COVID-19 notes
Johns Hopkins
COVID-19 DATA VISUALIZATION CENTER. Daily confirmed new cases and cumulative cases; US.
Data as of 8:52pm
Friday Apr 17
An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19
Not even Singapore has been able to avoid a lockdown
The efficient
city-state’s contact-tracing has not stopped the virus
Nor Japan: Coronavirus: Japan doctors warn of health system
'break down' as cases surge.
Currently 'no evidence' that COVID-19 survivors have
immunity, WHO warns
Scott Gottlieb: National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening
Executive
Summary
This report provides a road map for navigating through the current COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. It outlines specific directions for adapting our public-health strategy as we limit the epidemic spread of COVID-19 and are able to transition to new tools and approaches to prevent further spread of the disease. We outline the steps that can be taken as epidemic transmission is brought under control in different regions. These steps can transition to tools and approaches that target those with infection rather than mitigation tactics that target entire populations in regions where transmission is widespread and not controlled. We suggest measurable milestones for identifying when we can make these transitions and start reopening America for businesses and families.
In each phase, we outline the steps that the federal government, working with the states and public-health and health care partners, should take to inform the response. This will take time, but planning for each phase should begin now so the infrastructure is in place when it is time to transition.
The specific milestones and markers included in the report for transitioning our responses are judgments based on our current understanding, with the goal of facilitating an effective path forward. The epidemic is evolving rapidly, and our understanding of best responses will evolve as well. The broad set of tasks described here requires and will receive high-level, ongoing attention, and it should be updated and refined as additional evidence, context, and insights about the epidemic become available.
To gradually move away from a reliance on physical distancing as our primary tool for controlling future spread, we need:
1.
Better data to identify areas of spread and the rate of exposure and
immunity in the population;
2.
Improvements in state and local health care system capabilities,
public-health infrastructure for early outbreak identification, case
containment, and adequate medical supplies; and
3. Therapeutic, prophylactic, and preventive treatments and better-informed medical interventions that give us the tools to protect the most vulnerable people and help rescue those who may become very sick.
Our stepwise approach depends on our ability to aggregate and analyze data in real time. To strengthen our public-health surveillance system to account for the unprecedented spread of COVID-19, we need to harness the power of technology and drive additional resources to our state and local public-health departments, which are on the front lines of case identification and contact tracing. Finally, we must expand our investments in pharmaceutical research and development into COVID-19 and promote the rapid deployment of effective diagnostics, therapies, and eventually a vaccine.
Slow the Spread in Phase I. This is the current phase of response. The COVID-19 epidemic in the United States is growing, with community transmission occurring in every state. To slow the spread in this period,1 schools are closed across the country, workers are being asked to do their jobs from home when possible, community gathering spaces such as malls and gyms are closed, and restaurants are being asked to limit their services. These measures will need to be in place in each state until transmission has measurably slowed down and health infrastructure can be scaled up to safely manage the outbreak and care for the sick.
State-by-State Reopening in Phase II. Individual states can move to Phase II when they are able to safely diagnose, treat, and isolate COVID-19 cases and their contacts. During this phase, schools and businesses can reopen, and much of normal life can begin to resume in a phased approach. However, some physical distancing measures and limitations on gatherings will still need to be in place to prevent transmission from accelerating again. For older adults (those over age 60), those with underlying health conditions, and other populations at heightened risk from COVID-19, continuing to limit time in the community will be important.
Public hygiene will be sharply improved, and deep cleanings on shared spaces should become more routine. Shared surfaces will be more frequently sanitized, among other measures. In addition to case-based interventions that more actively identify and isolate people with the disease and their contacts, the public will initially be asked to limit gatherings, and people will initially be asked to wear fabric nonmedical face masks while in the community to reduce their risk of asymptomatic spread. Those who are sick will be asked to stay home and seek testing for COVID-19. Testing should become more widespread and routine as point-of-care diagnostics are fully deployed in doctors’ offices.
While we focus on state-by-state reopening of activities in a responsible manner and based on surveillance data, we note that states may move forward at a county or regional level if these conditions vary within the state and that coordination on reopening among states that share metropolitan regions will be necessary.
Establish Immune Protection and Lift Physical Distancing During Phase III. Physical distancing restrictions and other Phase II measures can be lifted when safe and effective tools for mitigating the risk of COVID-19 are available, including broad surveillance, therapeutics that can rescue patients with significant disease or prevent serious illness in those most at risk, or a safe and effective vaccine.
