- The COVID-Crisis And Leader Approval Ratings
The COVID-Crisis And Leader Approval Ratings
Despite the massive impact of the coronavirus crisis in Italy, where over 180 thousand people have so far contracted the virus and 24 thousand people have died, leading to the country’s healthcare system to be catastrophically overwhelmed, its leader Giuseppe Conte is riding an unprecedented wave of popularity.
Having Jumped to 71 percent in March, his highest rate since taking office, his approval rating in April is 63 percent – still a whole 11 points higher than his figure for February before the national lockdown was announced.
As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, it’s a similar story in the UK too, where Boris Johnson, who spent a couple of nights in intensive care due to Covid-19 himself, is 18 points up on February. This, although his government’s response has been under severe fire in recent weeks due largely to low testing capacity and a drastic lack of PPE for medical staff.
Where this coronavirus goodwill ends though is in the United States where the starkly divided population has been unmoved by Donald Trump’s crisis response to cross any of the deeply set party lines. Comparing poll averages in February to those in April show a very modest one-point increase for the president.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s inept handling of the spread of the virus has caused his already low approval ratings to drop by another 6 points since February – from 34 to 28 percent – with his grip on power seemingly at an all-time low.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/22/2020 – 02:45 - Global COVID-19 Lockdown – What You're Not Being Told, Part 1
Global COVID-19 Lockdown – What You’re Not Being Told, Part 1
Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,
We have been given a very clear narrative about the declared coronavirus pandemic.
The UK State has passed legislation, in the form of the Coronavirus Act, to compel people to self isolate and practice social distancing in order to delay the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (SC2). We are told this “lockdown”, a common prison term, is essential. We are also told that SC2 has been clearly identified to be the virus which causes the COVID 19 syndrome.
Necessary? Lawful?
At the time of writing SC2 is said to have infected 60,733 people with 7,097 people supposedly dying of COVID 19 in the UK. This case fatality ration (CFR) of 11.7% is seemingly one of the worst in the world. Furthermore, with just 135 people recovered, the recovery rate in the UK is inexplicably low.
Some reading this may baulk at use of words like “seemingly” and “alleged” in reference to these statistics. The mainstream media (MSM) have been leading the charge to cast anyone who questions the State’s coronavirus narrative as putting lives at risk. The claim being that questioning what we are told by the State, its officials and the MSM undermines the lockdown. The lockdown is, we are told, essential to save lives.
It is possible both to support the precautionary principle and question the lockdown. Questioning the scientific and statistical evidence base, supposedly justifying the complete removal of our civil liberties, does not mean those doing so care nothing for their fellow citizens. On the contrary, many of us are extremely concerned about the impact of the lockdown on everyone. It is desperately sad to see people blindly support their own house arrest while attacking anyone who questions the necessity for it.
Exercise? Yes / No?
The knee jerk reaction, assuming any questioning of the lockdown demonstrates a cavalier, uncaring disregard is puerile. Grown adults shouldn’t simply believe everything they are told like mindless idiots. Critical thinking and asking questions is never “bad” under any circumstances whatsoever.
Only the State, with the unwavering support of its MSM propaganda operation, enforces unanimity of thought. If a system cannot withstand questioning it suggests it is built upon shaky foundations and probably not worth maintaining. Yet perhaps it is what we are not told that is more telling.
Among the many things we are not told is how many lives the lockdown will ruin and end prematurely. Are these lives irrelevant?
We are not told the evidence for the existence of a virus called SARS-CoV-2 is highly questionable and the tests for it unreliable; we are not told that the numbers of deaths reportedly caused by COVID 19 is statistically vague, seemingly deliberately so; we are not told that these deaths are well within the normal range of excess winter mortality and we are not told that in previous years excess winter deaths have been higher than they are now.
We didn’t need to destroy the economy in response to those, far worse, periods of loss so why do we need to do so for this?
We will look at this in more detail in Part 2.
UNDERSTANDING MAINSTREAM MEDIA DISINFORMATION
Before we address what we are not being told it’s worth looking at how the MSM is spreading disinformation. On February 22nd one rag printed a story which absurdly alleged, without a shred of evidence, that Russia was somehow deliberately spreading disinformation about coronavirus. It reported this uncritically, questioning nothing. Their opening paragraph read:
Thousands of Russian-linked social media accounts have launched a coordinated effort to spread misinformation and alarm about coronavirus, disrupting global efforts to fight the epidemic, US officials have said.”
On March 10th the same rag reported another story about disinformation in which it was noted:
Disinformation experts say, there remains little evidence of concerted efforts to spread falsehoods about the virus, suggesting that the misleading information in circulation is spread primarily through grassroots chatter.”
The irony shouldn’t be overlooked. Directly contradicting their own previous disinformation, this MSM pulp assumes we are all so stupid we won’t notice their perpetual spin and evidence-free claims. The UK’s national broadcaster the BBC is perhaps the worst of all the disinformation propagandists. The sheer volume of disinformation they are pumping out is quite breathtaking.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights spells out what freedom of expression means. All human beings are born free with equal dignity and rights. All are afforded these rights without any distinction at all. Article 19 states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
The BBC, who obviously couldn’t care less about human rights, gleefully supported the censorship of so called conspiracy theorist David Icke. They did so by spreading disinformation. Icke raised concerns about the possible link between 5G and the spread of coronavirus. He did not incite violence, as suggested in the BBC’s disinformation. The BBC misled the public utterly when they stated:
“Conspiracy theories linking 5G signals to the coronavirus pandemic continue to spread despite there being no evidence the mobile phone signals pose a health risk.”
While I agree with the BBC that there is no evidence of a link between 5G and the apparent coronavirus, we certainly can’t rule it out. Because the second half of their statement, that there is no evidence that mobile signals pose a health risk, was a mendacious deceit.
There is a wealth of evidence of that risk.
The leading medical journal The Lancet noted these risks in 2018:
…mounting scientific evidence suggests that prolonged exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation has serious biological and health effects.”
Why are the BBC so willing to mislead the public and expose them to unnecessary health harms? Is it deliberate or are they just shoddy journalists?
Either way, quite clearly they are habitual pedlars of disinformation. They appear to no better than the worst clickbait sites that have proliferated over recent years.
The MSM is responsible for the majority of misinformation and disinformation circulating at the moment. We must diligently verify every claim they make and check the evidence ourselves. They are not to be trusted. As the BBC quite rightly points out:
STOP BEFORE YOU SHARE
CHECK YOUR SOURCES
(If it’s the MSM check to see if they offer any evidence at all or if it’s just their opinion. If it’s their opinion ignore it. It’s almost certainly unfounded)
PAUSE IF YOU FEEL EMOTIONAL
(If you do feel emotional you have probably just been manipulated by the MSM)
“SCIENCE LED” MEANS CHERRY PICKING SCIENCE
The UK State has been keen to insist that we all believe their lockdown response is led by the science. However they have cherry picked the science to roll out the lockdown and ignored the considerable scientific evidence which contradicts it. Both the UK and U.S. governments used the computer models of Imperial College London (ICL), predicting millions of deaths, to justify the removal of our civil liberties.
Almost as soon as the lockdown was in place the scientists, having launched their vaccine research fund raiser, downgraded their projections from an estimated 550,000 deaths in the UK to 20,000 or even lower. Neil Furguson, the lead scientist responsible for the initial ICL report stated that they had revised the figures because of the effectiveness of the lockdown safety measures.
Claiming the lockdown would need to last for at least 18 months until a vaccine is found. ICL are grant recipients of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They have shown no interests at all in researching possible preventative treatments, reducing the need for a vaccine, such as hydroxychloroquine.
The initial ICL computer models were based upon unproven assumptions. They assumed that SC2 would spread like influenza. This was contrary to the findings of the World Health Organisation who stated both that SC2 did not appear to spread as quickly as influenza and was less virulent.
The WHO found up to a 20% infection rate, where people were exposed to SC2 in crowded settings for prolonged periods, and a 1-5% infection rate in the community. This was nothing like the spread of the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic.
However, publishing their paper on March 16th, the ICL completely ignored the WHO research which was published a month earlier and stated, without any justification whatsoever:
COVID-19, a virus with comparable lethality to H1N1 influenza in 1918”
Dr Knut M. Wittkowski
Public Health England (PHE) disagreed with ICL’s evidence free assumptions and downgraded COVID 19 from a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID), due to relatively low mortality rates.
