- The History Of Vaccinations
The History Of Vaccinations
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/15/2020 – 02:45More than two centuries ago, on May 14, 1796, the English doctor Edward Jenner carried out what was later proven to have been the first modern-day vaccination, when he injected a young boy with pus from cow pox (or vaccinia virus) blisters on a milkmaid’s hands. This immunized him against smallpox and the virus’ name coined the term “vaccine.”
Jenner was the first doctor to introduce and scientifically study the smallpox vaccine. But the concept of giving yourself a mild form of the disease to immunize against a harsher form existed as early as 16th century China or early 18th century India.
With the progress of science in the 20th century, the development of vaccines was accelerating, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the latter part of the century also gave rise to skepticism and conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines.
While the disease targeted by the first modern-day vaccine, smallpox, has successfully been eradicated, that feat has not been accomplished for polio and tuberculosis yet…
You will find more infographics at Statista
WHO data on global vaccine coverage only goes back to 1980 despite humans having experimented with vaccines and inoculations (giving yourself a mild form of a disease to gain immunity) since the 16th century. But strides in global vaccine coverage – defined by the WHO as the share of one-year-olds having received a vaccine – have been made in the last 40 years as well.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In 1980 only around 20 percent of children in the world received the vaccines for tuberculosis, DTP (diphtheria/tetanus/whooping cough) and polio. While the former two were developed in the 1920s, the polio vaccine became commercially available in 1961.
Coverage rates for the three diseases rose to approximately 80 percent in the ten years up until 1990.
The immunization against hepatitis B, the world’s first genetically modified vaccine, was made available in the early 1980s and also reached a global coverage of 80 percent in 2012.
Measles vaccinations, on the other hand, have been available since the 1960s but have only reached around 69 percent of children globally (two doses), comparable to the HIB vaccine against a virus causing meningitis, which is now reaching 72 percent of all children worldwide.
- COVID-Kowtowing & How The EU Is Betraying Europe
COVID-Kowtowing & How The EU Is Betraying Europe
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/15/2020 – 02:00Authored by Con Coughlin via The Gatestone Institute,
The latest capitulation by the European Union in the face of Chinese intimidation demonstrates that, when it comes to protecting the interests of member states, the Brussels bureaucracy is no match for Beijing’s new breed of warrior diplomats.
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the more notable features of China’s response has been the willingness of senior Chinese diplomats to intervene forcibly in defence of China’s interests.
The interventions of these “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, so-called after a series of iconic Chinese action movies in which Chinese special forces vanquish their American foes, take several forms.
On one level, Chinese ambassadors, particularly those based in Western capitals, simply resort to blackmail, threatening to deny governments vital medical supplies to cope with the pandemic if they do not comply with Beijing’s wishes.
On another level, they indulge in disseminating fake news, using social media platforms to propagate information that is patently false.
To deal with the growing menace posed by China’s diplomatic community, it is vital, therefore, that the West take robust action to protect its interests, and to hold China to account for its role in causing the pandemic in the first place, and then trying to cover its culpability by launching a global campaign to conceal the origins of the outbreak.
Unfortunately, so far as the EU is concerned, the Brussels establishment has proved itself to be little more than a paper tiger when it comes to dealing with China’s more aggressive diplomatic approach, as can be seen from the EU’s most recent act of appeasement towards Beijing. The latest controversy concerns an article written by Nicolas Chapuis, the EU’s ambassador to China, which was conceived to mark the 45th anniversary of EU-China diplomatic relations, and was also signed by all 27 EU country national ambassadors in Beijing.
The article was written for publication in the state-owned China Daily newspaper, but ran into trouble when China’s foreign ministry objected to a reference in the article which suggested the coronavirus pandemic originated in China. The offending passage referred to the “outbreak of the coronavirus in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world.”
The article eventually appeared in print, but not before EU officials had agreed to remove this passage, prompting Mr Chapuis to remark, “It is of course regrettable to see that the sentence about the spread of the virus has been edited.”
The EU’s willingness to concede to Beijing’s bully-boy tactics is not the first time in recent weeks that Brussels has been forced to capitulate to Chinese intimidation. Last month, the EU amended a report into China’s disinformation campaign in Europe following pressure from Chinese officials. This prompted one outraged EU official to complain that the EU was “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party.”
In this latest example of Brussels kowtowing to Beijing, the EU only has itself to blame: by seeking to publish the article, it was deliberately seeking to pivot towards China in what appeared to be a European attempt to seize upon a perceived lack of U.S. leadership during the pandemic.
Apart from making itself look weak and incompetent, the failure to publish the article in full has angered a number of European governments, who have themselves been targeted by Beijing’s aggressive diplomatic tactics. This resulted in the Beijing embassies of countries such as Germany, France and Italy publishing the letter in full, complete with the reference originating in China and spreading from there to the rest of the world.
All these countries have good reason to want to stand their ground against Beijing. Italy has been the target of a skilful fake news campaign by Beijing with cleverly edited videos that show Italians showing their gratitude for China’s help in the pandemic when no such demonstrations took place.
The French government was outraged after the Chinese embassy in Paris accused French care-workers of abandoning their posts, thereby causing elderly residents to die; while Germany has complained that Chinese diplomats tried to pressure officials to make positive statements on how Beijing was handling the coronavirus pandemic.
As the EU, by constantly capitulating to Beijing’s demands, has shown it is totally incapable of protecting the interests of member states, the governments of Europe are finally waking up to the reality that, in order to defend themselves against China’s bully-boy tactics, they will have to look after themselves.
- E-Democracy: The 2020 Presidential Election Gets More Bizarre
E-Democracy: The 2020 Presidential Election Gets More Bizarre
Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/15/2020 – 00:05Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to dominate the news and life of the American Republic. With currently no end in sight it is not paranoid to wonder if and how the pandemic will affect the presidential elections coming up in November. Two World Wars, The Civil War, The Great Depression and the Spanish Flu were not enough to stop voting for some congressmen and the top executive of the United States as planned. Now for the first time there are rumors moving about that there could be a major delay for voting nationwide.
On a state level delays have happened a few times in history but there is no precedent for this happening on a national scale. This lack of precedent in dealing with this sort of situation could create room for certain “opportunities” that will be mostly detrimental to the future of America.
Manchurian vs. Muscovite Candidates in 2020
Even without the Covid-19 issue, Trump was, and could be again, bogged down by accusations of ties to Russia or working in Russian interests in the run up to election night. This naive “the Russians are coming” narrative was very effectively sold onto the Democrats so much so that they all started to actually believe their own absurdity. In fact the Department of Homeland Security and Trump’s eternal antagonists in the FBI have put together a document titled “Possible Russian Tactics Ahead of 2020 US Election”. And when big government agencies write “possible” they mean “confirmed” especially when that is the desired reality that they want. The stage is being set for Russiagate 2.0. It sort of worked to a degree the first time so why not try it again?
Now that Trump has experienced a delegitimization campaign via accusations from the Democrats the simplest defense would be to in turn accuse his opponent Biden and every other Democrat he has ever spoken to of being servants of China. Reason cannot triumph over madness, only more madness will do the trick.
Mainstream News Media loves to draw charts and connections between politicians and Russia based on the fact that some people, at some time have spoken to each other and gone to the same cocktail parties – guilt by association. Furthermore for the racist MSM, all Russians count as being agents of Putin/The Kremlin. No Russian businessman every works in his own interests, somehow they are all hive minded agents. This means that Trump is very free to throw the same guilt by association tactics at the Democrats for their contact with any person even remotely connected to China. If you draw enough red lines on pretty graphics connecting people, that is good enough to get a conviction nowadays. Trump is very likely to use any connections between the Democrats and China benign or validly suspicious to his advantage. Fighting fire with fire actually works when running for office.
In fact, this election cycle could very well cement a new wedge issue for American politics – whom our traitors serve, Russia or China? Or maybe more simply who is the big enemy, Russia or China? It will be very refreshing to finally get a new wedge issue, guns and abortion have gotten very repetitive.
There is a certain danger in going into an election with both sides accusing the other of being traitors – it utterly delegitimizes the elections and could delegitimize the American establishment, killing the Golden Goose of Stability that continues to lay eggs. Will lobbing accusations of treason in Washington definitely cause a collapse of the system – probably not, but it does knock on the door of that possibility which is unacceptably dangerous. If we convince the American people and establishment that the elections are completely controlled by foreign powers that is bound to have an impact.
Trump Must Go!?
The presidential inauguration happening in January, 72-78 days after election night, seems like a very good amount of padding, even for “Democracy” in a pre-internet world, but the Coronavirus is holding put. In theory Trump would have to step down if his time runs out during an electoral delay and the Presidency would go down the line of succession until it hits a viable candidate. But what if Trump feels that something is afoot and maybe leaving without an election is not in his or America’s best interests?