Rebuild Our Readiness for the Next Pandemic in Phase IV. After we successfully defeat COVID-19, we must ensure that America is never again unprepared to face a new infectious disease threat. This will require investment into research and development initiatives, expansion of public-health and health care infrastructure and workforce, and clear governance structures to execute strong preparedness plans. Properly implemented, the steps described here also provide the foundation for containing the damage that future pathogens may cause.
Lambert at
nakedcapitalism says: “Grab a cup of coffee. This is absolutely a must-read to
understand the vaccine situation.”
Word has come
from GSK and Sanofi that they are going to collaborate on vaccine development,
which brings together two of the more experienced large organizations in the
field. It looks like Sanofi is bringing the spike protein and GSK is bringing
the adjuvant (more on what that means below). Their press release says that
they plan to go into human patients late this year and to have everything
ready for regulatory filing in the second half of 2021. For its part,
Pfizer has announced that they’re pushing up their schedule with BioNTech and
possibly starting human trials in August, which probably puts them on a similar
timeline for eventual filing.
“But that’s next
year!” will be the
reaction of many who are hoping for a vaccine ASAP, and I can understand why. The
thing is, that would be absolutely unprecedented speed, way past the
current record set by the Ebola vaccine, which took about five years.
The fight
against the coronavirus won’t be over when the U.S. reopens. Here’s how the
nation must prepare itself.
As I wrote last
month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus,
suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to
24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about
that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree
that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people
haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said
Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of
Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.” The pandemic is not a hurricane
or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus
will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when
this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of
Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we
continue?”
COVID-19: WHY WE
SHOULD ALL WEAR MASKS — THERE IS NEW SCIENTIFIC RATIONALE
Antibody Tests
For Coronavirus Can Miss The Mark
VERY interesting graphics about that here (re false positives)
Rising deaths
outside hospitals are not being recorded as coronavirus
There's Only One
Way to Get the U.S. Back to Work: Testing, Testing and More Testing
Projecting the
transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period. Science.
From the abstract: ” Absent other interventions, a key metric for the
success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded.
To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be
necessary into 2022.”
Peter Turchin: Italy turns the
corner.
Italy is shaking off covid-19, with the number of people in intensive
care units now decreasing steadily
COVID-19
Occupational Risk Score
French prof
sparks furor with lab leak claim
Professor Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the AIDS
virus, says the new coronavirus is the result of a lab accident
A theory put forward by French professor Luc Montagnier — award-winning
co-discoverer of the AIDS virus but also mocked by some colleagues for some
outrageous theories — has sparked a scientific firestorm. According to the
Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, a man used to controversy, the SARS-CoV-2 virus
is the result of an attempt to manufacture a vaccine against the AIDS virus ..
The Only Man Who
Has a Clue (Taleb &colleagues and their warnings since Jan: of complex systems, precautionary
principle and best practices)
Regular Related Fare:
Stephanie Kelton: ‘They’re going to have massive
deficits. And it’s fine’
More than anyone else, Kelton is responsible for popularising modern
monetary theory — the idea that if a government is in charge of its own
currency, no inherent budget rule constrains it from spending more than it
taxes.
Michael Hudson
et al. The Use and Abuse of MMT. I included this article last week, but worth referencing again to
highlight this excerpt:
Modern Monetary
Theory (MMT) was developed to explain the logic of running government budget
deficits to increase demand in the economy’s consumption and capital investment
sectors so as to maintain full employment. But the enormous U.S. federal
budget deficits from the Obama bank bailout after the 2008 crash through the
Trump tax cuts and Coronavirus financial bailout have not pumped money into the
economy to finance new direct investment, employment, rising wages and living
standards. Instead, government money creation and Quantitative Easing have been
directed to the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors. The result
is a travesty of MMT, not its original aim.
By subsidizing
the financial sector and its debt overhead, this policy is deflationary instead
of supporting the “real” economy. The effect has been to empower the banking
sector, whose product is credit and debt creation that has taken an
unproductive and indeed extractive form.
Adam Tooze: Shockwave.
and The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back (no subscription required here)
Thursday’s news
confirms that the Western economies face a far deeper and more savage economic
shock than they have ever previously experienced. Regular business cycles
generally start with the more volatile sectors of the economy—real estate and
construction, for instance, or heavy engineering that depends on business
investment—or sectors that are subject to global competition, such as the motor
vehicles industry. In total, those sectors employ less than a quarter of the
workforce. The concentrated downturn in those sectors transmits to the rest of
the economy as a muffled shock.