However, ignoring both the WHO and PHE, the UK and US decided only the ICL knew what they were talking about. Cherry-picking their highly dubious research, they insisted the lockdown was necessary to “flatten the curve” and, in the UK, protect the NHS.
The science the State has chosen to believe is the minority view it seems. Epidemiologists, epidemiological statisticians, microbiologists, mathematicians and many other scientists and academics the world over have repeatedly warned that the lockdown is precisely the wrong thing to do.
COVID 19, the disease supposedly caused by SC2, is experienced as little more than a bad cough or cold by the vast majority of relatively healthy people. Dr Knut M. Wittkowski (Ph.D) is among the growing number of globally renowned scientists who question what we are told by the State and its MSM. In regard to both SC2 and COVID 19.
Dr Wittkowski stated:
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus. it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated….If we had herd immunity now, there couldn’t be a second wave in autumn.”
Such scientists and academics are all completely ignored by the State. Yet they believe others, such as Professor Neil Ferguson and Professor Karine Lacombe without hesitation. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the scientists the State chooses to believe overwhelmingly appear to have close links to the globalist foundations and pharmaceutical corporations developing the vaunted coronavirus vaccine.
ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN?
Those who reject all criticiam of the lockdown, and simply accept whatever the State tells them, presumably believe the State only has our best interests at heart and would never do anything to harm us. Perhaps they believe that to question the claims of the State can only ever be conspiracy theory.
Certainly that’s the message constantly reinforced by the MSM.
However, there is also plenty of evidence that the State frequently deceives the public. We only need look to the WMD lies told to start an illegal Iraq war in 2003 to understand that the State is willing to further the interests of the powerful and cares little about lives lost in the effort.
Therefore, in the UK, it is worth recapping what it is we are consenting to with the Coronavirus Act:
We consent to increased State surveillance of ourselves and our family.
We are happy that we could be detained, without charge, because some state official suspects, or claims they suspect, we may be infected.
It is fine with us that we or our loved ones can be sectioned under the Mental Health Act on the recommendation of a single doctor and neither we nor they need to have the protection of a second opinion before we are locked up.
We accept that the state can retain our biometric data and fingerprints for an extended period.
We consent that jury trials are a bit of an anachronism and Judges can hear more evidence by video or even audio link.
We think its fine that the evidence required, and processes undertaken, to determine and record our or our loved one’s deaths can be eroded to the point where they can be registered by people with no medical or legal expertise at all.
We don’t think the NHS needs to adhere to practice standards or bother with assessing the needs of some patients, especially older people.
We are also fine with the complete suspension of democracy in Britain.
We accept all of this based upon a unique subset of scientific opinion which, contrary to every known scientific principle, can never be questioned.
We agree with the MSM that people who question any aspect of the stories they tell us are dangerous because these people just don’t care if their own loved ones die. Only true believers care about their families.
We also accept the need for the State to invest considerable resources creating counter disinformation units whose purpose is to censor anything and everything which questions our firmly held beliefs. The beliefs informed by the many of the same people doing the censoring.
Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi -world leading microbiologist
I don’t know about you, but I remain unconvinced by the evidence I’ve seen so far. I have no doubt that there is a health crisis and excess seasonal deaths, but I have seen no evidence at all that the numbers are unprecedented or unusual in any way. Evidence we will explore in greater detail in Part 2.
I accept that we should exercise the precautionary principle and take steps to limit the risks to the most vulnerable but I do not accept that the lockdown is the best way to go about it. Nor do I see any necessity at all for all the other dictatorial clauses in the Coronavirus Act. I do not consent.
If you think this will all be over soon and won’t get worse I’m afraid you may be disappointing. The UK state have based this lockdown on the scientific rubbish spewed out by ICL. Here’s another one of the ICL’s recommendations:
The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more).”
There is nothing to suggest this isn’t the intention of the State. Certainly voices in the U.S. are already indicating their desire for an 18 month lockdown. Apparently taking their cue directly from the discredited ICL report and steadfastly ignoring everything else. Nor should we assume the draconian powers seized by the state won’t get worse.
Most of this response is being driven by globalist policy emanating, on this occasion, from the World Health Organisation. Speaking at the daily WHO press briefing on the March 30th Dr. Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said:
Lockdowns and shutdowns really should just be part of an overall comprehensive strategy…..Most of the transmission that’s actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household at family level….Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner.”
Given that we now live in a de facto dictatorship there’s no reason to believe that states across the globe won’t use this as justification to start removing people from their homes. My hope is that sense will prevail and, as it becomes clear the pandemic is waning, public pressure will mount to repeal this dictatorial legislation.
However, given some of the comments I have seen on social media over the last two weeks, the panic buying and attacks upon anyone questioning the State’s narrative, it seems many people are so frightened they desperately need to believe the State is trying to save them.
This fear is based upon apparent ignorance of the economic severity of the lockdown and the monumental health risk it poses. People don’t seem to want to know there is considerable doubt the Coronavirus Act is even legal in international law. There is also doubt that SARS-CoV-2 is an identifiable virus and the statistics we are given may well be based upon tests that can’t identify it anyway. There is evidence that the statistics we have been given have been deliberately manipulated to exaggerate the health risk and there is no evidence these excess deaths are “unprecedented.”
If you are among the few willing to look at this evidence I hope you will read part 2 of this article series. Coming soon.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/22/2020 – 02:00 - Forget The Pandemic, This Could Kill 90% Of US Population
Forget The Pandemic, This Could Kill 90% Of US Population
Authored by Paul Bedard, op-ed via WashingtonExaminer.com,
As bad as the coronavirus and the COVID-19 sickness it causes are, warning cries are increasing over a much bigger threat with the potential to kill 90% of the U.S. population. And, unlike the virus, Washington has known of the threat for decades and done little to nothing.
“We have seen this movie before and are living through it now,” said Peter Pry, one of the nation’s leading experts on electromagnetic pulse, the electric grid killer that threatens naturally from the sun and from weapons held by China.
“If we are not even prepared for the coronavirus, imagine the consequences if we get hit with a real existential threat, like EMP,” he said.
Advocates for protecting the nation’s electric grid and other vital systems, including military bases, from an EMP attack are seizing on the virus crisis to inject urgency into budgeting to protect electric transformers, transfer stations, and wires from disruption or meltdown.
“For the $2 trillion that will be spent on the coronavirus, we could harden all critical infrastructures against EMP, deploy space-based missile defense Brilliant Pebbles before the end of a second Trump term, modernize the U.S. nuclear deterrent from top to bottom (delivery vehicles, weapons, scientific-industrial base), and have over $1 trillion to spare,” said Pry, a key member of congressional EMP commissions and author of the new book The Power and the Light: The Congressional EMP Commission’s War to Save America 2001 – 2020.
Brian Sullivan, a government and military security analyst, said, “Can you imagine if our grid went down and we lost electricity for an extended period of time? As bad as our current situation is, it could always be a lot worse. We relied on our government leaders to prepare our country for a pandemic, and we see what that got us. We rely on that same leadership now to protect our electric grid.”
While warnings of the current pandemic have been around for less than a year, reports have been written about EMP attacks for decades. The first congressional EMP panel, for example, warned of a yearlong blackout following an attack on the electric grid.
“The EMP Commission estimates a nationwide blackout of the United States lasting one year could kill 90% of Americans from starvation and societal collapse,” said Pry. That would be about 295 million people.
In the past, warnings have been met inside the government and energy industry with eye-rolling. But President Trump has taken the threat seriously, especially as China and other foes have developed EMP weapons, and signed an executive order to move toward protecting the grid. The military has also taken steps to protect its operations.
But Pry details in his new book the efforts inside the “deep state” federal bureaucracy and electric industry to “slow-roll and sabotage” Trump’s agenda while making it look like they’re making progress.
“The strategy of pretending to do something but really doing nothing and then throwing money at the threat when it happens will get millions of Americans killed when there is an EMP,” he told Secrets.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/22/2020 – 00:10 - "New Normal" – Demand For Thermal Imaging Cameras Soar During Pandemic
“New Normal” – Demand For Thermal Imaging Cameras Soar During Pandemic
From “pandemic drones” with thermal optics searching for COVID-19 carriers to Amazon using thermal cameras to screen employees for the virus – there’s one certain thing: demand is surging for thermal sensors during the pandemic.