Of the U.S. presidents there is some debate as to whom among them is the most hated during their time in office by the other side. Lincoln made just a few enemies down south, Hoover got blamed for the economy collapsing, but the hatred for Trump is also top tier. If a delay happened during Reagan’s rule there would be no ramifications. The old actor staying in power two more months or so would be quickly forgotten, but Trump’s enemies despise him and will use any excuse to make sure he goes away forever.
The elections being put off for months opens the door to the very worst of dynamics, one half of the population chanting “he must go” while the other half chants “he must stay”. These situations are what lead to Color Revolutions succeeding in poor weak nations. The elections must happen on time to completely eliminate any possibility of this situation arising.
E-Democracy is the Worst Answer to the Problem
The American electoral system with its Gerrymandering, Hanging Chads, Buttigieg’s “Shadow” over the Iowa Caucus, and Sanders’ mysteriously candidacy denial in 2016 has problems to say the least. The voting system we Americans “enjoy” is far from perfect, but the scary possible answer to America being locked down on election night is a form of “Electronic Democracy”, which due to its intangible and vulnerable nature would be manipulable on a scale not even Boss Hogg could dream of.
The answer to 1776 is not 1984 and if anything needs to be protested it would be any efforts by the government to make elections “go digital”. Ironically such a move would actually be the way that the Chinese and Russians could actually get the guy they want in the Oval Office.
The American electoral system could benefit from standardization, or at least fixing many of the problems on a state level, but any electronic “solution” will be a massive step in the wrong direction.
Vote Now Do Not Delay
Although it technically risks lives, it is critical for real American security to get the election done on time. Any delay will open up lots of opportunities for something to ruin America’s long-term stability which is worth the cost of a potential handful of Covid casualties. The rhetoric between the Democrats and Republicans is dangerous with its growing narrative that America is being taken over foreign influence. Trump needs to either be re-elected or leave on time as to not spark some sort of need to overthrow him, or just revolt against him “holding onto power by delaying”. Furthermore, Electronic Democracy is a nightmarish farce that should not come to pass as it would actually make the quality of American elections go from problem ridden to worthless.
The potential human losses that could be inflicted by voting on time are worth it.
- 'Robot Bows, Customer Bows' – Sushi Bar Deploys Robotic Arm For Contactless Pickup Orders
‘Robot Bows, Customer Bows’ – Sushi Bar Deploys Robotic Arm For Contactless Pickup Orders
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 23:45OpenTable restaurant data continues to show most foot traffic at eateries across America at near zero. There are some signs of life in Naples, Tampa, Houston, and Dallas. But for most of the country, pickup or curbside delivery has been the norm for the last several months.
At Bleu Sushi in Philadelphia, those who are picking up delivery are now greeted with a robot arm that will hand them their order. This allows owner Hendra Yong and his staff to practice strict “safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic while also having a little fun,” said Eater Philly.
“We wanted to keep serving customers, in a safe way. So we came up with this idea. I can see people’s surprise when they come because no one else is doing this,” Yong said.
Bleu Sushi owner Hendra Yong with his newest employee, Bleu Bot. h/t Eater Philly Rachel Vigoda “When the robot bows, the customer bows,” he said. “It’s kind of funny to watch.”
Yong ordered the robot from Japan with the purpose of contactless pickup. He said there are still many functions that he’s trying to figure out but says the robot is here to stay.
I was out delivering food last night and bleu sushi has this neat ass social distancing robot pic.twitter.com/yL5QBQGy3d
— big naturals (@luifarted) May 3, 2020
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This #restaurant #bleusushi takes #SocialDistanacing to another level! #pma #coronavirus #rad #robots #messlife #food #delivery #bikemessenger #takeout #essential pic.twitter.com/FnWQqAhp1g
— Joe Cox Activist for an Equitable Philadelphia (@Joecoxactivist) April 28, 2020
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Ready for some high tech take-out? This robot at Bleu Sushi in Center City has you covered. Customer: It makes me happy inside to know this is where we’re at. That I can just pull up to a place and this random robot is going to hand me my food. @NBCPhiladelphia Tonight at 11 pic.twitter.com/9kVq056IMW
— Denise Nakano (@DeniseNakanoTV) May 6, 2020
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In the last month, we noted how a supermarket in the city took sanitizing to an entirely new level by dunking shopping carts into large vats of disinfectants to give customers the peace of mind that they won’t contract the deadly virus. Last week, another supermarket installed “tent-like plastic enclosures” around cashier booths to keep essential workers safe while interacting with customers at checkout lines.
It’s clear that a post-corona world is quickly changing the economy and how people interact with each other. It remains to be seen if social distancing will slow economic growth.
- New Facial Recognition Software Predicts You're A Criminal Based On Your Looks
New Facial Recognition Software Predicts You’re A Criminal Based On Your Looks
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 23:25Authored by Alan Macleod via MintPressNews.com,
A team from the University of Harrisburg, PA, has developed automated computer facial recognition software that they claim can predict with 80 percent accuracy and “no racial bias” whether a person is likely going to be a criminal, purely by looking at a picture of them.
“By automating the identification of potential threats without bias, our aim is to produce tools for crime prevention, law enforcement, and military applications,” they said, declaring that they were looking for “strategic partners” to work with to implement their product.
In a worrying use of words, the team in their own press release, move from referring to those the software recognizes as being “likely criminals” to “criminals” in the space of just one sentence, suggesting they are confident in the discredited racist pseudoscience of phrenology they appear to have updated for the 21st century.
Public reaction to the project was less than enthusiastic, judging by comments left on Facebook, which included “Societies have been trying to push the idea of ‘born criminals’ for centuries,” “and this isn’t profiling because……?” and “20 percent getting tailed by police constantly because they have the ‘crime face.’” Indeed, the response was so negative that the university pulled the press release from the internet. However, it is still visible using the Internet Wayback Machine.
While the research team claims to be removing bias and racism from decision making, leaving it up to a faceless algorithm, those who write the code, and those who get to decide who constitutes a criminal in the first place, certainly do have their own biases. Why are the homeless or people of color who “loiter” on sidewalks criminalized, but senators and congresspersons who vote for wars and regime change operations not? And who is more likely to be arrested? Wall Street executives doing cocaine in their offices or working-class people smoking marijuana or crack? The higher the level of a person in society, the more serious and harmful their crimes become, but the likelihood of an arrest and a custodial sentence decreases. Black people are more likely to be arrested for the same crime as white people and are sentenced to longer stays in prison, too. Furthermore, facial recognition software is notorious for being unable to tell people of color apart, raising further concerns.
Crime figures are greatly swayed by whom the police choose to follow and what they decide to prioritize. For example, a recent study found 97.5 percent of Brooklyn residents arrested for breaking social distancing laws were people of color. Meanwhile, an analysis of 95 million traffic stops found that police officers were far more likely to stop black people during the daytime when their race could be determined from afar. As soon as dusk hit, the disparity greatly diminished, as a “veil of darkness” saved them from undue harassment, according to researchers. Thus, the population of people convicted of crimes does not necessarily correspond to the population that commits them.
The 2002 hit movie Minority Report is set in a future world where the government’s pre-crime division stops all murders well before they happen, with future criminals locked up preemptively. Even if accurate, is an 80 percent accuracy rate worth risking the creation of a dystopian Minority Report-style society where people are monitored and arrested for pre-crimes?
Phrenology, the long-abandoned study of the size and shape of the head, has a long and sordid history of dangerous racist and elitist pseudoscience. For instance, Cesare Lombroso’s 1876 book, Criminal Man, told students that large jaws and high cheekbones were a feature of “criminals, savages and apes,” and was a sure sign of the “love of orgies and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.” Meanwhile, rapists nearly always have jug ears, delicate features, swollen lips, and hunchbacks. Lombroso himself was a professor in psychiatry and criminal anthropology and his book were taught in universities for decades. To Lombroso, it was almost impossible for a good-looking person to commit a serious crime.
The latest technological development from the University of Harrisburg appears to be an updated, “algorithmic phrenology,” repackaging a dangerous idea for the 21st century, all the more noteworthy because they are trying to sell it to law enforcement as an unbiased tool helping society.
- Restaurants Betting On Vaccine To Reopen Will Be Disappointed
Restaurants Betting On Vaccine To Reopen Will Be Disappointed
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 23:05Some restaurateurs, those who are surviving the severe economic downturn, because as we’ve noted, restaurants are getting fried during lockdowns, have said they will reopen dining halls when a proven vaccine is mass-produced for the general population. Now the issue, there is no clear timetable on when a treatment or vaccine will be ready — an uncertainty that could prove disastrous industrywide.
Danny Meyer, a restaurateur in New York City with 19 eateries, said his dining halls would remain closed until a COVID-19 vaccine is seen.
Of the 19 restaurants, he owns Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café, two pricey restaurants in Manhattan. He told Bloomberg that all of his eateries were shuttered in early March due to the public health crisis.
“We won’t be welcoming guests into our full-service restaurants for a very long time—probably not until there’s a vaccine,” Meyer said. “There is no interest or excitement on my part to having a half-full dining room while everyone is getting their temperature taken and wearing masks, for not much money.”