The coronavirus
lockdown directly affects services—retail, real estate, education,
entertainment, restaurants—where 80 percent of Americans work today. Thus the
result is immediate and catastrophic.
States Are in a Quandary as Taxes Evaporate and Virus
Spending Soars
The ballooning
costs of the coronavirus pandemic have put an unexpected strain on the finances
of states, which are hurriedly diverting funds from elsewhere to fight the
outbreak even as the economic shutdown squeezes their main source of revenue —
taxes. States provide most of America’s public health, education and policing
services, and a lot of its highways, mass transit systems and waterworks. Now,
sales taxes — the biggest source of revenue for most states — have fallen off a
cliff… Personal income taxes, usually states’ second-biggest revenue source,
started falling in March, when millions lost their paychecks and tax
withholdings stopped. April usually brings a big slug of income-tax money, but
this year the filing deadlines have been postponed until July.
Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard two-fer: Delusional: Investors are underestimating the economic
shock the world is facing
This time we
will avoid the textbook sequence of events in recessions: a swift crash
followed by a torrid buy-the-dip rebound, and then a slow downward grind over
months as reality hits home, ending only in capitulation at far lower levels. Authorities
have spared us such a fate by rescuing everything immediately … "We need a
vaccine. Until we get one, the stock markets are in cloud-cuckoo land,"
says professor Anthony Costello from University College London. The IMF's most
extreme scenario is all too plausible. It assumes the pandemic drags on, with a
second outbreak in 2021.
And: Rift fears as eurozone bailout fund is sunk
The eurozone’s
emergency plan to fight Covid-19 has unravelled within days. Italy’s prime
minister has rejected the central element of the €540bn package as a ‘trap’. No
Italian leader in the current febrile mood could accept it and survive for
long… ‘The deal is an admission of European inadequacy,’ said professor Adam
Tooze, of Columbia University. The plan eschews joint debt issuance and amounts
to extra debt foisted on states already at the outer boundaries of debt
sustainability, pushing them further into a ‘bad equilibrium’. Jean-Paul Fitoussi,
of Science Po in Paris, says the package amounts to ‘collective suicide’… ‘If
there is no real mutualisation of debt, we will either slide further
underwater, or take the inevitable politically incorrect step and say, ‘Enough
is enough, let’s get out’,’ he said. Above all, it misjudges the simmering
anger in Italy
It takes weeks
for jobs numbers to come out. That is too long in virus-time. These guys try to
fill the gap.
Real Time US Labor Market Estimates During 2020
Coronavirus Outbreak. PDF.
Labor market
statistics for the United States are collected once a month and published with
a three-week delay. In normal times, this procedure results in timely and
useful statistics. But these are not normal times. Currently, the most
recent statistics refer to the week of March 8- 14; new statistics will not be
available until May 8. In the meantime, the Coronavirus outbreak has shut down
a substantial portion of the U.S. economy. More timely and frequent data on the
impact on the labor force would surely be useful for both policy makers and the
broader public. Our core survey closely follows the CPS, which allows us to
construct estimates consistent with theirs. The first wave of our survey
covers the week of March 29-April 4. Our findings reveal unprecedented changes
in the US labor market since the most recent CPS data were collected:
1. The employment
rate decreased from 72.7% to 60.7%, implying 24 million jobs lost.
2. The
unemployment rate increased from 4.5% to 20.2%.
3. Hours worked
per working age adult declined 25% from the second week of March. Half of this
decline is due to lower hours per employed as opposed to lower employment.
4. Over 60% of
work hours were from home, compared with roughly 10% in 2017-2018.
5. Those who
still have their jobs are working fewer hours; 21% report a decline in
earnings.
6. Declines were
most pronounced for workers who were female, older, and less educated.
Martin Wolf: The world
economy is now collapsing
For what any forecast is worth, the IMF now suggests that global output
per head will contract by 4.2 per cent this year, vastly more than the 1.6 per
cent recorded in 2009, during the global financial crisis. … This “baseline”
assumes economic reopening in the second half of 2020. If so, the IMF forecasts
a 3 per cent global contraction in 2020, followed by a 5.8 per cent expansion
in 2021. In advanced economies, the forecast is of a 6.1 per cent contraction
this year, followed by a 4.5 per cent expansion in 2021. All this may prove too
optimistic.
