COVID-19 notes:
America Is Running Out of Nurses
Pandemic Is
Starting to Hit North American Meat Plants Again
Closely-held Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities
trader, said Thursday it was temporarily shutting down its beef processing
plant in Ontario due to “an abundance of caution as our local workforce deals
with the community-wide impacts of Covid-19.” It hasn’t yet decided when it
will reopen. “This is not just a Cargill spread, but community-wide spread in Guelph”.
London Begins
Emergency Lockdown as U.K. Fights New Virus Strain
Regular Related Fare:
Senate Proposal
Would Retroactively Shield Corporations From All COVID Lawsuits
COVID-19 RELIEF
DRAFT BILL PROVIDES $100 BILLION “DOUBLE-DIP” TAX DEDUCTION FOR THE WEALTHY
No stimulus checks, but big tax giveaways for well-connected business
owners.
"Amazing"
Hypocrisy: Democrats Make Wreck of Covid-19 Relief Negotiations
Democrats stonewalled all year on a new pandemic relief package. Now
they're proposing a new plan that undercuts even Republican proposals, and
screws everyone but - get this - defense contractors
… As for that $748 billion bill? According to the senior Democratic aide,
who pointed to comments made by Mitt Romney, it includes $560 billion in
offsets, “repurposed from March’s CARES Act.”
In other words, the aide says, “The $748 billion deal is really just $188
billion in new money.” Given all the high-flown rhetoric the Party devoted
before Election Day to rejecting aid packages they deemed heartlessly small, the
hypocrisy, he says, is “amazing.”
If you include the $160 billion package for state and local aid, the new
deal offers a maximum of $348 billion in new money
The Tax Time
Bomb That Congress Can Defuse
This is significant anti-stimulus at the worst possible time. In effect,
the one-time stimulus check and unemployment boost will be offset, for millions
of people, by the lack of an expected refund and even tax liability. That
blunts the impact of those relief measures.
FDR Knew Exactly
How to Solve Today’s Unemployment Crisis
A self-funding national infrastructure bank modeled on the “American
System” of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt would
help solve not one but two of the country’s biggest problems. Millions of
Americans have joined the ranks of the unemployed, and government relief checks
and savings are running out; meanwhile, the country still needs trillions of
dollars in infrastructure. Putting the unemployed to work on those
infrastructure projects seems an obvious solution, especially given that the
$600 or $700 stimulus checks Congress is planning on issuing will do little to
address the growing crisis. Various plans for solving the infrastructure crisis
involving public-private partnerships have been proposed, but they’ll
invariably result in private investors reaping the profits while the public
bears the costs and liabilities. We have relied for too long on private, often
global, capital, while the Chinese run circles around us building
infrastructure with credit simply created on the books of their
government-owned banks.
Joe Carson: Plunge In Retail
Sales Shows Vulnerable Consumer: Personal Savings Rate Is Overstated
Regular Fare:
The Economic
Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich.
“Our research shows that the economic case for keeping taxes on the rich
low is weak,” “Major tax cuts for the rich since the 1980s have increased
income inequality, with all the problems that brings, without any offsetting
gains in economic performance.”
Steve Keen: Discussing a Modern Debt Jubilee
Jubilees were common in antiquity. The Lord’s Prayer did not originally say “And forgive us our sins, as we have
forgiven those who sin against us”, but “And forgive us our debts, as we also
have forgiven our debtors”. But an old-fashioned Jubilee would reward those who
gambled with borrowed money, and thus effectively penalise those who did not.
It would also effectively bankrupt the banks, since their assets—our
debts—would fall, while their liabilities—our deposits—would remain constant.
A Modern Debt Jubilee gets around both problems by:
·
Giving everyone, whether they borrowed or not, exactly
the same amount of money; and
·
Replacing risky private debt as an income earning
asset for banks with riskless Jubilee Bonds.
The basic mechanics in a Modern Debt Jubilee are:
·
Every adult gets an identical sum of money;
o
Those in debt must pay their debt down by that amount;
o
Those that are not in debt—or have less debt than the
Jubilee amount—must buy newly-issued shares directly from corporations;
o
Corporations must use the revenue from share sales to
pay down corporate debt;
·
Jubilee Bonds are sold by Treasury to banks; and
o
Interest payments on Jubilee Bonds (partly) compensate
for the fall in interest payments on household and corporate debt.
