COVID-19 notes:
New Study: Vitamin D reduces risk of ICU admission 97%
… Taleb’s approach, and that of his “co-conspirators” Yaneer Bar-Yam and
Joe Norman, is as valid as it ever was, but that validity doesn’t last forever
if it is not applied by those in charge of policy. It hasn’t been and today
we’re way past the best-before date. Which, as we will see going forward, is
highly unfortunate, because all the alternatives are much worse.
We’ve seen an entire world, and tons of governments in that world, caught
with no blueprints and no playbooks for a coronavirus pandemic, despite having
been warned about such a pandemic coming, for decades. And so they all went
into “make it up as you go along” mode. With very little knowledge of what was
going on, and what to expect. With predictable failures as a result. …
That’s why blueprints and playbooks, written well before a pandemic
happens, are so important. You should never leave those things up to
politicians, who don’t understand the matter at hand, who will always have
other interests in mind (the economy), and will therefore assemble a bunch of
local epidemiologists in order to declare: we’re listening to science! Most of
these people mean well, but that’s not enough. And with that, we’re moving out
of the summer time and into, what?, COVID 2.0? With Lockdowns 2.0? There is no
need. Here’s what you do: Order a billion rapid tests, a billion doses of
hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a billion doses of zinc, a billion doses of Vitamin
D, and a zillion N95 facemasks.
…
2nd lockdowns are going to be hell to pay, for governments, for their
citizens, for their economies. And they don’t have to be. If just everyone gets
out the Fauci, “experts”, mood., and their potential connections to Big Pharma.
Vitamin D and zinc and HCS look very promising. So does the Russian vaccine,
but we don’t want it because, well, it’s Russian, and even more because it would deprive Gilead et al of huge potential profits furnished by western
governments. No, not all lockdowns are terrible. But a lock down should last
maximum 2 months, or you will needlessly destroy your economy. Thing is, you
must make sure it’s real, effective and short, not some Swedish or Dutch
half-lockdown, or any of the half-assed US ones. A lockdown is either a
lockdown or it’s not. But we’ve already passed that phase. Lockdowns in most
locations will simply no longer be accepted.
Post-COVID
syndrome severely damages children's hearts
Case studies also show MIS-C can strike seemingly healthy children
without warning three or four weeks after asymptomatic infections. "Children
might have no symptoms, no one knew they had the disease, and a few weeks
later, they may develop this exaggerated inflammation in the body."
Here Is
Everything We Know About A COVID-19 Vaccine
a team of analysts at Deutsche Bank has put together a lengthy
"non-technical" overview of the quest for a vaccine to innoculate the
world against SARS-CoV-2… The report is replete with helpful charts that offer
plenty of context
Coronavirus
Vaccine Roundup, Early September
… Wrapup: Dang, that’s a lot of vaccine candidates. And
as you can see, it’s a long-tail distribution – there are some big ones that
everyone knows about, but a lot of people are bringing a lot of technologies to
bear on the problem. This makes me think that we’re going to have a
multichapter story, in the end. There will be the first vaccines approved, then
the second wave, then the improvements on those, until we have (with luck, hard
work, skill, and lots of money) tossed this virus out of the human population
and back to the bats, pangolins, or whoever had it in the first place.
Not COVID, but vaccine-related:
UN Forced to
Admit Gates-funded [Polio] Vaccine is Causing Polio Outbreak in Africa
Regular Related Fare:
US Factory Orders Surprise To Upside, Remain Down 6.2% YoY
hard data bouncing, but not
as much as soft data
"Job Gains
Are Minimal" - ADP Employment Dramatically Misses Expectations In August
About Those
Stellar Initial Claims..
US corporate
bond issuance hits $1.919tn in 2020, beating full-year record
Remote Work Is
Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy
Regular Fare:
5-Reasons The
Fed’s New Policy Won’t Get Inflation
Mission Creep at
the Federal Reserve? Or Mission Focus?
Stocks Are Up.
Wages Are Down. What Does it Mean?
Hitting Zero:
700 Years of Declining Global Real Interest Rates
Must Reads:
James K. Galbraith: Rebuilding the Economy Will Require Joe Biden to Think Very Differently Than 2009
It is a delusion to think that merely injecting money will bring back the
happy mix of jobs and incomes we’ve lost in the Covid-19 pandemic.
… confirms that economic thinking on Team Biden, even among its most
progressive elements, is essentially the same as that behind the Obama-Biden
strategy for the previous economic crisis, from 2008 to 2009. But the underlying situation now is in many
ways much more serious and intractable.