The IMF offers three sobering alternative scenarios. In the first, lockdowns
last 50 per cent longer than in the baseline. In the second, there is a second
wave of the virus in 2021. In the third, these elements are combined. Under
longer lockdowns this year, global output is 3 per cent lower in 2020 than in
the baseline. With a second wave of infections, global output would be 5 per
cent below the baseline in 2021. With both misfortunes, global output would be
almost 8 per cent below the baseline in 2021. Under the latter possibility,
government spending in advanced economies would be 10 percentage points higher
relative to GDP in 2021 and government debt 20 percentage points higher in the
medium term than in the already unfavourable baseline. We have no real idea which will prove most correct. It might be even
worse: the virus might mutate; immunity for people who have had it might not
last; and a vaccine might not be forthcoming. A microbe has overthrown all our
arrogance.
Is America Going
to Have a Covid-19 Apocalypse?
Covid is one of those disasters which tests whomever
it happens to. Countries like Vietnam and Taiwan and even Germany
stayed on top of it, or got ahead of it, and are doing fine. Those who
mishandled it are taking some hard hits.
This isn’t primarily about deaths, though those are
awful, it is about the mishandling of the economy. In Canada, there’s a
benefit of $2,000 dollars per month for which most people who lost their jobs
qualify. Other countries have done even better: freezing mortgage payments,
rent, and so on, and organizing food delivery.
In the US, we have predictions of a 30 percent unemployment rate. I just
saw that less than half of Los Angeles county still has a job.
The bailout for regular people is $1,200. In a place like Los Angeles,
that won’t even cover most people’s rent.
There’s been a vast bailout, mainly–though not exclusively–through the
Fed, for the rich. Basically, as much free money at the trough as they can
gorge on. But small businesses are toast. A third of households, at
least, are on the verge of not just homelessness but not being able to eat.
Meanwhile we have a lovely display of typical US
business incompetence. The US’s logistics system is a wonder of the
world, but it was created in the 80s and 90s by people who are retired or dead
now. Meat packing plants are shutting down because of multiple cases, truckers
and warehouse workers are getting sick and scared. Farmers complain of problems
getting workers. The price of beef for farmers has crashed through the floor,
but they can’t get the animals to consumers.
Meanwhile, multiple states have not instituted isolation, and there are “protests,”
backed by Republicans, to reopen states that have.
Not isolating nationally means there are pockets of plague which are
still expanding exponentially, and which can reinfect the areas which did
isolate. Coming out of isolation too soon will mean that cases will explode
again a month to a month and a half after self-isolation ends.
The job issues mean trouble. People who can’t afford
food become violent. Food riots bring down nations.
Assuming these storms are weathered, or that Americans are so beaten down
they won’t riot even when starving, when the economy does re-open, many of the
jobs will be gone. People who did not earn during the time down will still have
to pay back-rent. At best, their spending is crippled, at worst they get
evicted. Many landlords will lose their property in any case, many small
businesses will go bankrupt and never re-appear. The likely scenario, longer term “after” the Coronavirus is another 10
year depression, except this one is likely to be a deflationary depression: no one but the rich has
money, no one is spending.
Imagine the fairly standard scenario of multiple waves
of coronavirus with multiple waves of self-isolation. No national policy, so
some states stay open as others are closed. People in warehouses keep getting
hit, logistics people get hit, migrant workers get hit or can’t even get into
the country. The system, already drawn tight to extract maximum profit, starts
breaking. Prices surge, there are actual shortages in many places.
This is some months out, I’d guess, although this is the sort of scenario
that goes from “eh, it’s OK” to BOOM very very fast when it does go.
America is fragile. The choice to not freeze mortgages, rent, interest
payments and so on, and to not bail out ordinary people as I instructed is
There is a real economy, Virginia, and if it freezes up, there will be
hell to pay. Logistics workers need PPE and they need it now. Freezes of rent,
mortgages, interest payments and so on need to be done now. If a complete idiot
wasn’t running the country, taking national control of when states close and
reopen should happen now. I would suggest that if Americans don’t want their
country in a new great depression, that they find a way to depose Trump now,
and if Pence won’t be competent, ditch him too.
There is a chance that America will fumble thru, as governors and mayors
who aren’t complete incompetents (and the rare actual competent governor, which
doesn’t include New York’s Cuomo), plus the rare competent CEOs manage to hold
thing together, barely.
But right now, this is looking like an epic
clusterfuck.
The US has a work force of 164,000,000.
