- Cape Town Cops Fire Rubber Bullets, Teargas As South African Food Shortages Spark Riots, Looting
Cape Town Cops Fire Rubber Bullets, Teargas As South African Food Shortages Spark Riots, Looting
COVID-19 has now claimed over 1,000 lives across Africa, and is accelerating fast, with a total of 52 of Africa’s 54 countries having reported cases and the number of infection approaching 20,000.
In an effort to control the spread of the deadly virus, which a report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa warned could lead to a death toll across Africa of 3.3 million people, authorities are instituting some of the world’s strictest lockdown rules.
During the restrictions sales of non-essential items – including alcohol and cigarettes – have been banned, and four weeks into a 35-day shut down food supplies have virtually run out.
One community leader in Cape Town has pleaded with South Africa’s leaders to combat food shortages now. Joanie Fredericks, of the Mitchells Plain township, said:
“Mr President we are in the middle of a food crisis. It’s war out here.
“People have broken into tuck shops. They have attacked people. The simple reason is because they are hungry.”
And food shortages in South Africa, have created panic and, as The Sun reports, prompting rioting and looting across some of the most deprived sections of the city.
Those waiting for much-needed aid built barricades of burning tyres and fought running battles with similar scenes witnessed in Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth.
Police fired rubber bullets and teargas to disperse the mobs but local community leaders fear more outbreaks of violence are imminent. Fredericks continued:
“When we started out feeding people we started out with the very vulnerable, …the children, the disabled people and the pensioners.
“But we are way past that Mr President, we are past the stage of sending people away.”
Pictures from Johannesburg also showed long queues of people formed at food distribution points (which makes sense since before the coronavirus struck, at least 20 million people were estimated to be in danger of acute food insecurity)…
Previously, The Sun reported how nurses in South Africa were shot with rubber bullets after they protested abut working conditions amid the pandemic.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/20/2020 – 02:45 - Led By "The Science" Towards A Medical Despotism?
Led By “The Science” Towards A Medical Despotism?
Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,
Having packed my TV in a box some 20 years ago (did I miss anything good?), I feel I have developed a certain immunity to some of the more blatant propaganda techniques waged upon the populace by the media and Government. On the occasions I do get to see them, I often find myself at a loss to know whether to laugh out loud at the absurdities, or weep that many will swallow them without question.
My favourite recent example of this in the media is this piece here on the BBC (the Babylon Bee Corporation?), where they examine the sinister measures being taken by some of Europe’s more authoritarian leaders, asking whether they are using Covid-19 as an excuse to oppress their populations and increase their power. Be thankful, O ye readers of such happenings, that nothing like that could ever happen in free countries such as Britain, France and Italy. If there ever came a time in free and happy Britain where they rushed draconian legislation through Parliament without opposition, put the population under house arrest, sent the economy into a tailspin, and set the police on us in case we sit on park benches — Heaven forfend — be assured that it would all be entirely benevolent and for our own good.
My favourite recent example from the Government was when I had the misfortune to listen to a clip from one of Dominic Raab’s regular evening stand-ups this week. He used the phrase — “We’re being led by the science. Led by the science” — so many times that I began to wonder whether the point was to lull us all into a trance. I think they were missing a trick, though. If they’d had some soothing harp music going on in the background, and got some nice, dreamy looking woman with hypnotic eyes and beautiful dulcet tones to say the words — “The science. The science. We’re being led by the science. We’re all in this together. Led by the science.” — why I reckon they could have lulled the whole population into gently falling asleep saying the words in ever-slower, ever more monotonous and drowsy tones. Mr Raab, however, didn’t quite cut it.
When some people hear Governments using slogans like, “Led by the science,” the aura of scientists and especially Government-endorsed scientists seems to be sufficient to make them roll over like puppies being stroked gently on their bellies. When I hear such slogans, my propaganda antennae immediately goes on full alert, and I start to wonder what they’re actually up to.
“Ah, so you’re anti science,” comes the taunt.
“Not a bit of it,” says I. “I’m just aware that scientists are rarely in complete agreement, and that when Governments use such statements to justify their actions in this way, it probably means that we are going to come out of this more restricted and less free than we were before.”
Because — whaddaya know? — whereas Mr Raab and co would have us believe that on Covid-19 there is something called “the science” and that there are people called “the scientists” who are all in agreement on “the science”, this is far from the truth. For example, these 12 extremely well qualified scientists do not agree with “the science” being followed by the likes of the British Government. Nor do these 10 extremely well qualified scientists. Oh and these 8 extremely well qualified scientists don’t either.
What Mr Raab really means is scientists who agree with the Government (and in case you weren’t sure where you’d heard the expression before, I believe Mr Raab was quoting from Greta Thunberg’s Greatest Hits, which she used back in the day to promote her particular brand of panic-mongering ). Or perhaps more accurately, we should say scientists whose inaccurate predictions using flawed data were swallowed by the Government, subsequently used to justify landing us all into a mess of truly gargantuan proportions, and yet are now apparently the shepherd which will lead us out into the Promised Land. Well, perhaps not the Promised Land, but at least to the point where we can leave our houses and go for a walk, unmolested and without watching out for who might be watching us. It is not, therefore, Government led by science. Rather it is Government using approved scientists to do whatsoever they will.
The great C.S. Lewis, with his remarkable foresight, saw the way all this was going as far back as 1958:
“On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants’ ‘science’ — they didn’t think much of Hitler’s racial theories or Stalin’s biology. But they can be muzzled.”
And indeed they are muzzled! For here we are in a situation where the science falsely so-called put forward by the likes of Imperial College, which relied on extremely scant and dubious data, is treated as the very Oracle of God by both Government and a compliant media, whilst the views put forth by the following extremely qualified people, are almost entirely ignored:
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Dr Sucharit Bhakdi, former professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene
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Dr John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine
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Professor Knut Wittkowski, Senior Research Associate, Rockefeller University
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Dr Alexander Kekulé, Chair for Medical Microbiology and Virology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and Director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology at the University Hospital Halle
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John Oxford, virologist at Queen Mary, University of London
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Dr Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford
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Dr Pablo Goldschmidt, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.
Why are their views ignored by the mainstream media? Firstly, because they do not fit the narrative set by the Government, which the likes of Mr Raab would have us believe is the only science in town and secondly, because they all state that huge decisions with enormous consequences have been taken on the basis of little or flawed data. Theirs is the kind of science that cannot be easily manipulated by Governments, which is why Governments are ignoring it. Again, Lewis foresaw this happening decades before it came to fruition:
“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.”
It is not even, as some might suppose, merely a question of scientific opinion versus other scientific opinion. The original Imperial College model, followed by the British Government, was based on assumptions that were simply unknown and which could not have been known at that time. It was not, therefore, in anyway properly speaking scientific. For instance, whereas the original case-rate fatality was assumed to be about 3.4%, as Dr. John Lee points out:
“In many examples, more complete data are now suggesting case-fatality rates of 0.4 per cent. My guess is that it will end up between 0.5 and 0.1 per cent, and probably nearer to the lower end of that.”
Imagine crashing an economy and imposing what is effectively a police state, with all the concomitant evils that will lead to, in order to deal with an illness with a case-fatality rate not significantly greater than a bad flu season. Is that rational? Is that proportional? Is that being led by the science?
Nor is there an scientific evidence whatsoever that placing the country under extreme lockdown measures proves any more effective than the more sensible measures taken by the likes of Japan and Sweden. Dr Lee again:
“The real point is that there isn’t any direct evidence that what we are doing is actually affecting the peak. It is possible to make arguments that sound reasonable that a lockdown should affect the peak. And yet other places which are doing different things seem to have similarly shaped graphs. It is only an assumption that the lockdown is having a big effect on the virus spread, but this is not a known scientific fact. As far as I can see, Sweden, despite not having anywhere near as severe a lockdown as we have had, actually has a very similar curve to ours. And Sweden’s death rate per hundred thousand people is roughly half of ours at the moment. So it is not a given that what we are doing is either working or is having all the right effects.”
Is he right? You can check for yourselves using the charts below, which show weekly Covid-19 reported deaths, both in terms of absolute numbers and per million population.
I cannot see any correlation whatsoever between the death rates in those countries under full lockdown, and Sweden which is not.
What is a given, however, is that the measures put in place by the British Government, and many other governments, which have allegedly been led by the science, are certain to lead to:
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Massive job losses (US unemployment has apparently risen by 22 million in just over a month)
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Far lower wages
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A huge rise in poverty
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A decline in general health
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A lowering of life expectancy
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A rise in mental health problems
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A rise in the suicide rate
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And many old people dying alone with no carers.
We cannot be sure of the extent, but these are the sorts of things that happen in a depression, which is what we are very obviously entering.
But my fear of where this leads to goes beyond even those possible scenarios. I have noticed in recent years an increasing propensity of those in charge to propose solutions to problems that are largely of their making. The noises I’m hearing from some of them suggest that this is what is taking shape, but on a larger scale than ever before. Being “led by the science” is turning out to be an unmitigated disaster, yet it will be “the science” — or Government-approved science — which will be proposed as the saviour. To stop such situations occurring again, we will be told that we must avail ourselves of more technology, more monitoring, more checks, more vaccines, more controls.
Lewis has spoken twice — let him speak for the third time:
“Under modern conditions any effective invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning—as Hitler’s regime in fact did. Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The majority in most countries respect science and want to be planned. And, therefore, almost by definition, if any man or group wishes to enslave us it will of course describe itself as ‘scientific planned democracy.’ All the more reason to look very carefully at anything which bears that label.”
In our Godless, unrepentant, modern technological society, it’s bound to happen. But no thanks.
Personally, I’d rather trust myself into the hands of the Living God than surrender to the Bill Gatesian Social Distancing Medical Despotism of compulsory vaccines, certifications and health apps that is starting to take shape around us. I urge those of you who hate where this is going as much as I do to do the same: repent; believe the Gospel; and pray like furies.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/20/2020 – 02:00 -
- Russia Sees COVID-19 Infections Explode In 8th Consecutive One-Day Record
Russia Sees COVID-19 Infections Explode In 8th Consecutive One-Day Record
In a deeply alarming development for a nation of almost 150 million people, Russia’s coronavirus cases have spiked by over 6,000 on Sunday, marking the 8th consecutive one-day record, the independent Moscow Times reports.
The nationwide infection tally is now at 42,853 following Sunday’s reported record rise of 6,060 cases – the most ever in a 24-hour period.
This despite in the early months of the crisis Russia reporting far fewer infections than most western European countries, though Russian officials at times warned they believed the reality to be far worse.
The country has been on lockdown since March 30, with Russian Orthodox Easter services which fell on this weekend curtailed to smaller numbers of celebrants (one week later than the holiday in the West).
“Orthodox priests have held Easter services in churches empty of parishioners because of restrictions imposed to block the spread of coronavirus,” AP reports.
Coronavirus cases began exploding early this month, with even President Putin having been exposed by an infected Moscow doctor, but subsequently testing negative, but still working in isolation out of an abundance of caution.