“It’s very frustrating, but it’s the only safe way to go,” he adds. This gloomy outlook is also shared by fellow restaurateur Daniel Humm, who may permanently close Eleven Madison Park.
With the restaurant industry on life-support, hopes for a vaccine were dashed on Wednesday when Dr. Anthony Fauci noted several caveats, one being that Gilead’s remdesivir has proven to be a “modest success” by the results so far – it’s not the ‘game-changer’ as Wall Street likes to believe. He said some of the vaccine trials could cause harm to test subjects while listing at least eight vaccines (including Moderna’s) in some stage of development.
Dr. Fauci said more details about the trails would be known by late fall or early winter.
As for President Trump, he’s on Twitter Thursday morning trying to pump the stock market with tweets about “VERY promising” vaccines “before the end of the year.”
A proven vaccine by the fourth quarter is possibly the best and most optimistic scenario, though JPMorgan’s core assumption is that one “could take 12-16 months” — which would mean a vaccine could be seen in the back half of 2021.
Rick Bright, the top federal vaccine official who claims he was ousted for criticizing President Trump’s response to the virus pandemic, told a House hearing on Thursday that “2020 will be (the) darkest winter in modern history.”
What’s worse, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently warned treatment or vaccine might be more than a year away – and in fact, may never arrive.
“A mass vaccine or treatment may be more than a year away. Indeed, in a worst-case scenario, we may never find a vaccine,” said Johnson. “So our plan must countenance a situation where we are in this, together, for the long haul, even while doing all we can to avoid that outcome.”
WHO’s Dr. Mike Ryan warned this week that the virus is bouncing around the population like HIV or a supercharged version of the common cold until a vaccine can be mass-produced.
Restaurants are making a good call to exclude the opening of dining halls, and many have opted to rework their business models to include carryout.
For restaurants waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine to reopen, we note that seventeen years after the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak and seven years since the first Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) case, there is still none.
What’s becoming clear is that a mass-produced vaccine is not a 2020 story. Bright told a House hearing on Thursday that a 12-18 month vaccine timeline is still very “aggressive.” Restaurants are doomed, and judging by the shockingly easy spread of viruses as we detailed earlier, it will be a long time before anything like ‘normal’ is back.
- How New York Turned Nursing Homes Into 'Slaughter Houses'
How New York Turned Nursing Homes Into ‘Slaughter Houses’
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 22:45Authored by Jon Miltimore via The Libertarian Institute/FEE,
At an April 23 press conference, Gov. Andrew Cuomo sounded indignant when a reporter asked if anyone had objected to New York’s policy of forcing nursing homes to admit recently discharged COVID-19 patients.
“They don’t have the right to object,” Cuomo answered before the reporter finished his question. “That is the rule, and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with it.”
New York isn’t the only state to adopt a policy ordering long-term care facilities to admit COVID-19-infected patients discharged from hospitals. New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California —three states also hit particularly hard by the novel coronavirus —passed similar policies to free up hospital beds to make room for sicker patients.
The practice is coming under increased scrutiny by health experts and family members of deceased patients who say the orders needlessly put the most susceptible populations at risk.
“The whole thing has just been handled awfully… by everybody in regard to nursing homes,” said Kathleen Cole, a nurse who recently lost her 89-year-old mother who lived at Ferncliff Nursing Home in Rhinebeck, New York:
“It’s like a slaughterhouse at these places.”
Cole, who shared her story with the Bucks County Courier Times, told the paper her mother, Dolores McGoldrick, became infected with COVID-19 on April 2 after Ferncliff re-admitted a resident who had been discharged in late March. Two weeks later her mother, a former school teacher, was dead.
Andrew Cuomo finally reverses his deadly Nursing Home order, which sent patients who tested positive for COVID-19 back to their nursing homes, which resulted in thousands of infections and deaths
— Stonewall Jackson (@1776Stonewall) May 11, 2020
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McGoldrick is one of nearly five thousand COVID-19 victims who died in New York nursing homes, according to new figures from The New York Times. New York’s high nursing home death toll is not an outlier. California recently released data showing that some 40 percent of California’s COVID-19 fatalities have come from eldercare homes. In Pennsylvania, nursing homes account for 65 percent of COVID-19 deaths. Both states, like New York, had orders in place that required nursing homes to admit recently released COVID-19 patients.
These results are not surprising to some. Health experts and trade associations had warned early on that forcing nursing homes to take on newly discharged COVID-19 patients was a recipe for disaster, noting that such facilities didn’t have the ability to properly quarantine the infected.
“This approach will introduce the highly contagious virus into more nursing homes. There will be more hospitalizations for nursing home residents who need ventilator care and ultimately, a higher number of deaths. Issuing such an order is a mistake and there is a better solution,” American Health Care Association President and CEO Mark Parkinson announced in March after New York’s order went into effect.
David Grabowski, a professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School, sounded incredulous when asked about the policy.
“Nursing homes are working so hard to keep the virus out, and now we’re going to be introducing new COVID-positive patients?” Grabowski told NBC.
Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition in New York, echoed that sentiment.
“To have a mandate that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients has put many people in grave danger,” Mollot told the Bucks County Courier Times.
The question, of course, is why states began ordering nursing homes to take in COVID-19 infected residents. The one thing we know of COVID-19, and have known from the beginning, is that the virus is particularly deadly for the elderly and people with compromised immune systems.
State leaders will have to answer that question themselves. But one answer might be that central planning is inherently irrational.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek observed that the problem with trying to centrally plan economies and other complex social orders is that central planners cannot possibly access, comprehend, and weigh the vast amount of information relevant to their sweeping decisions.
The NYT report on nursing homes receiving immunity from lawsuits over coronavirus deaths waits until the 23rd paragraph to briefly mention Cuomo’s admin required them to take COVID-19-positive patientshttps://t.co/LNlRLAqVLd
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) May 14, 2020
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The only way to cope with this “knowledge problem” is by bringing to bear the special knowledge that each individual has about the matters he or she is intimately familiar with. And that can only happen through decentralized processes, like the market price system.
This lesson has been lost on many, but particularly so on politicians and bureaucrats who imagine they possess the knowledge to design a more perfect social order. As Hayek famously explained in The Fatal Conceit:
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.
This is why individuals are more competent decision-makers about their own affairs than governments. For this reason, a society that removes decision-making from individuals and places it in the hands of central planners invites disorder and endangerment, the economist Thomas Sowell has observed.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong,” wrote Sowell.
Media were quick to describe the nursing home tragedy as a “market failure,” pointing out that 70 percent of nursing homes in the US are for-profit. This is hardly a market failure, however. Long-term care facilities saw the danger and warned public officials what would happen.
What were they told?
“That is the rule, and that is the regulation,” Cuomo told them, “and they have to comply with it.”
Gov. Cuomo and other officials responsible for these policies are guilty of Hayek’s fatal conceit. In their hubris, they presumed to know enough to centrally plan a complex society’s response to a complex pandemic, and to know more than individuals with local knowledge, industry expertise, and skin in the game, like the elder care experts and businesspeople who tried to warn policymakers about the disastrous effects the policy would have.
This presumption may stem from another kind of conceit: the dictatorial arrogance on display when Cuomo indignantly insisted that unquestioning compliance was the only appropriate response to his mandate.
Tragically, that conceit was quite literally fatal for many of the most vulnerable members of society.
- Life After Lockdown – Get Ready For "Social Bubbles"
Life After Lockdown – Get Ready For “Social Bubbles”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 22:25Governments are preparing for a post-corona world. They are relaxing social distancing rules, and public health experts have been figuring out how people should proceed with socializing. One solution could be “social bubbles,” which means small groups of people will be allowed to socialize with each other outside their household regularly.
Europe could be the first continent to implement the new scheme. The UK government is calling it “10 friends and family” strategy. This would enable people to socialize with ten friends and family for sporting activities, having a beer, and or even having dinner.
According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, the new strategy in reopening the economy while keeping the curve flatten was first examined by the Belgian government. The idea is to limit socialization in the immediate weeks and months after lockdowns are lifted to a small group. This will hopefully lower the probability of contracting the virus.
Psychologist Dr. Linda Papadopoulos is optimistic about social bubbles:
“At the start of COVID-19, people would have been like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is ridiculous!'” Papadopoulos told Market Watch. “But when we’ve not been allowed to see anybody bar immediate family for close to two months, I think people will see it as progress and a welcome development.”
Rory Sutherland, a behavioral scientist and vice chairman of the advertising agency Ogilvy, noted: “The proposal [social bubbles] makes perfect sense from an epidemiological perspective.”
“From a psychological perspective,” said Sutherland, “I am not sure that it works at all. … Any group assembling could simply claim that everyone present was part of the same cluster, and without spectacular levels of bureaucracy, it would be impossible to establish the veracity of this. It would re-establish the sight of large groups of people as a norm.”
He added, “I think it falls into that category of “excellent science, bad policy.”
