- You'll Never Guess Which Country Has The Most Widespread Adoption Of Crypto In The World
You’ll Never Guess Which Country Has The Most Widespread Adoption Of Crypto In The World
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/12/2020 – 02:45Reliance on remittances and the prevalence of peer-to-peer phone payments have led to a steep rise of cryptocurrency use in Africa’s largest economy.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, out of 65 countries in the Statista Global Consumer Survey, Nigerians were the most likely to say they used or owned cryptocurrency.
Almost a third of Nigerians said this applied to them.
The high cost of sending money across borders the conventional way has caused many to turn to local cryptocurrency exchanges catering to overseas workers and their families, according to Bitcoin.com. Nigerians also often use their phones to send money to each other also to pay in shops. Recently, businesses in the country have been adding crypto plugins to their phone payment options, adding another way in which Nigerians can use cryptocurrency in their everyday lives.
You will find more infographics at Statista
High rates of cryptocurrency ownership and use were also recorded in Vietnam, South Africa, Turkey and Peru.
One world region where many cryptocurrency users were located was Latin America, according to the survey. Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Chile all scored in the double digits when it comes to the adoption of cryptocurrency.
Incidentally, Spain was the country with one of the highest adoption rates in Europe, together with Ireland (10 percent each) and Greece (11 percent). Asian and African countries also scored higher than European and English-speaking nations, where crypto currency adoption was still very low.
Japan, finally, was the country in the survey where the fewest people had ever dealt in crypto currency. Only three percent said they had experience with crypto products, the lowest in the survey together with respondents in Sweden and Denmark.
- Britain's Enemies Will Tremble At The Sight Of Our Diversity & Inclusion…
Britain’s Enemies Will Tremble At The Sight Of Our Diversity & Inclusion…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/12/2020 – 02:00Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Not long ago, the British Army realized that it needed to completely revamp its recruiting campaign.
The younger generation simply wasn’t responding to the Army’s previous ‘Be All You Can Be’ style of advertising. So British leadership changed the recruiting message to keep up with the massive cultural shift that has been sweeping the world.
Their updated campaign focused on– you guessed it– diversity and inclusion.
The Army’s new priority was to show off how woke they are, and to make new recruits feel safe and happy… as opposed to building a lethal, highly effective fighting force.
One of the best examples of this ad campaign shows British soldiers on a combat patrol, ostensibly in the mountains of Afghanistan.
But suddenly the mission stops… because one of the soldiers is Muslim and needs to pray.
The ad shows the rest of the unit happily and patiently waiting. At one point, the radio squawks (which is usually because the command headquarters or another nearby unit needs to communicate with your squad.)
But one of the soldiers shushes the radio operator. So we not only need to stop the entire freaking war, but we have to cut ourselves off from potentially critical communication, just so this guy can continue to pray without being disturbed.
Just to be clear, I respect anyone’s religious beliefs. I don’t care if someone prays to the sun, Allah, or Joe Pesci.
But they don’t stop a war when someone gets SHOT. Duh. So why stop just because someone needs to pray? What kind of priority is this??
It’s as if the Army leadership actually believes “Our enemies will tremble at the sight of our diversity and inclusion. . .”
But in reality, the entire world now knows that the British military will stop in the middle of a war to coddle the needs of every individual soldier.
Again– this is a major shift in priorities. Military service is supposed to be about selfless sacrifice, not the needs of the individual.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese have figured this out.
In its new recruiting campaign, China’s military leadership shows the sacrifices that its soldiers make… the early mornings, the long days, the time away from family, and the difficult life.
But the Chinese ads attract exactly the type of person they’re looking for– people who don’t want to take the easy path.
China’s recruiting ads also show off a bonanza of high-tech weaponry, including some of the most advanced fighter jets, tanks, and ships in the world.
Take a look at these two side-by-side and ask yourself, “Gee I wonder who would win that war?”
I wrote about this yesterday– you can see this major shift in priorities just about everywhere.
The top priority of the world’s biggest corporations is no longer running their businesses and turning a profit. Now it’s all about showing off their woke credentials.
You can’t just sell shoes anymore. You have to run political ads to demonstrate how deeply you believe in the new religion of wokeness.
Nike built an entire ad campaign around Colin Kaepernick– the former NFL player who started the movement to kneel during the US national anthem.
And last month when Kaepernick tweeted that July 4th was a “celebration of white supremacy,” Disney almost immediately hired him to produce content.
Beyond wokeness, economic priorities have also shifted. National, state, and local governments all over the world are paying people to NOT work, and refusing to allow small businesses to operate at normal capacity.
Rather than work, produce, and contribute to a healthy economy, they want us all to be terrified of a virus and dependent on mother government.
As I wrote yesterday, economic prosperity is no longer the priority.
They will rack up limitless amounts of debt, print infinite quantities of money, make interest rates negative– all to protect people from Covid, regardless of the cost to the economy or individual liberty.
Then you have Bolshevik politicians to contend with, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who led a ridiculous crusade last year to banish Amazon from her district.
Amazon had originally announced that they would establish a second headquarters in Long Island City, New York (which AOC represents).
“HQ2” as it was called, would have brought billions of dollars in benefits– high paying jobs, investment, additional tax revenue. And in exchange, Amazon would have received some minor tax breaks.
The deal was a win/win for everyone. Amazon would have benefited, the local community would have benefited, and the government would have benefited.
But Bolsheviks don’t like win/win situations. They can’t stand it when a wealthy person or big business wins. They’re only willing to do a win/lose deal. And absent that, they’ll do a lose/lose deal.
And that’s exactly what AOC got– a lose/lose deal. Amazon walked away, and her district ended up with no big investment or additional tax revenue.
If economic prosperity were still the priority in the United States, angry voters would have revolted against AOC for her irrational, destructive behavior.
Instead she was celebrated… because, again, economic prosperity is no longer the priority.
Universities, which used to prioritize scientific advancement, vigorous debate, and the transfer of knowledge to the next generation, have embraced wokeness and become intolerant of any intellectual dissent.
And in the case of Great Britain, the new woke priorities even extend to national defense.
Their Army’s priority is now diversity and inclusion. It’s no longer about defending the nation, and, if necessary, fighting and winning wars.
Ultimately these new priorities cultivate weakness– a weaker national defense, a weaker economy, a weaker, more fractured society.
And it’s hard to imagine any nation thriving long-term when it consistently cultivates weakness.
* * *
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- Engdahl: Towards A US-China War? The Creation of A Global Totalitarian "One World Government" System?
Engdahl: Towards A US-China War? The Creation of A Global Totalitarian “One World Government” System?
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/12/2020 – 00:05Authored by F. William Engdahl via GlobalResearch.ca,
If we step back from the details of daily headlines around the world and try to make sense of larger patterns, the dominant dynamic defining world geopolitics in the past three years or more is the appearance of a genuine irregular conflict between the two most formidable powers on the planet – The Peoples’ Republic of China and the United States of America. Increasingly it’s beginning to look as if some very dark global networks are orchestrating what looks to be an updated rerun of their 1939-1945 World War. Only this time the stakes are total, and aim at creation a universal global totalitarian system, what David Rockefeller once called a “one world government.” The powers that be periodically use war to gain major policy shifts.
On behalf of the Powers That Be (PTB), World War II was orchestrated by the circles of the City of London and of Wall Street to maneuver two great obstacles – Russia and Germany – to wage a war to the death against each other, in order that those Anglo-Saxon PTB could reorganize the world geopolitical chess board to their advantage. It largely succeeded, but for the small detail that after 1945, Wall Street and the Rockefeller brothers were determined that England play the junior partner to Washington. London and Washington then entered the period of their global domination known as the Cold War.
That Anglo-American global condominium ended, by design, in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union by 1991.
Around this time, with the onset of the Bill Clinton presidency in 1992, the next phase– financial and industrial globalization– was inaugurated. With that, began the hollowing out of the industrial base of not only the United States, but also of Germany and the EU. The cheap labor outsourcing enabled by the new WTO drove wages down and destroyed one industry after the next in the industrial West after the 1990s. It was a necessary step on the path to what G.H.W. Bush in 1990 called the New World Order. The next step would be destruction of national sovereignty everywhere. Here the USA was the major obstacle.
“A little help from our friends…”
For the PTB, who owe no allegiance to nations, only to their power which is across borders, the birth of the World Trade Organization and their bringing China in as a full member in 2001 was intended as the key next step. At that point the PTB facilitated in China the greatest industrial growth by any nation in history, possibly excepting Germany from 1871-1914 and USA after 1866. WTO membership allowed Western multinationals from Apple to Nike to KFC to Ford and VW to pour billions into China to make their products at dirt-cheap wage levels for re-export to the West.
One of the great mysteries of that China growth is the fact that China was allowed to become the “workshop of the world” after 2001, first in lower-skill industries such as textiles or toys, later in pharmaceuticals and most recently in electronics assembly and production. The mystery clears up when we look at the idea that the PTB and their financial houses, using China, want to weaken strong industrial powers, especially the United States, to push their global agenda. Brzezinski often wrote that the nation state was to be eliminated, as did his patron, David Rockefeller. By allowing China to become a rival to Washington in economy and increasingly in technology, they created the means to destroy the superpower hegemony of the US.
By the onset of the Presidency of Xi Jinping in 2012, China was an economic colossus second in weight only to the United States. Clearly this could never have happened – not under the eye of the same Anglo-American old families who launched the Opium Wars after 1840 to bring China to heel and open their economy to Western financial looting – unless the Anglo-Americans had wanted it.
The same British-owned bank involved in the China opium trade, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC), founded by a Scotsman, Thomas Sutherland in 1865 in the then-British colony of Hong Kong, today is the largest non-Chinese bank in Hong Kong. HSBC has become so well-connected to China in recent years that it has since 2011 had as Board member and Deputy HSBC Chairman, Laura Cha. Cha was formerly Vice Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, being the first person outside mainland China to join the Beijing Central Government of the People’s Republic of China at vice-ministerial rank. In other words the largest bank in the UK has a board member who was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a China government official. China needed access to Western money and HSBC and other select banks such as JP MorganChase, Barclays, Goldman Sachs were clearly more than happy to assist.
“Socialism with Xi Jinping Characteristics…”
All told until 2012 when Xi took charge of the CCP in Beijing, China seemed to be willing to be a globalist “team player,” though with “Chinese characteristics.”
However, in 2015 after little more than two years in office, Xi Jinping endorsed a comprehensive national industrial strategy, Made in China: 2025. China 2025 replaced an earlier Western globalist document that had been formulated with the World Bank and the USA, the China 2030 report under Robert Zoellick. That shift to a China strategy for global tech domination might well have triggered a decision by the globalist PTB that China could no longer be relied on to play by the rules of the globalists, but rather that the CCP under Xi were determined to make China the global leader in advanced industrial, AI and bio-technologies. A resurgent China nationalist global hegemony was not the idea of the New World Order gang.
China:2025 combined with Xi’s strong advocacy of the Belt Road Initiative for global infrastructure linking China by land and sea to all Eurasia and beyond, likely suggested to the globalists that the only solution to the prospect of their losing their power to a China global hegemon would ultimately be war, a war that would destroy both nationalist powers, USA AND China. This is my conclusion and there is much to suggest this is now taking place.
Tit for Tat
If so, it will most likely be far different from the military contest of World War II. The USA and most of the Western industrial economies have “conveniently” imposed the worst economic depression since the 1930’s as a bizarre response to an alleged virus originating in Wuhan and spreading to the world. Despite the fact that the death toll, even with vastly inflated statistics, is at the level of a severe annual influenza, the insistence of politicians and the corrupt WHO to impose draconian lockdown and economic disruption has crippled the remaining industrial base in the US and most of the EU.