The end-result of a Modern Debt Jubilee is:
·
Debtors are not unfairly advantaged over savers
(debtors have less debt, while savers get new debt-free assets);
·
Private debt, both household and corporate, falls,
while equity (share ownership) rises;
·
The amount of money does not change a great deal (it
changes only by the interest on Jubilee Bonds); and
·
Banks remain solvent, because their assets rise as
much as their liabilities, and they gain equity from the interest on Jubilee
Bonds.
As with a government deficit, the government doesn’t
need to borrow the money given to debtors and savers: the Jubilee creates the
money, in the same manner that a deficit creates money. ..
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: A Good Response to a Bad Situation
In
traditional financial theory, interest rates are a key component of valuation
models. When interest rates fall, the discount rate used in these models
decreases and the price of the equity asset should appreciate, assuming all
other model inputs stay constant. So, interest-rate cuts by central banks may
be used to justify higher equity prices and CAPE ratios. Thus, the level of
interest rates is an increasingly important element to consider when valuing
equities. Many have been puzzled that the world’s stock markets haven’t
collapsed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn it has
wrought. But with interest rates low and likely to stay there, equities will
continue to look attractive, particularly when compared to bonds.” – Shiller, Black & Jivraj, Project Syndicate, November 30, 2020
The opening quote above seems almost obvious. That’s
the problem. It’s actually a striking example of the insidious and exquisitely
circular logic that I believe will prove disappointing and possibly even
catastrophic for investors over the coming decade. What follows may help to
clarify the situation.
Before going on, I should start by saying that I’ve
got great admiration for Robert Shiller. Even three decades ago when I was
completing my doctorate at Stanford, I avidly embraced his work, including his
studies on excess volatility. He has originated an impressive range of useful
tools, including the Case-Shiller housing price indices. As the tech bubble was
peaking in 2000, I doubt that any 30-something in finance was more pleased to
see Shiller become a widely-quoted figure in the financial markets. All of that
is important to say, before I tear into this particular metric.
Frankly, I suspect Shiller lent his name to the
Project Syndicate piece. His independent work is more careful, while his recent
collaborations have increasingly read like apologetics for historically
untenable valuations. I hope he will quickly call such loans due, lest they
affect his otherwise remarkable reputation.
A security is nothing more than a claim to some future
set of expected cash flows. The more you pay today for that stream of future
cash flows, the lower return you will receive over time. Right now, bond market
investors are paying just over $91 today in return for an expected $100 payment
from the U.S. Treasury a decade from now. That works out to an annual return
averaging nearly 0.9%.
Suppose you don’t like the idea of making less than 1%
annually on your investment for a decade. Let me tell you something that’s
absolutely true, and will make the investment in Treasury bonds seem vastly
more attractive:
Yes, bond
prices are high. But they’re fairly-valued relative to interest rates.
That statement might seem funny, if it wasn’t both a)
the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, and b) essentially the same argument
that’s being made to justify the most extreme stock market valuations in U.S.
history. Obviously, bonds are always “fairly-valued” if their own rate of
return is used for comparison. But it’s such a circular argument that it lacks
intrinsic meaning, and it’s certainly not what investors hear. What they hear,
when someone says “fairly-valued,” is that investors can expect future returns
to be somewhere in the range of historical norms, or at least historical
experience. That’s not what’s being said at all.
What’s actually happening today is that investors are
so uncomfortable with near-zero bond market valuations that they’ve priced
nearly every other asset class at levels that can be expected to produce
near-zero, or negative, 10-12 year returns as well.
So understand this. When people say that extreme stock market valuations are “justified” by interest rates, what they’re actually saying is that it’s “reasonable” for investors to price the stock market for long-term returns of nearly zero, because bonds are also priced for long-term returns of nearly zero. I know that’s not what you hear, but it’s precisely what’s being said.
Saying
that low interest rates ‘justify’ extreme stock market valuations is like
saying that poking yourself in the eye ‘justifies’ slamming your thumb with a
hammer.
Suppose that I create a valuation measure by taking the yield on my bond, and “correcting it by for interest rates” by subtracting out bond yields. Now, that seems ridiculous, but it’s very close to what’s going on when people try to “adjust” stock market valuations for the level of interest rates and use phrases like “fairly valued” and “attractive.” When both assets are at extreme valuations, this comparison, at best, says only that the dismal expected return on one asset is expected to exceed the really dismal expected return on the other asset. Why not just compute the two implied rates of return and compare them directly?
Look. It’s certainly descriptive to say that low
interest rates tend to go hand-in-hand with high stock market valuations, and
that high interest rates tend to go hand-in-hand with low stock market
valuations. The problem with “correcting” valuations for that regularity is
that it implies that both obscenely elevated prices and wildly depressed prices
are equivalent “fair value” situations. In the eye-poke, thumb-slam world, yes,
there’s a certain truth to that. It’s just that in the high interest rate, low
valuation situation, investors face outstanding prospects for long-term
returns. In the low interest rate, high-valuation situation, investors face
dismal prospects all around.
