COVID-19 notes:
Covid-19 Vaccines With ‘Minor Side Effects’ Could Still Be Pretty Bad
The risk of nasty side effects in the Moderna and Oxford trials should be
made clear now, before it ends up as fodder for the skeptics
… it’s vital that the public has a clear and balanced understanding of
this work—one that cuts through all the marketing and hype. But we’re not off
to a good start. The evidence so far suggests that we’re getting blinkered by
these groups’ PR, and so seduced by stories of their amazing speed that we’re
losing track of everything else. In particular, neither the mainstream media
nor the medical press has given much attention to the two vaccines’ potential
downsides—in particular, their risk of nasty adverse effects, even if they’re
not life-threatening. This sort of puffery doesn’t only help to build a false
impression; it may also dry the tinder for the future spread of vaccine
fearmongering.
The Key to Defeating COVID-19 Already Exists. We Need to Start Using It
As more doctors and nurses fall sick, it has become clear elimination is the best option
Many have argued for an explicit elimination strategy, acknowledging that
while not without its costs, ultimately it is the best choice for our society
and economy. As John Daley from the Grattan Institute wrote in March, this
would be the "least-bad" option.
Good takedown of the defeatist argument made by some that “we’re all
going to get it, it’s no use resisting, there will never be a vaccine and herd
immunity is all we have left to hope for.”
Worth reading in full, but includes this:
… It looks like it’s high time, in fact it’s long overdue, that we stop
calling COVID19 a respiratory disease. The SARS-CoV-2 virus may enter the body
through mouth and nose, but once it’s in, the lungs are merely the first organ
it reaches. But it’s through the vascular system that it spreads all through
the body.
What we see even in patients that have been declared “recovered”, and we
see this time and again, is crippling fatigue, lung damage, heart damage, brain
damage, nerve damage, multiple organ damage. And, as a recent report spelled
out, blood clotting was found in every organ in the body, including veins,
during autopsies.
Many “recovered” patients report symptoms, such as debilitating fatigue,
that can last for at least months. We simply don’t know for how long, because
it’s only been around for 7 months.
These are things to consider when you say we must surrender to the virus
and let it run its course. Even if it doesn’t overwhelm a certain area’s health
care system today, we may well be left with huge amounts of people who carry
its scars, and need medical assistance, for the rest of their lives. That
appears to be the minimum price you’re going to pay for letting the virus run
its course.
Why Armed Groups
in Latin America Are Enforcing COVID-19 Lockdowns
America’s Schools Are a Moral and Medical Catastrophe
A guide to understanding the science, and the politics, preventing U.S.
children from being educated this year.
India's Response to COVID-19 Is a Humanitarian Disaster
The government enforced a strict lockdown for weeks, giving the illusion
of responsible policy. But all the while it has failed to provide adequate
medical and economic support—and poor people are now paying the price.
Regular Related Fare:
U.S. High Frequency Indicators Confirm Economic Recovery Has Stalled since Late June
Architecture
billings, Sales manager indexes, Claims
It's Time To Rethink Asset Correlations In Era Of QE
Richard Wolff: Capitalism may not survive 2020 global crisis, which
will cut deeper and last longer than many predict
The current global crisis triggered by Covid-19 is the
third capitalist crash in this century. And governments’ incapacity to consider
non-capitalist solutions threatens to keep deepening this crisis into
capitalism’s worst.
The first was in early 2000. Because it was triggered
by the absurdly high prices of dot-com stocks, it got named the “dotcom
crisis.” In 2008, the trigger was widespread subprime mortgage default in the
US and the crash was far more serious, one of the worst in capitalism’s
history, second only to the crash of the 1930s. And now, in 2020, the trigger
was a viral pandemic, and we have a far deeper crash than in 2008.