The eruption of well-organized riots and vandalism under the banner of racial protests across the USA has brought America’s cities to a state in many cases of war zones resembling the cities of the 2013 Matt Damon and Jodie Foster film, Elysium. In this context, anti-Washington rhetoric from Beijing has taken on a sharp tone in their use of so-called “Wolf Diplomacy.”
Now after Washington closed the China Consulate in Houston and China the US Consulate in Chengdu, both sides have stepped up rhetoric. High tech companies are being banned in the US, military displays of force from the US in the South China Sea and waters near Taiwan are increasing tensions and rhetoric on both sides. The White House accuses the WHO of being an agent of Beijing, while China accuses the US of deliberately creating a deadly virus and bringing it to Wuhan. Chinese state media supports the explosion of violent protests across America under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Step-wise events are escalating dramatically. Many of the US self-styled Marxists leading the protests across US cities have ties to Beijing such as the Maoist-origin Revolutionary Communist Party, USA of Bob Avakian.
“Unrestricted Warfare”
Under these conditions, what kind of escalation is likely? In 1999 two colonels in the China PLA, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published a book with the PLA Press titled Unrestricted Warfare. Qiao Liang was promoted to Major General in the PLA Air Force and became deputy secretary-general of the Council for National Security Policy Studies. The two updated their work in 2016. It gives a window on high-level China military strategy.
Reviewing published US military doctrine in the aftermath of the 1991 US Operation Desert Storm war against Iraq, the Chinese authors point out what they see as US over-dependence on brute military force and conventional military doctrine. They claim,
“Observing, considering, and resolving problems from the point of view of technology is typical American thinking. Its advantages and disadvantages are both very apparent, just like the characters of Americans.”
They add,
“military threats are already often no longer the major factors affecting national security…these traditional factors are increasingly becoming more intertwined with grabbing resources, contending for markets, controlling capital, trade sanctions, and other economic factors, to the extent that they are even becoming secondary to these factors. They comprise a new pattern which threatens the political, economic and military security of a nation or nations… “
The two authors define the new form of warfare as, “encompassing the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural, and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air, space, and electronics spheres.”
They suggest China could use hacking into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media, and conducting urban warfare among the methods proposed. Recent revelations that Chinese entities pay millions in ad revenues to the New York Times and other mainstream USA media to voice China-positive views is one example. Similarly, maneuvering a Chinese national to head the US’ largest public pension fund, CalPERS, which poured billions into risky China stocks, or persuading the New York Stock Exchange to list dozens of China companies without requiring adherence to US accounting transparency increase US financial vulnerability are others.
This all suggests the form that a war between China and the US could take. It can be termed asymmetrical warfare or unrestricted war, where nothing that disrupts the enemy is off limits. Qiao has that, “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” There are no Geneva Conventions.
The two Beijing authors add this irregular warfare could include assaults on the political security, economic security, cultural security, and information security of the nation. The dependence of the US economy on China supply chains for everything from basic antibiotics to militarily-vital rare earth minerals is but one domain of vulnerability.
On its side, China is vulnerable to trade sanctions, financial disruption, bioterror attacks and oil embargoes to name a few. Some have suggested the recent locust plague and African Swine Fever devastation to China’s core food supplies, was not merely an act of nature. If not, then we are likely deep into an undeclared form of US-China unrestricted warfare. Could it be that the recent extreme floods along the China Yangtze River that threaten the giant Three Gorges Dam and have flooded Wuhan and other major China cities and devastated millions of acres of key cropland was not entirely seasonal?
A full unrestricted war of China and the USA would be more than a tragedy. It could be the end of civilization as we know it.
Is this what characters such as Bill Gates and his superiors are trying to bring about?
Do they plan to introduce their draconian dystopian “Reset” on the ashes of such a conflict?
- Fox News Ratings Surge, Leading 'Primetime Pack' Despite Boycotts As CNN, MSNBC Lag
Fox News Ratings Surge, Leading ‘Primetime Pack’ Despite Boycotts As CNN, MSNBC Lag
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 23:45While the national polls proclaim Joe Biden as the clear frontrunner, just like they did for Hillary Clinton back in the summer of 2016, signs of growing dissatisfaction with Biden, who has spent the last five months cowering in his basement in Rehobeth, abound, especially as more Americans grow weary of the progressives insistence on economy-crushing social distancing measures, even in areas where case numbers have declined substantially. They continue to hysterically condemn President Trump for causing 160,000 deaths (the number of Americans who have succumbed to the virus so far) without saying one word about the lapses in Wuhan that opened Pandora’s Box in the first place.
As spread slows dramatically from New Jersey to Arizona to California, Americans consistently rate President Trump as “better” on the economy than Biden, though some carefully worded polls have pointed to a surge in public frustration with a federal response that has been characterized as slow and inept.
But through it all, as the mainstream press doubled-down on its progressive slant – openly referring to violent rioters as “peaceful protesters” and reporting on ultra-progressive concepts like “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy” as if these theoretical interpretations are indisputable realities – conservative outlets like Fox News have picked up steam.
And this week, even the New York Times is being forced to admit that – love it or hate it – Fox News is America’s most popular news organization in television. And as the NYT’s Michael Grynbaum reported, while Fox has struggled with several recent “scandals”, things at the cable news channel “have never been better,” as it maintained its ratings dominance in June and July. And not just for cable: for all of television.
In one sense, this has been a difficult period for Fox News: a star anchor fired after being accused of sexual harassment, a lawsuit depicting a misogynist workplace, a top writer exposed as a racist internet troll, advertiser boycotts and outrage after Tucker Carlson called protesters “criminal mobs” and questioned the patriotism of a senator who lost her legs in Iraq.
In another sense, business has never been better.
In June and July, Fox News was the highest-rated television channel in the prime-time hours of 8 to 11 p.m. Not just on cable. Not just among news networks. All of television. The average live Fox News viewership in those hours outstripped cable rivals like CNN, MSNBC and ESPN, as well as the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC, according to Nielsen.
And nowhere is Fox more dominant than the prime-time slot, between 8 to 11, where Martha McCallum, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity rule the day. And even the return of sports didn’t shake Fox’s grip on an audience that has tuned in to its brand of news during a crisis that many complain has been politicized by both the left and the right.
Of course, Fox isn’t the only news channel that’s benefited; news consumption is up overall. But Fox has seen by far the biggest benefit as CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC etc all seem to speak with one voice that’s controlled by radical leftists masquerading as journalists.
Even the return of live sports did little to stop the momentum: The Fox News programs hosted by Mr. Carlson and Sean Hannity drew more live viewers than competing baseball and basketball games, including a Yankees-Nationals matchup on Opening Day.
Fox News’s big summer has been boosted by a rise in audience for news programming in general, an increase driven by interest in the pandemic, civil rights protests and the presidential election. ABC, CBS, and NBC, meanwhile, have more reruns on the summer schedule; the coronavirus has suspended most TV productions; and viewers are being lured away by streaming services and on-demand Hollywood movies.
But the Fox News ratings also demonstrate the size and resilience of America’s audience for pro-Trump opinion, and the loyalty of Fox News viewers who shrug off the controversies that routinely swirl around the network.
As Lachlan Murdoch bragged during last week’s earnings call, Fox’s advertising revenue is actually up over the past year. And though the NYT doesn’t come out and say clearly, the various “scandals” being pushed by leftists surrounding Trump’s handling of the virus simply don’t land with conservatives.
In other words, conservatives don’t blame Trump for the outbreak like liberals do.
“Massive news events that conservatives view through a highly partisan lens are driving the ratings, and none of the controversies really land with loyal Fox News viewers,” said Nicole Hemmer, a scholar at Columbia University and a historian of American conservative media.
Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox News’s parent company, bragged on an earnings call last week about the network’s “astronomical” ratings. He also said its ad revenue was up from a year ago — a reminder that Fox News, for all the flak it takes from critics, politicians and the advertisers that fled Mr. Carlson, remains an unrivaled profit engine for the Murdoch empire.
But perhaps the biggest reason why Fox has enjoyed such heightened popularity can be found in the NYT story itself, as America’s paper of record claims hydroxychloroquine has been “proven” to be “useless and even dangerous”. The medication has been in use treating malaria patients for more than half a century, and a study claiming it caused serious medical complications in COVID-19 patients was later corrected.
Complaints that Fox News prime-time hosts downplayed the coronavirus — and, in the case of Laura Ingraham, encouraged the use of hydroxychloroquine, a drug shown to be useless, and even dangerous, for Covid-19 patients — made little difference.
But the NYT doesn’t care, and why? Because that’s the narrative that the NYT, and Fox News’s main TV-based competitors, are working together to propagate.
- Escape From New York: Wealthy Residents Flee In Droves As The City Degenerates Into A Hellhole
Escape From New York: Wealthy Residents Flee In Droves As The City Degenerates Into A Hellhole
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 23:25Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
Hundreds of thousands of wealthy residents have already left New York City, and more are leaving every day as America’s biggest city rapidly degenerates into a hellhole. This is incredibly sad to watch, because in many ways New York had been an incredible success story over the past several decades.
The 1970s and 1980s were nightmarish times for the city, but over the past several decades it was transformed into a virtual paradise for the wealthy and famous. Crime rates absolutely plummeted, the city was given a dramatic facelift and a booming financial community brought an unprecedented amount of wealth into New York.
But now many of the old problems are starting to come back again, and a lot of wealthy New Yorkers have decided that it is time to look for greener pastures.
Of course the COVID-19 pandemic has been the primary motivation for a lot of the wealthy individuals that have been fleeing the city. According to the New York Times, there was a mass exodus of 420,000 New Yorkers between March 1st and May 1st…
Roughly 5 percent of residents — or about 420,000 people — left the city between March 1 and May 1. In the city’s very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes.
Can you imagine 40 percent of your neighborhood leaving in just two months?
Wealthy people can often pick up and move a lot more easily than the rest of us, because many of them are not tied to traditional jobs and a lot of them already own second homes. And it is definitely understandable that a lot of them would have wanted to leave during the peak of the pandemic in the New York area, but now that infection rates are a lot lower they still aren’t coming back and this has become a hot political issue for New York politicians.
Just a few days ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo lamented the fact that this mass exodus is hitting tax revenues really hard…
A single percent of New York’s population pays half of the state’s taxes, he said, “and they’re the most mobile people on the globe.”
“I literally talk to people all day long, who are now in their Hamptons house, who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house or in their Connecticut weekend house,” Cuomo continued. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking, if I stay there, they pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge. So, that would be a bad place if we had to go there.”
But New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking a completely different tone. At this point, he doesn’t seem to care whether the wealthy come back or not…
Mayor de Blasio couldn’t care less if wealthy people leave the city for good because of the coronavirus pandemic, telling reporters on Friday that he won’t bend over backward for the one percent to return to NYC.
In a briefing from City Hall, de Blasio for a second day in a row sneered at Gov. Cuomo’s suggestion that the Big Apple’s ballooning deficit can only be bridged if rich people who fled at the outset of the pandemic come back and start paying taxes again.
Mayor de Blasio can continue to deny reality if he wishes, but without a doubt the lack of revenue is starting to have a major impact.
The sanitation budget was cut by more than 100 million dollars, and at this point giant mountains of trash are starting to pile up around the city…
Photos show bags filled with leftover food scraps, cans and bottles piled high on sidewalks or overflowing out of corner litter baskets.
Dead rats have been found among the waste and raccoons have been spotted climbing out of garbage cans.
At one time such scenes would have been unthinkable in New York City, but now they have become a daily reality.
Meanwhile, crime rates are absolutely skyrocketing. In fact, the number of shootings in the city during the month of July was up 177 percent compared to the same month a year ago…
The NYPD recorded 244 shootings in July 2020 versus 88 in July 2019, which is a 177% increase. Shootings rose in July in every borough, police said. Through July 31, the city has experienced a 72% spike in shootings compared to the same time last year—772 versus 450 in 2019.