Russian Orthodox Easter service this weekend, via AP. Moscow Deputy mayor Anastasia Rakova over the weekend indicated city authorities in the country epicenter of Moscow will see the worst in the “difficult weeks” ahead.
“The peak in morbidity should arrive in the next two to three weeks,” she said.
The AFP has cited claims by Russian health officials to have carried out some 1.7 million coronavirus tests, however, there’s also been questions over the sourcing and reliability of the tests.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/20/2020 – 01:00 - "I've Never Encountered Anything Like This": China Stock Index Suffers Record Crash And Nobody Knows Why
“I’ve Never Encountered Anything Like This”: China Stock Index Suffers Record Crash And Nobody Knows Why
One of the consequences of centrally-planned markets is that – with no organic price discovery – “prices” are whatever some computer decides they are, and while major glitches have yet to hit US capital markets, Chinese stocks just suffered one of the biggest crashes in recent history, and nobody knows why.
Moments after the open of trading on Monday, China’s CSI 300 Health Care Index fell as much as 17% according to data compiled by Bloomberg and confirmed by the Shanghai Stock Exchange. That’s even as none of the 29 stocks in the industry group lost more than 2%, indicating that this was most likely an ETF trade gone bananas and demonstrating to the world the unprecedented risk from relying entirely on passive investing when all links to underlying securities – let alone fundamentals – are severed.
The crash, which was the biggest on record…
… sent the index to levels last seen in August of 2019.
The broader CSI 300 Index, of which the Health Care Index is a constituent, and which comprises stocks listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen, was down 2.4% at 10:26 a.m. local time. Both the Shanghai and Shenzhen benchmarks were higher. Daily stock price moves on the mainland are capped at 10%.
“I‘ve never encountered anything like this in my entire career,” said Shenzhen Qianhai Daoyi Investment Holdings fund manager Lu Boliang. “It’s definitely a bad mistake, especially as it impacts various ETF trades — what will happen to those trades placed at misleading prices? No one knows as it’s never happened before.”
What will happen is that some people will lose money, while those who are connected and wealthy to begin with, will see any “erroneous” trades unwound, and may even get some compensation for their troubles. Because that’s how centrally planned “markets” work.
As Bloomberg reports, “the Shanghai Stock Exchange is looking into an apparent pricing error in a gauge of health-care shares which affected the broader index.”
The bourse operator reportedly said it noticed the issue and is looking into its pricing, according to an employee in the media relations department. It wasn’t clear if Beijing had to pre-clear whatever the new price was “agreed” upon.
Suggesting that China just had a mini version of August 2015, Bloomberg adds that at least 20 ETFs track the CSI 300 Index; “They are mostly listed in Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan and South Korea.”
So in addition to exporting deadly viruses, China is now also in the business of exporting massive capital losses due to ETF “glitches.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 23:58 - COVID-19, Smartphone Surveillance, And The State
COVID-19, Smartphone Surveillance, And The State
Authored by Kurt Nimmo via ‘Another Day In Empire’ blog,
Total surveillance will negate political threats and our natural rights as well…
For the state, there is one primary imperative – to remain in power at all cost. If this imperative is to be successful, the state must impose, by stealth or deception, a system capable of monitoring all individuals who may pose an immediate or future threat to its dominance.
The COVID-19 “crisis,” produced either deliberately or by an act of nature, provides the state with a nearly airtight pretext for the imposition of further surveillance of the public, in particular political adversaries.
The largely manufactured “war on terror” following the attacks of 9/11 produced the needed climate of suspicion and fear to make possible the implementation of the Patriot Act, “a domestic-surveillance wish list full of investigatory powers long sought by the FBI,” an agency that has for many decades served as a political police force, a fact made public during the Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s.
Much of what we know about technological surveillance in the wake of 9/11 was gleaned from the revelations of Edward Snowden, a former NSA, and CIA employee. Snowden exposed a number of global surveillance programs, including PRISM and XKeyscore, the former in partnership with Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
“The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin,” writes Jeff Nesbit for Quartz.
The NSA and CIA “research arms” funded “birds of a feather,” including Google, as part of an effort to track and trace individuals across the internet. Funding was provided in part by the National Science Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA.
Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found [Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s] research efforts [into search engines] so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.
During the development of the Google search engine, Brin was in contract with an employee of the defense contractor MITRE Corp, a corporation “leading research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research Laboratory and US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command [and] the CIA’s internal Research and Development department,” according to journalist Kit Klarenberg.
The advent of social media further increased efforts to profile, track, and trace individuals. “You don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat to believe that the CIA is using Facebook, Twitter, Google… and other social media to spy on people,” CBS News reported almost a decade ago.
The coronavirus provides an additional pretense to further the already deep reach of the surveillance state and its corporate partners. The national security state has graduated from the exaggerated threat of Muslim terrorists in caves to an invisible pathogen a corporate propaganda media has exploited to frighten an ill-informed public—and thus clear the way for the state to introduce new and more intrusive surveillance.
Google and Apple have teamed up to create a system that tracks and traces individuals allegedly exposed to the coronavirus. “The technology would rely on the Bluetooth signals that smartphones can both send out and receive,” NPR reports.
If a person tests positive for COVID-19, they could notify public health authorities through an app. Those public health apps would then alert anyone whose smartphones had come near the infected person’s phone in the prior 14 days… The companies insist that they will preserve smartphone users’ privacy.
Google, however, cannot be trusted to preserve and respect privacy. In September the corporation was ordered to pay $170 million fine after it knowingly and illegally harvested personal information from children on its YouTube platform. Prior to this, the Silicon Vally tech giant was caught sharing its users’ personal information without obtaining consent. In 2014, Google was fined $22.5 million for implementing a workaround that let it spy on the browsing histories of mobile clients.
As Snowden recently pointed out, after COVID-19 runs its course the data collected will still be available to government and it will “use new causes like terrorist threats to justify continually gathering and analyzing people’s data.”
The expansion of the state’s surveillance network under the guise of protecting the American people from an invisible predator is being led by the son-in-law of President Trump, Jared Kushner.
“The proposed national network could help determine which areas of the country can safely relax social-distancing rules and which should remain vigilant. But it would also represent a significant expansion of government use of individual patient data, forcing a new reckoning over privacy limits amid a national crisis,” Politico reports.
Health privacy laws already grant broad exceptions for national security purposes. But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information has prompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.
The state, however, is far less concerned with the health of the American people than it is with enhancing its control over them, in particular those involved in political activism outside predefined parameters set by the state and its political class.
If a total surveillance system is to be realized, people will be required to submit, not under duress or force but willingly and with open arms. Henry Kissinger declared after the LA riots that presented with the right crisis, people will turn to the state and demand protection.
“The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government,” said the notorious Rockefeller operative.
Kissinger made his remark during a Bilderberg meeting in Evian, France in 1992.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Kissinger used the exaggerated and media-hyped threat of a seasonal virus killing millions to argue in favor of world government. “Addressing the necessities of the moment must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program,” Kissinger wrote for the Wall Street Journal.
This “global collaborative vision” of a one-world government cannot be effectively realized so long as there are political adversaries warning of lost liberty and the inevitability of totalitarianism inherent in the framework of so-called global governance. If allowed to be implemented, total surveillance will negate all political threats and our natural rights as well.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 23:55 - China Outraged After Largest German Newspaper Accuses Beijing Of "Exporting" Coronavirus Pandemic, Demands €149 Billion In Damages
China Outraged After Largest German Newspaper Accuses Beijing Of “Exporting” Coronavirus Pandemic, Demands €149 Billion In Damages
Let’s see how the pro-China “fact checkers” blow up on this one.
The editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest paper Bild on Thursday launched a full frontal attack on China’s communist president Xi Jinping for his regime’s failure to lying about the coronavirus outbreak and the massive human rights violations carried out by the Communist Party, and demanding no less that €149 billion in damages as a result of China’s actions.
In an article titled “What China Owes Us”, Julian Reichelt, the prominent editor-in-chief of the Bild, wrote to Jinping that “Your embassy in Berlin has addressed me in an open letter because we asked in our newspaper Bild whether China should pay for the massive economic damage the coronavirus is inflicting worldwide.”
Addressing the Chinese president, the German editor wrote that, “You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.”
Reichelt said that, “You rule by surveillance. You wouldn’t be president without surveillance. You monitor everything, every citizen, but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country. You shut down every newspaper and website that is critical of your rule, but not the stalls where bat soup is sold. You are not only monitoring your people, you are endangering them – and with them, the rest of the world.”
He continued with his bill of particulars, noting that “surveillance is a denial of freedom. And a nation that is not free, is not creative. A nation that is not innovative, does not invent anything. This is why you have made your country the world champion in intellectual property theft.
“China enriches itself with the inventions of others, instead of inventing on its own,” Reichelt wrote. “The reason China does not innovate and invent is that you don’t let the young people in your country think freely. China’s greatest export hit (that nobody wanted to have, but which has nevertheless gone around the world) is coronavirus.”
We can’t wait to read what Reichelt will have to say when it is confirmed that the “Wu Flu” escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a development we expect will take place any day.
The best-selling paper Bild calculated prior to Reichelt’s editorial that China owed Germany €149 billion for coronavirus damages, triggering the angry response from the Chinese embassy in Berlin. Bild said the compensation amounts to €1,784 per person if Germany’s GDP drops by 4.2 percent. The Bild article was titled: “What China owes us.”
In response, the spokeswoman for China’s embassy, Tao Lil, published an open letter to Bild in German on the embassy’s website stating that, “I followed your reporting on the corona pandemic in general and China’s alleged guilt in particular today. Apart from the fact that we consider it a pretty bad style to blame a country for a pandemic that is affecting the whole world and then to present an explicit account of alleged Chinese debts to Germany, the article ignores some essential facts.”
She added that “We note that many countries now struggling with COVID-19 have had time to prepare for the cross-border spread of the pathogen after China reported its outbreak under IHR [World Health Organization] guidelines.”
And in taking a page out of every liberal textbook, everywhere, having no credible defense, China’s embassy spokeswoman promptly changed subjects and said the article “stirs up xenophobia and nationalism.”
So… accusing a government of a giant cover up – which we already know happened as China itself admitted when it silenced the Wuhan doctor who tried to bring the world’s attention to the plague ravaging his town only to be arrested and forecefully silenced before dying from the coronavirus – is now nothing more than an act of racism. Got it. Perhaps the next time the IRS comes knocking and demanding a “fairer share” of one’s income, the same “you are racist” excuse can be applied as well?
Oh, and yes, the same line of questioning that got this site banned by the “ultra liberal” arbiters of all that is true and just in this world – and direct whose actions may have facilitates the deaths of thousands of people around the globe – was not lost on the Bild editor-in-chief, who cited last week’s Washington Post article reporting that, “your laboratories in Wuhan have been researching coronaviruses in bats, but without maintaining the highest safety standards. Why are your toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners? Would you like to explain this to the grieving widows, daughters, sons, husbands, parents of corona victims all over the world?”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, even if we did say it about 3 months earlier, for which we got the ultimate punishment from that paragon of free speech, Jack Dorsey.