Stefan Flasche, associate professor for the department of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, detailed in a recent blog post the importance of exclusivity within these bubbles.
Flasche noted how lockdowns were extremely hard for his young daughter, explaining how at her age, with limited digital communication that “her social life is very much centered around close physical contact with her best friends.”
He said allowing her to see her friends would “tremendously help her mental health and social development,” and he noted private playgroups could be formed.
This “social contact clustering for children would allow them to mingle with their friends while only adding a rather marginal risk for coronavirus infection from, or transmission to, those outside of the playgroup and their respective households,” Flasche said.
Furthermore, do not worry about the enforcement of these bubbles; the government could use smartphone app(s) to track and trace bubble violaters.
- China Releases A Whole Lot Of Made Up Economic "Data", "Markets" Fail To Respond
China Releases A Whole Lot Of Made Up Economic “Data”, “Markets” Fail To Respond
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 22:22It’s that time of the month when the goalseekotron in China’s NBS (which stands for National Bureau of Statistics and not Nonstop Bullshit) gets hyperactive and China spews out a whole lot of numbers that are supposed to represent the Beijing politburo’s model of how China’s economy should work at this moment. These include retail sales, industrial production, property investment, as well as unemployment, capex, and a bunch of other things we already forgot, and for some reason are closely followed by very serious analysts, and sometimes even move markets.
Which is why it is out obligation to inform you that this is what China “reported” moments ago as part of its April “economic” “data” dump.
- Industrial Output +3.9% Y/y; beat exp. +1.5%; up from -1.1% in March:
- Retail sales -7.5% y/y; miss exp. -6%, up from -15.8%
- Jan.-April fixed-asset investment excluding rural households -10.3% y/y; miss exp. -10%, and up from -16.1% in Jan.-March.
- Jan.-April property investment -3.3% y/y vs -7.7% in Jan.-March
- End-April surveyed jobless rate 6.0% vs 5.9% in March
Visually:
Now, we could provide some commentary – either pithy and incisive or profound and in-depth – on these data, but since this is all just made up numbers in some excel spreadsheet located in Beijing (perhaps one infected by some deadly Chinese visual basic virus), we won’t bother – especially when observing that after the biggest contraction in Chinese economic history the unemployment rate “soared” from 5% to 6%, we won’t, and instead will show what real time economic trackers show for China’s industrial and consumer activity, and let readers make their own conclusions.
And since all the “data” is made up anyway, it is only fitting that the made up “market” did not even bother to respond.
- What Is The Right "Letter" To Describe The Recovery? What A Stupid Question
What Is The Right “Letter” To Describe The Recovery? What A Stupid Question
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 22:05For the past month, there has been an obsession by traders and strategists to “package” this cycle into one of the typical “letters” – V, U or L; perhaps W or even a “Nike swoosh.” Mocking the armchair “letterists”, Investing legend Paul Singer said to go ahead and call it a “Q-shaped recovery”:
Clearly this is a ridiculous exercise, and trying to boil down a global economy, with quadrillions in fund flows, into a simplistic ‘shape’ that even a central banker can understand, is an exercise fit for an idiot or any other full-time central bank employee.
Which is why Bank of America has taken a different approach, and instead of letters, its economists are thinking about the trajectory in phases. According to them, we are now past the first phase – the shutdown – and squarely in the second phase, which is one of a transitioning economy. The last stage is the recovery which will be driven by three factors: path of the virus, degree of offsetting stimulus and residual economic damage.
So instead of letters, here are the 3 phases of the shutdown as defined by BofA:
- Phase 1: The shutdown. This started in mid-March as lockdown orders were put in place, resulting in a dramatic decline in economic activity. Over the month of March, $1.1 trillion dollars were lost from a pullback in consumer spending. The unemployment rate jumped to 14.7% with more than 20 million jobs lost between March and April. This phase was completed in April as suggested by the stabilization in aggregated BAC card data, leveling off in small business closures according to Homebase, and a peak in initial jobless claims.
- Phase 2: The transition. This phase started in May and will be a story of a transition with the weakness spilling from consumer spreading to the broader economy. The BAC aggregated card data show that consumer spending inflected higher as stimulus was delivered and businesses shifted online. However, there likely will be spillover effects as the pain in the household sector leads to a downturn in housing construction. Investment likely will also weaken as businesses pull back on capex and energy investment turns down. Re-escalation of the trade war looms in the background as an additional risk. There is also a risk that state & local governments fall under stress and begin to cut back. In this phase, the unemployment rate comes off the peak but remains uncomfortably elevated. This phase goes from mid 2Q to 3Q.
- Phase 3: The recovery. In this last phase the economy reopens and businesses come back to life, bringing back workers. The strength of the recovery will depend highly on three factors: the path of the virus, the degree of stimulus and the extent of residual damage on the economy. The greatest uncertainty surrounds this phase.
Phase 3: looks like a recovery, feels like a recession
The bank’s economists are most concerned about the third phase. After the initial bounce from the bottom upon reopening, the economy needs to find a sounder footing to progress further. The risk is that it plateaus thereafter for a period of time, entering a recovery period of fits and starts; Ultimately, it will boil down to three factors, explained below:
Phase 3: looks like a recovery, feels like a recession
The third phase leaves us the most concerned. After the initial bounce from the bottom upon reopening, the economy needs to find a sounder footing to progress further. We think the risk is that it plateaus thereafter for a period of time, entering a recovery period of fits and starts. We think it will boil down to three factors, explained below:
Path of the virus:
The path of COVID-19 will be the most critical part of the equation to understand the path of the recovery. Health experts are warning that the COVID-19 curve – either measured by the number of cases or deaths – will naturally increase as the lockdown measures are eased; the question is whether this leads to renewed lockdowns based on either data or political interference. The slope of the curve matters. A rapid steepening of the virus, similar to the second phase of the Spanish Flu, could lead to another round of lockdowns, forcing businesses to close once again and crushing what is left of animal spirits.
The goal is clearly to avoid such a negative outcome. The White House Coronavirus Task Force along with numerous health experts have outlined steps to a successful reopening, which include meeting a low enough level of COVID cases and implementing sufficient virus testing and contact tracing. Roughly 24 states have already eased social distancing policies in some form, kicking off the reopening process. Unfortunately many states have not met the criteria to reopen, which could put people in a place of having to weigh the tradeoffs between health and personal finances. Indeed, survey data suggests that even as states open up, activity will be slow to resume. According to CivicScience, while more than a third of workers feel comfortable returning to work now, consumers are hesitant to resume many typical activities such as traveling, eating out or going to a major sporting event for some time (Chart 3).
While BofA thinks it is unlikely that we will return to a blanket shelter-in-place policy, we could see “two steps forward, one step back” when it comes to the reopening. There will be some form of social distancing in place until there is a vaccine which could take 2 years, if not more. This will lead to cautious behavior including greater savings and therefore a slow and rocky recovery.
Degree of stimulus:
The policy response has been forceful thus far with around $2.8tn of stimulus on the fiscal front and a $2.4tn expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. The stimulus put in place has been aimed at stabilizing the economy – to offset the loss of income from the private sector and get credit to flow through the financial system.
The job is not over. The fiscal stimulus will fade in the summer and will likely need to be ramped up again. The expanded unemployment insurance of $600/week expires at the end of July while the expanded eligibility runs through the end of the year. However, that may not be sufficient on either metric, and these benefits will be extended, but perhaps adjusted to taper the $600/week added benefit until it is phased out. Also, the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) may need to extend the June 30th deadline to support small businesses with payroll and operating costs during the initial reopening phase. There will also need to be support for state & local governments to avoid coming cuts.
The Fed has also been active in capital markets and will soon be kicking off the Main Street Lending Facility, but BofA expects even more intervention by the central bank. Recent comments suggest the Fed is considering ways to support nonprofit organization as well as universities and colleges.
Residual damage to the economy:
One of the ways that the shock ripples through the economy is through bankruptcies. Given the extreme degree of dislocation, the economy needs to prepare for the failure of many businesses, resulting in permanent damage to real activity. Looking to corporate bond markets, BofA believes that the credit cycle should be at least as damaging as recent recessions, which means a 21% cumulative default rate and 8-10% of fallen angel downgrades from Investment Grade BBBs per year. With every passing day, the risks are growing that credit losses will exceed those estimates.
Meanwhile, we are likely to see even more destruction at the small business level. A recent CNBC survey found that 13% of small businesses would fold in less than a month under current lockdown conditions, and another 31% if it persisted for a few months. Similarly, the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) survey found that 12% of small businesses would need to shut down in under a month in this environment, 20% more under 3 months, and another 20% under 6 months.
That said, there are programs in place that should help mitigate the damage including the Fed’s corporate credit facilities and Main Street Lending Facility. However, the details of the Main Street Lending Facility are still be ironed out, and it is hard to say how successful it will prove to be. The Payroll Protection Program (PPP) is designed to bridge the gap for small businesses (< 500 employees), but it appears that demand is exceeding the amount of funds allocated to the program and although the funds will help cover payroll costs, there will still be the strain of other expenses which might make staying in business unviable.