Because capitalism’s periodic downturns (crashes,
recessions, depressions, crises, business cycles, busts, etc.) occur on average
every four to seven years, attributing each one to its different trigger has
the effect of distracting attention from the system’s inherent instability. It
also distracts from other basic problems that global capitalism has never
solved. Those have now exploded together, converging on this capitalist downturn
to make it extreme.
Five crises
Here are the five converging crises. Each country will
exhibit its own mixture of some or all of them. The United States suffers them
all, and this partly is why its economic crash and coronavirus pandemic are so
extreme.
The first is climate change (rising air and water
temperatures, floods, droughts, fires, etc.) that disrupts the world economy in
multiple ways.
The second is inequality. As French economist Thomas
Piketty and countless others have shown, capitalism worsens inequality of
wealth and income continuously unless and until the mass of impoverished revolt
or threaten to.
The third is racism. Many capitalist societies divide
their people into portions kept relatively safe from capitalism’s recurring
crashes and portions obliged to absorb them and their terrible consequences of
poverty, unemployment, slum dwelling, poor education, inadequate medical care,
and so on. It is simply too dangerous for capitalism’s reproduction over time
to threaten its entire working class with random, periodic unemployment,
poverty, etc. In the US, African-Americans have played the role of crisis
shock-absorber throughout the nation’s history. In other countries, religious
or ethnic minorities or immigrants play that role.
The fourth is instability, the periodic crashes that
accelerate inequality and reinforce racism.
And the fifth is the viral pandemic. Private profit
calculations lead private corporations almost everywhere to NOT produce and
stockpile the means to contain viral pandemics. Because governments pander to
the idea that private, profit-maximizing capitalists are paragons of
“efficiency,” they mostly failed to compensate for the private capitalists’
failure. So the pandemic was inadequately prepared-for and inadequately contained.
The more each government was committed to laissez-faire capitalism, the less it
offset private capitalism’s lack of preparedness for dangerous viruses, and the
worse is the coronavirus pandemic. The US and Brazil are today's glaring
examples.
What would have been logical response
The five converging crises persuade me that today’s
global crisis will cut deeper and last longer than most are currently
predicting.
The logical response to the 2020 crisis would have been…
Huge mistake
The way ahead presents a stark social choice.
Capitalism has shown itself poorly prepared for the pandemic’s arrival, poorly
prepared to contain it, and clearly unable to prevent the massively destructive
collision of business cycle downturn and viral pandemic. It is now proving
poorly adapted to managing the global capitalist downturn. Too much of both the
private and governmental responses to date have aimed at “returning to normal.”
By that is meant roughly the conditions before February/March of 2020 when
pandemic and capitalist crash arrived. Yet, there lies a huge mistake. That
normal contained all the seeds and processes that then brought us to the
present situation….
Joe Carson: Pandemic-Driven
Recession Is Not Over
Back-to-back strong monthly gains in retail sales in May and June and a
powerful rebound in the equity markets in Q2 create the impression the
recession is over. But the recessionary environment is only delayed, hidden by
the record amount of fiscal and monetary stimulus that has postponed layoffs,
spending cutbacks, bankruptcies, and business failures and operating losses.
Tad Rivelle, Chief Investment Officer of the Californian bond giant TCW,
doubts that the economy will recover as quickly as the rebound in risk assets
suggests. He's scrutinizing the magic of monetary policy and warns of a painful
restructuring process in many sectors of the corporate world.
There were many indications of a late cycle
environment already well established in 2019. We were seeing a pre-recessionary
economy in front of us. This was evident in corporate profitability, in world
trade and in the amount of leverage that had been built up in the corporate
sector. So we look at the whole Covid situation mostly as a catalyst: It
brought forward the recession that we were going to have at some point anyway,
and then accelerated the downturn by intensifying the pain on a variety of different
service industries, the most obvious being travel, hotels and similar sectors.
The Fed has essentially driven a gigantic wedge between the fundamentals
– which we don’t think are very good at all – and the capital market pricing.