Reichelt concluded that, “In your country, your people are whispering about you. Your power is crumbling. You have created an inscrutable, non-transparent China. Before Corona, China was known as a surveillance state. Now, China is known as a surveillance state that infected the world with a deadly disease.That is your political legacy.”
Bild’s full frontal attack on China may have been the trigger for everyone else to pile on, and on Saturday, President Donald Trump warned that China should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for unleashing the coronavirus pandemic, especially if it involved open lies about the origin of the deadly virus: the country’s only maximum security Level 4 biolab, which as Nature wrote in February 2017 was tasked with “studying the world’s most dangerous pathogens” in which the highly respected scientific publication also warned about “worries surround the Chinese lab. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times.”
Virologists read data on a container for viral samples at China’s first level-four biosafety lab at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Trump told reporters: “It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t, and the whole world is suffering because of it. “If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, then there should be consequences.”
We eagerly look forward to finding out just what those consequences are… not just for China, but for all those – such as Jack Dorsey and Twitter – who enabled this lie to be perpetuated for months.
Trump concluded the Chinese were “embarrassed” and the question was whether what happened with the coronavirus was “a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately?” All this happened just hours after this week the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started, revised its number of fatalities by with a sudden 50% jump in the figure, confirming yet again that anything that comes out of China is a lie, and that all those who defend China’s position – for purely monetary pursuits even if it means the deaths of countless people – should be judged, if not in a just as corrupt legal system, then in a court of the people.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 23:40 - Watch: Dramatic Footage Shows Chadian Military Jet 'Accidentally' Fires Missile At Senior Commander's Home
Watch: Dramatic Footage Shows Chadian Military Jet ‘Accidentally’ Fires Missile At Senior Commander’s Home
A missile was ‘accidentally’ fired from a Chadian military jet while sitting on the tarmac, preparing for an anti-jihadist mission in Chad. The missile struck a nearby house, killing five people, reported DefPost.
The incident occurred on Friday (April 17), involving a Russian-made Sukhoi Su-25 of the Chadian Air Force. Local media said the missile was fired from the warplane parked on the tarmac at the Adji Kossei airbase, bordering N’Djamena International Airport, an international airport serving N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad.
Local media said the blast destroyed the home of Mahamat Saleh Arim, deputy commander of the presidential guard and a close ally of President Idriss Deby Itno. Five people were reported dead. It was also reported that the missile struck several meters from the Chad headquarters of anti-jihadist Operation Barkhane, an operation that started in 2014 and is led by the French military to exterminate Islamist groups in Africa’s Sahel region.
“Following the accidental explosion of a rocket that occurred in the morning from a ground device of the Chadian Air Force, which caused several victims near the Kosseï Base, the French soldiers of the Barkhane force are immediately intervened in support of the Chadian security services to provide assistance to the victims.
Lifting, excavation and medical transport equipment, as well as several dozen Barkhane force personnel, including firefighters and medical personnel, were mobilized for rapid clearance of the affected area. Three wounded were taken into emergency care at the hospital of the French military base. The French Embassy in N’Djamena offers its deepest condolences to the families of the victims,” the French Embassy in N’Djamena wrote in an online statement.
The dramatic footage was caught on the airbase’s CCTV camera, shows the missile being fired from the Su-25.
Accidental fatal discharge of unguided rocket from #Chad Air Force Su-25 at N’Djamena https://t.co/DjysZPaREG pic.twitter.com/abQ7HgbI6T
— Joseph Dempsey (@JosephHDempsey) April 18, 2020
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In another tweet, the missile allegedly pierced through a French Army fuel truck, before hitting the home of the top military commander.
#Chad: The tank appears to be empty explaining why there was no explosion. #Sahel pic.twitter.com/TiJ9rLI4SY
— Rida Lyammouri (@rmaghrebi) April 17, 2020
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Joseph Dempsey, a defense and military analysis research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said if the missile did not go off course, it would have hit or at leased “crossed” French military assets.
Had the #Chad rocket not gone off course – with fatal consequences – it would have crossed to opposite #France military operated apron – note @Armee_de_lair C-130 in foreground of video pic.twitter.com/idDV8xfuDQ
— Joseph Dempsey (@JosephHDempsey) April 18, 2020
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“An investigation is underway to determine the circumstances of this incident,” said Youssouf Tom, public prosecutor at the N’Djamena High Court.
“The plane was taking off when the bomb broke loose, and hit a private residence in the city that houses soldiers’ families next to the airbase,” military personnel at the airbase told AFP.
The Chadian Air Force has a fleet of Russian-made Sukhoi jets that have been used to conduct aerial bombing raids against Boko Haram militants in the Lake Chad region.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 23:30 - Young COVID-Positive Redditors Describe Agony Of Ongoing Symptoms Nearly Two Months After Getting Sick
Young COVID-Positive Redditors Describe Agony Of Ongoing Symptoms Nearly Two Months After Getting Sick
While COVID-19 mostly kills older people with underlying conditions, it can have devastating effects on the vast majority who survive the initial illness – including younger individuals.
Based on what we know about this brand new disease, up to half of those who contract it may show no symptoms. Of those who become sick, effects range from no worse than the common cold, to ‘worst flu I’ve ever had,’ to requiring hospitalization and oxygen support, to death.
And while many believe we need to just rip the band-aid off and achieve herd immunity with a de-facto global ‘chickenpox party,’ evidence is mounting that coronavirus may remain in the body for weeks after a patient is ‘cleared’ of the disease – with some experiencing a second stage of the disease, and others reporting the illness hitting them in waves.
In South Korea, nearly 100 COVID-19 patients deemed ‘recovered’ had tested positive again, according to Jeong Eun-Kyeong, director of the Korean CDC, adding that the virus may have been reactivated rather than the patients being re-infected.”
To that end, members of Reddit’s “Covid 19 positive” forum – many of whom are younger, have been sharing their frustrating experiences as their bodies can’t seem to shake the virus.
A few examples of this alarming trend in threads:
- 7th week of being symptomatic today. Anyone else strugggling to fight this off?
- Symptoms Resurging
- I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired
- 29 days – keeps coming back
- Almost 4 weeks since first symptoms appeared I feel like I’m getting new symtpons
- 27 Days and Scared Reading These Posts
- We Need to Talk About What Coronavirus Recoveries Look Like
And a few excerpts, mostly from the ‘7th week’ thread above:
“I first became symptomatic on the 29th of February. I’m 30 years old and male. Have had 2 ER visits including a chest x-ray which was apparently clear. Cough comes and goes, absence of taste in mouth/metallic taste on tongue. Mild fever which has worsened this week. Starting to get incredibly weak. Had diarrhoea on and off since the start also. Lymph nodes are very sore and had shortness of breath feeling quite a lot too although my sats have normally been good.
Today marks the 49th day (7 weeks) of being sick and whilst I have had a few days where I began to feel better, overall I don’t feel like I’m recovering.”
And in reply:
I’m on day 51. Still weak off and on through the day, still have gunk in my lungs. I cried last night over the kitchen sink because I’m so sick of this. My breathing has been not too bad for the last week, but I woke up this morning feeling shortness of breath, which freaked me out. I thought that that symptom was over and done with.
I wish that there was more in the news about this presentation of the virus-the long lasting, up and down symptoms.
Another Redditor responds:
I started with mild symptoms in the first week of March…my most severe ones were about 4 weeks ago where I was struggling to breathe. I’m still getting wiped out just by going for a 30 minute walk outside. Breathing starts getting laboured at that point too, but otherwise I’m fine.
It’s exhausting dealing with it. I’m not sure how my wife is handling it because she says I’m looking and acting normal all of a sudden and then after a bit of activity I’ve got sputum, laboured breathing, and am ready to fall asleep on the next park bench.
I’m so frustrated because I’ll be walking along a path seeing people riding their bikes at the pace I was running at 5 weeks ago…it just doesn’t feel like it’s going away any time soon
And another:
“ME TOO. I’m 26 years old, healthy BMI, no pre-existing conditions. Week 7 (49 days) since I first got sick and the last week or so I’ve had chest pains and heart flutters. The difficulty breathing has gotten better some days but then regresses a bit. Like 2 steps forward, 1 step back. This is getting to the point where it seems ridiculous…I’m still barely able to work and can’t exercise yet.“
An Italian coronavirus victim writes:
Hi, I’m 29M And on week 6 since first symptoms. I feel better but not as before the disease. I have occasional muscle pain occasional diarrhoea and occasional sore throat. Some day I feel like nothing happened and the day after bam my happiness disappear because I fell not so well. Hope that they will develop some medicine. I feel that this is not over….
And another:
I have been battling this for more than 30 days at this point. It has never gotten to the point in which I had to go to the hospital but I have experienced a wide range of symptoms that I have never experienced before. Everything from the usual fever, cough, chest tightness to elevated heart rate, edema in one foot and very sharp pain on my left thigh, that seemed to come out of nowhere and I’m still dealing with.
These symptoms are unpredictable, weird and relentless.
This virus is honestly the worst thing that has ever happened to me and it’s really hard to find the strength to keep going at times. I understand I’m very lucky…it could be worse. It’s just hard to deal with this for sooo long. I just want to wake up one day and feel normal.
I really would love to know if recovery is truly real.
Clicking through the rest of the bulleted threads above reveals similar experiences shared by a disturbing number of people who have been grappling with COVID-19 with no end in sight.
So, as we consider the plan to reopen the economy by putting those most likely to survive contract COVID-19 back to work, it’s crucial that we employ strict measures to minimize infections to the greatest extent possible until we know more about the long-term effects of the disease, and/or a treatment is developed which can manage the myriad of lingering mystery symptoms. Unfortunately, a woeful lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) is going to make that a challenge.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 23:22 - Are We Brewing A New Feudalism?
Are We Brewing A New Feudalism?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
The answer to the question is “YES.” The large bailed-out creditors will end up with the property of the non-bailed-out debtors who are being pushed deeper into debt with “bail-out loans” and fees and penalties for missed debt payments. Write-offs for the One Percent, and more indebtedness for everyone else.
Turn your mind to the economy. The US has a work force of 164,000,000. The unemployment forecast from the work closedowns is 30%. That would mean 49,000,000 people who are potential rioters. (We are half way there with today’s report of a 16% unemployment rate with 22 million unemployed). Many of these people were already living paycheck to paycheck, could not raise $400, and their debts leave them no discretionary income. As they could barely service their debts when employed, how do they service them when unemployed and when their small businesses are closed and incurring costs but have no revenues? Loans further indebt them. The cash payouts to the unemployed might cover food and housing but will not service their debts.
Fast food franchises and stores in malls are saying they are not paying their rents for three months. Mall owners won’t be able to pay their creditors. The bailout works for no one except those who caused the problem. As they are being bailed out, they will have the money to buy up or foreclose on the bankrupted businesses. More property will be concentrated in fewer hands.
The bail-out scheme concocted by the New York banks and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, who earned the name “the foreclosure king” during his Wall Street career, leaves creditors whole and debtors deeper in debt.