Bankruptcies are likely to be more disruptive and painful for certain industries than others. Naturally there is concern over retail, which was suffering prior to the COVID recession. Additionally, certain service companies such as restaurants and hospitality are at risk. This can leave workers displaced and struggling to find employment that fits their skill set. Of the total net jobs lost thus far in the cycle, 38% have been in leisure and hospitality and another 10% in retail (Chart 4). One has to therefore worry about the path of commercial real estate which creates another path for the shock to multiply. We are concerned about the adverse feedback loop that can be triggered by bankruptcies.
Bottom line: This cycle does not fit a mold. The downturn was painful and abrupt. There are now signs of life in the economy upon reopening. But the last stage of the cycle – the true recovery – will be challenging.
- Amid Gold Market Turmoil, HSBC Taps Bank Of England For GLD Bars
Amid Gold Market Turmoil, HSBC Taps Bank Of England For GLD Bars
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 21:45Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com
During March and April, amid global financial turmoil, unprecedented demand for physical gold, refinery closures and a London lockdown, one question on the minds of many in the gold market was how HSBC London, the vault custodian of the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), was consistently able to source huge amounts of gold bars to back the enormous inflows into the world’s largest gold-backed Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).
173 tonnes during London Lockdown
From Monday 23 March (the day Boris Johnson triggered the UK and London lockdown) to close of business 12 May, the SPDR Gold Trust claims to have taken in a massive inflow of 175 tonnes of gold bars, swelling its gold holdings from 908 tonnes to 1083 tonnes.
That’s an addition of approximately 14,065 large Good Delivery gold bars since 23 March, each weighing 400 troy ozs, which would take up 29 stacks of pallets, each 6 pallets high, and is more than three times the amount of gold pallets labelled in the below photo.
175 tonnes of gold is over three times more than all the stacked pallets numbered in this photo. Each pallet contains 1 tonne of gold, with 6 pallets stacked being 6 tonnes. The time period of these GLD gold bar inflows was also not ‘business as usual’ in the London gold market despite what the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) may have you think, coinciding as it did with London gold spot liquidity problems (LBMA market maker bid-ask spreads and COMEX futures – spot gold spreads both reaching nearly $100 on 24 March) and a period in which no one else around the world was able to get their hands on physical gold in large quantities.
It also came at a time in which HSBC now reveals that it had a $200 million one-day loss due to what HSBC describes as:
“unprecedented widening of the gold exchange-for-physical basis, reflecting Covid-19-related challenges in gold refining and transportation, which affected HSBC’s gold leasing and financing business and other gold hedging activity leading to mark-to-market losses. “
So how did HSBC manage to source so much gold for the GLD during these times? Having gold in the right place at the right time? Using a proverbial forklift truck to shunt 173 pallets of gold from one side of a secretive vault in London to the other during the London lockdown? Or begging and borrowing the gold from anywhere it could find it?
Lender of Last Resort – Bank of England
On some recent days it appears to have been the latter, for buried deep within the latest SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) quarterly SEC filing (10Q), filed on 8 May, we see the following admission from the Trust’s Sponsor, World Gold Trust Services (the US subsidiary of the World Gold Council):
“Since April 15, 2020, gold was held by a subcustodian (the Bank of England), and the greatest amount of gold held on April 27, 2020 was approximately 45.91 tonnes or 4.4% of the Trust’s gold.”
This means that during April, HSBC used nearly 46 tonnes of gold stored in the Bank of England gold vaults to add to the SPDR Gold Trust, instead of using gold at HSBC’s own commercial London vault.
GLD 10-Q, Filed 8 May 2020
And why is this important? It’s important because it implies that:
a) there isn’t enough gold in the HSBC vault in London to fulfill SPDR Gold Trust basket creation requests from GLD Authorized Participants (APs).
b) that gold which is ultimately borrowed central bank gold at the Bank of England is being used as a source of GLD gold holdings.
c) that there are physical gold float shortages in the London physical gold market as well as liquidity problems of LBMA market makers in the London paper gold market.
SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) gold bar inflows into HSBC London vault during the total London lockdown are:
— Ronan Manly (@ronanmanly) April 24, 2020
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HSBC’s secretive Vault – An Open and Shut case?
Looking first at a), the GLD creation process is as follows. When Authorized Participants (APs) of the SPDR Gold Trust want new baskets of GLD shares to sell to investors, they transfer unallocated gold (gold credit) to the Trust, after which HSBC London then allocates the equivalent physical gold from its vault inventory to the SPDR Gold Trust account.
The fact that since mid April, HSBC has directed its custodian, the Bank of England, to allocate gold bars stored in the Bank of England vaults to the SPDR Gold Trust when processing Authorized Participant GLD creation requests implies that the HSBC London vault has not had sufficient gold inventory to provide at a minimum 45.91 tonnes gold bars to the SPDR Gold Trust (as of 27 April), and because of this had had to revert to using the gold of the GLD sub-custodian (the Bank of England).
From the GLD Prospectus:
“The subcustodians that the Custodian currently uses are the Bank of England, The Bank of Nova Scotia-ScotiaMocatta, ICBC Standard Bank London, JPMorgan Chase Bank and UBS AG.”
The fact that HSBC had to source gold at the Bank of England subcustodian and not from one of the commercial vaults also puts in doubt the ability of the other SPDR Gold Trust sub-custodians (JP Morgan Chase, ICBC Standard Bank, ScotiaMocatta and UBS) as sources for providing sufficient physical gold to GLD during this time. Note that JP Morgan and ICBC Standard have their own vaults in London but Scotia and UBS do not.
Gold-backed ETFS entail many risks, the use of sub-custodians among them Access to ‘Liquidity’
That gold in the Bank of England vaults is ultimately borrowed central bank gold, can be seen by the fact that commercial bank members of the LBMA hold gold accounts at the Bank of England specifically so that they can engage in gold lending with central banks (the central banks lend the gold and the commercial banks borrow the gold). This is something the Bank of England and the LBMA euphemistically refer to as ‘liquidity’ provision.
As the Bank of England says:
“We provide gold accounts to certain commercial firms that facilitate access for central banks to the London gold market.”
And as the Bank of England also says:
“By offering allocated accounts to commercial banks, we allow central banks to access the liquidity of the London gold market and trade directly with the commercial banks”
And as the LBMA states:
“the Bank of England offers gold custodial services to central banks and certain commercial firms that faciliate central bank access to the liquidity of the London gold market.
Those clearing members without their own vault operations – Scotiabank and UBS – utilise their accounts with one of the LBMA custodians or the Bank of England (BoE)”.
The 5 commercial bank members of the bullion clearing group London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (LPMCL), i.e. HSBC, JP Morgan, ICBC Standard, Scotia and UBS, also use these gold accounts at the Bank of England as part of their ability to call on each other for allocation of gold to help in the clearing process.
Beyond the LPMCL members, the Bank of England also provides gold custody accounts to any LBMA bullion bank member engaging in gold lending with central bank gold storage customers of the Bank of England. For example, these bullion banks would include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas, Citibank, and Standard Chartered etc.
One of the 8-10 Bank of England gold vaults, City of London Why is all of this important to the SPDR Gold Trust? Because, Bank of England vault gold held by commercial banks ultimately comes from central banks through gold lending or is for delivery back to central banks. Which means that when GLD holds 400 oz gold bars at the Bank of England with Bank of England as subcustodian, it is holding gold bars that either came from gold lending transactions or are ultimately going back to the lending central banks.
If the SPDR Gold Trust is now holding leased central bank gold as part of its gold holdings, this raises the issue of double counting, a situation in which the same gold bars are claimed by two distinct parties, the central bank which lent the gold and still accounts for it on its balance sheet, and an exchange traded gold-backed ETF (GLD) which thinks that it has title to those same gold bars since they were ‘allocated’ to GLD at the Bank of England.
She can’nae take any more, Captain!
An admission in an official SEC filing that the SPDR Gold Trust uses gold at the Bank of England is not unprecedented but is rare enough that it has not happened since 2016 after the SEC directed the GLD Sponsor, World Gold Trust Services to specifically divulge the use of subcustodians since the SEC deemed subcustodian holdings a risk to the Trust. See BullionStar article “SPDR Gold Trust gold bars being held at the Bank of England” for details.
Letter from the SEC to the GLD Sponsor, 29 March 2016, directing that GLD divulge the use of subcustodians. Similar to the current scenario, the use of gold at the Bank of England in 2016 to back the SPDR Gold Trust took place during a time of very large and fast inflows into the GLD during Q1 2016, particularly in February 2016 when 108 tonnes of gold were added to GLD, and March 2016 when 42 tonnes of gold were added. See below chart and the steep increases in GLD gold holdings in early 2016 and again now since 23 March 2020.