Murders in July rose 59% compared to last year with 54 in 2020 versus 34 a year ago. Burglaries were up 31% percent year-over-year. Police said 309 more auto thefts were reported for the month compared to a year earlier.
This explosion of criminal activity is being called a “crime wave”, and even the wealthiest neighborhoods are being hit hard…
New York City’s wealthiest neighborhood is grappling with a spike in armed robberies, new data reveals.
Manhattan’s Upper East Side has seen 27 robberies over the past four weeks – a 286 percent increase when compared to the same period last year, according to the NYPD.
Some of the wealthiest people on the entire planet call the Upper East Side home, and they paid a lot of money for their homes so that they would be insulated from this sort of thing.
But now even their neighborhoods aren’t safe.
Over on the Upper West Side, a different sort of problem is making headlines…
Hundreds of homeless people who have been put up in luxury hotels on Manhattan’s Upper West Side by the city as part of its efforts to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in shelters are terrifying residents by urinating, sleeping and taking drugs in the streets.
In July, it emerged that 139 of the city’s iconic hotels – which had been forced closed for months – had agreed to take in homeless people for $175 per person, per night as part of a scheme by the city to try to avoid a breakout of COVID-19 in homeless shelters.
Can you imagine paying millions of dollars for your home and seeing homeless people urinate and take drugs right on the sidewalk in front of your building on a regular basis?
Even worse, it has been revealed that quite a few of the individuals that are being housed in these luxury hotels are registered sex offenders…
Of greatest concern for parents are the sex offenders — 10 are living at the Belleclaire as of Thursday, the state sex offender registry said. That’s just one block from PS 87’s playground.
And of those ten, there are four that actually victimized children…
There are also four offenders whose victims were children: Ronald Butler, 62, convicted in June 2013 of raping a 16-year-old girl; Eddie Daniel, 59, convicted of abusing a 10-year-old in 2011; Jonathan Evans, 29, convicted of abusing a 6-year-old; and Michael Hughes, 55, convicted of possessing child pornography in 2007.
This is what life is like for the wealthy in New York City in 2020.
No wonder so many of them have left and have no plans to come back.
Sadly, similar things are happening in major cities all over the nation, and what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.
I certainly don’t blame anyone for wanting to leave New York. If I was living there, I would want to leave too.
All over America, major cities that are being run by Democrats are being transformed into hellholes, but most of those Democrats just keep winning elections over and over again.
When will we ever learn?
- Gundlach, Who Correctly Called The 2016 Presidential Election, Predicts Trump Will Win Again
Gundlach, Who Correctly Called The 2016 Presidential Election, Predicts Trump Will Win Again
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 23:05Back in early, DoubleLine’s Jeff Gundlach made a prediction that was viewed as anathema in “serious” circles: he said that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. And much to the chagrin of all his “serious” colleagues, he was proven correct which is why earlier today we said that the one thing we were most curious about from Gundlach’s latest webcast was who he thinks would win this time around.
Well, we got the answer, and once again if Gundlach is correct a whole lot of “experts” (not to mention pollsters) will again be humiliated on Nov 4, because according to the bond king Trump will once again emerge victorious.
One would know it based on such online betting sites as PredictIt (which incidentally are remarkably illiquid, and extremely easy to manipulate by anyone with modestly deep pockets), which show Biden as a clear favorite with a roughly 15 point lead…
… but then again the “experts” and odds in 2016 also said Trump had no chance of victory.
So it makes sense to ignore the pollsters, the online bookies and the exports who were dead wrong in 2016, and focus on those who called it right.
With that in mind, during a Q&A on his Tuesday afternoon webcast, Gundlach said that “my base case is actually that Donald Trump will win re-election,” adding that he’d “bet against” former Vice President Joe Biden defeating Trump in November.
“I think polls are very, very squishy right now because of the highly toxic political environment in which we live,” the 60-year-old billionaire said. Gundlach said he’s come across data suggesting that about “two-thirds of conservatives or moderate conservatives say that they have lied about their support for Donald Trump either directly or by omission.”
“I just think there’s a lot, a lot of time here. There’s going to be twists and turns,” Gundlach added.
Gundlach also voiced another contrarian view when he said that he expects “significant” volatility for markets, something which markets generally don’t as it is now conventional wisdom that whoever wins will be good for risk assets.
“This go-around, I expect much greater volatility around the election as the progressive policies, so-called, of tremendous increased deficit spending for basically wealth manipulation, that could get pretty heated, and we’ll see what happens.”
Finally, Gundlach did not spare criticism for Biden’s just announced running mate, saying said he didn’t think Kamala Harris was a “good pick,” adding that Harris is “maybe a little too charismatic.”
“She might be a little bit dominant with her personality, but I don’t have any particular thoughts on Kamala Harris. I’m not surprised that she’s the pick.”
Needless to say, if Gundlach is right again, there will be a whole lot more of this from the “resistance” who will then have another 4 years – in collaboration with the deep state – to come up with bizarre conspiracy theories “explaining” why they were dead wrong yet again.
One final observation non-political from the bond king: with the S&P now trading at all time highs, and more than 1,000 points above the March low, Gundlach remains confident that in the remaining 4 and a half months, the market will crash again, and that “we will see the March lows again this year.”
- Precious Metal Pummeling Continues In Early Asia Trading
Precious Metal Pummeling Continues In Early Asia Trading
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 22:45As Bloomberg’s Mark Cranfield noted this evening, small reversals are just not gold’s style after a major advance (typically somewhere between a 15% and 20% drop is more common), and the selling pressure on precious metals has continued as Japan and then China opens this evening with Silver futures back at a $23 handle and Gold futures back below $1900.
Sending the gold/silver ratio soaring…
After finding support at 2017 lows…
As Peter Schiff noted earlier:
Nothing goes up every single day, and gold and silver are not going to be the exception to that rule. There are no bull markets that are up every day. You’re always going to have down days.”
Peter said the fundamentals are better than any he’s ever seen.
The Federal Reserve is printing trillions of dollars. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said it isn’t even thinking about thinking about raising interest rates. And there are reports that the central bank is set to make a commitment to ramping up inflation. All of this is extremely bullish for gold.
In a CNBC interview, US Global Investors CEO Frank Holmes said he can see $4,000 gold in the relatively near future with G-20 finance ministers and central banks “working together like a cartel and they’re all printing trillions of dollars.”
We’ve not seen this level where central banks are printing money at a zero interest rate. At zero interest rates, gold becomes a very, very attractive asset class,” Holmes said.
You have to focus on the fundamentals. A lot of investors aren’t doing that.
They’re not looking into the future and realizing the monetary fiscal policies that have already driven gold past $2,000 are going to continue and drive it past $3,000, $4,000, $5,000… And therein lies the opportunity.”
Finally, we note that Central banks added another net 18.1 tons of gold to their reserves in June, according to the latest data from the World Gold Council, who also found that 20% of central banks globally plan to expand their gold holdings in 2020.
Factors related to the economic environment – such as negative interest rates – were overwhelming drivers of these planned purchases. This was supported by gold’s role as a safe haven in times of crisis, as well as its lack of default risk.”
This year’s surge in precious metals, as Peter Schiff warns, is not a happy occasion because it really portends some real big problems on the horizon. I mean, most Americans don’t have any gold. There is severe economic hardship that the vast majority of Americans are going to be enduring, and gold is basically letting you know that that hardship is on the way.”
- Food Bank Strains Emerge As Economy Falls Off Fiscal Cliff
Food Bank Strains Emerge As Economy Falls Off Fiscal Cliff
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 22:25The latest economic data suggest the US recovery stalled. One look at the Citi US econ surprise index, as of this week, shows the recovery ran out of steam last month. A fiscal cliff is already underway, set to enter the second week on Friday (Aug. 14) as tens of millions of Americans are unemployed and have yet to receive their stimulus checks.
The recovery, so far, is a massive economic sugar rush, entirely a function of the Trump administration on a reckless spending spree. One way the administration can artificially supercharge consumption is through issuing direct transfer payments to the working poor. The extra money has been used by households to pay down credit card bills, put food on the table, and pay housing expenses, while others used the free money to buy automobiles and FANG stocks.
President Trump signed an executive order over the weekend to fund another round of stimulus checks of approximately $400 per week, a reduction from the $600 federal aid seen in the first round from March to the end of July.
Massive federal spending has transformed America into a welfare state under the GOP watch. Tea Party politicians aren’t pleased with the Republican establishment’s wild spending spree.
With a fiscal cliff coming up on the second week, tens of millions of folks are unable to consume because they are insolvent and jobless, and their amount of consumption is dependent on the government. We’ve noted before, a quarter of all household income is derived from the government. And with no stimulus checks in the mail, that means Americans are returning to food banks:
Claudia Raymer, who manages a network of food-security groups in Ohio County, West Virginia, told Bloomberg when stimulus checks stopped arriving in late July, there was an immediate impact on households, resulting in rising food bank activity among the working poor.
The fiscal cliff will be more damaging in lower-income communities (than major metros), such as small towns in West Virginia, where folks were being paid handsomely by the federal government to sit at home. The problem is, once the payments end, consumption plunges, and the local communities return to a recessionary environment. With federal aid already running out for the stimulus program, the fiscal cliff has already been realized in West Virginia:
“We’ve definitely already seen food-security needs increase, just in a week, since the extra unemployment has ended,” Raymer said.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday the next round of stimulus checks could take a couple of weeks to distribute, which would suggest households might not receive their stimulus checks until the end of August.
Days before the stimulus program ended (late July), a sizeable food bank line appeared in Baltimore, Maryland.
behind the scenes: food bank line in Baltimore just getting started – a lot of hungry and broke families as fiscal cliff begins pic.twitter.com/30C1OBJDSP
— Alastair Williamson (@StockBoardAsset) July 26, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The economic crisis is far from over. Households are entirely screwed as depressionary unemployment levels will continue into the election. Many folks are dependent on direct transfer payments from the government and food banks for survival. Who would’ve ever thought this would be the case in the “greatest economy ever.”
- Tucker: We Need A Principled Anti-Lockdown Movement
Tucker: We Need A Principled Anti-Lockdown Movement
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 22:05Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the U.S. for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of information.
Something would prevent it. So I believed. So most of us believed.
Still it happened, all in a matter of days, March 12-16, 2020, and boom; it was over! We were locked down. Schools shut. Bars and restaurants closed. No international visitors. Theaters shuttered. Conferences forcibly ended. Sports stopped. We were told to stay home and watch movies…for two weeks to flatten the curve. Then two weeks stretched to five months. How lucky for those who lived in the states that resisted the pressure and stayed open, but even for them, they couldn’t visit relatives in other states due to quarantine restrictions and so on.
Lockdowns ended American life as we knew it just five months ago, for a virus that 99.4-6% of those who contract it shake off, for which the median age of death is 78-80 with comorbidities, for which there is not a single verified case of reinfection on the planet, for which international successes in managing this relied on herd immunity and openness.
Still the politicians who had become dictators couldn’t admit such astonishing failure so they kept the restrictions in place as a way of covering up what they had done.
That shock of Spring has now turned to a Summer of wickedness, with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else for the sorry state of life. Patience has run out and a national viciousness has taken its place. It is evident not only online but in person where strangers scream at each other for behaving in ways in which they disapprove.
What many states are calling “open” today would have been called “closed” six months ago. Sports are rare. Theaters aren’t open. In some places, you still can’t go to gyms or eat inside. Mask mandates are everywhere, and mask enforcers too. People are ratting out their neighbors, sending drones to ferret out house parties, and lashing out at each other in public places.
In a mere five months, lockdowners have manufactured a new form of social structure in which everyone is expected to treat everyone else as a deadly contagion. Even more preposterously, people have come to believe that if you come closer than six feet of another person, a disease spontaneously appears and spreads.
America has become an extremely ugly place. This is what lockdowns did.