The more debt is concentrated in fewer hands and the more indebted everyone else becomes, the less consumer purchasing power there is to drive the economy. The foreclosed assets become less valuable as their profitability declines with consumer purchasing power.
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The destruction of the US economy has been underway since global corporations moved middle class jobs offshore.
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It has been underway since the financial sector diverted a larger share of consumer income to the service of debt.
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It has been underway since corporations invested their profits in buying back their own shares instead of expanding their production capabilities.
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It has been underway since Quantitative Easing inflated stock and bond prices beyond realistic values.
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It has been going on since the rules against concentration were set aside and the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed.
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It has been going on since endless wars crowded out infrastructure investment and social safety net expansion.
Is this a plot or stupidity? Whatever the answer, the economy is being destroyed.
The economic problem is that private sector debt, both personal and corporate, is too great to be paid. This problem existed prior to the closedown. The closedown means that there is even less income with which to service the unsustainable level of debt. This is not a problem that can be fixed with more debt.
The problem is that banks lend to finance the purchase of existing financial assets, not to exand the economy’s productive potential.
The problem is that corporations use their profits and borrow money in order to buy back their own equity instead of investing in their businesses. The executives indebt the corporations while decapitalizing them, and they are rewarded for doing so with “performance bonuses.”
The problem is that global corporations thinking short-term moved high-productivity, high-value-added US jobs to Asia, thus reducing earned income in the US, impairing state and local tax base, and causing the Federal Reserve to substitute a growth in consumer debt in place of the lost consumer income growth.
The people in charge of the fix are only fixing it for themselves and in a short-sighted way. There is only one way to fix the situation, and that is to write down private sector debts to levels that can be serviced. As the creditors are being bailed out regardless, their loan losses don’t matter.
The bank and corporate bailouts are an opportunity to fix the economy in other important ways. In effect, the bailouts amount to nationalization. The government should accept the ownership that it is purchasing. Then the government can break up the “banks too big to fail” and separate investment from commercial banking without having to pass new Glass-Steagall legislation and without having to battle against financial lobbying in Congress. Once broken up, the banks could be sold off. This would take enormous vulnerability out of the financial system and restore financial competition. With corporations in government hands, the jobs could be brought home from overseas. The middle class would be restored.
These measures together with a debt writedown would restore consumer purchasing power. Pent-up demand would propel the economy to higher growth as occurred following World War II.
This is a real solution to a real problem. But with the One Percent in charge of the problem, we are not going to get a real solution. We are going to get more money used to push up prices of financial assets and paper over unsustainable debt and a dying economy with an artificially-inflated stock market.
The elite have failed us too many times. It is time to dethrone them.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 23:05 -
- Repo Guru Zoltan Pozsar Spots The Next Crisis
Repo Guru Zoltan Pozsar Spots The Next Crisis
Having been the first to correctly predict the Fed’s “nuclear bomb” response to the coronavirus pandemic as early as March 3 when in his 27th Global Money Notes “Covid-19 and Global Dollar Funding” he warned about the unprecedented dollar short squeeze that was set to rock global financial markets, Credit Suisse and former NY Fed repo guru Zoltan Pozsar has been one step ahead of the Fed – and virtually everyone else – when it comes to how the Fed’s monetary plumbing and liquidity operations are interwoven during times of crisis, and how to best unclog them when an black
swanbat event like the global economic shutdown hits.Which is why the Fed must have breathed a big sigh of relief when in his latest note “U.S. Dollar Libor and War Finance“, Pozsar gave the Fed’s unlimited liquidity injection over the past 4 weeks the thumbs up, saying that the “The Fed’s liquidity injections are working” pointing out that “Global dollar funding conditions have eased, and U.S. dollar Libor-OIS spreads started to tighten.”
Specifically, Pozsar lays out four reasons why he is confident that the market’s funding crisis is now over (which includes an interesting if tangential discussion on whether the Fed is sending a “Machiavellian” or “Bagehotian” message on benchmark rate reform – i.e., Libor vs SOFR – which readers can parse on their own in the attached note) and concludes that…
The machinery of war finance is in full swing and liquidity injections over the past month have stabilized funding markets and are compressing Libor-OIS spreads from the top down.
Yet despite the nuclear bomb of liquidity which appears to have fixed most of the funding conditions that snapped in the second half of March, there is one thing that Pozsar believes can still spoil the party, the same thing we discussed last week when we pointed out that in order to boost the cash balance at the Treasury to a record $960BN…
… the Treasury had unleashed an unprecedented flood of T-Bill issuance, which in the past 12 trading days has amounted to a record $1.5 trillion in gross new debt sold between T-Bills and Cash Management Bills, as shown below.
It is the chart above – the unprecedented burst in Bill supply – that Pozsar is keeping his eyes on and warning that while things may be getting better, and the Fed’s “machinery of war finance is easing unsecured funding pressures from the top down” the risk is that “bill supply can complicate this picture from the bottom up.”
Specifically, the sudden avalanche of Bill supply – and to think less than a month ago there was such a shortage of Bills, we were seeing negative yields through three months…
… which the Treasury is using to prefund the multi-trillion fiscal stimulus (and will have to be rolled every few weeks), Bill supply last week pushed Treasury bill yields from below OIS to 20 bps above OIS. To Pozsar this spike is ominous and suggests that the market may be nearing a tipping point on the front-end. The only solution: the Fed has to launch yield curve control to contain OIS as further supply without yield curve control – and there will be a lot of future supply – could push bill yields higher, “which would risk undoing the improvement that the Fed’s liquidity and regulatory measures helped engineer”, the repo guru warns.
The immediate – and potentially dangerous – consequence of sharply higher yields is that it would offset much of the Fed’s actions and serve as a liquidity drain: according to Pozsar, “higher bill yields could pull funds away from the FX swap market as foreign central banks put their dollars into bills, not FX swaps, and as bill-OIS spreads grind more positive, they will push FX swap implied yields higher, OIS-OIS cross-currency bases more negative and that will limit how much more U.S. dollar Libor-OIS spreads can tighten from here.”
This is how the Credit Suisse strategist dissects this potential landmine:
For all the talk about the war on an invisible enemy and war finance, we haven’t heard from the Debt Management Office of the Treasury and the Fed about the need for the monetary financing of the CARES Act and further stimulus measures. The exemption of Treasuries from the leverage ratio frees up demand for supply (“limitless inventories”), but the near-term supply of bills is too much and can push bills yields higher from here, risking a reversal to the improved funding conditions the Fed worked so hard to achieve.
So what should the Fed do? Simple: since Powell has already nationalized virtually all of the long-end with unlimited QE (and one can argue has taken over the corporate bond market by purchasing IG and HY bonds), the Fed will have to go all the way, and take over the entire yield curve, fixing the front-end by pegging three month T-Bill yields at OIS rates, to wit:
The Fed has done a lot and yield curve control where they peg three month Treasury bill yields at OIS rates and is the only thing the Fed has not done yet, but soon will have to. The target range for overnight rates and the OIS curve – the bottom layer of the money market cake – are the Fed’s monetary sanctum. Everything the Fed does is priced based on variables within that sanctum: the top of the band, IOR, IOR plus a spread and OIS plus a spread.
Incidentally it is not just repo “god” Pozsar who believes the next step for the Fed is yield curve control is Deutsche Bank’s rates strategist Stephen Zeng, although where Zeng disagrees with Pozsar is that latest move by the Fed which is now just a matter of time, will keep the system in a state of artificial balance since the Fed has to be far more worried about the long-end:
As volatility and market liquidity continue to normalize, the Fed’s market functioning-oriented purchases should slow further. On the other hand, uncertainty around the extent of economic damage the virus has caused and rapidly-increasing Treasury issuance to fund the fiscal stimulus suggest the Fed will be cautious in unwinding the pace of purchases… This reduction should coincide with a very gradual and staggered reopening of the US economy in the coming months.
Beyond June, we think the objective of these purchases will pivot towards more traditional goals of supporting a more rapid rebound and ensuring that the scarring effects of this crisis are as limited as possible. With inflation stuck below target and likely to move lower, inflation expectations anchored at uncomfortably low levels, and unemployment rising sharply, the Fed has every reason to ensure that financial conditions remain exceptionally accommodative. In this context, we foresee the Fed adopting front-end yield curve control (YCC) in late Q2 or Q3 that sets caps on Treasury yields out to about three years.
But…
While YCC may be a necessary policy response, it is not sufficient since it focuses on the front-end. In the US, medium- and long-term rates are more relevant for impacting financial conditions important to business and consumer economic decisions. If implemented, front-end YCC should be paired with more traditional QE that purchases securities across the curve and keeps long-end rates contained as well.
In short, the only thing that experts agree will avoid another crisis in the bond – and funding – markets is if the Fed effectively takes over the entire yield curve, ending capital markets as we know them, and launching “price discovery” by decree. While we have no doubt that the Fed will go the length, we can’t help but remember that such terminal central planning did not have a happy ending for the USSR.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 22:53 - Greenwich Mansions Are Finally Back In Demand, But Only As Short-Term Quarantine Escapes
Greenwich Mansions Are Finally Back In Demand, But Only As Short-Term Quarantine Escapes
The Greenwich housing market had been cooling off significantly over the last 12-18 months – that was, until the government tried to keep everybody quarantined in Manhattan.
We had written several articles talking about how the market was imploding as far back as April 2019 and how, at the beginning of 2020, almost no houses in the area were being sold without concessions or price cuts.
The state of the union for Greenwich in January of this year was that sales listings were falling…
…and buyers were demanding discounts.
Now, thanks to the government mandated quarantine of New York City, interest in homes in the area has skyrocketed – no longer for luxury long term housing, but rather as short-term rental escapes from the pandemic’s epicenter in the city.
City-dwellers are now bidding up leases in the Connecticut town, which has suddenly become a hot spot for people who have the financial means to make their way out of the city, according to Bloomberg.
Joanne Mancuso, an agent at Houlihan Lawrence, said: “It kind of builds. You got a couple of calls, and then all of sudden, the flurry came in.”
A listing that she had been shopping for $32,000 per month – a 9,261 sq. foot house on North Street with a pool – recently found a tenant who was willing to pay 56% more than the list price. The owners had previously sought a yearlong tenant when they put the house on the market in January. There were no takers, despite 6 people looking at the house.
During the week of March 16, when NYC closed schools, interest in the home suddenly surged. Three offers came in over the course of just 48 hours. The owners went with the tenants who wanted to stay the longest: 10 weeks. The renters are a family, with their grandparents and children, from Manhattan who “wanted to get out [to Greenwich] as soon as possible”.
In March, 53 single family homes in Greenwich were leased, which is nearly double the 27 from March 2019. In about 25% of the deals, tenants agreed to pay above the asking rents.
So far in April, 32 lease agreements have been signed compared to 14 last year. Homes are being rented for an average of $15,172, up from $8,817. 5 of the 32 deals this month went off above the asking price. One 3,200 sq. foot home that was being listed for $8,000 per month found a tenant for $8,700.