The GLD 10Q to the SEC at that time (filed on 29 April 2016), stated it as follows:
“During the quarter ended March 31, 2016, the greatest amount of gold held by subcustodians was approximately 29 tonnes or approximately 3.8% of the Trust’s gold at such date. The Bank of England held that gold as subcustodian.“
The periods in which GLD has held gold at the Bank of England, Q1 2016 and April 2020, correspond to very large and fast inflows into the SPDR Gold Trust. Chart source: www.GoldChartsRUs.com It’s notable therefore that the allocation to GLD of gold bars stored at the Bank of England corresponds to times in which there are fast and large inflows into GLD, with the Bank of England acting as an emergency backup to the HSBC vault. This time around with London on lockdown, is the HSBC London vault even open, or has it been shuttered along with everything else. Given that HSBC, the LBMA, and every party associated with the SPDR Gold Trust is ultra secretive about this vault even to the extent of not divulging its location, then no one in the market really knows.
Conclusion
It is interesting to note that the current large flows into the SPDR Gold Trust began on Monday 23 March. This was the same day as:
- the UK and London went into lockdown
- prices between COMEX gold futures and London gold spot (EfP) began to diverge widely
- Bid – Ask spot gold spreads quoted by LBMA market makers diverged wildly
UK Prime Minister speech on COVID-19, 10 Downing Street, 23 March, 8:30 pm
The consistent and large inflows into the SPDR Gold Trust starting on 23 March all the way through April and into May also correspond to the period of persistent and wide spreads between COMEX futures gold prices and London spot gold prices when the LBMA in unprecedented fashion made various attempts to reassure that all was OK in the London gold market.
Tag team – LBMA and COMEX The biggest spread between COMEX and London spot was on 24 March, when the contango was at one point $96. The spread remained wide (between 60 and 50) into 25 March, then contracted slightly to the 30 range over the rest of March. It was during this time that HSBC made its huge loss, which it describes in another filing here as:
“delivery disruptions in the gold market, which became highly illiquid on news of refinery closings”.
At the start of April the spot to COMEX contango was in the 20-25 range, but it expanded to the 40 range from 6 April, and exploded again for the whole week before Easter, to between $60 and $80. The contango remained high on Monday 13 April at over $65 when GLD started sourcing its gold from gold holdings in the Bank of England vaults.
The latest GLD 10-Q filing says that the SPDR Gold Trust began holding gold bars in the Bank of England beginning 15 April. While this is a delivery date of physical gold into the Trust, it could be based on trades a few days earlier, which would put the initial transactions in the days around Easter (12 April).
With this new revelation that the SPDR Gold Trust began allocating gold bars at the Bank of England during the very same time as market maker liquidity broke in the London gold market, it seems that the liquidity problems of the LBMA bullion banks are both in physical gold and in paper gold. Which would make sense seeing that the giant paper gold trading pyramid sits atop the tiny foundations of the physical gold market.
And was the 27 April, the date on which the SPDR Gold Trust says it held 45.91 tonnes of gold at the Bank of England, merely the latest date the GLD accountants ran a query for their filing before signing it off? What about since 27 April? How low really is the London gold float?
Since 27 April, another 35 tonnes of gold have been added to the mammoth GLD ETF. Where did this extra 35 tonnes of gold come from? If this were a bet, the odds on this gold being from the Bank of England would surely be less than evens, i.e. a sure fire bet.
This article was originally published on the BullionStar.com website under a similar title “Amid gold market turmoil, HSBC taps Bank of England for GLD gold bars.”
- Lockdown-Defying Speakeasies Cropping Up Across Manhattan
Lockdown-Defying Speakeasies Cropping Up Across Manhattan
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 21:45As New Yorkers grow weary of the ongoing lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic, speakeasies have been cropping up in Manhattan according to Page Six.
Discreet patrons are filling the backs of bars, pizza parlors and even pet stores in order to enjoy libations and delicacies with like-minded people flouting quarantine.
Page Six is told that a famous Upper East Side bar and lounge as well as a trendy downtown hotel have been opening up in spite of the coronavirus lockdown — but strictly for discreet friends of the owners and managers.
Meanwhile, the New York Post revealed this week that the Lower East Side’s Omar’s La Boîte hosted a small invite-only party in early May. “I know at least five people who were at [the hotel bar] on Monday night,” said a source. “I called one of them and said, ‘I heard you were at [said hotel bar] last night, and she sounded shocked. She said, ‘How did you know!’” –Page Six
After the Post published a picture of La Boîte which appeared to show over “a dozen revelers with no masks in sight,” the manager of the club denied that there had been any parties. Owner Omar Hernandez, meanwhile, said “We are looking into this distressing report. I’m sheltering outside the city, certainly wasn’t there, and I had no knowledge of any social gathering on-site.”
Just how long do our elected officials think people are going to remain compliant?
- Cop Who Hid While Parkland Students Were Slaughtered Wins Job Back, Plus Back Pay And Overtime
Cop Who Hid While Parkland Students Were Slaughtered Wins Job Back, Plus Back Pay And Overtime
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 21:25Authored by Daniel Payne via Just the News
The Parkland, Florida, police officer who sheltered behind his car while nearly 20 students were shot and killed will be re-instated to his job, his union announced on Thursday.
An arbitration process found that Brian Miller, at the time of the massacre a sergeant in the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, was “improperly terminated” by the department more than a year after the shooting.
An internal investigation last year determined that Miller had “neglected his duties” when he responded to the shooting reports at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018. He “failed to coordinate or direct deputies’ actions and did not direct or coordinate an immediate response into the school,” a state commission eventually ruled.
Miller was initially suspended after the shooting and was fired in June of last year. Yet an arbitrator determined that the sheriff’s department had not afforded him due process when it terminated him.
He will receive back pay as well as missed overtime, accrued holidays and other benefits to which he would have otherwise been entitled.
The sergeant had been terminated by Sheriff Gregory Tony, who replaced Scott Israel in that role following the shooting. Israel had been suspended from the department by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after the massacre; he is currently running against Tony to reclaim his position there.
- Mexico Is Cremating Bodies On An "Industrial Scale"
Mexico Is Cremating Bodies On An “Industrial Scale”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 21:05Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) unveiled a plan this week to reopen the country’s severely damaged economy by June 1 as part of normalization after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered lockdowns.
Lopez said Wednesday the reopening would be “cautious and gradual,” but with more than 40,000 infections and 4,200 deaths, there are new concerns the federal government is underreporting the public health crisis.
“The numbers do not appear to reflect the death toll for certain,” Donna Patterson, an expert on Mexico’s health care system at Delaware State University, told VOX. “At the federal level, the numbers aren’t being reported accurately.”
VOX reports that Mexican mayors, doctors, funeral home directors, and former government officials indicate the current situation on the ground is absolutely horrendous. They say deaths are being underreported and could be eight times higher than official data.
Dr. Laurie Ann Ximénez-Fyvie, the molecular genetics lab chief at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), said the underreporting is deliberate by the federal government.
“If Mexico is good at anything, it’s hiding numbers,” Fyvie said.
A Sky News investigations team dug deeper into the underreporting issue and discovered the death toll in Mexico City could be staggering. Disturbing images show the country is cremating bodies on an “industrial scale.”
“The bodies don’t stop coming. They can’t cope.” @ramsaysky reports from Mexico where the number of people dying from the #coronavirus pandemic is thought to be higher than official government figures.
More on this story: https://t.co/7G5LEHGLPN pic.twitter.com/PBOWqaPxlI
— SkyNews (@SkyNews) May 13, 2020
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Here’s AP’s coverage on Mexico City’s COVID-19 death toll and cremating bodies
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Sky obtained access to the city’s morgues and crematoriums, to only discover that the government is massively underreporting COVID-19 deaths.
From 30 crematoriums, Sky learned there is currently a three-day backlog in cremation across the city.
There is currently a three-day backlog for cremation at every public crematorium in the city and crematorium workers in recent days have indicated that more burials will have to take place because burning capacity is overwhelmed.
Black smoke billows out over cemeteries as the ovens are cremating on an industrial level in the city but the bodies don’t stop coming.
In fact, the ovens simply cannot cope and there are regular reports of breakdowns only adding to the backlog.
In full hazmat suits, crematorium staff are working around the clock bringing bodies to huge ovens for disposal.
Sky did the math, also finds several hundred people per day have been dying from the virus, many of whom were not reported in official data.
Sky News analysis of the data from 30 crematoria across Mexico City shows that each one is disposing of between 18 and 22 bodies each day, with a three-day backlog.
Taking an average number of 20 cremations, Sky has calculated the total number of cremations every day is 600. This figure does not include other crematoria or burials.
The urban area of Mexico City spans over two federal entities – Mexico City and the state of Mexico. Because of this, in order to work out the official figure for how many people have died, the figures for the two entities need to be added together.
Government figures show that the average number of people who die every day in Mexico City in May is 189 and (averaged out over the last five years for which figures are available, 2014-18) and the number for the state of Mexico is 185. That makes a total average daily deaths of 374.
That means there are at least 226 excess deaths occurring every day in early May, with most probably down to coronavirus.