All of this has occurred in the midst of the greatest political divide in many generations. Oddly, you almost predict a person’s politics based on their attitude toward the virus, as if sitting political figures are responsible for creating or controlling pathogens that have been part of the human experience since we first walked and talked. The politicization of this disease has been a terrible noise that has distracted from the wise disease management that characterized the American way for more than a century.
But the American people support this, right? I’m not so sure. It’s true that the TV and online media are blaring panic all day every day. If that’s where you get your information, it surely must feel like a plague. There is also the problem that people feel tremendously powerless right now. They have been locked down, silenced, humiliated, brutalized. The few attempts to get out and protest the lockdowns were greeted with jeers and derision by mainstream media. But it turned out that this was because they were protesting the wrong thing. When the protests against police brutality and racism swept the country, the media wholly approved. Yes, it all felt like gaslighting.
Where precisely does American opinion stand on lockdowns today? The polls one cannot trust: people know exactly what they are supposed to say to pollsters during a police-state lockdown. It’s usually a good guess that one-third of Americans take a position that is more-or-less consistent with human liberty – it’s not a fixed group and it shifts depending on the issue – so that’s probably a good guess now.
The incredible frenzy of the lying media has confused vast numbers. A poll revealed that many Americans think that 9% of us have died from C-19 whereas it is really 0.04%.
So yes, we have a propaganda problem, starting with the New York Times, which just today…
…demanded “more aggressive shutdowns than have been carried out in the past. The United States has not had a true national lockdown, shuttering only about half the country, compared with 90 percent in other countries with more successful outbreak control.”
None of which is true. This is pure ideological propaganda. The people who are saying true things seem to be only the 1% vs. the barrage of nonsense coming from media culture today.
We see almost no discussion in the mainstream press of the empirical evidence at home and abroad that the lockdowns make no sense from a medical and economic perspective. Medical experts for many decades have warned against disturbing social functioning in the event of disease. Preserving freedom has always been the policy priority: 1949-52, 1957-58, 1968-69, and 2005. The American revolution itself took place in the midst of a smallpox outbreak. Liberalism arose during centuries of pandemics.
And yet here we are.
This country needs a serious anti-lockdown movement, one that is not just political but cultural and intellectual, one that is deeply educated on history, philosophy, law, economics, and all sciences, and can rally around traditional American civic postulates concerning individual freedom and the limits of governments, and also around universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.
What should this movement – which need not be formally organized – study, believe, and teach?
Because property rights are the first violated in lockdown, the movement needs to embrace and champion the right of private ownership and control: of businesses, homes, and ourselves. The liberal tradition has long affirmed this principle, and it is nothing but appalling that the lockdowns took place as if private property doesn’t exist. Suddenly everything and everyone belonged to the state, and it would be the state to declare what is or is not essential, or even what is elective vs. nonelective for your medical care.
It should embrace the freedom to choose our associations, since that is what came under attack next: we couldn’t gather in groups, hold conferences, go to the movies, do anything not “socially distant” (I’m so sick of that phrase, wth dubious origins, that I could barely type it), or even go to another state to visit friends and relatives.
This movement needs to celebrate and defend religious freedom, since, incredibly, most houses of worship were forcibly closed by government. The modern idea of freedom came about in the late Middle Ages when exhaustion from religious wars gradually gave rise to the idea of tolerance. Religious toleration was the first great freedom that came to be codified in law. It’s stunning that it was so flagrantly violated this year.
It must come to terms with free enterprise and the innovation that comes with it. How much wealth and creativity has been lost in the lockdowns? It’s unfathomable. The biggest victims have been small and medium-sized businesses, whereas the large tech firms have thrived. To start and manage a commercial enterprise is a human right, the realization of which was the great achievement of modern life, as it spread prosperity throughout the world and lifted up the world’s people from the state of nature and to levels of the entrenched hierarchies of old.
Part of this liberal ideal is free trade, which has come under fire from both the left and right. Don’t forget that Donald Trump kicked off this dictatorial frenzy with his sudden and shocking bans of travel from China and Europe, which resulted in a frenzied and frantic mass crowding of airports in the days following. He did it with a stroke of a pen, overriding all his advisors. He still brags about it.
How much did his extreme reaction here inspire governors to do the same? Of course his actions reflect his persistent isolationism on not only trade but immigration too. Even now, Trump is refusing to allow foreign workers into the U.S. (except for emergency cases) because he incorrectly believes this will help the American job market. It’s an outrage: free enterprise entitles the employment of anyone from anywhere. This is a policy that is good for everyone.
So long as we are talking about freedom fundamentals, let’s talk about masks. They have become exactly what the New England Journal of Medicine called them: a talisman. They are symbols of social commitment and political loyalty. A free society rallies around individual choice, so if masks make a person feel safe, or if it makes them feel they are keeping others safe from their breath, fine. But when people attack others for resisting wearing them, and are apparently upset at the seeming appearance of rebellion from rules, this is imposition and intolerance – perhaps understandable given the times, but still illiberal.
Laws requiring face coverings in public would never have been tolerated even six months ago. And yet here we are, not only with laws but a growing number of recruits within the public to enforce them with appalling rudeness. It’s hardly the first time in history. American sumptuary laws in Colonial times mandated that people not dress in fancy clothes for reasons of piety and social conformism. Part of the capitalist revolution included the freedom to dress as one wants and the mass availability of fashion for everyone. The mandatory mask movement and its shock troops among the public is but a revival of puritanism.
The lockdowns crushed the economic prospects of millions, and government attempted to make up for that with wild spending of other people’s money and an unprecedented use of the printing press, as if government can somehow paper over the destruction it caused. Therefore, the anti-lockdown movement needs a commitment to fiscal sanity and sound money. We now know that a government with the capacity to create unlimited amounts of paper money cannot be constrained. This needs to be fixed.
As for health, the topic or excuse that unleashed the lockdowns in the first place, we surely should learn from this experience that politics and medicine need to be separated with a high wall. We have medical professionals who are traditionally in charge of mitigating disease, and they do so in line with their own professional associations and best judgement. Politics should never override the doctor/patient relationship, nor presume to know what is better for us than our own physicians.
On the matter of education, governors all over the country cruelly locked down all the schools, though there is near-zero threat to kids from the virus and there is no verified case of a child passing C-19 to an adult. Perhaps a small silver lining is that we have learned more about how parents can exercise more control over education than they have previously had. The anti-lockdown movement needs to embrace a multiplicity of educational alternatives including the possibility of full privatization so that education can again be part of the free enterprise matrix.
It’s true that anti-lockdown carries a negative connotation. Is there a better word to convey the positive dimension? My preference: liberalism. Progressives have abandoned it. It is also correct from a historical and international perspective. Liberalism and modernity are inextricably linked in history, says Benjamin Constant. A liberalism of the future needs to be prepared to understand, advocate, and fight for freedom in a non-lockdown world. No exceptions.
Which takes us to the final point. Whether this movement is working in the realms of academia, culture, journalism, or politics, there is an absolute urgency that it exercise unrelenting moral courage and integrity. Ferociously. It should be uncompromising on crucial points. It must be willing to speak even when it is unfashionable to do so, even when the media is screaming the opposite, even when the Twitter mob floods your notifications, even when you are shamed for thinking for yourself.
This time around, as you have surely noticed, even the voices of good people with good ideas fell silent in fear. This fear must be banished. The blowback against this despotism will come but it is not enough. We need character, integrity, courage, and truth, and this perhaps matters more than ideology and knowledge. Knowledge without the willingness and courage to speak is useless, because (as E.C. Harwood taught us) for integrity there is no substitute.
In the end, the case for unlocking society is a spiritual matter. What is your life worth and how do you want to live it? How important are the hard-won freedoms you exercise daily? What of the lives and liberties of others? These are everything. Freedom has never prevailed without passionate and courageous voices to defend it. We have the tools now, many more than before. They can throttle us but can’t finally shut us down. The notion that we would fail to speak for fear of the Twitter mob is absurd.
This movement, whether it is called anti-lockdown or just plain liberalism, must reject the wickedness and compulsion of this current moment in American life. It needs to counter the brutalism of lockdowns. It needs to speak and act with humane understanding and high regard for social functioning under freedom, and the hope for the future that comes with it.
The enemies of freedom and human rights have revealed themselves for the world to see. Let there be justice. The well-being of us all is at stake.
- University Of Georgia Suggests "Wearing A Face Mask" During Sex
University Of Georgia Suggests “Wearing A Face Mask” During Sex
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 21:45Just when you thought all universities were good for was churning out uninformed Marxists, the University of Georgia breaks that stigma by offering up some groundbreaking sexual health advice in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The University had written a section called “Covid-19 Considerations” on its University Health Center website several days ago, but the document was pulled down after the university was subjected to ridicule for its content, which actually suggested “wearing a face mask during sex.”
“Heavy breathing and panting can further the spread of the virus and wearing a mask can reduce the risk,” the entry on the site had said.
The site had also suggested practicing “solo sex”, which we’re guessing is now the gender-neutral politically-correct-approved non-binary non-triggering term for what used to be called masturbating. “You are your safest sex partner,” the site said.
The site offered up other confidence inspiring notes like “Wash your hands for 20 seconds before and after sexual activity” and “We do not know if Covid-19 can be spread through vaginal or anal sex.”
Happy to see that tuition money going to good use…
Meanwhile, peers at the University of Maryland have disagreed and said that wearing a mask is “not likely to prevent transmission if one of the partners has COVID-19” on their website.
UGA spokesman Greg Trevor told the Athens Banner-Herald:
“The information was consistent with language that appears on multiple health and medical sites across the country, including the Mayo Clinic. However, when the information was mocked, ridiculed and criticized on social media, we decided to take it down.”
- Pennsylvania Is Playing Politics With Drug Rationing
Pennsylvania Is Playing Politics With Drug Rationing
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 21:25Authored by Zachary Yost via The Mises Institute,
“Never let a crisis go to waste,” the old adage goes, and the coronavirus fiasco has demonstrated this principle in action more times than one can count. From declarations of veritable society-wide house arrest to crazed government spending and monetary policy, there has been no shortage of opportunistic actors working to live out their dreams of power and dominion over others that “normal” times would not allow.
Another such instance of gleeful advantage taking has come to light in the form of the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s “Ethical Allocation Framework for Emerging Treatments of COVID-19” guideline, a document that barely conceals its authors’ desire to use the current fiasco as an opportunity to engage in their own schemes of egalitarian social engineering.
Just as a reminder of the kind of central planners we are dealing with, this is the same Pennsylvania Department of Health that decreed on May 12 that nursing homes “must continue to take new admissions, if appropriate beds are available, and a suspected or confirmed positive for COVID-19 is not a reason to deny admission.” Months later, nearly 70 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the state have occurred in nursing homes.
Not being content with causing such a disaster, the state health department has issued guidance on how healthcare facilities should ration the limited supply of the new drug Remdesivir in the event that there are not enough doses to go around, but notes that the guidelines should apply to any scarce form of treatment. While certainly an unpleasant subject to address, it is true that in the face of scarcity the limited supply of Remdesivir or any other treatment will need to be rationed and that some kind of method of choosing will be needed. Scarcity is simply a fact of life that must be dealt with. However, because the distribution of Remdisivir has been taken over by the federal government, which distributes it to state governments, which in turn distribute it to healthcare providers, the process has unavoidably become political.
Putting all the jargon aside, the guideline is very clear about several points. First, it is not considered acceptable to distribute care via a random lottery, or on a first-come-first-served basis. Rather, healthcare providers must take into consideration “community-benefit” when rationing care and the department recommends the use of a weighted lottery system.
As you can see, the example lottery that the health department provides uses three different criteria to determine how a patient’s lottery chance is weighted: membership in a disadvantaged community, being an essential worker, and likelihood of death in the next year.