Bloomberg notes that thermal-imaging devices are in high demand among manufacturers and businesses preparing to reopen operations, who plan on using the technology to mitigate the spread of the virus.
FLIR Systems, one of the largest thermal imaging camera manufactures in the world, has reported a jump in demand:
“When the virus moved into Europe and North America, it was more Fortune 500 companies, hospital and health-care networks and immediate needs from essential business that were required to operate,” Flir CEO Jim Cannon said in an interview.
Here’s an example of a FLIR camera in use:
To control the spread of the virus, the “new normal” at corporate facilities appears to be the utilization of thermal cameras to screen for feverish employees.
Amazon is leading the charge with the installation of thermal cameras at its warehouses. They have made the screening of employees much more streamlined than using forehead thermometers.
Here’s an alleged image of one thermal device at an Amazon warehouse. The cameras are not FLIR made, but rather from an outfit called Infrared Cameras Inc in Texas.
News on corporate America deploying thermal cameras has led to a jump in FLIR’s stock.
General Motors and other automakers have recently confirmed they’re deploying thermal cameras to screen employees.
Bloomberg notes some thermal cameras could range between $2,500 to $15,000 per device.
“Scanners can be used to detect higher body temperatures, a common symptom of Covid-19. They measure temperature on the skin’s surface using infrared light to create a thermal image. They come in different forms from complex, fixed-position scanners to more basic hand-held devices. Costs can range from $2,500 to $15,000 each.”
Bill Parrish, Co-Founder & CTO of Seek Thermal, said, “there is big demand” for thermals at the moment from “Fortune 500 companies.” He said, “We have been inundated” with requests for products. “They are doing demos and evaluations to help them open up their factories.
Before the pandemic, thermal sensors have been widely deployed in warzones. So, one can make the argument that corporate America is using military technology to keep an eye on its workforce.
Besides screening at entrances of factories, thermals will be installed within facilities that will monitor workspaces for COVID-19 carriers.
Flir said it is gearing up for an exponential rise in demand for its sensors:
“If overnight huge industries place huge orders, that certainly will take time to satisfy those orders,” Flir’s Cannon said.
It’s only a matter of time before corporations and governments deploy pandemic drones with thermals, hunting for virus carriers.
The rise of Big Brother is imminent, it’s all happening under cover of the pandemic.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 23:50 - China Is Waging A New Kind Of War Against The US
China Is Waging A New Kind Of War Against The US
Authored by Gregory Copley via OilPrice.com,
Beijing made it clear in 1999 that when it went to war with the US it would be a new kind of war.
People’s Republic of China (PRC) Pres. Xi Jinping then announced in October 2018 that he had begun a “new 30 Years War” with the US.
But there seemed to be no “Pearl Harbor” moment, so the rest of the world disregarded the declaration of war. That was a mistake.
It became clear that the 2020 COVID-19-inspired “global fear pandemic” laid out the battlefield terrain and saw the opening shots emerge from the PRC in a variety of strategic formats. To be sure, COVID-19 was not itself the “Pearl Harbor moment”; it was the subsequent fear pandemic which drove down the global economy.
Beijing could not wait any longer to begin strategic operations — the new form of “total war” — if it was to survive as a global power and to assume primacy within its symbolic 30 year timeframe.
Shakespeare once noted:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
From Beijing’s standpoint, given that the PRC economy was already in massive decline, it was critical that the economies of its strategic rivals should also be forced into decline. That may or may not have been a planned aspect of the PRC’s COVID-19 response strategy, but it certainly was quickly adopted by Beijing.
In other words, if the PRC could not reverse its economic decline, its strategic competitiveness moving forward was critically dependent upon seeing its rivals decline commensurately, or even become crippled. It was not a race to the top; it was a race to avoid being first to the bottom.
And from Beijing’s standpoint, too, this was to be a war engaging broad-form population warfare strategies, particularly harnessed to electronic communications, in turn linked to a range of strategic and tactical psychological and psychopolitical operations. That was clear from the benchmark PRC 1999 study, Unrestricted Warfare, which has now emerged literally as the textbook of the new “total war” against the US and the West.
It was also all connected, as far as Beijing was concerned, to economic and social warfare, including population warfare, on a variety of levels. And only tangentially — in the short-term — was military force projection a component. Military confrontation involved risk if, for example, the US was to be directly engaged with force. So it was a strategy by which the PRC required the weakening and splitting of what otherwise would be an overwhelming adversary alliance.
– A fundamental tenet of the engagement by Beijing was to split the US away from its traditional allies, exploiting schisms which have been festering and expanding since the end of the Cold
– The parallel tenet was — and is — to then split the internal populations of US and its allies by exacerbating and supporting existing societal
By such means are solid and cohesive adversaries broken down to be challenged piecemeal, and then each of the separate adversaries weakened internally and prevented from achieving unfettered and decisive action even at a national level. If an adversary is fighting within itself or preoccupied with domestic issues it cannot pose a threat.
“Splittist” has long been a particularly vitriolic epithet used by Chinese communists to denigrate those who split away from the Communist Party of China (CPC), or attempted to split the country away from the CPC. Now, splitting strategies are employed against the enemies of the CPC.
Beijing’s approach was learned from the Western strategy of the Cold War, which was to exacerbate to the point of fracture the People’s Republic of China links with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR).
To drive a wedge into the Sino-Soviet rift.
Beijing understood this when it allowed itself to be part of that Sino-Soviet splitting operation when CPC Chairman Mao Zedong met with US Pres. Richard Nixon on February 21, 1972. At that time, the Soviet-PRC alliance was one of convenience, but it was never an easy match. Indeed, the Russian Federation modus vivendi with the PRC by 2020 — it would be difficult to call it an alliance — was fraught with as much mutual suspicion as the Sino-Soviet link of the Cold War.
Now Beijing has begun to apply that splitting technique against the West itself.
But, as central as that process is to PRC strategy — or, more accurately, to the strategy of the CPC, which is as much aimed at subduing the Chinese people as foreign societies — it is only one component which would enable the PRC, economically in decline and militarily no match for even the US let alone the formerly close Western set of alliances, to have a chance at strategic success.
Moreover, it should not be assumed that it is the CPC alone which has moved onto a “war footing” and which saw the new conflict as an amorphous “total war”: a total war which has taken on absolutely new dimensions from the shape of “total war” in the 20th Century. US Pres. Donald Trump began moving the US from a passive acceptance of PRC strategic expansionism — which had been underway for two decades at least — in 2017, and then moved into defensive strategic economic policies by late 2019.
Trump knew the PRC was at war with the US the moment his Administration took office in January 2017. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was also by that time already aware of the war, and was preparing Japan for it.
The COVID-19-related upheaval meant that, by early 2020, the prime ministers of Australia and the United Kingdom were also gradually coming aboard with the reality that they had been forced onto a war footing. What is significant is the degree to which public opinion in Africa generally, and in Australia, South-East Asia, the US, parts of Europe, and so on, has moved against the PRC as a result of the way in which Beijing has postured itself during the crisis.
The CPC — or at least Pres. Xi Jinping — does not seem to care. The velvet glove has been removed to some extent. It has begun to take advantage of the cover of the crisis to step up actions against rebellious elements in its autonomous Hong Kong region, for example, and to move its sole operational aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, into the South China Sea to highlight the perception that its armed forces have not been constrained by the COVID-19 crisis in the same way that the US and French navies have been.
But nowhere, however, was the extent of the war — the type of the war — discussed or understood. It is a global total war; one in which all elements of society, indeed of all societies, are conscripted. I have written extensively on this in a new book which will appear in the coming months.
This is not a “black swan event” — there is no such thing — but it is finally a clarification of the dynamic framework which has been emerging for the 21st Century. It is also worth noting that although the Xi strategy may be ambitious and innovative, it does not necessarily involve any real understanding of the US or the world by Pres. Xi, and more than most of the world understands Xi’s personal fusion of “China”. Arguably, Xi’s view of China and its destiny is akin to the mythical view which Hitler had of and for Germany.
But now Xi has committed the PRC to a strategic course of action. That is the physical component. So the planning can begin, by other states, as to how to deal with that PRC action.
