Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[THE_WIZARD_]

I resemble that remark...

[iam416]

Really enjoyed Kevin Williamson's piece comparing NY and Florida: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/...ck-scott-spar/

[Jeff Buchanan]

Really enjoyed Kevin Williamson's piece comparing NY and Florida: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/...ck-scott-spar/

Scott has his detractors in S. FL - no surprise there. And, as has already been mentioned, he's getting ripped by the "told-you-so" crowd over his dismantling of FL's welfare state, including what has become FL's national disaster, it's UIBs system. Whatever.

Debating the pluses and minuses of the US's welfare state is a very complicated argument as Kevin Williamson acknowledges in his NRO article. Some stuff in there I hadn't even thought about.

While, in the recent past, I haven't jumped on Hanni's band-wagon that America's administrative state and it's trend to socialism is inevitable, COVID is ripping back the curtain of it's cost and the inefficiencies of keeping one foot in a centralized administrative state and one foot out. Senator Scott is right to call out the stupidity of the most recent Congressional action to extend the hand-outs in a way that strengthens and perpetuates this administrative state and suggests that Hanni is absolutely correct..

[Jeff Buchanan]

I read a good (pay-walled) opinion piece today that offers an explanation of the disconnect between equity markets and economic reality. It opines that the reason behind the disconnect is the flood of money into liquidity that the Fed is enabling by what the author described as "printing money." We had a brief discussion about this a while back. One can argue that the FED is incurring debt with it's monetary policy and Congress with it's fiscal policy not printing money ..... the bottom line, as Geezer point out, regardless of how one describes it, it has the same downside impact.

A reckoning is coming. Jon thought a DOW around 16000 is going to happen. I don't see how the havoc COVID has wreaked and what havoc remains unaccounted for by the COVID reality that it is going to persist for a long time - and we are talking years, not months - that bond and equity markets will hold up. Investors are not going to keep investing in companies that will ultimately fail in an COVID driven economic reality and governments can't continue to prop them up.

Despite efforts to do just that, justifiable, IMO, we're already seeing what an economic recovery is going to look like in China. While factories their return to around 90% of pre-COVID capacity, national and worldwide demand for the goods they produce remains precipitously low. The PRC will respond to that in unique ways that the governments of western democracies won't. There, unemployment will remain persistently high, countries like the US that rely on an embattled service sector, if not on life support and soon to die, will experience significant economic shock - Great Depression like in it's impact on quality of life, IMO. Likewise EU countries that rely on tourism will suffer a similar fate.

All of this dents by usual optimism so, I just thought I'd brighten your day to drag your sorry asses down into my pit of despair.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Finally, if you're still reading and paying attention ........ re-opening now naysayers are taking it to the re-open now crowd that make up the decision makers in both FL and GA. The debate is getting down to the nut-cutting though which is good, IMO.

Critics argue neither of these states, and in particular one county of S. FL, Palm Beach, met the federal gating criteria. CASES RISING ACCORDING TO LEAKED FEDERAL DOCUMENT IDENTIFYING PALM BEACH CO. AS A "HOT SPOT."

Palm Beach County did not meet the gating requirements the report points out but commission members there that voted 5-1 to implement Stage 1 re-opening within that county, in responding to the Sun Sentinal piece, pointed to other data that described hospital admissions v. capacity and % +s of all tested as either steady or trending downwards. Some of the data they used isn't allowed, the commission member said, to be made public. WTF! The data he referred to is good data and so is the other stuff he couldn't talk about ...... probably (R(t), R(0) or any other rate measures that make sense as opposed to stupid new case and death #s which are useless measures for what re-opening decisions and progress monitoring demand.

One of the complaints in the report that appeared as the lead headline in Sunday's Sun Sentinel is that the data that county commissions are using to make re-opening decisions isn't readily available and I don't know why that is. We've discussed the kinds of data that is readily available and can be used as reliable measures of COVID containment. Many of us throw these up in our posts here so, they're no secret. This data should be made available and touted ...... because it uniformly demonstrates the presence of COVID containment in multiple states and locals down to a granular level to include municipalities/cities.

The point is that, here in the US as state's begin re-opening, we are getting down to the correct question of how can we most accurately judge the speed and progress of re-opening strategies? IMO, the data is there to do that and it's not cherry picking. It is simply using the right data but, for whatever reasons, the data informing the deciders isn't being routinely released. Weird.