Broker Blake Delany seems to think the rental interest could help sales later this year. It reduces the amount of homes available to buy and promotes living in the town, Delany said.
“Interest in the Greenwich market will have increased. A lot of tenants are going to see that living in the suburbs is quite nice.”
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 22:40 - Between A Rock & A Hard Place: Pandemic And Growth
Between A Rock & A Hard Place: Pandemic And Growth
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
There is no way authorities can limit the coronavirus and restore global growth and debt expansion to December 2019 levels.
Authorities around the world are between a rock and a hard place: they need policies that both limit the spread of the coronavirus and allow their economies to “open for business.” The two demands are inherently incompatible, and so neither one can be fulfilled.
The problem is the intrinsic natures of the virus and the global economy. This virus is highly contagious during its asymptomatic phase, which is long (5 to 20 days), and therefore impossible to control with the conventional tools of identifying people with symptoms and isolating them, and tracking their contacts with others.
While there is much we do not know for certainty about Covid-19, what’s clear (and not well-reported) is that its lethality is not exactly like a normal flu. The number of otherwise healthy people under the age of 60 who die of a regular flu is near-zero. The number of otherwise healthy people under the age of 60 who die of Covid-19 is not large as a percentage of cases but it is worryingly above zero. A great many otherwise healthy people under the age of 60 have died of Covid-19.
Yes, the vast majority of those who die are elderly and suffering from chronic health issues, but the number of younger, healthier people who are dying makes this virus consequentially different from a typical flu.
Everyone looking at total deaths (currently much lower than the fatalities in a typical flu season) is missing the semi-random lethality of Covid-19 in younger, healthier people, or at least certain strains of the virus in certain conditions (air pollution, viral load, etc.) and in not yet fully understood sub-populations.
This uncertainty and semi-randomness means authorities cannot claim that Covid-19 is “no worse than a regular flu” because the number of 40-year old doctors, nurses, transit employees, etc. who die of regular flu is near-zero, but the number who are dying of Covid-19 is far above zero.
In a regular flu season, people with healthy immune systems have little fear of dying of the flu. But Covid-19 is killing enough otherwise healthy people that there cannot be absolute certainty that the risk of death is essentially zero. This is an enormous difference psychologically, a difference that is currently under-appreciated.
The global economy is much like a shark: it must keep moving forward in growth and debt expansion or it dies. This reality is poorly understood and therefore of paramount importance.
The difference is debt. A large percentage of global consumption is ultimately based on debt. Debt masks a variety of inefficiencies, but the drag of inefficiencies and unproductive profiteering is visible if we look at the rate of “growth” and the rate of “debt expansion.”
In the past 12 years, debt has exploded higher globally just to maintain weak growth. Where $1 in new debt once increased GDP by 50 cents, now it boosts GDP by 5 cents–or by some measures, zero. It’s taking more and more debt to keep the “growth” shark moving forward.
The problem is debt must be serviced: interest must be paid and principal paid down. Even at near-zero interest rates, the principal payments loom large.
Debt has a built-in opportunity cost. Once the borrower takes on more debt, a chunk of income must be allotted to paying the new debt. That income is no longer available to be saved or invested or spent on goods and services; it’s tied up for the life of the loan.
Eventually, borrowers’ income is completely consumed by debt service and paying essentials such as rent and food. There is no income left after essentials and debt service are paid.
So what happens when income falls? There is no longer enough income to pay all the expenses, and so what does the household or company do? It pays the essential bills and defaults on the debt, i.e. stops servicing the debt.
The lender can pursue legal action to collect the debt, but heavily indebted households and companies simply don’t have the income or assets to pay the loan back. They declare bankruptcy and all their lenders must eat the loss.
This has far-reaching consequences. Lenders saddled with huge losses due to mass defaults are insolvent, and must conserve earnings to rebuild their capital requirements. To stem the flood of losses, they have to tighten lending standards and avoid making loans to over-indebted households and companies.
But reducing their lending to marginal borrowers greatly reduces their income, as marginal borrowers must pay higher interest rates, and so these are the most profitable loans lenders can make.
You see the feedback loop here: less lending, less profits, and lenders’ losses pile up. The banking sector unravels.
As in 2008, we see central banks bailing out insolvent lenders, but as I explained in a recent blog post, bailouts are not the same as revenues. Bailing out lenders and over-indebted corporations doesn’t magically create new creditworthy borrowers. Buy The Tumor, Sell the News (April 10, 2020)
Bailouts are short-term emergency measures, but they don’t restore the foundations of sustainable debt: credit-worthy borrowers.
From the point of view of the potential borrower, why borrow more money to spend on a superfluous vacation if income is uncertain? Why buy a house if there’s a chance it might decline in value by 20%? Wouldn’t it be wiser to delay purchases funded by more debt? Of course it’s wiser.
Let’s add up the uncertainties:
1. Covid-19 is not as risk-free for healthy people as ordinary flu. Therefore there is an uncertainty that favors caution and prudence and risk avoidance.
2. From the point of view of potential borrowers, there is also uncertainty about future income and asset values, and so lowering risk makes sense. The easiest way to avoid risk is not take on new debts to fund discretionary purchases and save money to create a cushion against uncertainties.
3. From the point of view of lenders, there is uncertainty about the creditworthiness of borrowers, households and companies alike. The past is not a good guide to the future: households with sterling credit may default if a primary wage earner loses their job.
Charging marginal borrowers higher interest rates is no longer a low-risk strategy, as what good is a month or two of higher interest if the borrower defaults and the lender is stuck with an enormous loss?
These uncertainties cannot be dialed back to zero. To truly limit the spread and semi-random lethality of Covid-19, authorities will have to make extreme measures permanent–for example, mass testing of the populace on a scale never seen, plus identifying those at lower risk (those who have recovered, etc.) and those at higher risk (elderly people with multiple health issues) and imposing different rules of conduct on each group.
This article outlines the incredibly cumbersome requirements of such a program: Disease Control, Civil Liberties, and Mass Testing — Calibrating Restrictions during the Covid-19 Pandemic. (via Ron G.)
Economically, the global financial system will unravel if debt expansion ceases or reverses, and incomes decline or even become uncertain.
Recall that the absolute number of defaults does not have to rise by much to sink the system. Even if there are no additional defaults, once debt stops expanding, the system unravels, as it requires expanding debt to fund expanding consumption (“growth”) and the continuing purchase of assets at bubble-top high valuations.
Once assets decline in market value, the system unravels, as bubble-top valued assets are the collateral holding up the world’s mountain of debt. Once the collateral shrinks, the system becomes increasingly prone to a self-reinforcing collapse of lending and asset crashes, as sellers can’t find any buyers and lenders can’t find any creditworthy borrowers with solid collateral and income.
For an example, consider global tourism and travel, including business-related travel. This sector accounts for roughly 10% of global GDP ($9.25 trillion). Tourism worldwide – Statistics & Facts. In 1960, about 25 million people traveled internationally. In 2019, the number of international travelers was 1.4 billion. This is a 56-fold increase.
When I moved to Hawaii as a young teen in 1969, the state had just cracked the 1 million visitors per year line. In 2019, 10.4 million visitors came to Hawaii.
Tourism and even business travel are the epitome of discretionary spending. What happens to incomes, asset valuations, collateral and debt defaults if global tourism only recovers to 50% of 2019 levels?
That would reduce global GDP by 5%, but this drop will trigger financial consequences many multiples of 5%.
What happens to the pricey room rental rates that have become standard? What happens to the incomes of AirBnB hosts? How many will seek to sell their properties or default on their mortgages?
What happens to property values in cities dependent on tourism when a significant percentage of AirBnB owners try to sell their properties? Who will want to take the risk of buying a property which could lose much of its value going forward?
Another apt analogy for the global financial system is an airliner. Airliners are optimized for flying at high altitudes at speeds of between 500 and 575 miles per hour. This is their envelope of maximum fuel efficiency.
While an airliner is physically able to fly at 500 feet, its fuel efficiency will be greatly reduced. Just as airliners cannot fly above a maximum altitude (around 45,000 feet) or approach the speed of sound (Mach 1), they cannot reach their maximum range flying at 500 feet.
The airliner is optimized for a very narrow envelope, and once it leaves that envelope, bad things happen: its engines flame out, it runs out of fuel, etc.
The global economy is optimized for a vast, steady expansion of debt to fund an equally vast and steady increase in consumption. Once it slips out of this narrow envelope, it crashes.
Central banks and governments can mask this in the short-term by substituting bailouts for revenues, but bailouts are not sustainable replacements for revenues, incomes, profits and debt service. The global economy has already fallen out of its sustainable envelope, and the only questions are its rate of descent and how long the remaining fuel will last.
There is no way authorities can limit the coronavirus and restore global growth and debt expansion to December 2019 levels. This is not what people want to hear, but it’s the reality we will have to deal with.
This essay was drawn from Musings Report 15. The Musings Reports are emailed weekly to subscribers and patrons. To subscribe or become a patron, please visit how to subscribe/become a patron.
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Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 22:15 - China Cuts One And Five-Year Loan Prime Rate Despite "V-Shaped Recovery"
China Cuts One And Five-Year Loan Prime Rate Despite “V-Shaped Recovery”
One of the more entertaining and fake narratives in the world right now is that China’s economy has experienced a “V-shaped post-covid” recovery, with various economic indicators such as trade and PMIs (if not so much GDP), staging a miraculous recovery after the economy collapsed in February. Not only is this not true, with vast stretches of China’s output still shut down as a result of collapsing demand, both domestically and internationally, but watching Beijing huff and puff even as it sends conflicting signals in hopes of further stimulating the economy is downright hilarious.
Case in point, last Wednesday China cut the rate on its one-year Medium Term Lending Facility – or the cost the central bank charges on 1-year funding to banks – from 3.15% to 2.95%, which of course is just one of the many, many rates that have emerged in China in recent years in a time when Beijing is afraid of cutting the overnight funding rates as China’s economy remains an overlevered time bomb. Indeed, as Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote last week, “yet again we have a muddle over which rate really matters most in that economy, but the underlying picture is crystal clear. China needs to get far more liquidity into the real economy, but can’t match the level of easing being seen abroad for fear of destabilising CNY and ending up dealing with the kind of USD real politik being shown above.“
Indeed, as China’s Politburo made clear during a meeting on April 17, more cuts would be coming (almost as if there isn’t really a V-shaped recovery but there is a whole lot of new liquidity). As Goldman reported, the most tangible and meaningful statements from the meeting chaired by President Xi “was the mentioning of RRR and interest rate cuts in the discussion of monetary policy stance. While this language is vague in the sense that RRR cuts could be partial, which the PBOC has done a number of times already, and it is not clear which interest rate needs to be cut, the short-term interbank rate has already been guided to a very low level, so the mention of these likely increases the odds of broad-based RRR cut and/or a benchmark deposit rate cut.“
Yet while China has been leery of touching it RRR which it cut last at the start of the year, it had no choice but to cut more and with traders expecting some announcement out of the PBOC, the Chinese central bank did not disappoint when on Monday morning it announced that China cut the 1 and 5-Year Prime rate – the benchmark rate local financial institutions charge for new loans – from 4.05% to 3.85%, and from 4.75% to 4.65%, respectively, sending both rates to their historic lows (which is not really all the long since China only introduced the Loan Prime Rate, better known as China’s Libor, only last summer). The rate decided by a group of 18 banks is released on or around the 20th of every month and is reported in the form of a spread over the interest rate of the central bank’s medium-term loans. The steady decline in the LPR since August last year has led to lower borrowing costs in the wider economy, and also to lower profits for banks.