… There are three reasons why the experience of the last expansion will
not be repeated now.
First, the pandemic has obliterated the global market for many advanced
capital goods in which America excels. Aircraft are a major example.
… When we come to the consumer, there is an even bigger problem. It is
that the largest share of increased spending in the last recovery — and the
secret of American success at job creation — was not in the purchase of goods,
but in the production and consumption of services.
… The pandemic has washed much of that away. .... There is an assumption,
in many quarters, that if and when the pandemic recedes, these will simply
return, and things will start up where they left off. This is neither a safe assumption nor even a
reasonable one.
… Third, as the pandemic lingers and people cannot work, arrears for
rent, mortgages, and utility bills are piling up.
… A new round of income supports can, of course, buy more time and is
indeed urgent right now. But it will not, by itself, set the economy on a path
toward renewed growth and high employment. Something else must be done, going
far beyond mere money. Or else, it’s depression all the way down.
The outlines of that something else are only just coming into view. Some
of the basic elements are the following: ……
… No spirit of radicalism animates these ideas. They are not driven by
ideology nor by any past commitment to any agenda. They follow as matters of
logic and fact from an understanding of the situation.
… It is a delusion to think that the easy methods of the postwar
economists, whose ideas have dominated liberal thought and response to economic
crises for 70 years now, will work in the face of the Covid-19 challenge. The
path forward requires planning and action on a far larger scale. It requires
skills, imagination, local knowledge, commitment, and mobilization that
resemble — but actually surpass — those brought to bear in the New Deal.
Art Berman: Stop Expecting
Oil and the Economy to Recover.
The Great Simplification: Energy is the economy. Money
is a call on energy. Debt is a lien on future energy.
What is happening to oil markets and to the global economy is not because
of a virus. The virus greatly accelerated what was already happening. Things
won’t go back to normal when the virus ends. The expansion of energy and debt
have been leading toward some sort of reckoning for at least the last fifty years.
That day of reckoning has been brought forward by coronavirus economic
closures.
Ilya Prigogine was a chemist who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for his work on dissipative structures and self-organization. Dissipative structures are physical systems that release considerable heat as they consume ever-greater energy to support their growth and increasing complexity. A crisis occurs when growth can no longer be supported by available energy resources. The system either collapses or spontaneously re-organizes itself into a simpler form that uses less energy.
Empires, organizations and
economies are dissipative structures. So is the human brain.
My friend Nate Hagens has applied some of Prigogine’s ideas to his
own research about world energy, economics and ecology. He believes that we are
on the cusp of something quite different from the scenarios suggested by Ahmed,
and Goehring and Rozencwajg.
Hagens predicted a global
economic decline in the 2020s and publicly expressed that opinion before the
Covid pandemic. The main reason for decline, he stated, was too much debt
undertaken to continue consuming and growing the economy. The virus has
accelerated its timing and may result in contraction greater than the 30% drop
during the Great Depression.
The Great Simplification will occur when the credit-supported part of the economy is removed.
Economic activity will contract and less energy will be needed because it will
be increasingly unaffordable to many parts of the population. People will be
forced to adjust living standards downward and self-organize around energy with
greater emphasis on local supply chains and regional economies.
…
Most ideas and analyses about future trends in energy and the economy
fail to recognize that they are the two aspects of the same thing. That is why
they are so far off the mark. This basic misalignment is painfully obvious
because the energy sector represents only 2.5% of the S&P 500 valuation but
underlies probably 95% of U.S. GDP. That is what Hagens calls energy blindness.
Bubble Fare:
Lance Roberts: Rationalization:
Low rates justify high valuations
The primary argument is that when inflation or interest rates fall, the
present value of future cash flows from equities rises, and subsequently, so
should their valuation. While true, assuming all else is equal, a falling
discount rate does suggest a higher valuation. However, when inflation
declines, future nominal cash flow from equities also falls, this can offset
the effect of lower discount rates. Lower discount rates are applied to lower
expected cash flows. In other words, without adjusting for inflation and, in no
small degree, economic growth, suggesting low rates justify overpaying for cash
flows is a very flawed premise.
… There is much to debate about the current level of interest rates and
future stock market returns. However, what is clear is the 40-year decline in
rates did not mitigate two extremely nasty bear markets since 1998, just as falling
rates did not mitigate the crash in 1929 and the subsequent depression. Do
low-interest rates justify high valuations? History suggests they don’t.