To illustrate this, the chart below shows a scatter
plot of the Shiller P/E, the 10-year Treasury yield, and the subsequent 10-year
average annual total return of the S&P 500. Yes, low rates and high CAPE
multiples tend to go together. Unfortunately, low or negative stock market
returns over the following decade are also an inescapable part of that
3-dimensional combination.
Tesla, the
Largest-Cap Stock Ever to Enter S&P 500: A Buy Signal or a Bubble?
Quote of the Week:
“there’s nothing like an epic
stock market bubble that warms the hearts and softens the minds
of men to ideas that would otherwise be impossible. One idea du jour, for example, is that low
interest rates justify high valuations.
Another is that the Fed can permanently inflate stocks using its
seemingly unlimited supply of credit. These ideas, and many others, are nearing
their expiration date.”
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
All the Stuff
Humans Make Now Outweighs Earth’s Organisms
according to a new paper in the journal Nature, at around 1.1 teratonnes
(or 1,100,000,000,000 metric tons), anthropogenic mass now outweighs Earth’s
dry biomass. That means all the living organisms, including vegetation,
animals, and microbes. More incredible still, at the start of the 20th century,
our anthropogenic mass tallied up to only 3 percent of the planet’s biomass but
has over the past 100 years grown at an astonishing rate: Annual production now
sits at 30 gigatonnes, or 30,000,000,000 metric tons. At this rate, in just 20
more years, anthropogenic mass will go from currently weighing slightly more
than total dry biomass to nearly tripling it.
Other Fare:
The Milky Way is
probably full of dead civilizations
Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably
killed themselves off already.
That’s the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv
database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the
emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across the Milky Way.
Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of a famous equation that
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake wrote in 1961. The
Drake equation, popularized by physicist Carl Sagan in his “Cosmos” miniseries,
relied on a number of mystery variables — like the prevalence of planets in the
universe, then an open question.
This new paper, authored by three Caltech physicists and one high school
student, is much more practical. It says where and when life is most likely to
occur in the Milky Way, and identifies the most important factor affecting its
prevalence: intelligent creatures’ tendency toward self-annihilation.
Fun Fare:
How the Grinch
stole a pandemic Christmas
He was sure every Who in the town was resistant / To keeping their
gatherings socially distant. / “And they’re cooking their turkeys!” he yelped
with anxiety. / “The year 2020 has crippled society!”
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
COVID Fare:
An Internal
Medicine Doctor and His Peers Read the Pfizer Vaccine Study and See Red Flags
[Updated]
While the World is on a
vaccine frenzy, the Indian Government is
distributing a home Covid Kit with Zinc, Doxycycline and Ivermectin. The cost:
$2.65 per person.
Media in other parts of the
world share different information than what you find in US-dominated mainstream
sources, such as:
‘Quadruple
Therapy with Ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19’
Yes, hydroxychloroquine is scientifically proven
against COVID-19…. Part II
Here I do a historical reflection on science and I
show all the irrefutable evidences of the functioning of the taboo medicine.
A retrospective comparison of drugs against COVID-19
Highlights
• Hydroxychloroquine is an efficient candidate drug against COVID-19.
• Oseltamivir can be prudently considered in combination therapy.
• Drug repurposing is a promising way to combat SARS-CoV-2 infection.
• Comparison of drug effects against COVID-19 is instructive in the
pandemic.
Physician
Specialists Urge CDC to Consider A Safe & Powerful Treatment For COVID-19.
Epidemiologist
At Yale Provides Testimony On Hydroxychloroquine For Treating COVID-19
It would appear that today
is THE day to question the vaccines being rolled out by the billions, but the
media tell us we’re not supposed, or allowed, to do that. Take your shot and shut
your face.
But the “approved” vaccines
so far, the Pfizer and Moderna ones, are based on an entirely new and untested
technology, messenger RNA. Could they work, could they be a new frontline for
medicine? Yes, perhaps they could. But shouldn’t their mid- and long term
effects be assessed? Of course they should. mRNA is being treated like GMOs,
which lobby to be declared safe as soon as someone doesn’t drop dead in the
first hours. While we’re playing games across generations with our own genetic
material.
And at the same time that
the mRNA vaccines are being rushed through, potentially much less questionable
approaches, like vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are said to need
much more research before they can be rolled out. That looks like there’s a
game being played, and the MSM are a big player in it. Nothing to do with
reporting the news, but with only a part of it.