1. How Societies Revive
Economic, social, and strategic recovery in any society beset by major crisis requires clean-sheet approaches and decisive steps to sweep away impediments to revival.
This is impossible — and usually undesirable — in normal conditions, and even in a crisis it is difficult unless societies and government agree that extraordinary steps are
permitted. In all of this should be understood the basic concept, angrily refuted by statists, that it is not the job of governments to control societies; it is the job of societies to control government.
But, in the present climate of widespread fear for the future, the fact that societies also fear change means that:
(a) The appearance of normalcy and continuity of institutions must be maintained as far as possible, and the utilization and revival of familiar, iconic, symbols, instruments, language, and faces is desirable; and
(b) The reality that massive change and threat has already been visited upon society means that substantive, planned, further underlying change is now more possible. In other words, change has already occurred: use it to “Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”, as Omar Khayyám suggested. But what that desire is, or should be, then becomes the primary
In the 2020 context, these factors were true as much for the PRC as for the US, UK, European Union (EU), or any other country. The difference in the application of the necessity to clearly specify what outcome is desired, however, lies in the goals and paths which each government wishes for its society.
Every major conflict tends to allow a government to increase its dominance over a society in order to combat an existential threat. How much that dominance is subsequently relaxed following the threat shows the difference between command economies – essentially socialist autocracies by definition – and classical democracies.
What has been significant in the early response to the fear pandemic which was triggered by the COVID-19 crisis is that many Western nation states actually began adopting permanent changes which would move their societies closer to the command status normally associated with communist or socialist-fascist autocracies. In this regard, my colleague, Prof. Yuri Maltsev, cites Friedrich Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Apart from the move toward greater control over economies, the move toward cashless societies, toward the implementation of technology-enabled control of individuals (enabling total surveillance and obedience, for example) by definition changes the nature of the societies.
But does greater control over an economy and the minimizing of social freedom lead to the kind of longer-term strategic recovery which was ostensibly the declared goal of combating the immediate threat? In other words, like suicide, is it a long-term solution to a short-term problem? Is it a successful operation which kills the patient?
Crisis provides the opportunity for many actions.
Things can be achieved in chaos which could never be accomplished in calm. Positive and negative things. The view of statists, usually, is that the answer to a crisis is more government. That, of course, is antithetical to the free movement and thought of the individual, and therefore alien to entrepreneurship and productivity.
The primary lessons, then, from the 2020 crisis, which has caused virtually all major nations to add unsustainably to their debt burdens, should include:
(i) Simplify and open society rather than legislate and control.
Remove inhibitions to economic and social stimulation which do not require state funding.
In other words, reduce the emphasis on activities which require taxpayer funds (which add to national debt). These neither stimulate revenue production by their action, nor enable productivity regeneration to occur. It is entrepreneurship which generates employment, taxation, and addresses the needs of national self-sufficiency;
(ii) Eliminate or reduce the penalties, efforts, and cost of both starting economic enterprises or closing them.
This means allowing corporate bankruptcies to occur. Better to endure short-term losses than to lose long-term economic momentum. Governments are now searching, in any event, for ways to write off, refute, or inflate out of their debt obligations anyway.
Is it not hypocritical to stop the marketplace from moving forward after the failure or collapse of commercial enterprises when governments routinely do so with impunity, often by printing more unsupported money? And many of the commercial enterprises have failed, in any event, due to the actions of governments in suppressing normal market activity. Efficient bankruptcy is the key to economic momentum.
(iii) Stimulate self-sufficiency through national and local-level policies which favor the local production of necessities and tools of strategic advantage, and deny that advantage to the adversary. This does indeed require the application — selectively, carefully, and temporarily — of bans on certain imported products in order to guarantee sovereign viability, and it does involve selective use of tariffs. It also involves the denial of some exports to an adversary.
In the case of the containment of the PRC, the US and other food exporting adversary states would deny supply of food to the PRC, given that food and water shortage is Beijing’s critical strategic vulnerability.
Clearly, the “globalism” philosophy, which grew progressively since the end of the Cold War, had swung the strategic pendulum in favor of great powers which sought to dominate markets for their own purposes.
It was the globalist interpretation of “free trade” which, in fact, made many economies totally dependent on a foreign power.
This has particularly, in the 21st Century, benefited the PRC, which was able to use “free trade” to build strategic control of other societies. Beijing is not unique, historically, in utilizing the battle-cry of “free trade”, which is ultimately not free to the party which allows itself to become strategically dependent. Britain and the United States have themselves done this in the past.
2. Repurposing Alliances
Treaties and alliances are meant to address immediate threats and opportunities. They do not last forever. Nor should they.
Lord Palmerston said, in the 19th Century: “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” Alliances and treaties are meant to serve specific objectives, and time often vitiates these objectives.
But what is clear at present is that the People’s Republic of China in 2020 lacks a viable alliance network. It treats states such as the DPRK (North Korea) as a mere tributary state, and other trading partners as though they should be tributary states. Thus, their compliance with Beijing must be forced.
The US, for most of the past seven decades, also treated its allies to greater or lesser degrees as more-or-less tributary states, and, as a result, its alliance structures became greatly reduced by resentments of junior alliance partners. Those partners may return to alliance with the US only through fear of the PRC and, to some extent, Russia.
What occurred in the first decades of the 21st Century, among other things, was that:
(a) The original purpose for the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) withered away, and yet the alliance had developed bureaucratically into one of the most effective strategic tools possible;
(b) The European Union (EU) created a layer of governance and control of Western and Central Europe which inhibited the growth, freedom, and security of most of the members of that union; and
(c) The United Nations moved from being a forum to mitigate differences into one which exacerbated them.
Bearing in mind the reality that the EU in many ways geopolitically overlaps the NATO membership (obviously excluding Canada and the US, which are in NATO but not the EU), it is clear that NATO now has a new role in protecting the physical borders of Europe. Significantly, it has not been deployed to meet this new role.
And that role is not specifically against an immediate threat of military intrusion by Russia, but very specifically in resisting a multi-faceted strategic physical intrusion by Turkey, or facilitated by Turkey.
How much, for example, has Europe been strategically inhibited by its inability to resist Turkish-sponsored or Turkish-supported population warfare which has weakened the economies and social frameworks of European states for the past decade. Turkey attempted to substantially expand and accelerate this population-political warfare Westwards since the start of the 2020 crisis. Moreover, this has not been constrained merely by the onpassage of refugees from the Syrian civil war, but by “commoditizing” refugees fleeing economic and security challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, and sub-Saharan Africa.
What has emerged is that NATO remains a viable and efficient military alliance for the protection of Western interests, whereas the EU has not. NATO, in an attempt to repurpose itself with the collapse of the original threat, the Warsaw Treaty bloc, has sought an “out-of-area” mission, and was thus employed in the war in Afghanistan, for example in the first two decades of the 21st Century. But there was no real thought given to a broader redefinition of the Alliance, to include IndoPacific partners.
It has the potential to be broadened and renamed to include the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-US) Alliance, the US-Japan Security Alliance, and so on, to take on a new purpose akin to the World War II alliance against the nazi-fascist-Japanese bloc. Similarly, the UKUSA Accords — commonly referred to as the Five-Eyes intelligence exchange between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — has the capacity to be repurposed with strategic objectives.
Clearly, alliances and treaties need sunset clauses: dates by which they are either retired or repurposed. The various arms limitation treaties have all either expired through mutual disinterest, or they have been consistently and dynamically given ongoing lives. Or they have become tools by one party to inhibit another.
The successive treaties to limit the construction of capital ships by major navies in the first half of the 20th Century was a classical case of how treaties were overtaken either by technological change or by the change in strategic objectives of the major powers. That included the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922; the London Naval Treaty of 1930; the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936 (by which time the process had become more or less meaningless).
Treaties and alliances are meant to give the signatories breathing space. Nothing more. All that is constant is “permanent interests”. And then we need to renegotiate the meaning of “permanent”.
Again, as we discussed in Point 1, above, the COVID-19 interregnum was the ideal time to revisit national goals, and to redefine the means of achieving them in a world in which the strategic context — the terrain — had clarified in new ways.
We will discuss in Point 4 the need to look at alliances within the framework of trade and survival patterns.
3. Repurposing Economies
It is time to re-designate the economic framework which existed up until 2020 as the “old economy”.