While the state’s determination of who is and who is not an essential worker is arbitrary and has been full of problems, one can at least see the logic behind such a consideration, as well as for those patients who are not likely to live much longer, although one must question where the state gets the authority to dictate such things to hospitals.
What raises the most concern is the idea that members of “disadvantaged communities” should be given a better chance at receiving treatment than others.
According to the guidance, because “low-income communities and certain racial/ethnic minorities” are being disproportionately burdened by the coronavirus, the end goal of public health is served by benefitting some groups over others.
According to the guidance, “the rationale is that a core goal of public health is to redress inequities that make health and safety less accessible to disadvantaged groups.”
One might have thought that the main goal of public health was to save as many lives as possible. But instead, it seems that the state department of health considers the emergency room to be the perfect place to start “mitigating the structural inequities that cause certain communities to bear the greatest burden during the pandemic.”
This formulation makes it unclear what the guidance means when it states that the first goal of the ethical framework is “to safeguard the public’s health by allocating scarce treatments to maximize community benefit.” Does community benefit mean saving as many lives as possible? Or is it some kind of grievance studies conception of equality where arriving at a more “equally distributed” survival rate based on race and socioeconomic status is the goal?
One can certainly argue that certain populations do not have very good access to healthcare resources, but it seems outrageous to think that the time to attempt to remedy such inequality is when triaging patients.
Similarly concerning is the way the guidance recommends that the treating physicians be removed from the rationing process and that it be left in the hands of hospital bureaucrats instead, effectively tying doctors’ hands to treat their patients. Is this the kind of state-run healthcare that we have to look forward to in the future? Doctors as helpless as their patients as bureaucrats “assess” a patient’s social suitability to be worthy of treatment?
The guidance goes on to recommend some procedures for how membership in a “disadvantaged community” should be determined. After noting that both members of low-income communities and racial minorities have been adversely affected by the virus and therefore deserve an increased chance of receiving treatment, the racial component drops entirely from consideration in recommendations, no doubt because such discrimination would be highly illegal and result in a torrent of lawsuits against the state and any hospital foolish enough to try it. The guideline is explicit that “no one is excluded from access based on age, disability, religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity and to ensure that no one is denied access based on stereotypes, perceived quality of life, or judgments about a person’s worth.” However, one can’t help but think that if racial discrimination were not illegal the logic of this guidance would dictate that it be undertaken in the name of “equality.”
What that list is lacking is a prohibition on discrimination based on socioeconomic status, which is the method the guidance suggests should be used for the purposes of weighing the lottery. Specifically, it recommends the use of the Area Deprivation Index, which is based on data from the 2015 American Community Survey. Hospitals would use the index’s Neighborhood Atlas to enter a patient’s address and determine if they are a disadvantaged community member.
One can’t help but feel that such a system is arbitrary to the extreme. When I entered my address into the Neighborhood Atlas I discovered that no one in my neighborhood would receive any weighted advantage if Remdisivir were needed. However, when I Google mapped the distance between my home and the nearest sector considered to be disadvantaged, I discovered that it was a mere two-minute drive away. Can anything based on something so arbitrary as five-year-old aggregated census block data be considered a useful tool for the fair rationing of treatment?
This entire scheme is just a taste of the ways medical care would be infected with politics if it were to be run by the government. In a system of socialized medicine would we see similar redistributionist schemes of rationing introduced? No doubt, many people of all political persuasions would view it as a fertile field for attempts at social engineering. Similarly, it is not hard to see politicians scheming to ensure that favored constituents and voting blocs have access to care at the expense of their opponent’s supporters, or that whole classes of people are purposefully and consciously disadvantaged based on whoever holds the keys to power at the moment.
The middle of a pandemic is no time for social engineering, but it is also not a time for state involvement in healthcare to begin with. That involvement has led to thousands of nursing home patients dying and has now led to a blatant redistributionist drug-rationing scheme. Further involvement is only going to make matters worse and continue to poison a crucial aspect of our lives with politics even more than it already is.
- Mississippi School Reopens Only To Send 100 Students Home When Teacher Appears Sick
Mississippi School Reopens Only To Send 100 Students Home When Teacher Appears Sick
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 21:05School districts across the nation are on edge now that we’re entering mid-August into September, when K-12 schools typically open. And during more normal times Fall sports like football are already in full swing in terms of practices, which in some places, for example in most parts of Texas, appears to be resuming as normal.
Many districts especially in the South are offering an ‘online option’ especially for middle through high school students while simultaneously opening their doors, albeit with strict safety measures in place, such as temperature checks and the wearing of masks.
But one Mississippi public school opened its doors as scheduled in early August, only to now be living the nightmare that most fear: “Roughly 100 students were sent home from a southern Mississippi high school on Tuesday after coming into contact with a teacher who was exhibiting mild COVID-19 symptoms,” The Hill reports.
Gulfport High School in Gulfport, Mississippi, via WLOX News. Amid raging school board debates and varying opinions among administrators over re-opening, many who say schools should stay closed altogether this fall argue that the moment a cluster of COVID-19 confirmations emerges in any given school they are going to shut their doors anyway.
In this latest case in Gulfport, Mississippi it’s not even as yet clear whether the teacher actually has coronavirus. But while a test is pending students were sent home anyway “out of an abundance of caution to keep everyone safe,” the district said in a statement.
Any students and faculty that had contact with the teacher will enter a 14-day quarantine – again estimated at about 100 – not returning to campus, pending the teacher’s test results return, The Hill continues. In the case of a negative test, the school said classes will resume as normal. The school says social distancing measures have been in place.
The whole episode presents a serious dilemma which high schools and hesitant colleges are sure to experience: assuming a school reopens, how much panic will ensue the moment students and teachers naturally catch common colds or other viruses?
Stock image: Infection Control Tech Outbreaks of various types of illnesses, or coughs, or also bacterial illnesses like Strep throat tend to be all-too-common on school campuses particularly in the fall and winter months.
It begs the question: will schools go on lockdown every time someone catches a common cold?
Add to this scenario the concern that many doctors and health officials have expressed, namely there’s a greater likelihood that after multiple months of much of the nation staying at home and social distancing, people’s immune systems tend to be much weaker, and thus could experience a ‘shock’ of sorts (in the form of illness) the moment individuals are back among crowds.
- Commercial Real Estate Bankruptcy Legislation Introduced
Commercial Real Estate Bankruptcy Legislation Introduced
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 20:45Two weeks ago we reproted that “in an uprecedented move, Congress proposes taxpayer-funded bailout Of $550 billion CMBS industry.” And now this: according to Chain Store Age, legislation has been introduced that would make “meaningful” temporary changes to bankruptcy laws, related to commercial real estate.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and supported by the International Council of Shopping Centers, would allow for the facilitation of commercial tenant rent deferrals and providing additional flexibility for small business tenants that file Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“The legislation will help businesses struggling with bankruptcy to weather the storm,” ICSC president and CEO Tom McGee said. “The bill provides significant relief to small business debtors and landlords. It also reinforces what many landlords have done since spring, as well as encourage deferred deals going forward.”
Under current law, rent deferral agreements waiving some or all of the current rent to be repaid in the future can be undone if the commercial tenant later files for bankruptcy. This risk discourages such agreements from happening. Specifically, Bankruptcy Code Section 547 deems the installment payments as “preferences” and commercial landlords can be forced by the court to forfeit such payments.
The Tillis bill would prevent this from happening, providing “certainty” to business landlords, as well as tenants, according to ICSC.
Additionally, the Tillis bill would allow an extra 90 days for commercial tenants in bankruptcy to decide whether to continue with current leases. And for certain small businesses, the bill would give tenants the ability to spread the payment of some post-bankruptcy rent over a longer period. The extra time would provide liquidity to small businesses, preserving jobs and businesses, noted ICSC.
As we reported previously, a parallel attempt to bail out the ultra-rich investors who are holding impaired commercial mortgage-backed securities was introduced by Reps Van Taylor (R., Texas) Rep. Al Lawson (D., Fla.). According to the initial proposal, and as usual, taxpayers would end up being on the hook via the various Fed-Treasury JVs that will fund these programs, as any new money injected to rescue CMBS debt will by default be junior to existing insolvent debt as “many of these borrowers have provisions in their initial loan documents that forbid them from taking on more debt without additional approval from their servicers. The proposed facility would instead structure the cash infusions as preferred equity, which isn’t subject to the debt restrictions.”
- Central Bank Balance Sheets To Hit $28 Trillion Next Year
Central Bank Balance Sheets To Hit $28 Trillion Next Year
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 20:25As noted earlier, silver is crashing as much as 15% today, a plunge which if it had spread to stocks would prompt a panic at the Fed and an injection of at least several trillion. The fact that precious metals do not need a rescue from the Fed – and in fact anything the Fed does do will only send them higher – is probably worth its own take, but for now we will simply look at how we got here, where we are going and update details on the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank (ECB), Bank of England (BoE), Bank of Japan (BoJ), Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and Bank of Canada (BoC) balance sheets, as well as on the programs implemented by each central bank.
As BofA shows, central bank balance sheet have never been bigger with the Fed now “holding” 34% of US GDP, and expected to see this number rise to 38%. For the other central banks the number is 25% for Canada and 123% for Japan.
Putting an actual number to the liquidity firehose, central banks have injected $24 trillion, or about a quarter of global GDP, into the market to keep it from crashing and expectations are that this number will increase to $28 trillion by the end of next year (this excludes the tens of trillions in assorted liquidity instruments in China). That would be a very optimistic expectation.
And since these days chart inflation means that one picture is worth a trillion words, we will focus on the visuals as they are self-explanatory.
Fed:
ECB:
BOE:
BOJ:
RBA:
BoC:
- Exposing COVID-19's "Orgy Of Incoherence"
Exposing COVID-19’s “Orgy Of Incoherence”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 20:05Authored by Omar Khan via Medium.com,
Of late, despite flashes of social media mania, there has been heartening focus in a number of countries from policy makers on evidence based COVID responses, localized interventions where needed, encouraging prudent social distancing and hygiene measures. This deserves to be supported.
An Orgy of Incoherence
Each day, in “COVID panic land” statements are issued that are never seemingly challenged, or even questioned, or even unpacked, or even “quizzed” for minimal coherence.
First, just a canopy bit of perspective, quoting Lord Sumption, former High Court Judge in the UK, who has become a lightning rod for speaking out about the mass invalidation of civil liberties over hyped hysteria.
“COVID-19 is a serious disease, but historically it is at the bottom end of the scale. For anyone under 50 the risk of death is tiny, less than for seasonal flu. In the great majority of cases the symptoms are mild or non-existent. Our ancestors lived with far worse epidemic diseases without rushing to put their heads in a bag. In other parts of the world they still do (world-wide, tuberculosis kills many more than COVID-19).”
While there is some outrage evident in Lord Sumption’s assessment, the above statements are all factually true, and can be objectively corroborated. Relative to our ancestral experience with viruses, I will spell that out further below as well, so as to pacify the “here and now” doomsayers.
Samples of Mindlessness
“What if COVID never goes away?”
Since it kills virtually no one in statistical terms below 60, and above 60 without comorbidities recovery rates are still highly encouraging, and since the impact on net mortality is not anywhere close to seismic on the actual numbers, the answer is, “We live with it.” Or “We end all life as we know it due to what is tantamount to a bad influenza period.”
It’s a virus, so likely may not disappear. We will develop greater immunity, our hygiene habits will improve, we might get a vaccine, but we need a “vaccine” against panic and the myopia of “risk-free” living, which we have not imposed on ourselves in reaction to anything else in history: from terrorism to earthquakes to tuberculosis to race car driving (so from the man-made catastrophes to natural disasters, to global diseases to human hobbies).