The unemployment forecast from the work closedowns is 30%. That would mean 49,000,000
people who are potential rioters. (We are half way there with today’s report of
a 16% unemployment rate with 22 million unemployed). Many of these people were
already living paycheck to paycheck, could not raise $400, and their debts
leave them no discretionary income. As
they could barely service their debts when employed, how do they service them
when unemployed and when their small businesses are closed and incurring costs
but have no revenues? Loans further
indebt them. The cash payouts to the unemployed might cover food and housing
but will not service their debts.
… The people in charge of the fix are only fixing it for themselves and
in a short-sighted way. There is only
one way to fix the situation, and that is to write down private sector debts to
levels that can be serviced. As the
creditors are being bailed out regardless, their loan losses don’t matter.
Stiglitz Calls for ‘Super Chapter 11’ to Avoid
Systemic Collapse
Policymakers
need a way to prevent debtors from going under while the economy is on lockdown
Biophysical
Economics and the Coronavirus Pandemic
Summary: As I see it, there are two
constraints on our ability to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. The first
constraint is money. This gets all the press right now — and rightly so. To
slow the spread of the coronavirus, millions of people are staying home from
work. Since we don’t want these people to starve, we need to somehow give them
money. But where should this money come from?
While this appears like a monetary constraint, it’s
actually a social constraint. Money is a social fiction that we can create and
destroy at will. So at the societal level, ‘not having enough money’ isn’t a
real constraint. No, the real constraint is about who has the power to create
and distribute money. We usually give most of this power to the private sector.
(Banks create the majority of money when they issue credit.) We forget that the
government can also create money. Fortunately, many governments of the world
are rediscovering this power, and are paying their citizens to stay at home.
While this (apparent) monetary constraint is on the top of our minds,
there are also biophysical constraints on how we can deal with the coronavirus
pandemic. These biophysical constraints are little discussed, but they’re more
fundamental than the lack of money.
These biophysical constraints have to do with industrialization, which
has greatly changed the structure of society. Some of this social change makes
coping with pandemics easier. Some makes it harder.
Let’s start with the bad. …
Figure 1: The demographic inversion in the US. The sector composition of
the US in 1800 (left) and in 2010 (right). [Source: Rethinking Economic Growth
Theory from a Biophysical Perspective]
A Pandemic
Iceberg Hits the ‘Unsinkable’ U.S. Economy– A Map Ahead
Regular Fare:
Joe Carson: The
"Best" Economy Ever? Neither Before, Nor After Coronavirus
The strong rebound in equity prices since mid-March suggests investors are banking on a fast rebound in the economy once government eases the restrictions on work-life, travel and social and recreational gatherings. Reopening regions or sectors of the economy will undoubtedly produce a statistically powerful rebound; triggering a race among analysts to revise up growth estimates as fast as they raced to reduce them. But “boomerang” statistics on jobs and GDP does not mean a return to the “best” economy for the simple it was not the best before. Here’s why. ….
The economic
crisis will expose a decade’s worth of corporate fraud.
Big Thoughts:
Pepe Escobar: Total system
failure will give rise to new economy
Soon we will be facing three major, interlocking debates: the management
(in many cases appalling) of the crisis; the search for future models; and the
reconfiguration of the world-system.
This is just a first approach in what should be seen as a do-or-die
cognitive competition.
Sound analyses of what could be the next economic model are already popping up. As
background, a really serious debunking of all (dying) neoliberalism development
myths can be seen here.
Yes, a new economic model should be revolving around these axes: AI
computing; automated manufacturing; solar and wind energy; high-speed 5G-driven
data transfer; and nanotechnology.
China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are very well positioned for what’s
ahead, as well as selected European latitudes.
Plamen Tonchev, head of the Asia unit at the Institute of International
Economic Relations in Athens, Greece, points to the possible reorganization –
short term – of Belt and Road Initiative projects, privileging investment in
energy, export of solar panels, 5G networks and the Health Silk Road.
Covid-19 is like a particle accelerator, consolidating
tendencies that were already developing.
It’s the End of
the World Economy as We Know It
When big convulsive economic events happen, the implications tend to take
years to play out, and spiral in unpredictable directions. Who would have
thought that a crisis that began with mortgage defaults in American suburbs in
2007 would lead to a fiscal crisis in Greece in 2010? Or that a stock market crash
in New York in 1929 would contribute to the rise of fascists in Europe in the
1930s? The world economy is an infinitely complicated web of interconnections.