This opinion was offered a month ago here: SARS-COV-2 is here and we're going to have to deal with it, while not killing the economy, sports or our entire school system in the process of doing so. People are going to get sick and some people are going die. Nothing has changed. Frustratingly, for me anyway, is the unwillingness of a large segment of the US population to come to terms with this reality.

[Ghengis Jon]

What I see, and a financial analyst I ain't, is a rise in stock buying based on fear and performance. Jobless rates skyrocket, weak quarterly earnings, GDP contracts and the market rises. WTF.

Well, the market bounced at 18k. Lots of investors are suffering from Fear Of Missing Out, putting out large sums of money regardless of the economy's direction. This rise contributes to those who diversified and bet on small and mid caps which have really gotten crushed. Money fleeing from here seeks better returns than the .5-1.5% many bills and CDs are paying. Bond funds have already made their jump so there's not much interest there. Gotta put the money somewhere and the S&P is moving up in a volatile way.

My neighbor shut down their business last week, going to remain closed for a few more months. No foot traffic. Being able to open, even a bit early despite the rules, means nothing if there's no customers about. Once the economic reality of drastically reduced sales finally overcomes the emotional goal of "we must open NOW", the market will drop again. 16k was a random number I pulled, will probably be closer to 18k. 16k if a second wave of covid wreaks havoc.

Keep your play money in cash, a buying opportunity approaches.

[Jeff Buchanan]

...................My neighbor shut down their business last week, going to remain closed for a few more months. No foot traffic. Being able to open, even a bit early despite the rules, means nothing if there's no customers about. Once the economic reality of drastically reduced sales finally overcomes the emotional goal of "we must open NOW", the market will drop again..........

Yeah,this COVID influenced economic reality is disturbing shit. This thing is going to be around, infecting people and killing the vulnerable for at least another year, possibly longer if emerging vaccines don't work. There is no certainty that I'm reading about that they will work. The probability of vaccine failures is more likely than massive successes in the short term, given the history of vaccines.

I think we are about to see a battle royale break out between re-openers who have come to grips with the impact of carrying on in the COVID reality - people will get infected and the vulnerable will die in excess of normal death rates - and those who haven't and continue to insist that increased illness and death are unacceptable costs of allowing businesses to do business.

IMO, in the current circumstance where there is no certainty, only doubt, the only way to increase consumer willingness to let go of a lock-down mentality, get out of the house and spend is if businesses re-open on a large scale and hire workers back across multiple sectors of the economy to enable spending. This is not hard to understand yet, as I see it on a local level in FL, officials making re-opening decisions continue to be fearful of the potential for the media back-lash of the meme, "BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!!!!"

I just received a news feed from the Sun Sentinel - my S. FL news rag that covers the tri-county region of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward CO.s - that the City of Fort Lauderdale Mayor, Trentallis has decided to challenge the Broward Co. BOC decision to keep gyms closed in his city. Gym owners - and there are a lot of them beyond the corporate guys like LA Fitness and Crunch, are cheering on Trentallis.

For sure, it's a social and public health experiment to see what happens during re-opening, albeit with what seem to be reasonable mitigation measures being called for. Gyms and restaurants are decent test beds to determine if re-opening them creates a wave of new +s such that % new+s increases, hospitals get pressured with new admissions, EDs start to see big increases in patient presentations with ILI or COVID SX, R(t) increases locally or on a state level - lots of decent measures are available.

Here's Broward's numbers as of Saturday:

Broward.PNG

Broward2.PNG

I'll keep an eye open as most businesses in Broward including retail and restaurants can open with standard restrictions on Monday. Gyms too if the Fort Lauderdale Mayor gets his way - and he has published mitigation guidelines on his own for gyms. Openings won't be successful, an uptick in economic activity won't occur, unemployment won't drop if re-openings at some level don't start occurring and as they are monitored don't progress to advanced stages. Consumers, given the option to decide, can head out, test the waters and gain confidence that they're not "all gonna die," probably not even get sick if they are properly careful. The horribly destructive meme coming from some official sources and augmented by a complicit and willing social, broadcast and print media that's out there has to be extinguished by showing these predictions of the coming catastrophe are fundamentally wrong.