According to Bloomberg, some analysts had expected a cut of 20 basis points after the central bank trimmed several of its policy rates since the last LPR was set in March, and added liquidity to the financial system. The five-year tenor, a reference for mortgages, was cut to 4.65% on Monday versus 4.75% in March.
In addition to the MLF cut last week, the central bank also cut the cost of short-term open market operations in late March by the most since 2015, and announced a two-phase cut to the reserve ratio requirement for smaller banks.
As a reminder, Friday’s data showed GDP dropped the most since at least 1992.
And, as noted above, hours after the dismal economic reports, the country’s leaders pledged to deliver more stimulus including interest rate cuts to boost domestic demand. Authorities will keep liquidity “reasonably ample” by cutting the amount of reserves banks need to hold, China Central Television reported after a meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 21:55 - As Coronavirus Depression Continues, Americans Are Putting Their Rent On Credit Cards
As Coronavirus Depression Continues, Americans Are Putting Their Rent On Credit Cards
Despite what the stock market would have you believe, the United States is sinking further into a depression. And the unemployed are now resorting to putting their rent on credit cards.
It’s a temporarily solution that may help tenants get through a month or two, but it’s ultimately driving an already broke consumer deeper into debt that will cripple them in the long term. About 84% of tenants in the U.S. have paid full or partial rent through April 12, the WSJ reports, a number that has risen significantly since the first week of April.
But credit cards as a form of payment are also rising by 13%, compared to the first three months of the year. The number of tenants paying with a credit card is up 30% when compared to the same period in March.
While sometimes tenants pay rent with credit cards to boost their credit score or earn rewards, this is increasingly looking like a desperation scenario, where credit cards could be the last fallback before tenants start filing for bankruptcy and wind up out on the street.
In general, electronic payments have risen since the start of the pandemic. Building owners will sometimes accept credit cards through apartment management software or third party apps. Even with interest rates near 0%, the average interest rate on a credit card is still in the double digits. It’s even higher for those taking cash advances.
While some landlords and creditors have said they would make provisions for those who have lost their jobs, the credit bureaus will be far more unforgiving. They will be offering no special treatment, according to the WSJ, because a revision to the CARE act that would have prevented them from reporting negative information due to the pandemic was left out at the last minute.
Some landlords have offered to absorb the transaction costs related to using credit cards. “Once we saw where things were going with this pandemic, a lot of our rules just kind of went out the window,” one landlord said.
But if unemployment doesn’t start to arrive by the time many of these tenants have to pay May rent, they could be faced with far more dire consequences.
Bruce McClary, spokesman for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, said: “Your rent payment isn’t the only thing you owe, and chances are you have other financial commitments you’re having to keep on track as well.”
Over 22 million people have applied for unemployment over the past fourweeks.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 21:50 - Luongo: Government Intervention Is Always, Without Fail, The Wrong Response To Economic Problems
Luongo: Government Intervention Is Always, Without Fail, The Wrong Response To Economic Problems
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
Government intervention into the market is always, and without fail, the wrong response to an economic problem. Politicians justify their intervention with ‘saving jobs,’ ‘dealing with a crisis’ or simply, ‘because I can.’
They only focus on the ‘seen’ and ignore the ‘unseen’ effects of their policies, selling them to voters on that basis alone. This is the first rule of economic analysis.
The great Frederick Bastiat described this in his seminal work of 1850, ‘That Which is Seen, and That Which is Unseen”
No discussion of the secondary or tertiary effects is allowed.
Even though those effects are often far worse. But because they are harder to predict and more pernicious and diffuse they are ultimately ignored.
President Trump is no different in this than any other politician. In fact, he may be one of the worst examples of a politician doing too much in history. To Trump nothing cannot be fixed without his direct application of the weight and force of the U.S. government.
From sanctions to tariffs, stimulus spending to bailouts, Trump has become the WWE Version of FDR in the past month. The latest bailout to the oil industry Trump is proposing is paying drillers to leave their oil in the ground.
The Energy Department has drafted a plan to compensate companies for sitting on as much as 365 million barrels worth of oil reserves and counting it as part of the U.S. government’s emergency stockpile, said senior administration officials, who asked not to be identified describing deliberations prior to a decision and announcement.
Federal law already gives the Energy Department authority to set aside as much as 1 billion barrels of oil for emergencies — without dictating where they should go. That creates a legal opening for storing crude outside the government’s existing reserve and even blocking its extraction in the first place.
The keep-it-in-the-ground plan, which would require billions of dollars in appropriations from Congress, could be unprecedented and reflects a Trump administration push to help domestic drillers battered by a surge of oil production and a collapse of demand tied to the coronavirus.
I’ve warned for years that Trump’s policies of antagonizing the world would come back to bite him. The frantic response by his administration to the breaking of the world financial system through the collapse in oil prices is precisely because he pursued his “Energy Dominance” policy which sought to make America the price-maker in oil versus being a price-taker.
It put the U.S. in the vulnerable position it was in in March, having spent trillions in ramping up domestic production while attacking competition around the world — Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela.
Everyone saw the charts of U.S. oil production go vertical. Most everyone didn’t see the cumulative negative free cash flow generated by the industry doing the same thing, quarter over quarter.
Trump’s “Best Economy Ever” was built on a foundation of quicksand and now he’s scrambling to prop it up before it sinks into oblivion.
He put himself in this position with his insane and ridiculous belligerence in foreign policy around the world. If you don’t think Putin’s decision to say no to OPEC+ production cuts in March which precipitated this collapse wasn’t a direct response to Trump’s lunatic antics in Iraq, Syria and Iran then you are either willfully obtuse, a moron or both. (I told you in my last article I’m done mincing words).
He put himself in this position by intervening in the oil markets at every level and now the worm has turned on him.
For most of 2019 we wondered what the world would look like at $200 per barrel oil in the case of a U.S. war with Iran. But the truth is it would look a helluva lot like the world today at $20 per barrel.
And it’s not going to improve anytime soon. Trump is right to push to open the U.S. economy up regardless of the status of COVID-19 because the best way to save the oil industry is to get people working and raising the demand for oil.
The U.S. had a grenade dropped on its budget. It looks like a nuclear bomb, but that’s only because of the continued arrogance and necessity of politicians, like Trump, needing to be ‘seen’ doing something caused far more damage than it would have if they hadn’t intervened in the first place.
The adage, “never let a crisis go to waste,” is apropos here. Politicians use the cover of crisis to act. They have to be ‘seen’ acting rather than not. Trump is acutely aware of this because he truly can’t stand criticism.
A man without principles, Trump acts mostly out of his need to deflect criticism and be ‘seen’ by his base as their champion.
You could argue this ‘pay-not-to-drill’ plan is Trump’s way of getting around agreeing to production cuts with OPEC+ publicly, but that would be giving him far too much credit (more of that willful obtuseness I mentioned earlier)
But, really this is just another ridiculous bailout no different than FDR paying farmers not to plant (which we still do nearly 90 years later) and burning crops while people were starving.
And the unseen effects of these bailouts and alphabet soup programs of asset purchases will be the final wholesale looting of what once was the engine of the U.S.’s economic greatness, the middle class.
Trump thinks he’s saving middle class jobs here but he’s destroying them. These were jobs that should never have existed in the first place. Extending them into the future only prolongs the agony while the money spent mostly goes to the vultures hanging around D.C. to save themselves.
The fact that every action taken so far by the Trump administration to counter the effects of the deflationary spiral set off last money has been to bail out someone else, tells you no one in D.C. is even paying lip service to the unseen effects of their actions.
Moral Hazard? We don’t have time for that!
And the people surrounding Trump, including Trump himself, know this and can’t help themselves.
This is not an economic one but rather a crisis of confidence and faith in the role of government. This is why they are acting so swiftly, to save themselves, not us.
If they’d get out of our way and let the market clear, which it will do eventually anyway, we could all get back to productive work that much faster.
We crossed the monetary Rubicon last month. From here on out it will be an endless series of Hollywood Red Carpet openings while they further destroy what’s left the discipline of the market and hollow out what’s left of our lives.
The government has always been an economic vandal, obsessed with first-order effects to further is own ends. As the after-effects of this period of history present themselves we’ll come to understand this even more acutely.
By the time Trump and his band of economic ignoramuses are done there won’t be an America worth making great again. That’s the future once seen, you can’t unsee.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 21:25 - New Jersey Reports Alarming Jump In New Cases As Global Total Passes 2.4 Million: Live Updates
New Jersey Reports Alarming Jump In New Cases As Global Total Passes 2.4 Million: Live Updates
Summary:
- Singapore, Russia report big upticks in new cases
- NY reports drop in deaths
- NY launches nation’s largest surveillance testing program
- Cuomo: “We’re on the downward slope”
- No. of confirmed cases reaches 2.4 million
- Peru case total passes 15k
- Spain, UK see big drop in deaths
- PA reports jump in new cases, deaths
- Putin offers words of encouragement for Russians celebrating Easter in isolation
- South Korea considers extending social distancing guidelines despite drop in new cases
- Turkey passes Iran as worst-hit country in ME
- Protesters gather in Wisconsin, Texas
- NJ reports jump in new cases, deaths
- US death toll passes 40k
- Italy sees slowdown in new cases, deaths
* * *
Update (2010ET): As another week begins, several governors around the country are pushing back at VP Mike Pence’s claims that there are enough tests available for any states that meet the other criteria in the “Opening Up America Again” plan to start opening up. Meanwhile NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing to kick off what would be the nation’s first broad-based random surveillance testing regime. He said Sunday that beginning this week, public health officials will aim to start testing thousands of NYers a day who have never shown symptoms of COVID-19 for “antibodies” to try and determine just how widespread the virus has really become.
New York will test 2,000 people a day, or 14,000 per week, out of its nearly 20 million residents, Cuomo said.
The presence of antibodies should indicate that a person has been infected, and recovered from, the virus. However, whether infection means patients will be forever immune to reinfection hasn’t yet been conclusively determined.
Earlier, New Jersey reported a surprisingly large jump in cases, while also reporting more than 100 deaths, one of its worst reports since the outbreak began in terms of deaths and new cases.
UPDATE: Today we’ve received 3,915 new confirmed #COVID19 test results. Our statewide total is now 85,301.
Sadly, we’ve lost another 132 New Jerseyans. We’ve now lost a total of 4,202 souls to #COVID19.