So, the question emerges, other than the now clearly discredited “optics” of warning us of millions of deaths, inflamed by modelers who have perfected the art of imperfection in their predictions (and our saying that is as “factual” as it gets), and other than reality being “gas-lighted” by deranged and virtually unremitting media reports urging panic and paralysis upon us, what triggers this bizarre new threshold of absurd self-preservation, even when the opportunity cost is the virtual end of social and economic life as we know it? We “sneezed” civilization away?
“What if there’s a second wave?”
It will, if following the patterns of virtually all viruses, be even less dangerous, immunity will be greater, we may be sane enough to protect nursing homes, and we will find the rebuilding of society a better place to focus our attention.
And why on God’s earth are we so infatuated with caseloads? A mild upward tick in Catalonia, and the UK in sheer panic imposes quarantine on anyone returning from Spain? Overall net mortality is no worse than the UK (zero in the last two days, August 1st and 2nd), and we are just postponing the inevitable, unless the UK is going to not only leave Europe but take leave of its senses at the same time, and operate as an “anti-COVID fortress” with dwindling economic and cultural and social prospects.
“But, by God, I’m NOT getting a fever or a dry cough, forget number of deaths annually by influenza, pneumonia, crossing the street, diabetes, heart attacks… all acceptable EXCEPT the dread… theme music please!… scourge of “COVID!”
Vietnam, which marshaled its sanity and responses so remarkably and reports to date no deaths from COVID, found three residents infected in DaNang, after months of no local cases reported apparently, and in a fit of over-reaction, shut DaNang down, and evacuated the (mostly local) tourists from there. Elephant guns and mosquitoes come to mind. (Several days later, updating on August 10th, there are now 11 deaths in Vietnam, averaging about 20 cases a day for the last few days; compared to anywhere else in the world, scant argument for panicked evacuation or shutdown).
Some large global multinationals have proclaimed no face-to-face meetings, even if crucially needed in local markets, until 2021! On what basis? Surely, this should be assessed locally? And if you are in a community which is recovering, now has 1,000 people gathering thresholds, or marriages of up to 500 or more taking place in Asia, and if you are a newly forming team that needs to engage, to rally, to align, to build the necessary relationships for greater virtual work to be possible, in fact, why would a HQ “declare” themselves a medical authority on gatherings per se, large or small, decoupled from the leadership discretion of leaders you have entrusted brands, livelihoods of your employees and hundreds of millions (or more) dollars in revenue to? And should not a “factual” threshold, rather than a calendar one be established?
We surely cannot manically shut down whole communities when infection rates and lethality rates show a serious but statistically modest viral challenge. But the economic meltdown, psychological impacts, social disruption, while not reducible to lab results, are every bit as palpable, arguably more devastating in the medium to longer term, and will not recover if societies and economies are being turned “on” and “off” by every “spasm” of control fetishism.
And the “Facts” Keep Rolling In
Just taking the “florid” Floridian over-reaction, a cursory look at July 25th shows 124 deaths reported, of which only one, only one I reiterate, took place that day! The rest were merrily backfilled from May 28th cumulatively! Should this not be taken as scandalously distorting? No, just another day in the “porn media” sweepstakes. As I write (August 2nd), hospital capacity in Florida is greater than it was on July 2nd, despite 300,000 tests administered since.
We also hear from numerous studies, including from Professor Francois Balloux in a pre-print, reconfirming evidence that eight out of 10 who never had COVID-19 seem to have an immune response triggered by T-cells based on prior exposure to other illnesses, including the common cold. That would argue for an affinity between this coronavirus and other more common strains, rather than this being a world ravaging contagion unlike any seen before. One wonders if we never encountered a virus prior to 2020?
Hot on the heels of that, The Wall Street Journal reported: Flu wiped out in Southern Hemisphere virtually, from reports. As an example, Chile had recorded as of the time of the article going to print, 1,134 respiratory illnesses compared to 20,949 last year. Could it be that people diagnosed with flu or influenza are being “tagged” as COVID-19, particularly those who die, hence the cases of flu and influenza seem to be on a precipitous decline?
As the plummeting numbers of seasonal respiratory viral infections from Argentina to South Africa to New Zealand continue to confound, the myopic are congratulating draconian COVID containment measures for this positive byproduct, ignoring the far more likely rationale that these are still there, “baked” into the COVID numbers. After all, other than via notoriously fallible tests, based on the symptoms, how could you know?
Once More a Plea for Perspective
Despite only 2% of DC’s hospital capacity being utilized, school has been cancelled for the fall due to the demands by the teacher’s union. With overwhelming global evidence of school openings being unconnected with any spikes thereafter, children not being at risk by and large (statistically being far more likely to be killed riding over to school, and over nine times as statistically likely to drown — source CDC — than from deaths “ascribed” to COVID), we have to more than wonder. Specifically, in the US,138 COVID “ascribed” deaths in that age group versus 995 from drowning in an average year, 4,000 in auto accidents for school age kids and teens over a similar period.
The Lancet has now also weighed in that Lockdowns don’t work, in a country by country analysis. But we already knew that! Just compare Japan to Belgium! Compare Taiwan to the UK. And we’ll get to Sweden, as fatality numbers plummet, and it was the only western country to have grown economically last quarter (Taiwan grew first quarter 2020, too). But for some reason we should insist rather that our “poster children” for COVID rectitude should be the shattered economies with no viral “breakthrough” to show for it? Virtually all of Europe has said, no hardcore lockdowns going forward, localized restrictions, prudent, evidence-based reactions, and following key elements of the Swedish model, would be the essential playbook.
As a percentage of the global population, even with all the likely “mis-stated” COVID fatalities, taking the numbers as gospel, we come in at .0052%. Swine Flu (2009–10) was .0029%, HIV .565%, Hong Kong flu of 1968 also much higher at .027%, Asian Flu of 1957/58 still higher at .070%, the Spanish flu of 1918 a ravaging 2.73%. The global economy persevered, the world progressed and moved on to fresh prosperity through all of these. Just yesterday we read the sheer collapse of GDP in the US has eliminated the last 5 years of growth in one fell swoop in a matter of months.
For those who relish historical comparisons, the true pandemic “terrors” were the Black Death of 1347–51 with 42.11% as a percentage of global population and the Plague of Justinian 541–542 with 28.51%. Doubtless the rudimentary understanding of medicine in those eras was a sharp contributing factor to the exponential growth of the respective contagions.
The Perpetuation of Fraudulent Panic-Mongering
Though mass congested protests are seemingly of no “superspreader” concern through some unexplained medical voodoo (pandering for political advantage being one of the “vaccines” against public health nostrums it seems), when “panic” seemed on the wane, mainstream media stopped tracking “deaths” (despite even those being periodically miscounted as per the CDC or back-filled), and decided that all “infections” past or present would now be anointed “new cases.” And voila, the floodgates are open once more via some linguistic legerdemain.
Not sick? No problem! No symptoms? Easy. Symptoms which could be mild and seasonal? You dare not make light! Not dying? Give it time… stop society!
Then came the mask mandates. We all know about them, so let me simply make the point that they are far from settled science, and they are downright dangerous when exercising, as the deaths of several Chinese students while running a race during PE with these contraptions heart-breakingly revealed.
The Norwegian health authorities, not noted for their reckless or libertine ways (and with some of the best COVID stats in Europe), doubled down recently on their recommendation for those without symptoms not to wear face masks, arguing the number of infections in Norway made them moot.
Taking the most optimistic efficacy number, medical masks prevent roughly 40% of infections. Keep in mind that most of us outside the medical profession are not wearing medical masks. 200,000 would have to wear them to prevent one new infection per week in Norway. As the agency wrote,
“The number of people who experience undesirable effects (difficulty breathing, communicating when that is critical, or dropping other hygienic prudence being given a false sense of security) is likely to be much larger than the number of infections prevented.”
They concede that in congested community settings, public transport etc., there “might” be some benefit, but again largely with medical masks. They note even then, “However, study results vary greatly.” This meshes with the recent conclusion from the Dutch government indicating they will not require universal mask wearing as effectiveness of overall “masking” has not been demonstrated to their empirical satisfaction. Oxford University points out that no government should be able to mandate this usurpation of civil liberties for something that is not “settled science” by any stretch of the imagination, based on observational assertions. The suggestion is that “liberties” are not to be trifled with, or annulled absent overwhelming “evidence” not assertion.
The Great Lockdown Lacuna
There was a gaping policy hole that “lockdown” sought to furtively fill, the pseudo-scientific reflexive obeisance to untested modeling.
From the reliably inaccurate doomsday prognosticator Neil Ferguson had come the “second Spanish flu” prediction (which had led to 50 million deaths when the world’s population was a fraction of today’s, roughly 1.7 billion, one third of which became infected) re COVID, predicting 500,000 deaths in the UK alone, and if Sweden continued its flirtation with disaster, “at least” 80,000+ there. Since Sweden has less than 6,000 deaths with no lockdown and 75% of those were from nursing home cases which they tragically mismanaged, and as we have countries that have not locked down, which have not produced such torrents of mortality, perhaps we can leave the modelers alone at last?
Even by the end of February, the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship provided a perfect sample to extrapolate from. And this was evidence-based, not model-based. 3,711 passengers and crew, quarantined after a virus outbreak, with an average age of 58 were repeatedly tested. There were 705 cases (19% infection rate), 6 deaths (case fatality rate of 1%) by the end of March, eventually 14 in total, compared to the 116 that the Imperial model would have predicted.
Over half the cases were “asymptomatic” which, if you take it at face value, meant many more were infected or “had” been infected, and the tests were picking up residue of the virus (which we are told can be detected for up to two months after it is no longer “live”). Either way the mortality rate would then resemble “severe seasonal influenza” as a saner version of Anthony Fauci had himself written earlier in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Almost all the deaths on the Diamond Princess were in the over 70 age group. Later the USS Theodore Roosevelt produced one death and three hospitalized cases out of 1,156 infections (much younger and healthier profile, of course), no deaths out of 1,046 cases on the Charles de Gaulle either, and this pattern continued to repeat.
WHO itself had added to the panic due to a rookie computational error, asserting the population mortality risk to be 3.8%. They arrived at this by taking the then known Chinese deaths and dividing them by the number of confirmed cases, ignoring that likely only a small proportion of infected people had been tested, asymptomatic cases were likely not represented, and those who went in for testing were inevitably those with serious symptoms. This evident computational distortion contributed also to the policy errors relating to both hospital capacity and nursing home fatalities.
Deaths in care homes are now estimated to have accounted for half of all COVID related mortality. When it was suggested, looking at 96% of Italian mortalities, for example, coming from the elderly with comorbidities, that we isolate the vulnerable, and not shut down the planet, people said it was “unrealistic” and “had never been done.” As if closing down the world, putting the wider economy into enforced seizure with no possible available longer-term financial hedge by which to recover livelihoods and industries, was a sane alternative?
For perspective, 650,000 COVID deaths globally pale next to 33.4 million deaths to date roughly in 2020 overall, and for most of the population (under 65 with no pre-existing conditions), normal influenza, road accidents, suicides, and a host of other causes of death (TB, cancer, hypertension, diabetes) are statistically far more significant. But the newness of COVID and the frenzied, fevered, unrelenting media hype have stripped most people’s critical faculties of any proportionality on that front it seems.
Though Stockholm with 2.5 times the population density of New York State outperformed NY State on virtually any COVID metric you care to name overall, and at their respective peaks, and therefore still has a relatively open economy today, far more so that NY State, when facts made it evident the virus had all but disappeared from Sweden, there was from the media enablers and all the governments and who had clung feverishly to the “lockdown” mania, not a word, just deafening silence.
Researchers from the University of Toronto found that whether a country was locked down or not was “not associated” with the COVID-19 death rate. The noted journal Lancet cites,
“Government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”
They did plausibly keep, for an initial period, hospitals from being over-run, and that should certainly be evaluated in a focused way on that basis.