Hussman: Yikes!
You know it’s a bubble when you have to edit the Y axis on all of your
charts because valuations have broken above every historical peak, and
estimated future market returns have fallen beyond the lowest points in
history, including 1929.
One of the things to remember about investing is that the higher the
price you pay today, for a given stream of future cash flows, the lower the
long-term returns you can expect. It’s exactly when past returns are most
glorious that future prospects are most dismal.
Still, it’s also clear that if overvaluation alone was enough to drive
prices lower, the market could never reach the sort of extreme hypervaluation
we saw in 1929 and 2000, nor the dismal long-term prospects those valuations
created. So we have to distinguish between long-term returns, which are driven
by valuations, and returns over shorter segments of the market cycle, which are
driven by investor psychology. When investors are inclined toward speculation,
they tend to be indiscriminate about it. … As I’ve detailed extensively, the
one thing that made the recent bull market “different” from prior market cycles
was that historically-reliable “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” extremes
did nothing to contain speculation amid the novelty of zero interest rate policy.
… There’s enormous value in understanding that market valuations are the main
drivers of long-term investment returns and the extent of potential market
losses over the complete market cycle, while investor psychology typically
matters more over shorter segments of the market cycle. … The most important
observation about market valuations here is that while a decade of zero
interest rate policy has encouraged yield-seeking speculation in stocks, the
resulting extreme in stock market valuations has also driven likely 10-12 year
S&P 500 nominal total returns below zero.
Tweet of the Week:
Lance Roberts: #Inflation comes from stronger #economic growth, #rising #wages and increasing #production which leads to higher #consumption to support higher prices. Here's why the #Fed won't get #inflation.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Heat stored in the Earth system: where does the energy
go?
Ice Sheet
Melting on Track With Worst-Case Scenario
Scientists are surprised about the rate at which melting has accelerated.
Robert Pollin:
Biden Not Phasing Out Fossil Fuel, Relies on Carbon Capture
Other Fare:
Lancet Study Finds U.S. Has, by Far, the World’s Most-Overpriced Medical Care
Consumer Reports Slams Tesla's $8,000 Full Self Driving Vaporware In Scathing New Review
Quotes of the Week:
Louis-Vincent Gave: “It is easier to find an alluring candidate in the US presidential race than an OECD central banker even thinking of raising interest rates in his or her lifetime.”
Lance Roberts: “The current assumption is
that the Fed’s new policy will lead to higher inflation.
“The new policy regime is an important
evolution in our thinking about how to achieve our goals and another step
toward greater transparency, The policy change positions us for success in
achieving our maximum employment and price stability goals in the future.” –
Fed Reserve Bank of NY, John Williams, via WSJ
What exactly is this new policy? Well, that’s the interesting part, no
one actually knows.”
Brian Romachuk: “The Federal Reserve has
announced some changes to its description of the long-term objective of policy.
From an operational perspective, this change is entirely cosmetic, and
accomplishes nothing useful. It is really a distraction from the reality that
the Fed is pushing on a string. The only way forward for monetary policy is for
it to be transformed into fiscal policy.” From: Fed Rearranges Deck
Chairs On Monetary Policy Titanic
Pics of the Week:
Tatsuya Tanaka is a master of turning everyday objects into miniature worlds that seem larger than life. He’s been doing it daily for almost a decade, and in the midst of the COVID pandemic, he’s started to integrate some all-too-familiar objects into his work.
EXTRA Fare:
Geopolitical Nonsense Fare:
Gilbert Doctorow: Novichok and Nonsense: From a post-factual to a post-logic world
Craig Murray: Novichok, Navalny, Nordstream, Nonsense
Germany, Not Russia, Should Answer Questions Over Navalny Case
Contrary to Western
assertions about Russia having to answer questions about the Navalny case, the
onus is very much on the German authorities to explain their “findings” and to
back them up with verifiable evidence. Otherwise it amounts to hearsay and
innuendo.
US Nonsense Fare:
Kunstler: The Ghost in the Machine
The abiding mystery of the
2020 election is how come the Democratic Party, wishing so zealously to win
back power, took pains to nominate a candidate weaker than the ghost of Millard
Fillmore. Resorting to Occam’s Razor, one might have to conclude that Joe Biden
was simply the best they had — a surefire case for the party’s necessary
extinction.