Prices are reflective of a very high degree of optimism. Risk markets in
general are embracing the idea that we are going to have a V-shaped recovery.
This is a very odd notion since the current environment is really sort of two
recessions: The recession that you were going to have to deal with anyway, and
then this lockdown Covid-related situation as well. So, while it’s possible
that we will recover pretty quickly from the lockdown, you’re still left with
the deeper underlying issues.
…
The Fed hasn’t fixed the underlying problems, but it
has masked all the symptoms. Central banks are supposed to listen to
markets and watch the information they are producing. The Fed has completely
obscured the message. We don’t really know what businesses are viable because
everything is viable at the moment. Therefore, you don’t actually know what the
underlying level of stress is. All you know is that you
look at numbers that haven’t been seen in our professional lives: This kind of
economic contraction, as it relates to movements in GDP, has never been
experienced. So the idea that risk markets will look at a once in a century
kind of decline in economic variables and then basically turn around in a
matter of weeks and say «everything is going to be as it was in January almost»
is a big leap of faith from a pricing standpoint.
Federal Reserve
IR Policy - Longer, Lower, and ZIRP Until Something (or Everything) Breaks
the chart [on the left] shows interest rate cycles from 1981 through 2020
(and likely through 2040)...and note they grow progressively longer, starting
and ending lower, and with less interest rate recovery. Based on this pattern and the macro's driving
this, this current cycle is likely to be decades at zero (or more likely moving
to NIRP) with no rate hikes; the chart [on the right] details the DEPTH of the
cut (the percentage from starting rate to cycle low rate), the DURATION (the
number of months from initial rate cut to initial rate cut of the next cycle),
and the RECOVERY (how much rates are hiked in the hiking phase from the cycle
low rate).
BIS: Inflation at risk from COVID-19
when we say at risk, it is not that inflation is a risk (outside EM), the
risk is that there won’t be enough inflation; in other words there is deflation
risk.
Regular Fare:
The financial system has turned credit intermediation into a debt mint
that produces assets to enrich investors but leaves households, firms, and
governments struggling with unsustainable liabilities. The COVID-19 crisis
makes reform more urgent than ever.
A Mighty Short Squeeze May Be Building in Gold
As per Albert Edwards tweet: Authers shows how “bank
bullion swap dealers being caught very short as buyers of gold futures
increasingly take physical delivery. So even after this huge rally, he
highlights the high risk of blast-off if swap dealers forced to cover shorts”
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that the first half of 2020 has
brought, among many other things, renewed calls for the demise of the US
dollar. It’s been pretty much a non-stop call for over a decade now, and
longer. But this time, like all previous ones, I’m thinking: I don’t see it. I
guess my first question is always: please explain why the dollar would collapse
before the euro does.
Bubble Fare:
If That Was a Bubble, What’s This?
Rob Arnott Says It’s ‘Insanely Stupid’ to Chase Market Bubbles
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
The Beginning Of The End For Gas Flaring
'Green Economic Growth' Is a Myth
There are 'no realistic scenarios' to make the economic growth demanded
by capitalism compatible with a safe climate, researchers who advised the UN
found.
Heavy rains threaten more flooding across large parts of China
Other Fare:
3rd of 3-part series: The psychology of misinformation: How to prevent it
Quote of the Week:
Fauci: “I would not get on a plane or eat inside a restaurant.”
Tweet of the Week:
This cat discovering that it has ears is absolutely the best thing I will see today.