We each have a series of direct economic relationships we can see: the stores
we buy from, the employer that pays our salary, the bank that makes us a home
loan. But once you get two or three levels out, it’s really impossible to know
with any confidence how those connections work. And that, in turn, shows what
is unnerving about the economic calamity accompanying the spread of the novel
coronavirus.
… The human toll of COVID-19 is unlikely to approach even a mean fraction
of the pain visited on humanity in the first quarter of the 20th century. But
what about the stories we tell about our global institutions, our shared
values, and our own orthodoxies and authorities?
Those stories are dying. They are dying because the institutions built on
those stories failed us all, and all at once.
First, the people die; then, the stories.
The failures of these institutions were not simple mistakes, evidence of
wrongness of one kind or another. The failures of these institutions were
failures of narrative, devastating revelations of
each institution’s fundamental inability to do what they said they would do. Revelations that their
purpose was something other than the story they told about themselves. In
various ways they each held power over us through those stories, told using the
language of our needs and values and beliefs. In a single event, the world
proved those stories false on their faces.
Whether we allow the world-as-it-is that was revealed by COVID-19 to
change our commitment to these institutions and ideas is up to us; this is a time in which the world may be reshaped. In the past month and for
the first time in most of our lives, each of us looked around and knew that
everyone else had seen the same thing. We saw the emperors of our world
standing naked as the day they were born. If the ravages of war and disease are
humanity’s birthright, so too is the opportunity
that comes along ever so rarely to seize something different. Something better.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Is there a limit
to optimism when it comes to climate change?
On the fringes of the
pessimist camp, the suspicion circulates that the optimists deliberately
undersell the gravity of climate change: the optimist is a kind of climate
esoteric who fears the effects of the truth on the masses. Let us set these
aside as caricatures. Both the optimists and the pessimists tend to agree on the
prescription: immediate and drastic action. But the reasons offered for the prescription
naturally vary with the expectations of success. The optimist has recourse
especially to our self-interest when selling climate change mitigation …. This
brand of green boosterism has little resonance with those who, like the Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci, subscribe to ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of
the will’. Expect to fail, says the
pessimist, try anyway
Red, White & Green. book review of Climate
Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case, by Anatol Lieven
He correctly argues that to
rebuild our economies in a way that successfully caps climate change will
require consistency of purpose among governments of the Right and the Left
across a number of electoral cycles. Climate change cannot be stopped in a
four- or five-year presidential or parliamentary term. Durable consensus of
this kind can only be achieved by remedying the failures of the political
status quo.
… So, Lieven believes, now
is the time for enlightened state command. Democracy as presently practised has
become about short-term gratification. If we are to prevail against climate
change, we must adopt a Chinese perspective and concentrate on the long term.
… Lieven is surely right
that climate change will reshape our politics as thoroughly as the two world
wars did. It is time (and hopefully not too late) to put ourselves on a war footing.
We must spawn a new politics.
… Lieven imagines a siege
state response. I imagine a world that makes common cause against a shared
threat. Neither approach is probably right on its own, but the more dangerous
scenario is that nothing happens at either level. So we should heed Lieven’s
call to action
Nassim Nicholas Taleb tweet:
Rightwing sociopathic quacks
like Bjorn Lomborg are ALWAYS on the wrong side of things precautionary,
(including climate). Saying "no worse than the flu" was ignorant 3
months ago; saying it after data from the past few weeks is outright
malfeasance.
Other Fare:
[Greek] Gov't to go
after priests flouting quarantine
LRB: Inclined to
Putrefaction.
In the cold autumn of 1629, the plague came to Italy. It arrived with the German
mercenaries (and their fleas) who marched through the Piedmont countryside. The
epidemic raged through the north, only slowing when it reached the natural
barrier of the Apennines. On the other side of the mountains, Florence braced
itself. The officials of the Sanità , the city’s health board, wrote anxiously
to their colleagues in Milan, Verona, Venice, in the hope that studying the
patterns of contagion would help them protect their city. Reports came from
Parma that its ‘inhabitants are reduced to such a state that they are jealous
of those who are dead’. The Sanità learned that, in Bologna, officials had
forbidden people to discuss the peste, as if they feared you could summon death
with a word. Plague was thought to spread through corrupt air, on the breath of
the sick or trapped in soft materials like cloth or wood, so in June 1630 the
Sanità stopped the flow of commerce and implemented a cordon sanitaire across
the mountain passes of the Apennines.… The Sanità arranged the delivery of
food, wine and firewood to the homes of the quarantined. Each quarantined
person received a daily allowance of two loaves of bread and half a boccale (around
a pint) of wine. On Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, they were given meat. On
Tuesdays, they got a sausage seasoned with pepper, fennel and rosemary. On
Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, rice and cheese were delivered; on Friday, a
salad of sweet and bitter herbs. The Sanità spent an enormous amount of money
on food because they thought that the diet of the poor made them especially
vulnerable to infection, but not everyone thought it was a good idea. ….