Look, maybe some see this as a ghoulish experiment that risks health and life. We have seen headlines that re-openings in SK and China have produced hot spots but we're also seeing better control because of better preparation - testing and contact tracing - ramped up in the US as well. In the current circumstance where uncertainty is the most certain known when it comes to SARS-COV-2 and COVID-19, my bet is that we'll move forward with re-opening and it won't be the Apocalypse some are suggesting it will be.

This approach is my salve to the despair that I've been feeling today over the coming melt down of the US and global economy that will be precipitated with certainty if we continue to sit on our hands and cower in fear.

[THE_WIZARD_]

You are a man of few words...

[Dr. Strangelove]

Good news from Moderna. Phase 1 vaccine test was positive.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/17/stock-futures-up-after-powell-says-economy-could-recover-some-this-year.html

[Ghengis Jon]

That is good news but it's only Phase I testing. MRNA stock up 40% and the DOW up 700 pts in pre-market trading. FOMO!!!!


https://www.marketwatch.com/story/do...of2&yptr=yahoo

[iam416]

It's pretty much unqualified good news. I can imagine Jon winning $1M in the lottery....well, it's good news, but others have won a lot more and I still have to pay taxes on it, so....

[Jeff Buchanan]

Not here to buzz kill but let's make sure this announcement from the lay press is understood in some context.

First, Moderna is a US based company in Cambridge Mass. It received a $465m grant from the US government in March for SARS-COV-2 vaccine development. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is the US Government collaborating and directing agency. This is the agency that the guy who got fired then testified before Congress about his firing last week was the head of. I suspect his firing had nothing to do with Trump's alleged COVID unpreparedness but rather Trump fast-tracking one company and this guy objecting to a policy like that.

Moderna was founded in 2010 and it's platform for vaccine development is unique. It is working on none of the historically significant types of vaccines I talked about up thread (live or attenuated viruses). The current COVID vaccine is a novel mRNA biologic that introduces a protein sequencing molecule into human cells that then prompts the immune system to produce SARS-COV-2 antibodies. mRNA technology is also being used to develop a wide range of therapeutic approaches to diseases, esp. cancers.

Importantly there are major competing interests working on the same thing using the same development platforms. China is one of them. So is Germany. Last week's NYT's article on US Cyber Security Agency claims that China was hacking into companies doing vaccine R&D to steal technology using non-traditional agents and techniques (that is code for Chinese students in the US) was noteworthy in regards to the race to develop a SARS-COV-2 vaccine (I'm going to do another article on this today).

You may have also heard of Sanofi vaccines. These are also novel biologics but use a DNA platform to produce a vaccine. Sanofi is working with the US Government's Biomedical Advanced R&D Agency (BARDA) and has a partnership with GSK to develop vaccine products. Both BARDA and NAID come under HHS. I suspect that given how the US government works, there's competition instead of cooperation between these two agencies.

One can also tie in the WHO's efforts within the last two weeks to get all the major players to cooperate in development and production of all vaccines to insure "fairness" in distribution as acknowledgment that competition for a vaccine is going to produce a race for dollars and the potential that the poorest won't get vaccinated.

The biggest advantage of both mRNA and DNA vaccines is that they can be easily and cost effectively produced in large quantities compared to traditional vaccines.

Having said that and IMO, mRNA vaccines will emerge as the best candidate vaccine with DNA vaccines just as effective but will come to market after mRNA vaccines. Other's of the standard variety will also emerge and be brought to market in about the same time as the DNA products. We'll need all of them to vaccinate the billions who will need it.

Second, there are no guarantees. These press releases are coming from Moderna and we should be suspicious of the motives (gate a leg up on market share, drive share prices up). During this week you'll hear Trump misrepresenting the available facts on vaccines in general. Ignore him.

I don't think things are much different re vaccines on Monday, May 18th than they were a week ago except markets are reacting to the positive news. The reality is that vaccines are being developed and some might be available by the fall but not at scale. Most vaccines won't be available until early next year, possibly later and even then production at scale and delivery of the vaccines to the world's population is going to take a while.