And that includes the economic prisms through which we viewed science and technology up to that point.
The “new economy” includes some fundamentals, such as:
1. Global and national economies constrained by unprecedented levels of debt and debt-service;
2. Declining market size due to economic constraints and to the actual decline in population levels, particularly within key socio-economic market groups;
3. Polarization, because of economic, political and security factors, of trading networks, leading to greater bilateralization of trade and the need to re-monetize some trade as barter or counter-trade, or define it by creative currency “baskets”;
4. Reduced availability of funding for a period for research and development, some commercial infrastructure, and for pure science. On the other hand, viable stimulus to re-engage unemployed workers would likely include some public sector infrastructure packages;
5. Greater ease by armed forces in achieving recruiting targets as commercial jobs fail to take up all available workforce;
6. Growing distrust of governmental attempts to control the economy by restricting the use of cash as paper currencies lose the “full faith and credit” of governments. This will see a stimulus for the use of alternate forms of “currency”, including cryptocurrencies. All of this will lead to a polarization of societies away from governments (ie: lead to greater distrust in government), which can only be contained for a limited period and which will absolutely lead to a further decline in economic productivity, as the PRC has been discovering for the past eight years. This further compounds the challenge of global strategic competitiveness.
What, then, is to be done?
The stimulation of national economies is very much linked to seeing economies as just that: national. Or at least best protected within specific geopolitical regions.
The first decades of the 21st Century (indeed, the period since the end of the Cold War) saw most countries outsource much of their manufacturing to the PRC. The crash of 2020 saw, then, most countries exposed to an existential dependency on the PRC for vital supplies across all sectors of society.
This resulted in the biggest single event in history highlighting the destruction of the sovereignty and independence of action of most nation states in the world. The PRC, in order to capitalize on the damage inflicted by the 2020 crisis on most national economies, quickly moved to return to full PRC manufacturing capability to ensure that, as the coronavirus containments were lifted on most economies, the PRC could then dump manufactured goods onto the world market.
This was designed to ensure that national manufacturing in other countries would be disincentivized from being re-established to end dependency on the PRC. The PRC manufacturing base had already begun to outprice itself during the past five years at least (to 2020), and the PRC had to do something to regain its position as the “sole source” for manufacturing.
This meant that the PRC had a vested interest, too, in ensuring that those rising economies which had been beginning to take over the global manufacturing roles from the PRC were themselves set back. That included the manufacturing sectors of Thailand, Vietnam, and so on.
Hence the need for those nation states wishing to re-assert a measure of sovereign independence to consider restrictions and tariffs on imported goods as a means to protect the re-start of local industries. The question, then, was how to do this in a way which did not allow also the re-building of workforce complacency and revived union opportunism, knowing that domestic markets were protected.
A variety of actions, then, would need to be considered by those “advanced” societies which had thought themselves somehow in the post-industrial phase, but now found it necessary to revive domestic manufacturing. These could include:
– Eliminating constraints on small to medium businesses by (i) minimizing the burden of tax reporting bureaucracy; (ii) creating a simplified tax structure for small to medium business; and (iii) creating freedoms from heavy unionization for small to medium businesses
– Repurposing education away from the “pseudo-post-industrial” model which focused on university degrees of questionable value either to liberal, contextual thinking, or to education in spheres of practical value to manufacturing. This would mean reversing the demeaning and paternalistic view of academia toward “blue collar” workforces, and instead providing technical school educations, and structured trade apprenticeships. This could and should enable many people to enter the workforce at a younger age, thus stimulating the economy by removing them from society-supported dependency. Moreover, it could also include apprenticeship-like skills acquisition in the armed services.
– Eliminating most of the punitive elements of bankruptcy laws, and lower the barrier to the creation of new corporations to stimulate the creation of entrepreneurial enterprises. Even the US has, in recent years, made aspects of its bankruptcy laws more punitive, but the US still provides the best model in this regard. Australia, for example, has corporate start-up and wind-up practices which are draconian and Dickensian. The more that the state is removed from the process, the more that enterprise and productivity will be stimulated.
– Eliminating or reducing the size of centralized governmental structures. Government employment is a burden for any economy. Some of it is vital to ensuring a viable state; most of it is not. Reducing governmental bureaucracies by enforcing a wave of mandatory retirements and a selective freeze on hiring is a far better use of state funds than financing an unproductive economy.
– Eliminating legislative constraints on agricultural efficiency and encourage programs which help restore soil balance. Ensuring adequate farmer control over water sources, and also reversing the negative impact of the use of chemical fertilizers over the past century.
4. Repurposing Trading Blocs
Trade is an essential tool of society. It is assumed that free trade is the vital aspect of a prospering society. But the reality is that trade in essentials is an existential underpinning of sovereignty.
The control of trade and trading patterns is also, therefore, a decisive tool in national security strategy. World Wars I and II made clear how control of global sea lanes determined the outcome of those conflicts.
“Free trade” in a time of confrontation and crisis, then, is axiomatically counterproductive to achieving national survival and in constraining an opponent.
The crisis of 2020 ensured that, for the time being, the age of free trade was now ended. That is not an ideological or philosophical position — concepts of markets determining free trade can endure — but rather a position of ensuring national survival, and minimizing the advantage of a competitor. Apart from the major power which wishes to dominate its trading partners, only those who do not recognize that a war has begun will continue to insist on “free trade”.
So if trade is to be emphasized between trusted partners, then that would assume that trade pacts would need to include security provisions to ensure the delivery of that trade. This re-emphasizes, of course, the security of sea lanes, straits and waterways, and air traffic routes. The assumption of a continuation of the old “rules-based world order” is no longer valid.
The PRC, in announcing (in October 2018) its “new Thirty Years War” indicated that at the end of that war (in 2049) it would have in place a “new Treaty of Westphalia” — by some new name — to emplace a Beijing-dominated “rules-based world order”. Saying it does not make it so, but the intention was clear: the PRC does not accept the pre-2020 order of theoretically-equal nation-states to be valid.
The new trading objectives of post-2020 governments, then, need to be defined, because it is clear that they have not been defined up until this point. These objectives would need to define national goals, needs, and methods of achieving the desired ends.
It means that trading patterns must overlay security patterns. In other words, if trade is critical, the means must be there to ensure that it can be achieved. Trade, then, becomes not merely about commodities, but about the means and routes of delivering them, and the security to guarantee that pattern.
5. Repurposing Strategies
How can strategies designed for different times be applied in the post-2020 world?
Economic, geopolitical, and trade dependency factors changed with the crisis of 2020. Yes, much business will continue as usual, but the underlying strategic inflection has changed, and the global debt position has transformed economic capabilities.
More to the point, the People’s Republic of China has made it clear that it has already embarked on a war — an amorphous total war of the 21st Century kind — from which it cannot resile. That war, for the PRC, as noted, is dominated by a strong interactive pattern of population, sociological, economic, technological, and information dominance factors, quite apart from military factors.
Indeed, the PRC hopes that the war would be won before any resort to military confrontation of a formal kind.
Does that mean that one response would be to force the PRC to fight its war on terms it considers disadvantageous? Because that would indeed be a military aspect of the “total war”.
So, at present, the PRC is embarked on a defensive military strategy vis-á-vis the United States, while posturing with symbolic military actions in some areas, such as the South and East China Seas. But Beijing is highly aggressive in its power projection by diplomatic and non-military means against other targets. And it only has economic levers to sustain that attempted use of “overwhelming force” on its trading and diplomatic partners.
And these are levers from a declining PRC economy. As noted, the PRC approach is to minimize resistance to its strategic offensive by minimizing the economic strength and independence of its targets.
Where have we seen a comparable model of strategic projection in history? Nothing appears to be immediately comparable. This is very much a grand strategy of bluff, deception, and audacity. It has, for Beijing, been effective to this point, but the 2020 crisis did polarize much thinking against the PRC.
6. Repurposing Defense
What military structures and doctrine will survive the 2020 inflection point?
Clearly, for the first time in many years, most governments will need to force their defense planners to harmonize defense strategic plans with national grand strategic goals and options. That will be difficult, because defense structures are heavily dependent on legacy capital items, legacy doctrine, and inherited postures. And government leaders are notoriously resistant to giving long-term goals.