US Political Farce Fare:
#DemExit Now:
How the Democratic Party Cheated Bernie Sanders Out of the Nomination
… When they stopped counting the vote in Iowa, depriving the leading
candidate of essential momentum, it was a clear indication that once again the party establishment would do
everything to manipulate results in favor of yet another neoliberal avatar
bound to lose to Trump in an ignominious landslide—which is actually what the
Democratic party establishment wants, four more years of their demonized
opponent rather than the tiniest return toward social decency. Nothing about
the coronavirus changes this essential dynamic.
That’s how bad the Democratic party has become, blatantly tipping the scales toward their favored outcome in order to
maintain oligarchic control, and they expect us to Vote Blue No Matter
Who?
We’re asked to believe that the candidate who
supported ordinary people at the grassroots level all across the country, by
lending crucial support to strikes and direct action, spawning innumerable
viable candidacies at the local and state levels, and regularly summoning many
thousands of people to populist rallies calling for basic human decency, was easily defeated by a cognitively
challenged Wall Street shill who has backed every economic and foreign policy
barbarity of the last 50 years, and who cannot be put in a small gym with a
few dozen people without descending into furious spittles of verbal aggression.
We’re supposed to trust that the candidate with a pervasive national
presence for the last five years was suddenly, in a matter of 72 hours,
annihilated by the geezer who had zero volunteers, staff or advertising in any
of the states he miraculously turned around by 20, 30 or 40 points.
It’s time to put an end to this sham, because we can’t
accede to this level of duplicity without ourselves becoming complicit in the
madness. Trump essentially terminated the neoliberal Republican party in one
election cycle, but because the Democratic party establishment is more
entrenched and dangerous, the prime carrier of the neoliberal virus to which
the Republicans are just accessories, it is the more difficult enemy to beat.
(too many) Quotes of the Week:
Joe Rogan on Trump vs Biden:
“He’s gonna destroy him. He’s gonna kill him man. I mean it’s such an
easy target, it’s like Mike Tyson versus a three-year-old.”
Ryan Cooper: “Faced with a shattering economic breakdown,
Obama and his key advisers largely sought to restore the wobbly pre-crisis
status quo, inaugurating a decade of economic stagnation and dislocation that
culminated in the election of Donald Trump.”
from: Into the Maw.
How Obama-era economics failed us.
Jonathan Tepper: We have never seen countrywide lockdowns to prevent the spread of a
virus. It is right that governments compensate citizens for quarantines that
prevent them from working and central banks prevent a short-term liquidity
crisis from becoming a crisis of solvency. But the response must not be a cover
to bail out bust borrowers and out-of-pocket speculators. Yet last week we
witnessed unprecedented moves by the US Federal Reserve to buy low-rated bonds
and even exchange traded funds of junk debt. Markets reacted with glee at being
rescued yet again. One strategist on Wall Street even called it a ‘gift from
the Easter bunny’. Former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner once described Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street as ‘the bible of central banking.’
According to that 1873 book, central bankers are supposed to avert panic by
lending early and without limit to solvent companies, against good collateral,
and at a penalty rate. However, when it came to the crunch in 2008
Mr Geithner consciously disregarded that sacred text. He and then Fed chairman
Ben Bernanke lent freely to possibly insolvent groups at zero rates. Those actions encouraged moral hazard on a grand scale. Instead of
promoting prudence, central bankers since then have continuously spiked the
punchbowl.
Doug Noland: Even before COVID-19,
central banks and their “money” creating operations were considered fundamental
to the solution for myriad problems at home and abroad. With stocks at inflated
record highs and boom-time unemployment near 60-year lows, the Fed nonetheless
slashed rates and restarted QE. Despite ongoing double-digit Credit growth, the
People’s Bank of China (PBOC) cut rates and pursued aggressive monetary
injections. Not many weeks after the ECB ended a historic ($2.6 TN) QE
operation, it abruptly restarted the printing press. Money supply in the U.S.,
China and elsewhere surged parabolically. I’ve referred to 2019 as a “Monetary Fiasco,” though it proved merely a
warmup.