Pic of the Week:
Toon of the Week:
EXTRA (stuff not everyone cares to hear) FARE:
BLM and Cancel Culture Fare:
A new intelligentsia is pushing back against wokeness
Today we are having a new
national debate about whether the United States is redeemable, about the nature
of its founding figures and documents – even the date of its founding — and
what to do with those who dissent. But one side is winning. Since George
Floyd’s horrifying murder, an anti-racist discourse that insists on the primacy
of race is swiftly becoming the norm in newsrooms and corporate boardrooms
across America. But as in Douglass’s day, the sides are not clearly divided
along racial lines. A small group of Black intellectuals are leading a
counter-culture against the newly hegemonic wokeness. They are public
intellectuals like John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia
University
McWhorter: The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility: The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people
Related Historical Revisionism Fare:
How Lincoln Destroyed the United States
Quotes of the Week:
Chloe Valdary: “Racial essentialism is very reductive and actually oppressive. Ironically, it reduces us as individuals to our immutable characteristics, which is precisely what we were supposed to be fighting against.”
Thomas Chatterton Williams: Woke’ anti-racism proceeds from the premise that race is real – if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not more significant still – putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. We can simultaneously resist bigotry and imagine a society that has outgrown the identities it preys on”
James Howard Kunstler: The global economy is in a tailspin from corona virus, actually close to auguring clean into ground-zero and their services may not be required… for anything! I’d be demoralized, too, were I twenty years old. To make matters worse, the cafes, craft beer joints, and twee little vegan lunch bars are shut down, along with the music halls and every other arts venue, and who has any money? Their intersectional bodies are roiling with youthful hormones, with an assist from weed and other stimulants. What better way to work off all that energy on a warm summer night than to riot in the streets against a society that has actually prepared them for nothing except protesting the unfairness of life.
Caitlin Johnstone: In reality it would be a lot more truthful and authentic for the bases within the US war machine to continue to bear the names of racists, killers and oppressors, since these embody the values of that war machine far better than anything with a more pleasant ring to it. As long as you’re robbing the American people to murder brown-skinned foreigners for corporate interests and geostrategic resource control, you might as well have names which reflect such values on your war machinery. So I say keep the Confederate names on the bases. Hell, add more of them. Add the names of Nazis, genocidal warlords and serial killers too while you’re at it. It’d certainly be a lot more honest and accurate to have a Fort Jeffrey Dahmer as part of America’s murder machine than a Fort Colin Kaepernick.
War is the single worst
thing in the world. It is the most evil, insane, counter-productive, wasteful,
damaging, kleptocratic and unsustainable thing that human beings do, by a very
wide margin. If Americans could viscerally experience all of the horrors that
are inflicted by the war machine their wealth and resources are being funneled
into, with their perception unfiltered by propaganda and government secrecy,
they would fall to their knees screaming with abject rage. They would be in the
streets immediately forcing an end to this unforgivable savagery. Which is
exactly why America has so much government secrecy and propaganda. If Americans
could see with their perceptions unmanipulated, their response to the news that
$740 billion is being stolen from the American people by a sociopathic murder
machine in exchange for removing the names of Confederate leaders from its
bases would not be “Oh good, maybe we’ll get a Fort Harriet Tubman!” It would
be rage. Unmitigated, unforgiving rage. Which is all the status quo deserves.
Which is all the Democratic Party exists to prevent.
Political and Geopolitical Fare:
John Cleese: Society Is Now Controlled By The Most Touchy, Emotionally Unstable, & Fragile People
Former Monty Python and Fawlty
Towers star John Cleese has had enough of political correctness and the cancel
culture, and as for the state of the “dysfunctional world we live in,” warning
that “it’s completely hopeless…” As for the sense of hopelessness he feels,
Cleese blames the “power seekers.” “I believe there’s something wrong with
these people. The reason they want to be powerful is that they want to control
people, so that they don’t get lathered into situations that they can’t control
emotionally. The one thing they fear is losing power, so they’ll do almost
anything to hold on to it. If they don’t know what they’re doing or what
they’re talking about, there’s no way (the world) will ever get well.”
Tweets of the Week:
1)
Effective immediately, Washington will call
itself the “Washington Football Team”
2)
I strongly recommend changing it to the
Washington Lying Dog-Face Pony Soldiers.
3)
Washington is offensive. Call it: City Name Sports Team.