Governments are revisiting their situations, but to what extent can long-term capital defense programs be recalibrated for the new strategic environment? Even more significantly, how can defense forces even sustain operational capabilities when declining national economic outlooks will likely constrain defense spending growth, if growth is even feasible in the coming few years?
To a significant degree, because the “new total war” is likely to be less kinetic and less formal than in the 20th Century, improvements in efficiency will likely emerge from more interdisciplinary cooperation than has been historically achieved. This is the most difficult aspect. In “war” situations, the military assumes it must lead.
The Russian Government recently gave warfighting leadership authority, even in nonkinetic frameworks, to the Russian General Staff on the basis that “non-military actions comprised 80 percent of contemporary conflict”. But can careers of military discipline, logic, and chain of command adapt to the new, fluid, amorphous social face of “total war of the 21st Century”?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 23:30 - "Crazy Premiums" In Oil ETFs – Crude Carnage Sends AsiaPac Oil Futures Limit-Down
“Crazy Premiums” In Oil ETFs – Crude Carnage Sends AsiaPac Oil Futures Limit-Down
Forget Turnaround Tuesday. Oil is a “dangerous market to trade in right now,” said Pierre Andurand, founder of Andurand Capital Management LLP, in a Bloomberg TV interview. The market needs shutins to happen now, he said.
“This has changed everything,” said Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank.
“So much of the recent recovery was based on the fact that the oil price had been above $50-$60, providing support to economic activity, and that’s just been decimated.”
This “price slump was psychologically very important,” said Eugen Weinberg, Commerzbank AG’s head of commodity research.
“There is a possibility it will change perceptions forever.”
The best summary of today’s chaos came from Bloomberg energy reporter Javier Blas who put it simply: “Yesterday was scary. Today is a lot more scary. The whole oil market is screaming oversupply simultaneously. June WTI, which four weeks away from expiry, just touched $6.5 a barrel. The market is going to force huge production cuts not in May or June, but immediately.”
Yesterday was scary. Today is a lot more scary. The whole oil market is screaming oversupply simultaneously. June WTI, which four weeks away from expiry, just touched $6.5 a barrel. The market is going to force huge production cuts not in May or June, but immediately | #OOTT
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 21, 2020
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* * *
Update (2300ET): There is no escaping the carnage in the crude complex as Asian futures and ETFs linked to oil prices are trading chaotically overnight.
June WTI futures are rolling back over…
Shanghai Oil Futures are ‘only’ down 10% (thanks to China’s limit-down circuit-breakers)…
China futures catching down to WTI…
The Samsung Crude Oil Futures ETF (which held more than $500 million worth of the derivatives as of April 20) has crashed 45%…
As Bloomberg reports, Samsung Asset Management (Hong Kong) Ltd, which manages the fund, said in a Tuesday exchange filing that the fund will sell its entire holdings of June oil contracts and buy September contracts. It also warned that in a “worst case scenario,” the net asset value of the fund may drop to zero and investors may suffer “a total loss” of their investments.
“There is a big tracking error after the ETF switches from tracking June futures to September futures,” said Castor Pang, head of research at Core Pacific-Yamaichi International Hong Kong.
“After the switch, the value of the ETF evaporates by more than half because of the plunge in oil futures.”
Additionally, as Bloomberg’s Ye Xie notes, because short-selling is not allowed in China, making arbitrage more difficult – several Chinese ETFs tied to crude oil prices are trading at “crazy premiums”…
As Xie so correctly concludes, until they can find the next fool to push up the ETF prices, investors need oil prices to rally a lot just for them to break even.
Good luck with that.
* * *
Update (1435ET): With settlement now come and gone, the May contract soared back higher today…
and adjustments to the USO allocation (to June, July, and August) prompted a bid in each ahead of the settle which all then plunged back after…
* * *
(Update 1425ET): It has been an exciting day for the USO ETF, if not so much its holders, and after growing speculation the largest oil ETF may have to follow its peer OIL and liquidate, moments ago USO was halted again, this time announcing that it has moved 5% of its futures into the August WTI contract, stating that it may invest in any month available due to market conditions, and warning that it may see significant deviations from its benchmark.
- USO SAYS IT HAS MOVED SOME WTI HOLDINGS INTO AUGUST CONTRACT
- USO: MAY INVEST IN ANY MONTH AVAILABLE DUE TO MARKET CONDITIONS
- USO SAYS MAY SEE SIGNIFICANT DEVIATIONS FROM ITS BENCHMARK
- USO HAS ABOUT 40% OF HOLDINGS IN JUNE CRUDE FUTURES CONTRACTS
- USO HAS ABOUT 55% OF HOLDINGS IN JULY CRUDE FUTURES CONTRACTS
$USO is running some kind of oil hedge fund now and basically saying it can invest in whatever it feels like. https://t.co/EyDmZpZt7n
— ForexLive (@ForexLive) April 21, 2020
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All of this real-time jiggering with the terms of the USO to avoid going under just goes to show that ETFs, and passive investing in general, are products geared exclusively to bull markets and promptly implode when there is a downdraft in risk assets.
* * *
Update (1345ET): Here we go again. June WTI is now crashing – trading below $7 – down over 65% on the day…
And July is crashing, down over 30%, below $18…
Remember the settle occurs at 1430ET (and the expiry of the May contract)… and the prompt spread (May-June) has surged back to zero…
USO is also testing pre-market lows as retail and the roll panic out…
“A lot of retailer investors are looking at it and realizing that they are losing money hand over fist,” Tariq Zahir, commodity fund manager at New York-based Tyche Capital Advisors LLC said.
“It’s undeniable that the USO is having a having a very big effect on the June contract and it wouldn’t be surprising if we go substantially lower.”
* * *
Forget Turnaround Tuesday, paper oil markets are collapsing once again with USO halted numerous times, OIL liquidated, and June futures puking hard in a repeat of yesterday’s May contract bloodbath…
May is rallying here as June crashes… (we suspect more ETF rolls)…
Sending the prompt spread soaring back…
But June is now down a shocking 45% to a $10 handle… and there is still 90 minutes until settlement.
Yesterday, the break of $10 was what sparked the waterfall in the May contract.
USO is down 30%…
Here are five analysts’ views on what’s happening in the world’s largest oil ETF…
Dave Lutz, macro strategist at JonesTrading:
“Retail investors should have a way to trade the price of oil, but USO has such problems with the roll effect that I’m not sure that’s the best vehicle. Problem is, it’s really the only one,” he said. In addition, “the fact that creations are suspended means that this is no longer going to track properly.”
Joseph Saluzzi, Themis Trading LLC partner and co-head of equity trading:
“Some ETFs are not exactly what you think they are — the rule for any investor is to know what you own. Some folks may have thought that USO was simply a proxy for the current oil price, and they didn’t really understand the mechanics of the oil futures market.”
Matt Maley, equity strategist at Miller Tabak + Co.:
“There is no question that this is a tool for investors of all sizes to bet on the price of oil. Many of these investors — again, of all sizes — have tried to pick the bottom in oil several times over the past week or two and they’ve all gotten burned. This has caused these buyers on weakness to become forced sellers. When the dust settles, it’s going to create an unbelievable opportunity for buyers. Until we get a better feeling of when the demand side of the supply/demand equation is going to improve, it tells me that the risks are still much too high compared to the potential rewards,” said Maley.
“I worry that it’s going to have a negative impact on liquidity in the oil markets, and thus have a negative impact on confidence in that market.”
Jeremy Senderowicz, a partner at law firm Dechert:
“Once creations are suspended then the arbitrage process cannot work as normal, as new shares cannot be created to meet increased demand,” he said.
“The 8-K says they are suspending creations because they’ve used up all the shares they’ve registered (they filed yesterday to register more shares but the SEC needs to declare it effective and they haven’t done so yet). That indicates that demand for the shares was quite high. If that demand continues, then until new shares can be created you can fill in the blank as to what might happen in trading…(which may be why they had the trading halt). That seems like the big takeaway to me.”
Dan Genter, CEO of RNC Genter Capital Management:
“The ETFs that are dealing with the contracts in the commodities are never going to take physical delivery, they can’t take it. There’s not a doubt the oil ETFs distorted the market. It was across the board but the ETFs, in our opinion, were the biggest problem,” he said. “The panic is because there are people invested in that commodity and in the contracts that not only have no intention of taking delivery, they have no capacity for taking delivery. All of a sudden, you’re up against a wall. They call it a contract for a reason.”