We’re getting lost in a
-dark?- web of opinions disguised as news. We can not ask the questions that we
know everyone should ask. The Moderna mRNA vaccine was approved in the US the
other day as it was simultaneously found to offer immunity for just 2 months.
And on the basis of that, vaccination passports are being prepared for all of
our societies. While we might find much better protection in vitamin D, HCQ and
ivermectin. Or the Russian and Chinese vaccines. But those must not be
discussed.
Political [more election B.S.] Fare:
Peter Navarro
releases 'The Immaculate Deception,' a report about the 2020 presidential
election
"From the findings of
this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated
strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence
ticket," the report states.
The Gyre Widens (nothing new here, I just love the style in which JHK
writes…)
The mind-numbing weirdness
of Joe Biden’s insertion into the election of 2020 — like the furtive groping
of an intern in a cloakroom — only signals the Democratic Party’s reckless
drive to self-destruction, dragging the republic over the edge of an abyss with
it. How did this hollowed-out figure of a grifting old pol find himself
pretending to national leadership, and in an historic moment of crisis that
goes far beyond the mere wrecking of an election? Who wanted him there so
badly, and why? My guess would be Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and
John Brennan anxious to stay out of prison, heading a long list of officials
present and former who committed crimes trying desperately to protect them,
with accessories aplenty across the aisle. That’s what this four-year coup has
been about, snowballing criminality, culminating in an orgy of blatant ballot
fraud.
…
Just as impeachment
concluded in failure, Mr. Biden got smoked in the early primaries, only to
triumph mysteriously in the March Super Tuesday voting. After all, a primary is
the party’s own election, and they can engineer it however they want. So, they
contrived to elevate someone already criminally culpable in the mind of any
citizen paying attention and capable of adding two-and-two to get four. Weird,
a little bit?
…
The trouble is, Mr. Trump
actually does have the evidence, and he intends to use it after four years of
being remorselessly fucked around by his antagonists. So, the nation is at the
point in this long, winding drama that has become a fight to the death and
there will be no rituals of torch-passing just to keep up appearances that
everything is functioning normally. Mr. Trump has the evidence of widespread,
yes widespread, ballot fraud. He is the president, after all, and he has all
the information. As he’s said more than once, he’s caught them all. And they
know it.
Escobar: When Deplorables
Become Ungovernables
Beyond the raucous
altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the
key factual points.
1.
A series of rules in mostly
swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures,
without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud
schemes.
2.
Biden was de facto coronated
by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks
before the electoral college vote this past Monday.
3.
Every serious, professional
audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de
facto squashed.
In any Global South latitude
where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style,
this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a
relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.
On the recent Supreme Court
ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to
see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made
by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle
this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize
that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that
has always been corrupt.”
…
A perverse form of blowback
is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear,
the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of
what happens next in Dystopia Central.
Both options are dire.
1.
The election stands, even if
considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that
peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together
anymore.
2.
Was the election to be
somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to
finish the job.
In either case, The
Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.
Other Political Fare:
The
Revolutionary Struggle Is A Fight Between Movement And Inertia
There’s a feud on the American political left right
now which (as usual) breaks down more or less along the lines of center-left
“Bernie in the primary, Clinton/Biden in the general” progressives angrily
opposing a push towards meaningful change from those further to the left.
It all started when comedian and lefty commentator
Jimmy Dore made a video arguing that House progressives should refuse to re-elect Nancy
Pelosi as House Speaker unless she puts Medicare for All to a floor vote.
Dore’s argument has been endorsed by many high-profile voices on the left, and it has also been
attacked as self-defeating and unreasonable by many others
…
I haven’t seen any convincing arguments why Dore’s
suggestion should not be implemented, but I have seen many strong arguments for
why it should, like this one for Current Affairs by Briahna Joy Gray or this
one by Rising‘s Krystal Ball. The pandemic and a Democrat-controlled House
presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to shove hard toward getting Americans
the same healthcare rights afforded to everyone else in every major country on
earth and forcing all House Democrats who oppose it to expose themselves to
their constituents instead of passing the blame to the Republicans. With things
getting more and more desperate, waiting for the next once-in-a-century
opportunity to even begin pushing is a ridiculous proposition.
The entire revolutionary
struggle, ultimately, is a battle between movement and inertia. Wherever you’ve
got a political status quo that needs changing you’ll find revolutionary-minded
forces pushing toward change and guardians of the status quo making clever-sounding
arguments for why the smart strategy is to remain motionless. When the status
quo is destructive and unsustainable, as this one unquestionably is, the ones
pushing for movement are always on the correct side of the debate.