In fact, crematorium sources told Sky News that 80-90% of the deaths they are having to deal with are due to COVID-19.
Sky’s analysis suggests the government’s official figure is about 19% of the actual number of COVID-19 deaths in Mexico City, and the real value is probably five times higher, which is why the city is burning bodies on an industrial level. This is exactly what happened in Wuhan, China.
As to AMLO’s ability to open the economy remains anyone guess at the moment, one thing is certain, the country does not have the virus spread under control.
- Viruses Versus Lockdowns: It's Not About Tradeoffs
Viruses Versus Lockdowns: It’s Not About Tradeoffs
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 20:45Authored by Michael Accad via The Mises Institute,
It is tempting to oppose the harmful effects of COVID-related lockdowns with arguments couched in terms of tradeoffs.
We may contend that when public authorities promote the benefits of “flattening the curve,” they fail to properly take into account the actual costs of imposing business closures and of forced social distancing: the coming economic depression will lead to mass unemployment, rising poverty, suicides, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and myriad other potential causes of death and suffering which could be considerably worse than the harms of the pandemic itself, especially if we consider the spontaneous mitigation that people normally apply under the circumstances.
While I have no doubt that lockdown policies can and will have serious deleterious consequences, I believe that the emphasis on tradeoffs is misguided and counterproductive. It immediately invites a utilitarian calculus: How many deaths and how much suffering will be caused by lockdowns? How many deaths and how much suffering would occur without the lockdowns? How exactly are we to measure the total harm? What time frame should we consider when we ponder the costs of one option versus the other?
It’s easy to see that no one can have any firm answers to those questions. No one can convincingly make the case that one policy is better than the other on utilitarian grounds, which is what tradeoff language encourages us to do. That is especially true if we consider that lockdown policies are invariably modified in response to changing circumstances and aim toward ever shifting goalposts.
This goes to the heart of Ludwig von Mises’s criticism of the empiricists and behaviorists of his day: they could only conceive of social phenomena in mechanical terms and failed to see that human action makes the planning of human affairs irreducible to predictive calculus. Things have not changed. Ludicrous presumptions hide behind mathematical wizardry and statistical modeling continues to rule.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE ECONOMY
On what grounds, then, should we oppose lockdowns if not by calling attention to the great harms that will ensue?
It seems to me that lockdowns should be opposed not by arguing in terms of “quantity of harm,” but by pointing out that the only role for government—whether in pandemic times or not—is actually to promote the economy.
But we need to understand what the economy is to begin with.
In its broader, original meaning, the economy is not simply a sum total of exchanges of material goods and services among consumers, businesses, and governments, to be measured as a “GDP.” That is the concept that the utilitarians are accustomed to, and it’s how mainstream political philosophy conceives of the economy. Originally, however, the Greek term Oîkonomia meant “household affairs” and came to refer, by extension, to the entire life of the community as such.
The reason to consider the life of the community as such is that the human being is, by nature, a social animal who depends essentially on the division of labor that takes place within an integrated and wholly interconnected society. We depend on the division of labor from the moment we are born: we need parents who can feed us, and our parents themselves need the specialized work of others to survive—specialized work that invariably crosses different generations. The division of labor forms a more or less tight-knit “political” community that promotes and defends the interests of its own members. That community may be a small primitive tribe or a huge nation-state, it is nevertheless one community engaged in the division of labor in its own unique way.
The division of labor, then, is not a matter of personal choice. Being connected to a community is not an option that one can choose to either engage in or refrain from. No one can live as an outcast. Even the hermit depends on others, and therefore on society. True ostracism is a death sentence, and involuntary partial ostracism (imprisonment) is a most severe punishment. The economy is as necessary to human life as oxygen or water are.
For that reason, the famous evolutionary sociobiologist E.O. Wilson has changed his perspective on the human race. He has taken the position that human beings are a “eusocial species,” whose members are totally dependent on a complex, intergenerational division of labor in much the same way that bees are dependent on other bees. Man is indeed a very social animal.
THE TRUE COMMON GOOD
The broad division of labor on which we all essentially depend amounts to far more than the accounting transactions that occupy the attention of professional econometricians. It includes the myriad ways in which we depend on others, ways which may be at once measurable yet uncountable, self-interested yet gratuitous. Understood properly, the economy points to the true common good, the good that unites us as the eusocial animals that we are. That true common good does not distinguish between “essential” and “nonessential” worker or activity.
That understanding of the common good is a far cry from the perverted notion of it that dominates modern political thought: a stock of material goods or services to be taken from some and redistributed to others by the government according to “shared interests” and “rights.” We should be especially fearful of that notion given that the same government determines what those shared interests and rights are based on mechanistic, utilitarian norms—norms that invariably garner votes.
If the government’s role is to safeguard the true common good, then it should do so primarily by safeguarding the integrity of the society, in which the division of labor naturally takes place. Government acts properly when that integrity is threatened, either from within (by criminal activity) or from without (by outside invaders or aggressors). Its role is to deter or defend from those threats when private efforts cannot prevail. The role of government is not to defend or promote the particular goods of certain individuals. That’s an abomination!
Even individual lives are not for the government to “save,” because efforts by the government to save the lives of some invariably infringe on the goods and sometimes on the lives of others. The saving of individual lives cannot possibly be a promotion of the true common good.
But does not the saving of lives help safeguard the integrity of society?
Not really. To see this we must distinguish secondary effects from primary ones. For example, imagine that the police successfully intervene to stop Smith from murdering Jones. Did they act because the police has a mission to save Jones’s life? No. The primary effect of the police action is to protect the integrity of the community by putting Smith and his sociopathic behavior out of commission. It is not, per se, to save Jones’ life—even if he should be so lucky.
Likewise, when soldiers are deployed against an invading army, the primary aim is to defend the integrity of society. Military defense is not carried out primarily to save individual lives or reduce individual suffering: more lives might conceivably be lost and more individual suffering occasioned in the process of defending the country than if the country were to capitulate and allow the invader to take over.
BEWARE OF METAPHORS
Might one argue that a pandemic threatens the integrity of society precisely as a foreign invader would? Doesn’t the COVID-19, then, warrant government action for that very reason?
I don’t believe so. Such an argument falls into the metaphorical trap of considering the COVID-19 virus in martial terms. The virus is not an invader. It has no intention of destroying or taking over society. In fact, as Jörg Guido Hüllsman recently pointed out, it has no intention whatsoever. It is not even alive! To be sure, SARS-CoV-2 is a very dangerous and transmissible pollutant that can cause much harm and many deaths. But it is not, as such, a threat to the integrity of society.
It is the true economy and the integrity of society that the government should protect or promote. Lockdowns do the exact opposite. They fracture us, harm us, and weaken us all. If maintained long enough, they will disintegrate us. In the meantime, they undoubtedly obstruct our efforts to find the best way to respond to pandemics. They should be opposed—not because of tradeoffs—but because they are antithetical to the economy, that is, to the good of society.
- "Reckless" – Drone Operator Flies Dangerously Close To Blue Angels
“Reckless” – Drone Operator Flies Dangerously Close To Blue Angels
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 20:25What we’re about to show you is probably one of the most reckless and irresponsible videos uploaded to the internet by a clueless civilian drone operator.
During an America Strong flyover by the US Navy Blue Angels in Detroit, Michigan, on May 12, a civilian drone pilot flew his quadcopter dangerously close to the six F/A-18 Hornets as they flew over the city’s metro area.
“The original video posted to YouTube included a number of different angles with the camera drone appearing momentarily in some of the shots. The final shot shows the Blue Angel six-aircraft wedge formation flying extremely close to the camera drone as they pass overhead at speed,” said The Aviationist.
The video was uploaded to a social media account called “@GIOLUCIA.” It has yet to be confirmed who the actual drone pilot is, but if caught by the Federal Aviation Administration, there would likely be severe fines and possible jail time. The video shows several potential violations: first, operating in controlled airspace that was shut down for the event, flying out of the line of sight, possibly breaching altitude height of 400 feet, and flying too close an aircraft.
The Aviationist said this “could have ended in a midair collision” – which would have been absolutely devastating, considering the F-18s were flying in a tight formation over a densely populated metro area.
Back in 2018, we showed another idiot drone operator ‘dive-bombing’ a commercial jetliner near the Vegas airport.
These are the idiots that could one day cause an incident of some sort and result in the government grounding and or banning civilian drone use for recreational purposes. Let’s hope that never happens.
- Let's Not Allow Another Crisis To Bamboozle Us
Let’s Not Allow Another Crisis To Bamboozle Us
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 20:05Authored by Walter Williams, op-ed via Townhall.com,
Former Barack Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel, during a recent interview, reminded us of his 2008 financial crisis quotation, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.” The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a wonderful opportunity for those of us who want greater control over our lives.
Sadly, too many Americans have already taken the bait. We’ve allowed politicians and bureaucrats to dictate to us what’s an essential business and what isn’t, who has access to hospitals and who hasn’t, and a host of minor and major dictates.
