gained and the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.3 percent. The fourth quarter growth of Germany’s economy was revised higher to 0.3 percent, from 0.1 percent.
Most Asian indexes fell. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 3 percent with financial and consumer stocks falling the most after the government announced a plan to increase a tax on stock trading. Shares in Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing fell by nearly 9 percent, the most in the index.
A line at a San Antonio food distribution center on Sunday after a winter storm left millions without power.Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times
A winter storm in Texas that pushed its power grid to the brink of collapse and left millions without electricity during a brutal cold snap has led to the resignations of five officials who oversaw the state’s electric grid.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which governs the flow of power for more than 26 million Texans, has been blamed for the widespread failures. The governor, lawmakers and federal officials quickly began inquiries into the system’s failures, particularly its preparation for cold weather, reports Rick Rojas for The New York Times.
The five board members, who announced on Tuesday that they intended to resign after a meeting set for Wednesday morning, were all from outside of Texas, a point of contention for critics who questioned the wisdom of outsiders playing such an influential role in the state’s infrastructure. In a statement filed with the Public Utility Commission, four board members said they were stepping down “to allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions.” In a footnote, the filing added that a fifth member was also resigning.
Those departing are the chairwoman, Sally Talberg, a former state utility regulator who lives in Michigan; Peter Cramton, the vice chairman and an economics professor at the University of Cologne in Germany and the University of Maryland; Terry Bulger, a retired banking executive who lives in Illinois; and Raymond Hepper, who is a former official with the agency overseeing the power grid in New England. Another person who was supposed to fill a vacant seat, Craig S. Ivey, has withdrawn from the 16-member board.
The board became the target of blame and scrutiny after the winter storm last week brought the state’s electric grid precariously close to a complete blackout that could have taken months to recover from. In a last-minute effort to avert that, the council, known as ERCOT, ordered rolling outages that plunged much of the state into darkness and caused electricity prices to skyrocket. Some customers had bills well over $10,000.
The second and final day of the DealBook DC Policy Project featured discussions on the prospects of bipartisan deal-making in Washington, overhauling of the financial markets and corporate America’s role in fighting the pandemic.
Here are the highlights from the sessions on Tuesday:
“We’ll lose 1.3 million jobs.”
Elements of Democrats’ stimulus proposals, including raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, attracted criticism from Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah. But he mentioned potential common ground with the Biden administration, including on climate change. Mr. Romney defended his traditional conservatism amid the G.O.P.’s embrace of right-wing populism, but noted that if former President Donald J. Trump ran for re-election in 2024, “I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.”
“I think it’s pathological that you could have greater than 100 percent short interest.”
Lessons from meme-stock mania were among the topics discussed by Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of the online brokerage firm Robinhood. He defended the practice of directing trades to market makers for a fee, which allows Robinhood to offer commission-free trading. Also on the panel, Jay Clayton, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the markets were functioning the way they should in many ways, including by promoting competition among brokers and market makers.
“There will continue to be vaccinations required for Covid.”
The chief executive of CVS Health, Karen S. Lynch, spoke about the fight against the pandemic, saying that people would probably need booster shots and might need to keep wearing masks next year. But whether businesses should require employees to be inoculated was a “company-by-company response,” she said.
Natasha Van Duser has war stories from bartending during the pandemic. She has since left service work.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
During two enormous crises — a public health emergency and an economic crash — restaurant service workers have found themselves double-exposed.
Many say their average tips have declined, while they’ve been saddled with the added work of policing patrons who aren’t social distancing, or as one service worker put it, “babysitting for the greater good,” Emma Goldberg reports for The New York Times.
On top of this, women, who make up more than two-thirds of servers, say they are facing “maskual harassment” — a term coined by the nonprofit organization One Fair Wage to describe demands that servers remove their masks to receive a tip.
The economic challenges have raised existential questions: Could this crisis herald the end of tipping, or a raise in the minimum wage for tipped workers? Depending on subjective gratuities has long been a fraught issue, but rarely has it had the safety consequences that it does now, when workers are struggling to enforce public health compliance from the customers whose tips they depend on.
Natasha Van Duser, 27, who tended bar in Manhattan, had never thought to show up to work with pepper spray. That was before last spring, when, she said, a customer dining outside spat on her and threatened to kill her when she asked him to put on a mask before walking to the bathroom; there were others who shouted expletives at her or suggested she take the temperature of their behinds instead of their foreheads.
In a recent national study of more than 1,600 workers, conducted by One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, over three-quarters of workers reported “witnessing hostile behavior” from customers who were asked to comply with coronavirus protocols, more than 40 percent reported a change in the frequency of unwanted sexual comments during the pandemic and more than 80 percent reported that their tips had declined.