Congressional
Democrats Are Raking in Huge Donations from War Profiteers
The Canadian
Government Talks About Peace — But It’s Investing in War
Canada likes to see itself
as a benign global actor, but its extensive history of military intervention
tells a different story. A $70 billion upgrade of the Canadian navy now carried
out by Justin Trudeau will strengthen its capacity for military action as a US
sidekick in world affairs.
… Canada’s real track record
in world affairs bears very little resemblance to the smug and self-satisfied
stories it tells about itself. Instead of proffering olive branches, it is
spending $100 billion to strengthen its navy’s capacity for throwing its weight
around, all in support of US imperialism and Canadian corporations abroad. And
with no sign of dissent coming from the Canadian political class, that pattern
of duplicity looks set to continue.
Why They're
Denying You Healthcare And Financial Support During A Pandemic
[Political] Quotes of the Week:
Ian Welsh: “Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order. It’s really impossible to overstate how he was there all the way, doing all the worst things. The way the world and America runs is his legacy, why would he listen to his political enemies, the people he helped destroy in the 70s and 80s, who he drove into the political wilderness with his allies who followed the so-called Third Way?... There’s going to be a lot of gaslighting during the Biden regime. A lot of pretending that he’s doing left wing things, when he isn’t... Biden doesn’t want to do most progressive or left wing things. He doesn’t agree with them…. Biden’s career is about destroying left-wingers, even very mild left wingers, then bulldozing over their bodies in the New Deal mass grave he helped created. That’s who he is, that’s his legacy and he believes in it.”
Big Thoughts Fare:
After Escape:
The New Climate Power Politics
Elon Musk’s rockets may capture headlines, but the strategy that Latour
has dubbed “escape,” or “exit,” is a dead end. And that fact is evident not
only to the EU, but also to China and the most powerful voices of global
capital as well. There is every reason to think that profound shifts are
breaking the impasse that has defined our reality for the last thirty years.
This is not to say that we do not face a divided and unequal world set on a
disastrous course, but rather that the key players and the terms of the
negotiation are shifting.
…
Recall Latour’s searing
analysis of the origin of our contemporary crisis in Down to Earth:
It is as though a significant segment of the ruling
classes had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for
everyone else. Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to act as
though history were going to continue to move toward a … world in which all
humans could prosper equally. From the 1980s on, the ruling classes stopped
purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world … to
get rid of all the burdens of solidarity … hence deregulation; they have
decided that a sort of gilded fortress would have to be built—hence the
explosion of inequalities; and they have decided that, to conceal the crass
selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world, they would have to reject
absolutely the threat at the origin of this headlong flight—hence the denial of
climate change.
This is not diplomatic talk.
This is an indictment worthy of a climate Nuremberg. On Latour’s merciless
reading, the exit-eers are the enemy of all. Those who build rocket ships
signal all too clearly their intentions
[Somewhat] Satirical Fare:
CJ Hopkins: Year Zero
GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing …
which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it
and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in
the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions.
The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking
Want.”
….
If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in
the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut
up and take the fucking vaccine.
If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask
on your fucking kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the
pointlessness of putting masks on kids.
If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians
rigged the fucking election.
And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an
election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible.
It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked
fact.
[Surprisingly, Not] Satirical Fare:
A CIA Officer
Has a Headache. Media Blame Russia.
The Washington Post
editorial board (12/9/20) took the news to its logical endpoint, combining the
Moscow, Havana and Guangzhou cases, together with other discredited Russiagate
theories, to demand that President-elect Joe Biden must “call out” Russian
President Vladimir Putin. Given that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
moved their famous doomsday clock—symbolizing the risk of the destruction of
the planet through nuclear weapons—to the closest it has ever been to midnight,
upping tensions with Russia would be reckless in the extreme. For the
single-minded Post, however, Putin’s denials are actually further proof of devious,
“asymmetric warfare” being waged against America. The problem with this whole
narrative, journalistically, is that with tremendously high stakes it relies
largely on the testimonies of US officials, many of them anonymous, who have a
clear incentive to lie and defame three countries with whom the United States
is currently ramping up tensions.
[Probably] Satirical Fare:
Health Canada
announces that dudes who wear shorts all winter will get vaccine last
R.I.P. Fare:
Leo Panitch passed away. Panitch was Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University.
The Long Shot of Democratic Socialism Is Our Only Shot. An Interview with Leo Panitch.
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