The Bad Science Round Up
Forcing people walking in parks to wear masks, when even the most fantastic assertions of aerosol transmissibility, which came from machines in lab settings, do not suggest in open air, a mere cough or exhalation magically can be infectiously propelled to unwitting passerby, is moronic.
Swedes and Danes and the Dutch have been enjoying social interaction in cafes and bars, but don’t let the Irish near those pubs (August 10th may see that finally relaxed). As one commentator mentioned, they doubtless have an obscure Irish custom we don’t know about and they need to be weaned off, that in riotous affection leads them to kiss each other’s noses and hack into each other’s throats whenever in pubs. Otherwise, what happens on “August 10th” that wasn’t true on “July 10th” seems quite inscrutable.
Melbourne has interrupted its last “Level 3” Lockdown to initiate a new six week “Level 4” Lockdown (replete with overnight curfew) due to the admitted concern of 600 or so cases of what they are calling “community transmission.” But the real precipitating panic during this “surge” was apparently the number of deaths in a 24 hour period. That number is “seven” during a 24 hour period (considered “recovery” numbers in much of the planet) and still the overall COVID ascribed death count for Australia is 208 from February across the entire country! Those seven, were 70, 80 and 90 years of age, with numerous pre-existing conditions. The fragility of the economy there does not suggest immunity to other shocks likely to flow from these overlapping, never ending lockdowns, particularly as it’s winter there, and viruses are known at times to naturally spike over that period.
And why don’t we finish yet another round-up of our fevered over-reactions with the precarious petulance of the “tests” by which these dire read-outs emerge at all?
Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, provides a bracing corrective, indicating that at lower prevalence of the virus, “sensitivity” and “specificity” of the testing gets less precise.
You start first with the “sensitivity” of the test: the proportion of people who test positive out of those who actually have the virus. The second is “specificity” which is the proportion who test negative, out of those who should indeed have done so. The true specificity and sensitivity of the prevailing tests are not known, admitted to by the UK’s Office for National Statistics, owing to the newness of the virus, a tripwire shared globally.
Let us take the Professor’s operating theater of the UK and assume 1,000 people have the virus, say, .1% (current actual estimates are lower, hovering around 0.04%). Now, say, 10,000 random people go get tested. So, 10 people will have it at the 0.1% infection rate, and 9,990 will not. Estimates tell us 80% of those who have the virus test positive, says the Professor (easily corroborated), this is the “sensitivity” and the “specificity” for those who test negative may be as high as 99.9% with the best (rare) tests.
So, on this basis, eight people will be correctly identified, and two will receive a false negative.
Of the 9,990 that are actually negative, all but 10 will be correctly diagnosed as “negative.” But 10 will be told they have COVID-19 when they actually don’t. That gives us 18 positive tests; eight from those who have it, and 10 from those who don’t. So only 44% of the infections indicated are real. Hence, we have to say, alarmingly, the chance of accurately detecting the disease being less than 50% is fairly glaring.
This isn’t hypothetical, as current viral levels are lower than the above case study. The US Centers for Disease Control kits concede they can generate up to 30% false positives! With the top tests costing upwards of GBP 100 per test, developing countries necessarily opt for more affordable options, with tests where specificity could be as low as 95%.
Then in the 10,000 test scenario, there would be 500 false positives among the eight genuine positives, so the false positives would far outstrip the genuine results, providing an appearance of a “surge” in infections that seems mystifyingly disconnected from numbers of hospital admissions and deaths.
So, if at low prevalence, with false positives rising at the same time actual infections plummet, then even if COVID-19 completely disappeared (the aspired to promised land), then even with no actual positives, on the above example, ten people would be wrongly diagnosed as positive, and the official data would obstinately still show a 0.1% prevalence of COVID-19! Off the current testing regimes, we may be incessantly chasing a shadow, and we may endlessly perpetuate panic and social and economic meltdown over a veritable phantom as a result.
Therefore?
It’s time to restate terms of reference and redefine thresholds meriting panic. We must clarify actual mortality and not “caseloads” as the relevant metric and compare cost/benefit trade-offs rather than allowing ourselves to be economically devastated and medically cuckolded by episodic ephemera posing as data.
- Facebook Cracks Down On 'Fake' Local News Networks Run By Political Operatives
Facebook Cracks Down On ‘Fake’ Local News Networks Run By Political Operatives
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 19:45After taking the unprecedented step of removing a post from President Trump’s page for having the audacity to include a snippet from a Fox News interview where the president exaggerated how children handle COVID infection, Facebook is taking yet another step to crack down on non-mainstream voices on both the left and the right.
Since hard-core progressives are pushing for Facebook to deplatform all conservatives and even some centrists, a decision that could have grave consequences for FB’s business, the decision isn’t a surprise.
A report in the Columbia Journalism Review drew attention to this trend of “pink slime” local news earlier this month, and since the 2016 election, a team of researchers has uncovered more than 1,200 ‘fake’ local news sites that repackage community news with a political slant favoring the campaign that they are (often obliquely) backing.
The original Bernie Sanders Campaign helped mastermind this technique. But by blocking all such sites from accessing Facebook’s “News Exemption”, the social media platform is effectively bringing the same level of scrutiny that it already applies to “national” news platforms to “local news” platforms.
It’s also notable because FB’s decision comes just one week after the NYT quietly scrubbed “sponsored” news posts paid for by the Chinese government that essentially inserted what appeared to be news stories with a slant that heavily favored the Chinese government.
A local news outlet will be disqualified as “political” if it meets any of the criteria below, courtesy of Axios:
- It’s owned by a political entity or a political person (definitions below).
- If a political person is leading the company in an executive position, such as a CEO, board member, chairman of its board, or a publisher or editor-in-chief.
- If the publisher shares proprietary information about any of its Facebook accounts or account passwords, API access keys, and/or data about their Facebook readers – like location, demographics, or consumption habits – directly with a Political Person or Entity as they are defined below.
- If the Page lists a political entity or a political person as its “Confirmed Page Owner” or “Confirmed Page Partner” on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Facebook defines a “political person” as “a candidate for elected office, a person who holds elected office, a person whose job is subject to legislative confirmation, or a person employed by and/or vested with decision-making authority by a political person or at a political entity.” A “political entity” is “an organization, company, or other group whose predominant purpose is to influence politics and elections.” These generally include PACs and Super PACs, and entities regulated as “Social Welfare Organizations” under Section 501(c)(4) of the US Internal Revenue Code.
- The Father Of Modern Finance: "Inflation Is Totally Out Of The Control Of Central Banks"
The Father Of Modern Finance: “Inflation Is Totally Out Of The Control Of Central Banks”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 19:25Submitted by Christoph Gisiger of TheMarket.ch
Few economists have had a greater influence on the financial markets than Eugene Fama. According to his Efficient Market Theory, competition among investors is so intense that all information and expectations are immediately and correctly priced in. Therefore, it’s impossible to beat the market in the long-term.
Never shy of making pointed statements, the Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago doubts the power of the central banks. “The business of central banks is like pornography: In essence, it’s just entertainment and it doesn’t have any real effects”, he says. In contrast, he warns that investors could begin to question the credit worthiness of governments because of the high national debt levels.
In this in-depth interview with The Market/NZZ, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Prof. Fama explains why he welcomes the boom in passive investing and why he sees no problem in the high capital concentration at tech giants like Apple, Amazon or Microsoft. In his view, absurd price swings such as negative oil prices are no reason to doubt the rational behavior of markets.
Professor Fama, the efficient market hypothesis has revolutionized the way people invest. What goes through your mind when you look at the wild swings the stock market made this year?
The market seems pretty good. It held up even though the economy is deep in the bucket. This is a good example of how forward looking the market really is: It’s looking past what we are going through now, and it’s saying that the future doesn’t look that bad.
Do you think that’s the correct assumption?
If I could forecast, I wouldn’t be a professor.
Still, since the crash in February/March, we basically went from 1929 to 1999 in just a few months. What are the chances stocks are in a bubble?
Bubbles are things people see in hindsight. They don’t identify them in advance. Sure, you can look at the behavior of prices, and you may be able to identify cases where they are too high. But if you only look back and say: “Oh, stocks went down a lot, so that was a bubble”, then that’s 20/20 hindsight. At the time, there was no evidence that there was a bubble.
On the other hand, sometimes there are obvious signs of excess. Let’s take the final stage of the great dotcom bull market of the late nineties as an example.
Let’s go back to that period before the crash. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, made his famous “irrational exuberance” speech about the market being too high in early December 1996. But even after the crash, the market never went back to the level when he made that speech. So what do you think of that forecast?
Is there really no way to spot a bubble?
Here’s another example: In the fifties, there was a famous professor at Stanford who was an agricultural economist. He brought plots of agricultural prices into the faculty lounge and asked people to identify bubbles. Of course, they saw the ups and downs, and all of them identified bubbles. Afterwards, he told them that these were just numbers he had randomly generated. That tells you how good people are with identifying bubbles.
Against that backdrop, what do you make of the growing discipleship of behavioral finance which focuses on the influence of psychology on investment decisions and questions the efficiency of markets?
What I say is that we agree on the facts but we disagree on the interpretation. In my view, there is no such thing as behavioral finance. Essentially, it’s just a criticism of efficient markets. They don’t have a theory of their own. Hence, that makes me the most important person in behavioral finance. Without me, they don’t have anybody to disagree with. So I think behavioral finance is just a branch of efficient markets.
But what about factors like emotions, herd mentality or cycles? Aren’t they important at all?
Tastes and behavior are important in economics. Nobody denies that. But you have to translate these things into something testable, so we can take the data and test it, looking forward and not looking backward. That’s my response to all that stuff. It never works out.
Yet, we also know that investors regularly mix up similar-looking stock tickers or company names and thereby cause absurd movements in stock prices. How is this rational behavior?
It isn’t. You can identify mistakes like that. It’s common that names confuse investors and as a result, you can get temporary price movements. But they are usually tiny and go away quickly. I don’t say markets are completely efficient, but they’re efficient for most questions that I address. Models are never a 100% true. If they were, we would call them reality, not models. But for almost all purposes, market efficiency is a very good approximation. I’ll go even further: Almost all investors should regard markets as efficient for their own investment decisions. If they do that, they will be better off in the long-term.
Still, recently we saw some truly strange things that are hard to explain rationally, like negative oil prices or credit spreads on fortress balance sheet companies like Apple exploding. Is this the way rational markets are supposed to behave?
It’s always foolish to look at individual cases because every individual case is different. I don’t know how to judge those particular events and I don’t get into the business of valuing individual companies. But the fact that the oil price went briefly negative tells you that all storages were full. Therefore, people weren’t able to buy oil since there was no place to put it. The negative price didn’t last very long, but it shows you that once you start producing oil, this stuff keeps coming out of the ground no matter what. That means the price can go negative, and someone who has storage capacity can make money at that point.
Would you ever have expected to see negative oil prices?
We’ve seen a lot of things that we thought could never happen before. But they did, like negative interest rates all over the countries in Europe.
Negative interest rates are turning the financial system upside down. Are markets still able to function efficiently when bonds are yielding less than zero?
Negative interest rates tell you that there is some cost to storing cash. That’s why you get negative rates, mostly in short-term bonds. The alternative to holding those bonds is to hold cash, but holding cash is apparently not costless. This means you’re bound by the cost of holding cash. So, what do you do with your cash? If we’re talking about a position of hundreds of millions of dollars you don’t want to have that in cash.
And what about the fundamental consequences of negative rates? How are they impacting the real economy?
I don’t’ think they impact the real economy, but it’s a problem for the financial system. What’s more, in 2008, in response to the financial crisis, the Fed started to pay interest on its reserves. But there is no interest on the currency, and currency is exchangeable for reserves on demand by the banks. So based on classic monetary theory, you don’t really know what’s determining inflation at this point. There is no control over the stock of what qualifies as money, since reserves aren’t really money anymore because they are paying interest. That means you can’t control the currency supply. In other words: Inflation is totally out of the control of central banks.
