The extraordinary Renaissance man Henri Guéron has died of the coronavirus. A physicist like his father Jules Guéron, he married a Radcliffe friend, Judy Mitchell. But Henri jumped ship and retrained as an immigration lawyer. Judy funded him on his career change just as she had forced Radcliffe to allow her to become the first every woman to major in economics. They were pioneers. Judy became a professor of economics focusing on worker rights.

My husband's first foreign posting with the Financial Times was in Brussels and we wound up living in the same apartment building as Jules Guéron, Henri's father, then secretary-general of Euratom, a part of the European Union. Our neighbor became a mentor.

When our son became Bar-Mitzvah at the ULI reform synagogue in Paris, Jules Guéron attended the party and gave him a set of Anatole France novels to encourage him to kick off the Jewish traces.

In New York Henri worked often pro bono while Judy joined corporate boards. Despite Jules' secularism I wrote to Judy with the traditional Jewish wish: “may you be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

Harvard was pretty sexist in the 1960s, not just over economics majors. As the college magazine reported this month, the head of the astronomy department, Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin, was not given a Harvard full professorship and salary, but only a Radcliffe professorship with a lower pay grade. Lloyd and Susan Rudolph were both senior fellows in Indian government. Lloyd got tenure and Susan got pregnant. The Harvard Club of Paris refused to allow Radcliffe women to join it, barring Maria Livanos who might have boosted its funding.

*Gilead (GILD) will donate its entire stockpile of Remdesivir to the cities with the most vulnerability to coronavirus early next week, too late for Henri. Its CEO made the promise on CBS's Face the Nation. More than half the patients treated with the GILD drug recovered within 11 days, 4 days faster than those who didn't get it.

*Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) by some measures lost nearly $50 bn in Q1. I think there is a lesson in that. Buffett has always done well by buying when others are too fearful to do so. But it may not work this time round. He sold all Berkshire airline shares.

Human beings like to use past memories to decide what present-day crises mean. I am conflicted by our long-time Paris experience into fearing inflation more than depression—because I haven't lived through a depression. The issue is what will drive the US economy next, demand picking up or supply constricting. Being afraid of inflation I spot it everywhere, in the price of eggs, soup packets, and canned salmon. I am furious that my office telephone is out of order but that I am being billed for it all the same by Spectrum which moreover upped the rate. My Internet is down as well.

I have hopes that we can avoid inflation by using the money being spread out by the Fed and Congress to boost healthcare and infrastructure rather than corporate spending and aid to the wealthy. But I'm afraid we are not going to resolve social problems with our policies, but in fact add to inequality.

Thermo Fisher (TMO) and Roche (RHHBY) may lose out as the US Defense Dept is funding a coronavirus assay which works within 24 hours of exposure to the infection—before there are symptoms at all. It uses a polymerase chain reaction and nose or throat swabs and was developed by Mt Sinai Hospital, and Duke and Princeton Universities, according to The Guardian, a UK newspaper.

However the RHHBY antibody test was cleared for use to determine the spread of the virus by the FDA. Antibodies also may work to find people who were infected but did not get CVID-19. Roche says the test is 100% accurate in finding antibodies in the blood, and only delivers fake positives in 2% of those tested. The former number is the key to containment.

A less respectable British newspaper, the Mail on Sunday has just published an article claiming that the Wuhan Institute of Virology doing a study of bat viruses funded by US universities and a US government grant of $3.5 mn, sloppily carried out swab tests in a cave without personnel being protected from the bat juice. Mark Switzer, a US diplomat and scientist more than 2 years ago (March 2018) warned about the risk from how the Institute was handling virus samples. He included a photograph of a refrigerator holding 1500 sample potentially pathogenic viruses with a broken seal. Further confirmation came from an article published 8 months ago by Yuan Zhiming, who headed the Institute's biosafety committee. He wrote that the laboratories did not have biosafety managers or engineers in The Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity last Sept. “This makes it difficult to identify and mitigate potential safety hazards in facility and equipment operation early enough”, he wrote, blaming “limited resources.” The supposedly secure labs were being “run on extremely minimal operational costs” or “in some cases none at all.” In a later article, he wrote that “several high-level biosafety laboratories have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes". The photographs of the lab showing people working without protection have all disappeared from the Wuhan Institute website.

Prof. Yuan's lab is about 10 miles from the wildlife market blamed for the corona virus outbreak.

There is a case for blaming the US-funded laboratory instead, being made by Stephen Bryen PhD, my former colleague on the staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when Clifford P. Case (R-NJ) was the minority chairman.

Canadian ute Algonquin (AQN) raised its dividend to 15.5¢ from 14.1¢. That's US money.

A new consortium of UK companies will bring Telefonica, Virgin Media, and John Malone's Liberty Global together to offer telephone, TF, and broadband to subscribers of Vodafone next year, to compete with BT. We sold TEF and LBTYA but still own VOD.

A potential new gold mine operation depends on arbitration between Papua New Guinea and operators Barrick Gold (GOLD) and Zijin Ming of China. If a deal is struck another emerging market will gain from the price of gold, and GOLD may become a buy again.

Funds

Storage REITs are doing poorly in the lockdown except Global Self Storage Inc (SELF), a former global bond fund. It is down 15% (ex div 6.93%). Windmills are not magicians any more than Buffett. Sell SELF which is trading at 53.6x earnings and is barely covered on the Street.

Standard Life Aberdeen (SLFPF) - run US closed-end funds will create dividend-reinvestment (DRIP) accounts to issue shares in lieu of cash dividends to try to reduce the discounts from net asset value. The news boosted the Friday trading of Aberdeen Asia-Pacific Income Fund, FAX, up 0.85%; but not Aberdeen Global Income Fund, FCO, which fell 0.7%; Aberdeen Emerging Markets Equity Income Fund, AEF, which fell 2.05%; or Aberdeen Japan Equity Fund, JEQ, which fell 2.78%. Each fund will have a window allowing investments of up to $250,000 which can be used to buy funds at a discount directly from SLFPY managers, and not on the open market. If a fund is at a premium the new shares will be issued at Net Asset value or 95% of the current market price, whichever is higher.