More information: https://t.co/JW1q8awGh7 pic.twitter.com/1tWidAf2fJ
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) April 19, 2020
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Nearby Connecticut also reported a drop in hospitalizations, and a rise in deaths, a pattern familiar to both NJ and NY.
As of Sunday evening, here’s a ranking of the most hard-hit US states.
- New York (223,699 cases)
- New Jersey (32,181 cases)
- Massachusetts (32,181 cases)
- Pennsylvania (29,463 cases)
- Michigan (29,263 cases)
Also at tonight’s press conference, to try and plug a major weakness in America’s testing infrastructure, Trump said he would use the DPA to force American companies to produce more of the “swabs” needed to run COVID-19 tests – many governors have been complaining about shortages of the swabs impacting testing capacity.
President Trump displays coronavirus swab test, saying it’s going to be a “tremendous success.”
“This is what it’s about … this is a big deal and we’re working on it and we’re working with the companies.” https://t.co/XZjy4W2xnx pic.twitter.com/IVHMixrhxO
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) April 19, 2020
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Finally, in Latin America, Peru reported another huge jump in cases, pushing the total number of confirmed cases in the world’s No. 2 copper producer past 15,000. Meanwhile, Mexico looks to be the next country to join Sweden in seeing a dangerous uptick in new cases and deaths after refusing to go all-in on lockdowns and social distancing. Bloomberg reported Sunday that Mexico City hospitals are near the point of being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients as the country’s mortality rate soars, suggesting that the virus is much more widespread in Mexico than testing would indicate.
Still, the US has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 740,000 infections and over 40,000 deaths. And while many governors are slamming President Trump for taking a step back with one breath then encouraging protesters demanding states to reopen to essentially break the law.
Reuters reports on Saturday, several dozen protesters gathered in the Texas capital of Austin chanting “USA! USA!” and “Let us work!” In Brookfield, Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators cheered as they lined a main road and waved American flags to protest the latest extension of the state’s “safer at home” order, imposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
It’s another example of Trump’s feckless behavior, and unnecessarily leaves him vulnerable to more criticism should the reopening process hit a ‘snag’.
Finally, the global case total has surpassed 2.4 million.
* * *
Update (1410ET): The US has reached another ignominious milestone: The countrywide death toll has surpassed 40k.
That’s according to an official toll kept by Reuters, which also found that the US case count was nearing 760k.
Notably, PA warned earlier that it was adding nearly 300 new deaths to the statewide death toll, many of which occurred earlier this month, but were never tested.
There have been a couple of other interesting developments in the past few hours: Turkey has surpassed Iran as the Middle Eastern country with the largest total of coronavirus cases.
Turkey reported 3,977 new cases on Sunday, along with 127 new deaths. That was for a total of 86,306 cases and 2,017 deaths. By the same totals, Iran is just around 86k.
Meanwhile, New York State continued its frustrating practice of releasing its data in drips and drabs, releasing its latest daily positive test totals – it was 6,054 for the last 24 hours – which brought the total to 242,786. Cuomo announced the death toll hours ago.
* * *
Update (1315ET): Eager not to sound too triumphant following the latest optimistic coronavirus figures, French President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that he expects France’s economy to contract around 10% in 2020 (keep in mind, nearly all estimates of growth/contraction for 2020 are, at this point, probably based almost entirely on guessswork). He also said that he was weighing whether to pass legislation to make wearing a mask on public transit a legal requirement, subjecting those who aren’t wearing a mask to fines and potential imprisonment.
Back in New York, Cuomo reiterated several of his points from the last few days, namely that the state intends to proceed with widespread antibody testing as soon as possible (a strategy that might produce some unpleasant surprises, according to recent data) while also again bashing the federal government for failing to supply the state with an endless river of tests. Any NY reopening plan must be firmly rooted in testing, Cuomo said (despite Dr. Fauci’s comment that testing everybody doesn’t need to be a priority to reopen the economy).
Finally, PA reported a jump in new cases and deaths that reflected new cases from earlier this month that had initially been left out of official totals.
- PENN. REPORTS 276 NEW DEATHS, REFLECTING DEATHS FROM EARLY APR
- PENNSYLVANIA REPORTS 1,215 NEW CASES, BRINGING TOTAL TO 32,284
Many of these involved patients and residents in managed-care facilities like – you guessed it – nursing homes…
* * *
Update (1255ET): Italy reported 3,047 new cases of coronavirus and 433 new deaths over the last 24 hours on Sunday afternoon, yet another notable lowdown in deaths that will help the government led by PM Giuseppe Conte make the case that its decision to start slowly lifting the lockdown is working out.
The new numbers have brought the Italian total to 178,972 cases, and 23,660 deaths.
Meanwhile, Sunday’s latest round of figures out of NY show what’s contributing to the continued drop in hospitalizations and ICU intubations.
And finally, the arch of new cases and deaths….
Before we go, here’s an updated map comparing the arc of outbreaks in different states and different countries.
We’ve managed to do another update again on our chart with the development of active cases #covid19 for selected countries plus New York State. pic.twitter.com/0vTXGGoeh0
— Datagraver (@Datagraver) April 19, 2020
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We’ll have more to come shortly.
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Update (1225ET): Andrew Cuomo kicked off his slightly-delayed Sunday morning press briefing by announcing that the state recorded only 507 COVID-19-related deaths during the past 24 hours, the lowest single-day reading since April 6.
At the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset giving an update on #Coronavirus. Watch live: https://t.co/j2lidEhlKg
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) April 19, 2020
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Elsewhere, while new cases in Singapore soared, France saw its latest daily death toll shrink to its slowest level in three weeks, the latest optimistic headline out of Europe.
As Cuomo continued on, he insisted that, after more than a week of mostly encouraging numbers, “we believe NY is past the peak and we are now descending the other side of the mountain.”
So, the US is finally joining Europe at the top of the “downward slope” – for round one, at least.
Regardless, even the best-case scenario for the US calls for another six weeks of “la quarantena”. And Italy, Spain and France are, realistically, not that much further ahead, despite governments in both countries taking the first tentative steps toward reopening.
* * *
One day after Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez announced plans to extend what is about to become a strict, six-week-long countrywide lockdown until May 9, health authorities declared another drop in the rate of new COVID-19 cases and deaths, while also reporting an encouraging drop in patients in severe condition, suggesting that the country’s dramatic efforts have worked – even if doubts remain about the accuracy of the government’s figures.
Of particular concern to lawmakers, particularly members of the Spanish opposition, are the numbers of deaths that have occurred in nursing homes and other private facilities that are especially susceptible to the virus, and whether or not they are accurate, or even whether the government is deliberately trying to obscure the death toll to keep the mortality rate, an already outrageous 10%, from climbing even higher.
To be sure, many experts suspect these double-digit mortality rates seen in Spain, but also in other countries including Italy and the UK, are a sign that the virus is much more widespread than official tallies reflect. The countries with the most thorough testing – countries like Germany and South Korea – have kept their mortality rates at a fraction of 1%, which is certainly encouraging. In the US, the mortality rate has been pretty steady, though it ticked up to ~5% this week.
As the debate over accurate accounting rages in Spain, Sanchez asked parliament during a televised address last night to pass a plan to extend the lockdown but begin easing some of the more-strict measures like one requiring children to remain in the house. The PM hopes to have them playing outside again by the end of the month.
Now, to conveniently support his argument for why Parliament should support his plan, the health ministry has reported its lowest single-day death toll in a month.
Things were also looking fairly rosy in the UK, which reported another 596 hospital deaths, a drop of nearly 300 from yesterday’s tally.
As of 9am 19 April, 482,063 tests have concluded, with 21,626 tests on 18 April.
372,967 people have been tested of which 120,067 tested positive.
As of 5pm on 18 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus, 16,060 have sadly died. pic.twitter.com/sO9IRInBsu
— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) April 19, 2020
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Elsewhere, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin is being forced to reckon with the reality that SARS-CoV-2 has penetrated Russian society to a much deeper extent than had been previously believed. The rate with which new cases are being reported continued to accelerate on Sunday, as health officials counted 6,060 new cases over the past 24 hours, another record count. The 16% jump brought the country’s total to 42,853. Meanwhile, a total of 361 people have died from the virus. President Vladimir Putin has warned that the outbreak is not yet close to peaking, even after imposing a national lockdown last month.
“This year, [Easter] is being celebrated amid forced restrictions,” Putin said on Sunday, which is the traditional Easter celebration day for all Orthodox Christian churches, like the Greeks and the Russians, among others.
“These are essential in fighting the spread of the disease,” Putin said about the government’s lockdowns and social-distancing guidelines.
Signs of real progress in Europe and the US (not to mention South Korea and a handful of other countries that acted aggressively and achieved outstanding results) have helped ease the sense of terror brought about by a lingering uncertainty: As Gov Cuomo put it, America now knows for sure that these measures – social distancing and lockdowns – have been working to contain the virus.
The question now is ‘to what degree?’, and will we risk a serious relapse if America starts reopening in the next few weeks? However, with Japan enduring a sudden and surprisingly harsh resurgence, and even China doing its level-best to tamp down any reports of new clusters discovered since “the Great Reopening” began, more countries are starting to second-guess their decisions, and on Sunday, South Korea decided to extend its ‘social distancing’ campaigns – just in case.
News this morning about a Hormel-owned food processing plant shutting down are raising fears that, should the lockdown drag on for much longer inside the US, the tears at the social fabric might start to widen.
And as Trump’s critics continue to deride reports about the virus potentially having leaked from a bio-lab, Australia on Sunday called for an “independent, international inquiry” into the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, and officials even signaled that the country’s relationship with China – which has helped fuel Australia’s 3-decade economic boom, an expansion virtually unrivaled in modern times – “will change”. And it doesn’t sound likely that they’ll be changing for the better.
More alarming even than Russia and China, however, is Singapore. The city-state won plaudits for containing the coronavirus early on with strict contact-tracing protocols that required contacts to be identified within 2 hours. But for some inexplicable reason, the densely populated city saw its total case count grow by 160% over the past week, with officials reporting hundreds of new infections on Friday and over the weekend, a revelation that is simply staggering in light of the strict lockdown measures that the country is currently under. The country reported a jump of almost 1k new cases on Saturday, as we noted at the time, with most of the new cases tied to packed migrant-worker apartments that are basically like college dorms.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 21:15 - Study Finds Doing This Regularly Is Likely To Prevent COVID-19 Hospitalization
Study Finds Doing This Regularly Is Likely To Prevent COVID-19 Hospitalization
Multiple reports have been issued over the past month carefully documenting many of the underlying health issues which make the chances much higher for COVID-19 infected individuals of landing in the hospital, and possibly death.
Foremost among these is the pervasive American problem of obesity, and the often corresponding disease of diabetes. “Young adults with obesity are more likely to be hospitalized, even if they have no other health problems, studies show,” a New York Times report detailed days ago.
However, in the first weeks and months of the crisis it seems there were few studies and reports advancing the opposite: what are ways and individual might prevent infection or at least greatly mitigate its severity?