Leftist politicians who want to get into our pocketbooks are beginning to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is the best argument for a wealth tax. Let’s first define a wealth tax. A wealth tax is applicable to and levied on a variety of accumulated assets that include cash, money market funds, real property, trust funds, owner-occupied housing and other wealth accumulations. Assume a taxpayer earns $150,000 a year and falls in the 32% tax bracket. That individual’s income tax liability for the year will be 32% x $150,000 or $48,800. Say the taxpayer has a net worth of $500,000 consisting of a business or home and the government imposes a wealth tax of 32%, the person’s tax liability is $160,000.
The problem with most politicians is when they enact a law, they seldom ask, “Then what?” They assume a world of what economists call zero elasticity wherein people behave after a tax is imposed just as they behaved before the tax was imposed and the only difference is that more money comes into the government’s tax coffers. The long-term effect of a wealth tax is that people will try to avoid it by not accumulating as much wealth or concealing the wealth they accumulate.
A wealth tax has become increasingly attractive because it lends itself to demagoguery about the significant wealth disparity in the United States. The Federal Reserve reports that, in 2018, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 70% of the country’s wealth, and the richest 1% owned 32% of the wealth. That fact gave Democratic presidential contenders such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren incentives to propose a wealth tax as a part of their campaign rhetoric. Leftists lament that multibillionaires such as Charles Koch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Sheldon Adelson have not made charitable efforts to address the coronavirus crisis.
My questions to these political leeches are: To whom does the billionaire’s wealth belong? And how did they accumulate such wealth?
Did they accumulate their great wealth by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man, as has been the case throughout most of human history? No, they accumulated great wealth by serving and pleasing their fellow man in the pursuit of profits. Unfortunately, demagoguery and lack of understanding has led to “profit” becoming a dirty word. Profit is a payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants in a way that economizes on society’s scarce resources.
Here’s a question for you. Which entities produce greater consumer satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments? I’m guessing you’ll answer the former. Their survival depends on pleasing ordinary people. Public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments’ survival are not strictly tied to pleasing people but rather on politicians and the ability of government to impose taxes.
Some advocates of wealth taxes and other forms of taxation might argue that they are temporary measures to get us over the COVID-19 crisis. Do not buy that argument. The great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program.” The telephone tax was levied on wealthy Americans with telephones in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War. That tax was repealed over 100 years later in 2006. One of the objectives of the World War II withholding tax was to bring faster revenues to fight the war. The withholding of taxes is still with us blinding Americans on the taxes they pay. Let us not allow a crisis to bamboozle us again.
- Colombia Militarizes Brazilian Border As COVID Deaths Soar
Colombia Militarizes Brazilian Border As COVID Deaths Soar
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 19:45A rise in cases and deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil has spooked neighboring countries, resulting in the National Army of Colombia to bolster forces along Brazil–Colombia border, reported Bloomberg.
Johns Hopkins University reported the South American country had more than 188,000 cases and 13,000 fatalities on Thursday afternoon. The fast-spreading virus is ravaging the country’s favelas, something we warned about in late March.
Brazil leads BRIC countries in terms of virus deaths
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s virus response has backfired, due mostly because his administration is concentrated on reopening the economy rather than flattening the curve.
Colombian President Ivan Duque Marquez has had no other choice than increase military presence on its Amazon border that is shared with Brazil and Peru, a move that will hopefully prevent virus carriers from entering the country.
“The decision has been made to militarize, with more presence, all the border points and exercise the respective control to prevent imported cases of floating populations from arriving,” President Duque said Tuesday.
Brazil has transformed into the epicenter of the pandemic in South America. It has the sixth-highest number of infections and deaths globally. On the continent, second to Brazil is Peru, which has more than 76,000 cases and nearly 2,200 fatalities.
Paraguay President Abdo Benitez warned last week that the virus situation in Brazil is deteriorating. He deployed military personnel to Brazil–Paraguay border and enforced checkpoints.
“Brazil is perhaps the place where there is today the greatest spread of coronavirus in the world, and that is a great threat to our country,” Benitez said. “We have to understand that this is a huge threat to the entire effort that the Paraguayan people have been making.”
Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez has also expressed concern and recently said Brazil represents a threat to South America.
Scenes of Heavily armed Colombian troops patrolling Brazil–Colombia border.
VIDEO: Colombia will increase its military presence on the Amazon border, which it shares with Brazil and Peru, to prevent the spread of imported cases of coronavirus from floating populations pic.twitter.com/nqY52tQhvw
— AFP news agency (@AFP) May 14, 2020
- Companies Call The Market Top With Most Stock Sales In Eight Years
Companies Call The Market Top With Most Stock Sales In Eight Years
Tyler Durden
Thu, 05/14/2020 – 19:25If one asks companies why the market, by which we of course mean just the top 5 tech names that now comprise “the market”…
… has soared 30% in the past two months, the most likely response is a blank stare: after all nearly 30% of companies have pulled guidance as nobody has any idea what is coming. Not even the Fed in fact: in an interview with MNI, St Louis Fed president James Bullard said the Fed may not have enough clarity on the economy by its June meeting to offer a quarterly forecast.
One thing companies do know, echoing recent similar observations from both Stanley Druckenmiller and David Tepper, is that stocks have run up too far, too fast. And, as a result, CEOs, CFOs and Treasurers are all taking advantage of the tidal wave of liquidity that has propelled many shares back to all time record levels, and are selling stock at a furious pace not seen in almost a decade.
According to Bloomberg calculations, public companies have raised more cash in the past three days – from selling shares – than in any week in eight years. Buyers have been undaunted by warnings from either Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who cautioned about unprecedented downside risk to the U.S. economy, from Goldman Sachs which we first reported said stocks could drop nearly 20% in the next three months, or by investing titans who say this is the most overbought market in history. No, these are retail investors who know better than even corporate management…
… and riding a momentum wave unlike any in recent history, are buying everything companies have to sell.
And while these same amateur traders will point to the strength in equity financing is a promising sign for the broader economy (what they really mean is that Fed backstops actually do work), the reality is that a burst of corporate selling is about as bearish as it gets, as the investors who know their own assets and growth potential best are rushing to sell their stock to a greater fool. Luckily, there is more than enough of those in the US retail investing population.
“Now’s the time to act. The rally is extremely fragile,” said Michael Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors, who spent 12 years advising companies on mergers and capital-raising. “When you’re a CFO or a board director of a company in a capital intensive industry, you raise money so that you don’t lose your job. That’s 100% the right thing to do now.“
Sadly for all those greater, perhaps greatest fools, who bought the shares the rally is now ending, because despite a modest short covering rally on Thursday, the market has double-topped out, unable to rise above 2,950 and is now sliding despite trillions and trillions in central bank liquidity.
Of course, every short-squeeze in the broader market will be promptly used by companies to sell even more shares. Just int the past three days, investment banks have conducted 16 secondary offerings on U.S. exchanges since Monday in stocks such as Zillow, Equinix, MyoKardia, YETI Holdings, and Q2 Holdings Inc. And according to Bloomberg, through Wednesday that already made for the busiest week of 2020.
In fact, in just the first three days of the week, companies raised more than $17 billion from investors, the most since 2012, thanks largely to PNC Financial Services Group Inc. selling $12.1 billion of its BlackRock shares in the second-largest offering since 2009.
As Bloomberg summarized, “a scarcity of deals during the market’s March meltdown has turned into a geyser after equities recovered and issuers released their first earnings reports since the new coronavirus pushed investors away from risk.”
Since March 1, share sales by public companies and top holders have raised about $35 billion, with this week’s activity comprising half of that volume. Equity-linked offerings are also on the rise, raising $11 billion in the last two weeks – nearly double their haul from the second half of April.
Yet what is even more bizarre is that traders are rewarding these massive at times dilutions (because who cares about such things as shares outstanding at a time of central planning) by bidding their stocks up by an average of 5% from their offering prices even as the Nasdaq has suffered a 2.2% decline in recent days.
”If your stock has done well, you might do a secondary offering here because you know there’s going to be an opportunity to deploy that,” said Jerry Braakman, chief investment officer of First American Trust, in Santa Ana, California, which manages about $1.8 billion. “When people are looking at this current environment, cash is king and equity is a long-term holding.” Because of course equity is a “long-term holding” during a depression when the only liquidity out there is thanks to central banks.
There is just one problem: while it’s safe to say the situation now in the market defies historical comparison, Bloomberg points out that “the record for stocks after big surges in share sales isn’t encouraging” and usually results in broad market selling, something which the companies know too well, and is precisely why there is a firehose of equity offerings now before the window closes. Consider that monthly proceeds from secondary offerings have surpassed $30 billion on only three occasions since 2010. Three months after those spikes, the S&P 500 was trading lower every time (and on most occasions required either small or large Fed bailouts to keep the party going).
Proceeds from this month’s U.S. stock offerings have surpassed $24 billion so far, but are almost assured to cross $30 billion in the next two weeks.
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