The next question will be, after a vaccine produces an immune response, how long will it last and what actually will be it's protective nature. Remember, most people who get flu vaccines aren't completely protected but when exposed to a sufficient dose of the virus to become infected have milder symptoms. The vulnerable still get very sick and die from influenza. That same cohort will get sick and die even when vaccinated against SARS-COV-2 ...... the press will have a new meme then something having to do with the vaccines don't work and we need to re-shutter.

[Jeff Buchanan]

As promised here are some comments on what I learned over the weekend from a link to reviews of 4 books not necessarily recently written but advanced as pertinent to understanding the remarks coming from GB's intelligence agencies (and the NYT's articles among many others on this subject) about how state warfare, as we knew it through 1945 waged on a global scale has been replaced by other means and most recently by a fierce battle for technology advantage and huge, but not new, perhaps way more sophisticated, efforts at destabilizing adversaries with disinformation.

The degree of infiltration of non-traditional agents of foreign governments into US R&D is staggering. It's been going on for decades and according to some is the primary reason that the US is declining as a world power with China making substantial gains in it's wake. I've not seen anything published to debunk the character and extent of this kind of warfare.

All of this caused me to think this weekend while in the depths of my despair over the impact of COVID-19 on the national and global economy if I wasn't being victimized, yep, even eating up a serious disinformation campaign coming out of Russia and China. That is not to suggest they are collaborating but they definitely could be said to have parallel interests.

The nature of a skillfully designed disinformation campaign might be to sew doubt about the trustworthiness of government. Check. Or it could be an after the COVID fact effort to destabilize the US economy by augmenting, through social media and a willing press, fears of shortages and deaths from the virus if people go back to work. Check.

I spoke of PRC complicity in what I called optimizing their fuck up to their advantage. They may have released SARS-COV-2 by accident and with benign intentions in it's development and study, but still, the PRC is malevolently and purposefully designing ways to optimize the impact of their fuck up and make life hard for us now. Brilliant actually.

I can think of a number of things, not getting a lot of press or official public exposure that are working to punish the Chinese - counterattack by the US in the context of current modalities of warfare is probably a better choice of words. De-listing Chinese companies from the stock exchanges, re-emphasizing and punishing violations of trading restrictions imposed by the US on foreign companies doing business with China, refusing to continue trade talks with China, defunding the WHO with the express intent of punishing them for "collaborating" with the Chinese in hiding the true nature of COVID, continuing to insure global financial transactions are run through the dollar controlled money exchange mechanisms, to name a few.

A related comment regarding the importance of maintaining control of US global financial transactions. The American banking system (read the US) has tremendous leverage and advantage considering most financial transactions are carried out in dollars. China has been working towards weakening that US advantage through the use of what appear to most of us as benign ways to make payments using our smart phones.

These payment methods are much more ubiquitous in Asia than in the US or EU but Chinese companies (Chinese companies masquerading as Asian companies) are hard at work trying to get these payment platforms into broad use globally. They completely circumvent the banking and finance mechanisms that have been controlled by the US since the 1944 Brenton Woods agreements. Major players are Alibaba and guess who, Huawei.

The 5G battle and to an equal extent that which involves payment app installs on Chinese manufactured cell phones is another good example of new battles being waged that have no resemblance at all to warfare carried out by the concepts of mutually assured Destruction (MAD), tanks rolling across the African desert or the Eastern planes of Germany to confront the USSR or the great sea battles and sea supported land battles of the 20th century that America dominated.

Strangely, and in the vein of disinformation, an old article appeared in the Economist on their weekend read list that in detailed graphs showed how the global economy and political tensions would rise significantly with the re-election of Donald Trump to the WH. The three candidates under the microscope where Sanders, Biden and trump.Thinking about this article in the context of warfare and that it was sprung via the Economist, it could be viewed as an appropriate skirmish to engage in by the Chinese. Pretty sure the Chicoms would like to get rid of Trump who has taken a very tough stand against Xi and his cronies and bring in the Obama/Biden Chinese detente appeasers.

So, fuck the Chinese ..... and I should admit that I am the last guy to embrace conspiracy theories. This, however, is on a whole new level beyond often factually dubious conspiracy theories ..... this one is WAR!!!!

[Whitley]

https://www.freep.com/story/news/hea...us/5206229002/

A good story of an overview of the covid 19 for the layman.

[iam416]

You're posting links to a covid-overview when you have shit near ten score posts from Buchanan to call on?