But, don;t worry, because President Trump will take the pain way… right?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 23:21 - Rich Americans Flee To Luxury 'Doomsday Resort' Shelters In New Zealand As Panic Grows
Rich Americans Flee To Luxury ‘Doomsday Resort’ Shelters In New Zealand As Panic Grows
New Zealand has become the ‘doomsday resort’ and #1 pandemic escape destination for America’s rich. Those in Silicon Valley or Manhattan lucky enough to have caught the last international flights into Auckland before borders were shut to foreign travelers late last month — to say nothing of the uptick in private jets landing in the country even days after the ban took effect — in many cases for the first time moved into their multi-million dollar specially designed luxury doomsday bunkers.
Bloomberg profiles how rich Americans escaped in droves just as US coronavirus cases began to explode, arriving in isolated and beautiful New Zealand over 1,000 miles off Australia’s southern coast — and among the least impacted countries on the earth, currently at a little over 1,400 COVID-19 cases and 12 deaths, out of a population of almost 5 million.
“As coronavirus infections tore across the U.S. in early March, a Silicon Valley executive called the survival shelter manufacturer Rising S Co. He wanted to know how to open the secret door to his multimillion-dollar bunker 11 feet underground in New Zealand,” the Bloomberg story begins dramatically enough.
“He went out to New Zealand to escape everything that’s happening,” Gary Lynch, general manager of Rising S Co., described of one elite bunker owner. “And as far as I know, he’s still there.” The Texas-based company specializing in high-tech luxury survival bunkers and homes has multiple such clients moving into what are often their third or fourth homes designed specifically for just such an apocalyptic pandemic or other scenario.
“For years, New Zealand has featured prominently in the doomsday survival plans of wealthy Americans worried that, say, a killer germ might paralyze the world,” writes Bloomberg.
The island of Waiheke off Auckland has in recent years been a playground for the super-rich, now fast becoming home to those waiting out the pandemic in luxury, via stuff.co.nz. The report describes further:
Rising S Co. has planted about 10 private bunkers in New Zealand over the past several years. The average cost is $3 million for a shelter weighing about 150 tons, but it can easily go as high as $8 million with additional features like luxury bathrooms, game rooms, shooting ranges, gyms, theaters and surgical beds.
The ultra-wealthy have long bet that New Zealand would be the safest place in the world to hunker down during a global crisis, and so far that bet is proving right.
One popular such destination within the country is Waiheke Island, dubbed “the Hamptons of New Zealand” for the high concentration of billionaires who enjoy local wineries and elite eateries set amidst cliff-top mansions and breathtaking views of the ocean.
Mihai Dinulescu, a 34-year old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who fled to New Zealand said “a lot of venture capital people I know were not afraid enough in time for the border close.”
Young Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Mihai Dinulescu in New Zealand, via Bloomberg. He added somewhat ominously: “And now they can’t get in.”
“Over the years, the moneyed North Americans who have managed to wrangle properties there include hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson, Hollywood film director James Cameron and PayPal Holdings Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel, who has two estates in New Zealand, one of which features views of snow-capped mountains and has a safe room,” Bloomberg describes.
Tech leaders have long been smitten by picturesque New Zealand’s potential as a place to ride out the apocalypse, given its extreme isolation – now its biggest strength. Billionaire Thiel, who in 2011 became a joint US-New Zealand citizen years ago described it as “utopia”.
* * *
Diagram of a typical luxury doomsday shelter produced by Texas-based Rising S Co, via Bloomberg:
“Delux Bomb Shelter”
Kiwis fully expected the recent boom in billionaire doomsday prepper homes to continue. One local luxury home company related the example of a $12 million house which—
…had an “air tunnel” marked in the foundation plans that could easily fit four people walking shoulder-to-shoulder. “It was quite obviously an escape tunnel in the basement,” he said.
This as more broadly the disaster preparedness industry is generally expected to grow around the world.
Luxury shelter under construction by Rising S Co, via Bloomberg. However, those without such means can only ‘stay behind’ and watch as the super-wealthy flee virus hotspots for safer and more comfortable climes.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 23:10 - Documents Reveal Feds Are Excited To Create A Mass Surveillance Network
Documents Reveal Feds Are Excited To Create A Mass Surveillance Network
A FOIA request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center revealed how excited the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) is about using CCTV cameras to create a national surveillance network.
An NSCAI presentation titled “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview” discusses China’s facial recognition CCTV camera network in glowing terms.
“When we talk about data resources, really the largest data source is the government.'”
The presentation discusses how the Chinese government profits from encouraging companies to use facial recognition on visitors and employees.
“Now that these companies are operating at scale they are building a host of other services (e.g. facial recognition for office buildings, augmented reality)”
In America things are not all that different.
In the United States, the Feds encourage private companies like Clearview AI, Amazon Ring and Flock Safety to use facial recognition and automatic license plate readers to identify everyone.
Under the section “State Datasets: Surveillance = Smart Cities” the presentation extol’s China’s smart city surveillance saying, “it turns out that having streets carpeted with cameras is good infrastructure for smart cities as well.”
Americans do not need more government surveillance and we certainly do not need our smart cities carpeted with government surveillance devices.
The NSCAI says, “mass surveillance is a killer application for deep learning.”
As our government applies AI deep learning to things like CCTV cameras, cellphone locations, and license plate readers, a person’s entire life can be predicted.
AI’s will use deep learning to accurately guess where you work, eat, shop, sleep, worship and vacation. Basically, mass surveillance is a killer application for knowing all there is to know about everyone.
Last week MLlive, revealed that a startup AI company co-founded by the University of Michigan is helping governments use CCTV cameras to monitor people for social distancing as indicated by a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan (UM):
“Two weeks ago, Corso said he and his team began tracking physical distancing at locations like Times Square in New York, Miami Beach, Abbey Road in London and the Ruthven Museums Building at UM.”
Police in New York City use CCTV cameras to fine people up to $1,000 for not social distancing. While police in Florida set up checkpoints on highways and police in the United Kingdom use CCTV cameras to enforce stay-at-home orders.
Voxel51 uses their “physical distancing index” to track social distancing in major cities around the globe.
“Voxel51 is tracking the impact of the coronavirus global pandemic on social behavior, using a metric we developed called the Voxel51 Physical Distancing Index (PDI). The PDI helps people understand how the coronavirus is changing human activity in real-time around the world. Using our cutting-edge computer vision models and live video streams from some of the most visited streets in the world, the PDI captures the average amount of human activity and social distancing behaviors in major cities over time.”
What worries me is how law enforcement might use Voxel51 to fine or arrest people for not observing government-mandated social distancing.
Despite what Voxel51 claims about anonymizing identifiable data, they are still collecting their data from public/government cameras.
A 2019 article in the Michigan News University of Michigan revealed that Voxel51 uses artificial intelligence to identify and follow people and objects.
“Voxel51 has set out to overcome those obstacles with their video analytics platform and open source software libraries that, together, enable state-of-the-art video recognition. It identifies and follows objects and actions in each clip. As co-founder Brian Moore says, We transform video into value.”
I find it hard to believe that cities and governments would pay money to simply look at anonymized data. Especially when Voxel51’s business model is built around identifying people and objects on a mass-scale.
A perfect example of how the Feds view mass surveillance can best be summed up in the NSCAI presentation, “American companies have a lot to gain by adopting ideas from Chinese companies.”
Everyday, it seems Americans are being told we need more national surveillance programs to keep everyone safe.
Our governments’ obsession with monitoring everyone is only going to grow as the coronavirus grips the country. It is our job to keep these surveillance programs from being implemented or risk becoming an authoritarian state like China.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 22:50 - Social Distancing Sacrifice: Texas ER Doc Lives In Treehouse To Keep Family Safe
Social Distancing Sacrifice: Texas ER Doc Lives In Treehouse To Keep Family Safe
An emergency room doctor at an area hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, has decided to live in a treehouse in his backyard to limit the transmission risk of COVID-19 to his family.
Jason Barnes, 39, works in the emergency room at CHRISTUS Spohn Health System in Corpus Christi, has treated COVID-19 patients over the last month. He decided to live in the family’s treehouse after he wanted to be near his family but removed at a safe distance.