The Labor Day starting-gun
kicks off the high campaign season and Ol’ White Joe wobbles forth from his
lair under a rock somewhere to dazzle audiences of six or eight sympathetic
journos posed in “social distancing” formation while the party’s Antifa and BLM
shock troops soften up voters elsewhere across the land with vote-winning
riots, arson, and looting. There’s a recipe for political success!
You have to wonder how the
claque of DC deep state players behind this fiasco could come up with a
game-plan so stupidly inept… but there it is! Apparently, they’re laying
further plans now to bum-rush Ol’ Joe into the White House by main force with a
“color revolution” — that is, an orchestrated fake popular revolt as in the
Ukraine Maidan regime change operation of 2014. In fact, as Revolver News
reports, the same wrecking crew of US State Department officials, intel spooks,
contract insurrectionists, and George Soros-sponsored NGO intriguers is behind
the US 2020 “Transition Integrity Project” aimed at launching a US
post-election coup against Mr. Trump, no matter how the election actually goes.
The plan was all over the
web wires this holiday weekend. Everybody knows exactly what to expect now: a
November 3 Trump election victory followed by a king-tide of post-election
write-in votes for Ol’ Joe… a long, drawn-out, and surely inconclusive battle
trying to validate scores of millions of postmarks and signatures… and a skein
of Lawfare-managed shenanigans conducted in battleground state legislatures to
change-out electoral college slates. And any objections by Mr. Trump and his
party will be labeled as Putin-backed fascist treason.
Will that result in Mr.
Biden actually gliding into the oval office? No, it will bring on a years’ long
quasi civil war sure to finish off the institutions of a federal republic and
also whatever remains of the US economy. Is that what y’all really want, Nancy
Pelosi, Hillary & Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Adam Schiff, Bill Kristol,
David Frum, Dean Baquet, and five hundred other seditious political degenerates
out there?
Quotes of the Week:
Glenn Greenwald: “how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report? It’s possible because news outlets have completely distorted the term “confirmation” beyond all recognition. Indeed, they now use it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means, thereby draping themselves in journalistic glory they have not earned and, worse, deceiving the public into believing that an unproven assertion has, in fact, been proven. With this disinformation method, they are doing the exact opposite of what journalism, at its core, is supposed to do: separate fact from speculation.”
Tom Luongo: While the Democrats and the media try to keep the dream of Russian interference into our elections alive we are distracted from what the real operation is - to stop Trump’s re-election and delay until the coup is complete in the U.S. to bury all the evidence of Obamagate. That’s all Russiagate and Ukrainegate and Skripalgate and now Navalnygate are — comfort food lies to angry shitlibs who are still haven’t fully processed the 2016 election and Brexit, kept on a drip feed of social media dopamine hits in a state of perpetual Bargaining so that they never move on to Acceptance.
Eric Weinstein: We the Left are not our Democratic Party leadership. And we never signed up with a blood oath to gaslight our Republican rivals for two reasons: A) It is evil. B) It is the one thing that is most likely to get us four more years of Donald Trump. Gaslighting is a losing game.
Former Secret Service agent: "We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses," said the former agent, adding "He would mess with every single woman or teen. It was horrible."
The agent also claimed Biden
would walk around naked in the VP residence. "I mean, Stark naked…
Weinstein level stuff."
Ikonoklast: “In a two-party, one-ideology state, where the wealth and power elites have captured the parties, voting on its own is useless. No matter who you vote for you still get a neoliberal capitalist apologist or right wing reactionary. The two-party, one-ideology, neoliberal state, is a ratchet and hold system. The right (or ultra-right as it is now) ratchets up the neoliberal measures and tightens the law and order screws on the people. The faux-center (really a mid-right) candidate set, if they win, then essentially hold the system at the current point. Real reform does not occur.”
Caitlin Johnstone: “Assange started a leak publishing outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt power responded by smearing, torturing and imprisoning him, thereby proving his thesis unassailably correct. The depravity of the powerful can only operate behind veils of secrecy, because if it happened out in the open our greatly outnumbered rulers would risk finding themselves on the wrong end of a guillotine blade.”
RIP, David Graeber, Fare:
Ian Welsh: R.I.P. David Graeber
Steve Keen: Eulogy to David
Graeber
Graeber, 2016: Why Capitalism
Creates Pointless Jobs
Graeber, 2015: Ferguson and the
Criminalization of American Life
Graeber 2007: Manners, Deference,
and Private Property: Or, Elements for a General Theory of Hierarchy
Photos of the Week:
DNC Politics in Pics: The Puppet
Candidate
The bold image
the sad reality
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