BBC News
By Fernando Duarte
image captionInnocent Havyarimana lowered the prices of his products when the pandemic struck
When Innocent Havyarimana started his soap-making business in Kenya s Kakuma refugee camp in early 2015, he was trying to move on from the traumatic events that had made him flee his native Burundi a year earlier.
Little did he know that his cottage enterprise would become a major weapon in the fight against coronavirus in one of the world s biggest settlements of its kind - Kakuma is home to almost 200,000 people.
As soon as the former chemistry student realised the importance of hand-washing in tackling the spread of Covid-19, he lowered prices and started to offer his products in smaller quantities and sizes, to make them more affordable.
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Are stock markets, especially the U.S. market, in a bubble that is sure to pop? The answer depends on prospects for corporate earnings and interest rates. Provided the former are strong and the latter ultra-low, stock prices look reasonable.
The best-known measure of market value the “cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio” of Yale’s Nobel laureate, Robert Shiller is indeed flashing red. One can invert this metric, to show the yield: on the S&P Composite index, this is just three per cent Tuesday. The only years since 1880 it has been even lower were 1929 and 1999-2000. We all know what happened then.