Noland again: How could it be possible
for stocks to mount such a rally in the face of a looming global economic
depression? No Conundrum. Early in the mortgage finance Bubble period, I would
write “liquidity loves inflation!” Throw “money” into an
unsound system and it will instinctively gravitate to areas demonstrating
robust inflationary biases. These days stocks fit the bill. Equities
markets are bolstered by the deeply entrenched view that the Fed will do whatever
it takes to sustain inflated prices, along with a market structure (i.e. ETFs,
derivatives, 401k plans and pension contributions, hedge funds, algorithmic
trading, stock buybacks, etc.) that promotes trend-following flows….. COVID-19 is the catalyst for the bursting of history’s greatest global
Bubble. And no amount of fiscal and monetary stimulus will immunize the U.S.
economy from the unfolding economic downturn. After a decade of historic
excess, global economies face unprecedented fragility. Importantly, international
officials lack the flexibility enjoyed by policymakers from the world’s reserve
currency government. Here in the U.S., a unique
dynamic sees massive monetary inflation chiefly funneled into U.S. securities
markets, bypassing most of the population and much of the economy.
Kunstler: “Money is not an economy.
Money is a medium of exchange within an economy where people grow things, make
things, move things, and serve each other in countless ways. We’re not going to replace all those growings, makings, movings, and
services by just giving people money. Money may produce more
money by the magic of compound interest, but money is not necessarily wealth,
it just represents our ideas about wealth, and interest stops compounding
anyway when the trend is clearly for reduced growings, makings, movings, and
servicings.”
Hamilton Nolan: “Fantasize for a moment
that we could set aside politics and operate based upon common sense. What
would the federal government do to best mitigate the devastation that this
pandemic will visit upon human beings? It would, first of all, provide free
healthcare to everyone. It would distribute medical resources nationally based
on the greatest need. Then, to protect people from the necessary economic deep
freeze we are all in due to social distancing, the government would pursue
measures that would get everyone through this time in one piece: It would
subsidize the nation’s payrolls, so that workers could stay in their jobs and
businesses could restart easily; it would suspend rent, for people and
businesses alike; it would send everyone a monthly basic income to pay for
necessities until this is over; and it would avoid allowing small businesses to
go bankrupt, because those represent millions of jobs that people need to
return to.
Those are all obvious steps to take if your goal was to protect humans.
But imagine, instead, if you had an entirely different goal: protecting
capital. What would you do then? Well, you would prioritize the health of
corporate balance sheets, rather than human bodies. You would keep the healthcare
industry, now booming, in private hands; you would stimulate consumer demand
via unemployment benefits, rather than by keeping workers on existing payrolls,
in order to create an enormous pool of cheap and desperate labor; you would
pursue tax cuts for the investor class; you would welcome the opportunity to
allow debt to pile up on individuals; and you wouldn’t be too sad about small
businesses going bankrupt—they are, after all, just ceding market share to
bigger, richer businesses. You would use this crisis to create a greater, not
lesser, concentration of wealth. You would emerge on the other side with more,
not less, inequality. The truth is, it would be easy.
Now, guess what the U.S. federal government is doing?”
From: The Plan Is to
Save Capital and Let the People Die.
Bill Blain: “As analysts simultaneously forecast global
depression and record stock markets by year end, are we are into the realms of
financial insanity? I have some seriously dark dystopian forebodings about
where this could go... If you can’t make your mind up about
markets, you are in good company. I have to admit I am beginning to wonder what
some commentators are smoking – there is lot of hallucinogenic nonsense out
there. But, the bottom line is the global economy is not dead. It is adapting.
That means massive change. It means dropping current orthodoxy, and working out
what is real today may well be dead and buried tomorrow, and front-running the
completely new opportunities that are going to arise. It’s dangerous, but kind
of exciting. To face the future... get pragmatic. First: Work out why the market is fooling itself. …..”
Fun Fare:
Rescuing cobalt-eyed baby of the world’s fluffiest cat
A new ’Oumuamua
theory could mean many more interstellar visitors are headed our way
Tweets of the Week:
Researchers in
Finland created this 3D model to show how easily
#Covid_19 can spread in indoor spaces. That’s why mask, goggles, gloves are
important when grocery shopping/out & about.
In a sane world, the government would deliver a small Package to every
person in America. Each month: face masks, gloves, a pre-paid debit card,
testing kits, information about how to vote by mail. All delivered by USPS.
Toon of the Week:
Pic of the Week:
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