In the coming months, the Fed is expected to make a major commitment to ramping up inflation soon. What would it mean for investors if we really get inflation?
Inflation and return on investments is a tough topic that’s been around since the early seventies. In principle, you can see the effects of inflation on long-term interest rates, but you can’t see them in stocks very well because the volatility is so high. Hence, we don’t know what effect inflation will have on markets. It depends on the effect on real activity: High, but stable inflation wouldn’t be a big deal. What’s really a big deal is when it gets unstable.
It’s not just the Fed, around the globe central banks are flooding the system with liquidity like never before. Is this a reason for concern?
Frankly, I think this is just posturing. Actually, the central banks don’t do anything real. They are issuing one form of debt to buy another form of debt. If you are an old Modigliani–Miller person the way I am, you think that’s a neutral activity: You’re issuing short-term debt to buy long-term debt or vice-versa. That’s not something that should have any real effects.
Then again, the financial markets sure seem to love it. At least it looks like that the S&P 500 is moving upwards in tandem with the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet.
Every day we hear a story about the movement of stock prices. But the story is different each day. So basically, these stories are made up after the fact. But when we look at it systematically, we don’t see a big effect of Fed actions on real activity or on stock prices or on anything else. That’s why I use to say that the business of central banks is like pornography: In essence, it’s just entertainment and it doesn’t have any real effects.
But how about the effects of this “free money” on borrowing? Isn’t the record amount of corporate and government debt a real problem?
That really bothers me. We haven’t hit it yet, but there has to come a point where people start questioning whether government debt is really riskless. Piling on debt even in good times is a new thing: In the US, we cut taxes and increased the deficit as a consequence, but that happened when the economy was booming. How are we going to pay that back? It has to come out of taxes in the future. As a matter of fact, we didn’t really lower taxes. What we did was we lowered them now and raised them in the future, when we have to pay off that debt. That’s why I worry that investors will become skeptical of whether governments can actually pay off so much debt. Now, we’re piling on like crazy because of the Covid-pandemic. That was unavoidable, but it was avoidable in the past, when we did it in good times. When does the market say “enough”?
In recent years, we’ve also witnessed a revolution in passive investing. How does the amazing indexing and ETF boom impact valuations of stocks and bonds?
That’s a complicated question, and nobody knows the answer. For almost sixty years, I have been saying that there should be more passive investing since there’s no evidence that active managers generate a superior performance for their high fees. Finally, passive investing is catching on. Of course, you can’t go 100% passive because somebody has to determine prices.
But aren’t ETFs undermining the generic price discovery of markets? In principle, they just buy stocks mechanically and don’t care about prices or valuations.
They don’t but the people who buy ETFs pay attention. But here’s the key issue: Who are you knocking out of the market when you go passive? Are you knocking out bad active investors or good active investors? If you are knocking out bad active investors, you are making the market more efficient. If you are knocking out good active investors, you are making it less efficient. In general, there are very few good active investors. That’s what all the evidence says, going back fifty years now: It’s very difficult to find people who can beat the market.
How about Warren Buffett for starters?
The real question is: How do you pick Warren Buffett? The way you pick him is after the fact, since he has done very well. Now, suppose I take 100,000 investors and say: Let’s let them run for 30 years and pick out the winner. Because you roll the dice so many times, even if none of them is a good or bad investor, many investors will do well and many will do poorly purely by chance. Statistically there is also going to be a big winner, but solely due to chance. In other words: There will be extremely good outcomes and extremely bad outcomes, but you just can’t tell who is successful because of luck and who because of skill.
So you’re saying that Warren Buffett was just lucky?
The problem with picking a winner after the fact is you can’t tell. If you would have identified him fifty years ago and you looked at him and would have said: “That’s the guy!”, then I would believe you that you can tell if someone’s going to be an investment genius. But you couldn’t do that fifty years ago, because there’s a statistical problem.
Another concern people are talking about is the extremely high market concentration. Today, five tech giants make up more than 20% of the S&P 500. What does this mean for the efficiency of the stock market?
In the past, it’s always been the case that the largest fifty companies account for more than 50% of the total value of the market. Now, we’ve got a technological revolution, and it turns out that there are five or six big winners, these trillion-dollar companies. They are a pretty large fraction of the market, but they did it through innovation, not through theft or any other illegal behavior. So I don’t know why that’s a negative. These are all new businesses that provide new services we didn’t have before.
In addition to that, more trades than ever are based on algorithmic high-speed trading. How does that impact the functioning of financial markets?
This has been an open question for around fifteen years. No one really knows what effect high speed trading has on prices. One of my colleagues has worked a lot on that topic. His suggestion is to slow trading down to something like a tenth of a second between trades and thereby kill the advantage of these fast traders. I don’t see any problem with that.
There’s also a fierce debate about factor investing. For example, value has underperformed growth for the past decade. Is value investing death?
Who knows? The problem is that you can’t tell from ten years of data. We don’t know if the last ten years are just a statistical blip or not, because the variance of returns is so high. Ken French and I recently published a paper called “The Value Premium”. We basically say that it’s not just ten years. If you go back 28 years and compare that period to the previous 28 years, you cannot tell whether expected returns have changed, or whether the premium is zero, or equal to its historical value. The volatility is so high that you can’t make any statements like that. There is no way to know the answer. Besides, the value premium has done poorly in the US, but not in international markets.
What does this mean for investors?
The challenge in asset pricing is to come up with the right dimensions of risk and how they relate to expected returns. That’s been a challenge as long as I have been in the business. I suggested solutions every twenty years or so. None of them worked perfectly. Sometimes they work for a while, and then they don’t seem to work anymore. The problem is that we’re always buried in volatility which makes it hard to tell what’s right and wrong.
What exactly are these risks?
We’ve identified what we call the five potential dimensions of risks: Stocks relative to bonds, small relative to big stocks, value relative to growth stocks, high versus low profitability stocks, and high investment versus low investment stocks. All of these things seem to capture some of the variation in returns. But whether that’s the right breakdown or not is hard to tell.
What sort of lesson should investors take from that? For example, can we say that small stocks should theoretically perform better than large stocks over the long run?
It’s really hard to tell because you get buried in volatility. For instance, the January effect, which refers to a premium of small stocks in the first month of the year, was identified in hindsight. And, once it was identified, it wasn’t there anymore. That begs the question whether the value premium, the size premium, the profitability premium or the investment premium were also temporary. If they are not real dimensions of risks and if they are not things people are concerned about, then you would expect them to go away because that’s fundamental economics: If there is a profit opportunity out there, and it’s generating expected returns, people will bid up or down the price on those things so that they disappear.
Is there anything you now would watch out for specifically as an investor right now?
This experience we’re going through is totally unusual. If you go back in the past, we experienced the same kind of pandemic in 1918 towards the end of World War I. But at that time, we didn’t take the same measures we’re taking now, shutting down whole economies. So we really don’t know what the response will be if and when there’s a cure for this disease. For instance, what will the response of consumers be at that point? Everybody wants to know if we are going to get a V-shaped response. But nobody knows because you don’t know what people are going to do when this is over.
What’s your advice for investors in this environment?
I don’t do investment advice. But the general prescription is to decide how much risk you’re willing to bear and then let that be guiding your decision into how much to put in stocks versus bonds. Also, stay away from hedge funds because you’re going to lose a lot of money fast.
- Peak Insanity: Tesla Adds $16 Billion In Market Cap After Announcing 5-For-1 Stock Split
Peak Insanity: Tesla Adds $16 Billion In Market Cap After Announcing 5-For-1 Stock Split
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 19:24There are only so many “positive news” levers a company can pull in the absence of consistently turning a legitimate profit: stacking up receivables, releasing and taking deposits for “new” products that may not ever materialize, pulling borrow and securing the float while mysterious out of the money call option purchases go off daily, selling regulatory credits to claim profitability while your core auto selling business loses money and adjusting warranty reserves to gear your accounting are a few examples.
This box of tricks, inclusive of most everything aside from just being a consistently profitable company, includes very few tactics that Tesla hasn’t tapped. But today, the company pulled one more rabbit out of their hat with the announcement of a 5-for-1 stock split.
And to prove the market has reached hysteria, Tesla’s market cap is up by about $16 billion after hours. A stock split, of course, does nothing to add equity or value to a company – instead, it just multiplies the number of shares outstanding and divides the company up into smaller parts.
Of course, those “sophisticated” enough to be buying shares in Tesla at a $250 billion valuation may not realize this – as they have added nearly half of General Motors’ market cap to the company in the after market session on the news.
$TSLA up $18B on stock split.
Even 1999 didn’t provide that level of stupidity.— Dean Sheikh (@DeanSheikh1) August 11, 2020
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Meanwhile, we’re sure the news has nothing to do with the fact that Tesla shares have lagged over the last couple of sessions – and we’re double sure the news has nothing to do with Elon Musk watching Apple shares soar on their announcement of a stock split.
“Each stockholder of record on August 21, 2020 will receive a dividend of four additional shares of common stock for each then-held share, to be distributed after close of trading on August 28, 2020. Trading will begin on a stock split-adjusted basis on August 31, 2020,” the company said in a corporate filing.
Though the split will make Tesla shares more “affordable”, Charles Schwab and other online brokerages are already offering fractions of shares held on their balance sheets for as little as $5. So the idea of luring in more bagholders who have no clue what a market cap is to purchase a stock that appears to be cheaper may not work.
So, why is Tesla going ahead with the stock split if retail investors are clearly having no trouble accessing the company’s shares?
We’ll let you take a guess.
Looks like the stock needs a boost: #Tesla declared 5-1 stock split in form of stock dividend to make stock ownership more accessible to Robinhooders. Each stockholder of record on Aug21 will receive dividend of 4 additional shares. Trading will begin on split-adj basis on Aug31. pic.twitter.com/qe7690lFlu
— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) August 11, 2020
- CNN Is Hosed If Trump Loses: Former Exec
CNN Is Hosed If Trump Loses: Former Exec
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/11/2020 – 19:05At CNN, orange man may be bad – but he’s great for ratings. In fact, essential according to one former exec.
Former CNN president Jonathan Klein has told Digiday that the networks’ fate is tied to whether President Trump is re-elected, because no more “bad guy” or “antagonist” will mean viewers won’t be able to feed on the drama inside their leftist echo-chamber.
“Grandpa is a nice guy,” Klein told the outlet, likely referring to Joe Biden, adding “Everybody might be relieved to not watch as much cable news anymore and go find a book to read, a garden to plant, or a socially-distanced walk to take.”
Klein, who parted ways with the network in 2010, said that what Trump gave journalistic outlets “was an audience that felt the urgency” to watch, adding “that urgency among 70% of the audience might dissipate a little bit.”
“I don’t think it was any more complicated than that Trump was good for ratings,” he said, adding “Make no mistake, it’s a symbiotic relationship. The dramatic rise and relevance of CNN for better or worse is tied to Donald Trump.”
And as Fox News’ Joseph Wilfsohn points out, Klein’s commments come “Despite the suggestion from CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter on Sunday that anti-Trump news outlets don’t exist,” yet former CNN reporter Peter Hamby told Digiday that consumers have “confused ideas about journalism and think it’s supposed to be resistance-y.”
If Trump loses, they’ll always have war?
Now that Chris Cuomo admits CNN is a “Hyper-Partisan” News Network . .
Jim Acosta & Brian Stelter run for cover-
Looking at how to “Spin”
How to Blame Pres. Trump . .
And Blame #COVID19
Preventing Americans knowing Truth!
💥CNN Never Changed!pic.twitter.com/BsQj0ZxYtz— Lawyerforlaws (@lawyer4laws) April 14, 2020
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