Researcher Zhen Yan, PhD, University of Virginia School of Medicine. Image source: UVA Health Newsweek reported Friday on new University of Virginia School of Medicine, which found regular exercise is behind healthier immune systems able to withstand and beat the virus.
Specifically regular exercise is likely to prevent COVID-19 patients from developing severe complications like acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a common cause of death among the infected, the study found.
“According to the study, between 3 and 17 percent of all COVID-19 patients will develop ARDS, while available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 20 and 42 percent of all patients hospitalized with COVID-19 will develop ARDS,” Newsweek reports. Of these about 45 percent of patients who develop severe ARDS will die, according to researchers.
Per the report:
In his research, Yan studied a powerful antioxidant that is released throughout the body when exercising, which showed to help prevent disease, such as ARDS. The antioxidant is known as “extracellular superoxide dismutase” (EcSOD), which is created naturally by our muscles, but Yan’s studies discovered an increase in production when exercising.
“These findings strongly support that enhanced EcSOD expression from skeletal muscle or other tissues/organ, which can be redistributed to lung tissue, could be a viable preventative/therapeutic measures in reducing the risk and severity of ARDS,” Yan’s study says.
“Our findings suggest aerobic exercise is particularly potent in stimulating EcSOD expression,” Zhen Yan, head researcher at the University of Virginia School of Medicine stated to Newsweek. “With that said, weight training helps maintain or even increase muscle mass. More muscle mass will likely lead to more EcSOD production, hence more benefits.” Yan’s team used mice running “about 10 miles/day” as part of the studey.
“Generally speaking, 30 min moderate intensity exercise per day would be enough to have many of the health benefits,” Dr. Yan added.
Obesity has been linked with COVID-19 complications in recent studies. Image: istockphoto Further Yan emphasized the following following exercises as producing the most EcSOD in the body:
- Aerobics.
- Weight lifting.
- Running.
“Aerobic exercise can be easily done at home, such as [a] stationary bike, aerobic floor exercise and rowing machines. Of course, canoeing, biking and running outside with strict social distance are good options,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 21:00 - Beware The Russian Disinformation Trope
Beware The Russian Disinformation Trope
Authored by Thomas Farnan via TheNationalPulse.com,
Last week, the DOJ declassified three footnotes in the Inspector General’s FISA report. They showed the FBI knew Christopher Steele had associations with shady Russian oligarchs and that somebody – whose identity is redacted – suggested in 2017 that parts of the dossier may have included Russian disinformation.
Some responded as if the footnotes revealed Vladimir Putin and not an FBI-CIA-Clinton conspiracy was responsible for the ridiculous machinations of Russiagate. National Review editor Rich Lowry was especially over-the-top, even managing by passive-aggressive link to turn the disclosures into a criticism of President Trump:
In other words, the Kremlin may have succeeded in getting us to turn even more viciously against ourselves and conduct our politics in an atmosphere characterized by screaming headlines, dark insinuations and endless investigations — all by feeding a few lies to a private eye hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump.
Let’s unwind that.
We already knew that something happened a few months after the election that made the FBI stop using the dossier to get FISA warrants. By then the British had come clean and were discrediting Steele. Maybe it was British spies saying, “Have you idiots considered yet whether this is Russian disinformation?”
Anyone with half a brain would have asked the question.
That would explain why the identity of the dossier skeptic in the footnotes is blacked out. Under the Five Eyes Agreement, details about British intelligence sharing cannot be disclosed. The second footnote (#350) says that whomever the undisclosed dossier skeptic is, he or she has “no information” tying its salacious allegations to Russia.
It is just speculation, in other words.
Did Russia fabricate the Steele dossier with the intent of getting us to turn viciously on ourselves?
It is theoretically possible that Vladimir Putin fed a whopper to Christopher Steele about Donald Trump hiring prostitutes to pee on a bed the Obamas had once used.
There are two problems with that scenario, though.
-
First, Steele had not been to Russia for 20 years. He spent his professional life as an anti-Russia gadfly. Fatuous claims are made on his behalf that Putin had ordered him to be poisoned. If Christopher Steele is the ex-spy our vaunted intelligence services relied on to explore whether Putin had kompromat on Trump – that’s really bad.
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The bigger problem with any Russian disinformation scenario is for the dossier to affect the succession of power in America even slightly, the FBI would have to make 17 separate sloppy mistakes, all inuring to the benefit of Hillary Clinton and against Trump. Unless his name was Ras-Putin, there is no way Putin could have divined that such a wild story would be treated with a seriousness it never deserved.
As I have asked on this page before:
“If the Steele dossier tapped Russian sources to reveal a Putin plot to harm Hillary, why did it primarily include crazy stuff that hurt Trump? And if it was created to smear Trump, why did the intelligence community rely on it to conclude that Putin was out to get Hillary?”
CBS reporter Catherine Herridge may have provided some answers this week when she uncovered two additional declassified footnotes from the report. These revealed, not surprisingly, that US spy agencies contorted themselves in 2017 to conclude that Steele was somehow connected to Russian intelligence, but he wasn’t compromised by them.
What a tangled web our spies weaved, huh? We already knew they were trying to sell the idea of kompromat, though. Indeed – by definition – it’s not kompromat if it’s not from Putin.
More interesting in the notes was the admission that the FBI knew a Steele sub-source favored Hillary Clinton. As those of us chided as conspiracy theorists have been saying for years, they were the only kinds of sub-sources Clinton opposition researcher Fusion GPS used.
Most importantly, the footnotes reveal dubious intelligence assessments based on unidentified but compromised second and third-hand sources, and no real evidence of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Okay, let’s assume – even with all that – it was the Russians.
If so, they were just messing with someone they hated (Christopher Steele) and probably thought if he repeated the pee tape stupidity it would only make him look like an idiot.
Read closely, though, the dossier tells you who fabricated it beginning on its first page, and it was not the Russians:
Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. Source C, a senior Russian financial official said that the TRUMP operation should be seen in terms of PUTIN’s desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon countries’ interests rather than ideals-based international order established after World War Two. S/he had heard PUTIN talking in this way to close associates on several occasions.
Unless Vladimir Putin goes around the Kremlin talking like an Ivy League graduate with a plush job waiting for him as an analyst at John Brennan’s CIA, he never said any of those things. An ideals-based Transatlantic alliance that defies the rabble who prefer governance based on national interest is, instead, a uniquely Western worldview.
Nobody has produced evidence that Source C was acting at the behest of the Russian government. Instead, he or she is parroting official Washington’s psycho-fantasies about the world. A good guess is that it was either a complete fabrication or a self-serving oligarch buying a favor by telling the Clinton campaign what it wanted to hear, who would later strongly deny any involvement.
Even before the footnotes were released everyone knew Steele had connections with such characters.
Lee Smith, the venerable, readable, oracle of Spygate is right: the dossier is a political operation sourced in Washington and any other interpretation is just a distraction.
Beware especially pundits associated with NeverTrump who assert with ontological certainty that Russia interfered in the election. They would love to believe that when people in Pittsburgh defied them and voted for Trump, we were tricked by Putin.
The problem with their self-serving ruse is that “Putin-did-it” provides a lifeboat for the Spygate conspirators. Brennan, Comey, McCabe et al. are going to say, “we were fooled by the Russians like everyone else.” In the hysteria they generated, Putin is the matinee villain du jour and Russian disinformation makes them victims of his shenanigans, poor fellas.
Three years of scrutiny has determined that the dossier was phony. That the FBI, CIA and Clinton campaign used it to orchestrate the biggest political dirty trick in American history is the real scandal, and Putin is a red herring.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 20:35 -
- Eric Peters: 'Fed Isn't Just Delaying The Inevitable Reckoning…It's Making It Worse'
Eric Peters: ‘Fed Isn’t Just Delaying The Inevitable Reckoning…It’s Making It Worse’
As investors in the US and around the world confront the fact that the Federal Reserve is never really out of ammo, One River Asset Management Founder Eric Peters joined Erik Townsend for an interview on Townsend’s weekly MacroVoices podcast, which features in-depth interviews with portfolio managers and prominent figures in the wealth-management industry.
Markets finally rebounded last week after the fastest, most brutal selloff in modern history, a selloff that was inspired by the realization that half the world would need to stop to prevent millions from dying and hospitals from being absolutely overwhelmed like they were in Wuhan.
Fueling the enthusiasm, late last week, just before Peters’ interview, the Fed unleashed its latest program: a $2.3 trillion program that expanded liquidity to small businesses and municipalities alike – or at least that’s how Jay Powell marketed it.
With the Fed’s balance sheet on its way to $6 – and then $8 – trillion, Townsend asked Peters what he suspects will be the ultimate result of Powell & Co’s repeated interventions in credit markets, interventions that the market has come to depend on, especially now.
Whether or not the central bank’s decision is setting us up for an even more dramatic reversal later on no longer seems like a matter of speculation. The rapidity with which the market unraveled in March – erasing three years’ worth of artificially inflated gains in three weeks – is evidence of what happens when artificial supports finally give way, leaving chaos in their wake.
But at this point, actually swallowing the medicine is almost too painful a prospect to contemplate. Peters pointed out that it wasn’t just stocks that crashed. At points, corporate debt and gold have gotten hammered – the selling hasn’t been constrained to stocks.
The fact that the market was only 25% shows just how potent the Fed’s market interventions have been: Peters believes the drawdone in US equity benchmarks would have been “at least 50%” and possibly as much as 80% if the central bank had sat on its hands.
So you have a very leveraged economy. And all of a sudden, because of this catalyst (meaning the virus), people needed to gross down quickly. And so you had way too many people selling essentially everything, which is why you saw not only stocks fall but you saw bonds fall, you saw gold fall. Everything fell all at the same time. And if the Fed had not come in and drawn a line underneath that with the policies that they implemented, we would have seen a crash that was far worse than what we’ve seen. I think we had the US equity market fall 35% from the highs or something like – it may sound dramatic, but it was only down 25% on the year. So I think, just unambiguously, we would have been down at least 50% and perhaps 80% had the Fed not done what it did.
Why? Well, the logic behind Peters’ supposition is pretty straightforward: the central bank’s massive liquidity injections led virtually every private market participant to become a buyer.
And when the shock came and everybody turned to sell, the people at the controls suddenly realized – oh wait – there’s nobody to sell to. So the Fed needed to step in.
After all: “If everyone is overleveraged and they all need to gross their books down in one way or another at the same time, there literally is not a buyer. There is just no buyer. There is no strong hand out there. There is only one hand and that was the Fed.”
“So that’s what they did.”
And again, these losses aren’t really an exact reflection of the virus’s impact on economic fundamentals and therefore corporate earnings…this is simply a reaction, like the release of a slingshot. Because the truth is, the Fed set the stage for this reversal ten years ago in the aftermath of the crisis. As Townsend and Peters discussed, the outbreak was merely a catalyst for losses that probably would have been inevitable.
Though the coronavirus was probably about as bad as it gets for equity bulls.
Listen to the whole interview below:
Tyler Durden
Sun, 04/19/2020 – 20:10
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