GOLDMAN BULLISH ON VACCINE

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. expects large swathes of the public across major developed economies to receive a vaccine against the coronavirus by the middle of next year, driving a “sharp pickup” in global growth. The bank predicts half the U.K. public will be vaccinated in March, with the U.S. and Canada reaching that threshold a month later. The European Union, Japan and Australia are due to follow in May. “We expect large shares of the population to be vaccinated” toward the end of the second quarter, economists Daan Struyven and Sid Bhushan wrote in a report. With production increasing, the vaccination rate is set to exceed 70 per cent in the autumn. The best hopes for ending the pandemic, which has sunk the global economy into its deepest contraction since the Great Depression, rest on deployment of a vaccine.