Credit…Matt Chase
Boredom’s impact on the economy is under-researched, experts say, possibly because there has been no modern situation like this one, but many agree that it’s an important one, Sydney Ember reports for The New York Times.
Feeling bored may result in different kinds of behaviors, like increasing novelty seeking and increasing reward sensitivity, said Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, who studies boredom.
This swirl of reactions to boredom can help explain the GameStop phenomenon, Ms. Westgate said. Investing in the stock was not just an act that felt engaging, powered by a propensity for taking risks and the excitement of reward, but also something that felt meaningful: For many traders, it was a form of protest.
Early in the pandemic, bread-making fervor prompted stores across the country to sell out of yeast. Puzzle sales have skyrocketed. Gardening has taken off as a hobby. Home improvement, too, has boomed. Sherwin-Williams said it had record sales in the fourth quarter and for the year, in part because of strong performances in its do-it-yourself and residential repaint businesses. Pandemic boredom evidently has nothing on watching paint dry.
There has also been an increase in sales of things like video games to keep us occupied, as well as things to help relieve the stress of the pandemic (and, perhaps, boredom from being at home), including self-help books, candles and messaging appliances.
It is possible that not being bored during certain periods of the day is also making people less productive, said Bec Weeks, who worked as a senior adviser for the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian government and is a co-founder of a behavioral science app called Pique.
Research has shown that mind-wandering, an activity that can happen during periods of boredom, can result in greater productivity. But during the pandemic, some of the best opportunities for mind-wandering, like the daily commute to work, have been lost for the millions of people now working from home.
“Even in those moments when we used to be bored, there were often a lot of things going on that we didn’t realize,” Ms. Weeks said.
Credit…Andrea Chronopoulos
Last month, Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, wrote that the company wanted businesses it invests in to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as they emit by 2050 at the latest.
But crucial details were missing from the pledge, including what proportion of the companies BlackRock invests in will be zero-emission businesses in 2050. On Saturday, in response to questions from The New York Times, a BlackRock spokesman said that the company’s “ambition” was to have “net zero emissions across our entire assets under management by 2050,” The New York Times’s Peter Eavis and Clifford Krauss report.
As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important.
Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but are finding that the technology often doesn’t exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives.
Determining how hard companies are really trying can be very difficult when there are no regulatory standards that require uniform disclosures of important information like emissions.
Institutional Shareholder Services, a firm that advises investors on how to vote on corporate matters, analyzed what corporations are doing to reduce emissions. Just over a third of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 stock index have set ambitious targets, it found, while 215 had no target at all. The rest had weak targets.
“To realize the necessary emission reductions, more ambitious targets urgently need to be set,” said Viola Lutz, deputy head of ISS ESG Climate Solutions, an arm of Institutional Shareholder Services. “Otherwise, we project emissions for S&P 500 companies will end up being triple of what they should be in 2050.”
The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday chose Oshkosh Defense, a manufacturer of military vehicles, to build the next generation of postal delivery trucks, shunning an all-electric vehicle maker that had been in the running for the multibillion-dollar, 10-year contract.
Under an initial $482 million deal, Oshkosh will complete the design and then assemble 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years, the Postal Service said.
Oshkosh was awarded the contract over two other bidders. One, the Workhorse Group, a small producer of electric delivery trucks based in Loveland, Ohio, was counting on the postal contract to provide a surge in revenue. At its height this month, the company’s stock was up more than tenfold in a year, in part on hopes it would win all or part of the postal contract. On Tuesday, after the Postal Service announced its decision, Workhorse shares lost nearly half their value. The other final bidder was Karsan, a Turkish maker of trucks and buses that was considered a long shot for the contract.
The choice of Oshkosh, which has no track record in producing electric vehicles, over Workhorse raised questions among some environmentalists over President Biden’s promised push to electrify the federal fleet. But some critics had also raised concerns that too swift a transition to plug-in trucks made by a fledgling company — and the buildup of charging infrastructure that would require — could burden a Postal Service already struggling with delivery delays.
Oshkosh has promised to shift to battery-powered vehicles if necessary, reflecting a wider push by automakers to bolster their offerings of electric vehicles to cut down on the industry’s carbon footprint. The new vehicles will be equipped with either fuel-efficient gasoline engines or electric batteries, and they will be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technology, the Postal Service said.
The Post Office operates almost 230,000 vehicles and has one of the world’s largest civilian vehicle fleets, but its aging fleet — which federal data shows gets only about 10 miles a gallon — had also long been due for an upgrade.
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, speaks during a hearing with Robert Lighthizer, a non-pictured U.S. commercial agent, in Washington, DC, United States on Tuesday, March 12, 2019.
Anna Moneymaker | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Democrats, who lead the Senate’s powerful finance committee, are preparing to take over the rich, dark money groups and specialized agencies after their party takes control of Congress.
Committee chairman Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Announced its priorities to CNBC Thursday, one day after he officially took over the chairmanship of the panel.
He said tax reform was one of the priorities of the committee that includes Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., A Wall Street critic and advocate of tax hikes for the rich. Of particular interest, Wyden said, is how billionaires made so much money during the pandemic when much of the economy, including millions of working families, was struggling.
Wyden also said the committee will get a grip on health care costs that will involve confronting drug companies.
With regard to big tech, Wyden continues to be an advocate for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which he co-authored. The provision protects technology companies from being held liable for what users post on their platforms. Republican leaders, including former President Donald Trump, and several Democrats are against Section 230.
When asked if he would call executives from major pharmaceutical and technology companies, Wyden said, “We’re going to go where we need to get the facts.”
Dark money
The panel will delve into the tax-exempt nonprofits that organized the January 6 pro-Trump rally that led to the deadly Capitol Hill riot, Wyden said.
Shortly before becoming CFO, Wyden sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig asking him to investigate what role, if any, these groups played in the riot. Indeed, pro-Trump dark money organizations helped plan the rally, during which then-President Trump encouraged supporters to march on the Capitol.
These types of groups are known as dark money organizations because they do not publicly disclose their donors. Warren and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, DR.I., who is also a member of the Finance Committee, recently sent a letter to the new Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, addressing dark money groups across the political spectrum.
Wyden said the IRS told him it was considering his request.
“The reason I’m so interested in whether tax-exempt organizations were involved in planning or inciting the insurrection is that the law couldn’t be simpler and more understandable. Tax-exempt organizations cannot and cannot be involved in illegal activities. ” involved in inciting a riot, “Wyden told CNBC.” We will make sure the IRS moves on immediately. “
When asked whether he wants to ask Rettig to testify before the committee, Wyden did not rule this out. “We’re going to be looking at a number of issues where we want the IRS on file,” he said.
Tax reform targets over-riches
In 2019, Wyden proposed taxing income from capital gains at the same rates as wages and paying taxes on profits from stock operations. Upon joining the finance committee, Warren said she plans to introduce her proposed wealth tax on assets valued at over $ 50 million.
Warren’s plan includes “a two-cent tax on every dollar of individual assets over $ 50 million and an additional tax on every dollar of assets over $ 1 billion,” according to Wednesday’s press release.
For starters, the committee will focus on the news needed to ease tax reform – including an emphasis on how the rich got richer during the Covid-19 crisis.
“You have to be able to lay that foundation,” said Wyden.
“You have to be able to describe how people who are very, very wealthy billionaires … how come they can make these huge sums of money,” he added during the pandemic.
SINGAPORE – Thailand will receive its first batch of vaccines next month and plans to produce its own vaccines, according to finance ministers.
Initially, about 100,000 cans will arrive, Arkhom Termpittayapaisith told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Friday.
“The first vaccines will be coming to Thailand next month, the first lot,” he said, adding that Thai company Siam Bioscience will be working with Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to develop vaccines that will be useful for both Thailand and other countries are available.
He spoke to CNBC as part of the coverage of the World Economic Forum’s Davos agenda.
Thailand will begin rolling out vaccines on Feb. 14 and intends to vaccinate 19 million people in the first phase, its prime minister said on Wednesday, according to a Reuters report.
The Southeast Asian nation hasAccording to the report, 26 million cans of AstraZeneca to be made by Siam Bioscience and 2 million cans of China’s Sinovac were secured. It has also reserved 35 million cans from AstraZeneca, it added.
Pandemic meets tourism
Termpittayapaisith also said tourism is expected to recover by the end of the year rather than mid-year as forecast. The Thai economy relies heavily on tourism for its growth, but the arrivals of foreign tourists almost completely stalled during the pandemic.
Tourist arrivals fell 66% to 6.69 million in the first six months of 2020 as countries around the world imposed bans and travel restrictions due to the pandemic.
By comparison, Thailand had a record 39.8 million tourists in 2019, according to Reuters. Tourist spending represented around 11% of Thailand’s GDP that year, the report said.
Commuters wearing face masks wait for a canal boat in Bangkok on March 2, 2020.
MLADEN ANTONOV | AFP | Getty Images
“We’re also focusing on domestic consumption so you can see that the economic package … encourages more spending on the basic economy,” Termpittayapaisith said, adding that it aims to offset the decline in international tourism revenue.
Thailand lowered its forecast for economic growth for this year from 4.5% to 2.8% on Thursday. According to the central bank, the economy is expected to shrink by 6.6% in 2020.
The country reported a record 959 cases on Tuesday, the highest daily increase since early January when it accelerated its testing, according to Reuters.
Thailand has one of the lowest reported cases in Southeast Asia. So far, 17,023 cases and 76 deaths have been reported, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