“The main reason I’m isolating from my family because I’ve been treating patients with the virus,” Barnes told USA Today. “My wife and kids often get sick with things I bring home from the hospital, and many times in the emergency department, we get caught off guard with patients.”
Barnes has been lodging in the treehouse for three weeks. He said it comes with air-conditioning, a bed, access to WiFi, and a minifridge. He speaks to his kids while sitting on his balcony.
“They’re within yelling distance,” Barnes said. “But I can call or go up to the glass. They know not to open the door and risk catching something.”
He considered purchasing an RV or renting an apartment but wanted to be at home and safely removed that he could see his kids every day before he heads off to the emergency room.
Barnes describes his living situation as similar to camping but “much more comfortable.”
The hardest part he said is showering:
“Christus leadership has made it easy for us to shower at work, but when I’m off for a few days I don’t want to go to work to shower, so my oldest son will rig up a water hose,” Barnes said. “He’s got a nozzle he created with one of those water balloon things that fills up like 30 balloons at a time and he’ll set it up and I’ll take a quick cold shower.”
He said other doctors are isolating from their families in this challenging period, though he said he might be the only one living in a treehouse.
“Many people are doing this quarantining,” Barnes said. “I just happen to have a more quirky way, but I’m not doing this to be funny. I’m taking these precautions to be safe.”
Some Americans are making scarifies for the nation, while others continue to ignore social distancing measures and could trigger the second coronavirus wave.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 22:30 - House To Vote On 'Remote Proxy Voting' Despite Serious Security & Constitutional Concerns
House To Vote On ‘Remote Proxy Voting’ Despite Serious Security & Constitutional Concerns
Authored by Eoin Higgins via CommonDreams.org,
The House is expected on Thursday to vote on a measure allowing members to vote remotely via proxies for the duration of the coronavirus outbreak crisis, a proposal that could be a solution to legislative gridlock exacerbated by the House’s extended recess due to the pandemic which has made it unsafe for Congress to meet. Rules Committee chair Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) explained the proxy rules change to the New York Times in an interview last week.
“This is what we’re comfortable with doing now that I think poses the least amount of risk,” McGovern told the Times. “For those who feel they want to be here and engage in debate, they can come back, but for those members who are in states where they are instructed not to leave their homes or not to travel, they can still participate.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), center, looks at Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), right, as McGovern speaks during a news conference on Monday, March 9, 2020. (Photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images) House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), in a letter to the chairs of the House Committee on Rules and the House Committee on Administration, said he sees the implementation of the new rule as a first step in virtual, remote voting for Congress.
“Beyond implementing the proxy voting as a first step, we ought to use this time as an opportunity to prepare for Congress to be able to work according to its full capabilities even with social and physical distancing guidelines in place,” wrote Hoyer.
Hoyer acknowledged challenges and security risks to the process, but expressed confidence that lawmakers could find a solution.
But, as the Washington Post reported Tuesday, there are technological hurdles in front of representatives.
Looks like @LeaderHoyer gets it on remote deliberations. He calls for the House, including its committees, to get back to work, and supports full deliberations (including voting) by teleconference. Also says teleconference voting > proxy voting. pic.twitter.com/pHmUc3Ekyl
— Daniel Schuman (@danielschuman) April 21, 2020
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“Many members of Congress probably couldn’t handle two-step authentication from their laptops,” a senior House Democratic aide told the Post. “We have conference calls where people can’t even mute themselves or get off mute. There’s a big tech gap that’s going to be problematic.“
And even if the House can manage to make the virtul meetings work, the aide added, there are Constitutional concerns.
Flordia Rep. Matt Gaetz wore a gas mask onto the floor last month: “Essentially the floor of the Congress is a Petri dish. We all fly into these dirty airports, we touch and selfie everyone we meet, and then we congregate together,” Gaetz said at the time.
“If this is challenged in the courts and we’ve passed 40 laws that have been enacted and the Supreme Court invalidates them all,” said the aide, “that’s a nightmare.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 22:10 - Shocking Study Finds Coronavirus Mutations That Are Much Deadlier Than The Original
Shocking Study Finds Coronavirus Mutations That Are Much Deadlier Than The Original
A shocking new study found that SARS-CoV-2’s ability to mutate has been vastly underestimated…
A group of researchers at Zhejiang University, a top-flight research university situated in Hangzhou, the capital of the eastern coastal Chinese province of Zhejiang, have made what just might be remembered as a critical breakthrough in our understanding of the wide range of symptoms that patients face.
Studies have suggested that as up to half of those who have been infected with the virus might be “asymptomatic”, a categorization that includes those who experienced extremely mild symptoms, often resembling a bad cold or a mild fever. Now, this team of scientists has discovered 31 new mutated strains of the virus that might explain the stubbornly high mortality rates in parts of Europe and New York.
According to the South China Morning Post, some of the mutant strains exhibited a much more dangerous capacity to invade human cells, implying that certain strains might be much more lethal than others. What’s more, these strains were found to be “genetically similar” to samples isolated in New York and places like Italy in Europe.
Critically, the study, led by Professor Li Lanjuan, the first Chinese academic to recommend a complete shutdown to fight the virus, showed for the first time a probable link between the type of strain that infects a patient and the level of brutality of the symptoms they face.
This is nothing short of a breakthrough – though it’s being underplayed in the American press, probably because health journalists are grappling with a confusing paradox: Dr. Fauci said last month that there was “no evidence” of deadly mutations, yet these researchers have found exactly that – though of course this research has yet to be replicated or peer reviewed.
“Sars-CoV-2 has acquired mutations capable of substantially changing its pathogenicity,” Li and her team wrote in their non-peer-reviewed paper which was published by the preprint service medRxiv.org, another top research for non-peer-reviewed research, along with the Lancet.
Li took an unusual approach to investigate the virus mutation. She analysed the viral strains isolated from 11 randomly chosen Covid-19 patients from Hangzhou in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and then tested how efficiently they could infect and kill cells.
The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in most patients across Europe, while the milder strains were the predominant varieties found in parts of the United States, such as Washington state, according to their paper.
A separate study had found that New York strains had been imported from Europe. The death rate in New York was similar to that in many European countries, if not worse.
But the weaker mutation did not mean a lower risk for everybody, according to Li’s study. In Zhejiang, two patients in their 30s and 50s who contracted the weaker strain became severely ill. Although both survived in the end, the elder patient needed treatment in an intensive care unit.
Li’s study involved a notably small number of strains, only a few dozen were investigated, as opposed to hundreds or thousands of strains in some major studies of new viruses. However, she still managed to find what appears to be a definite link that could shed new light – or unearth new complications in the quest to finding a cure or a vaccine. Li’s team attributed these “functional changes” in the different strains to variations in the “viral-spike protein” – aka the “spikes” on the “ball” used to represent SARS-CoV-2.
Li’s team detected more than 30 mutations. Among them 19 mutations – or about 60 per cent – were new.
They found some of these mutations could lead to functional changes in the virus’ spike protein, a unique structure over the viral envelope enabling the coronavirus to bind with human cells. Computer simulation predicted that these mutations would increase its infectivity.
The fact that such unexpectedly intense variations could arise from a sample of fewer than a dozen patients means the genetic variability of this virus might be much higher than initially expected. And it may have mutated since the outbreak began, which of course could create complications in the quest for a vaccine. Most alarmingly, some of the mutated strains carried as much as 270x the viral load as the weakest strains.
To verify the theory, Li and colleagues infected cells with strains carrying different mutations. The most aggressive strains could generate 270 times as much viral load as the weakest type. These strains also killed the cells the fastest.
It was an unexpected result from fewer than a dozen patients, “indicating that the true diversity of the viral strains is still largely underappreciated,” Li wrote in the paper.
It’s just the latest reminder of how much we don’t know about this virus. The projection that a virus could take 18 months to 2 years to develop is based on not much more than guesswork inspired by wishful thinking. Because of this, waiting until a vaccine or cure is in hand could lead us to wait much longer than many were expecting.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 21:50 - Trump Suspends Green Card Issuance For 60 Days
Trump Suspends Green Card Issuance For 60 Days
Following a surprise twitter announcement that shook the nation late on Monday, President Trump said he would suspend legal immigration to the US for at least two months to help Americans who have been put out of work because of the coronavirus crisis.
“It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced by new immigrant labor flown in from abroad,” Trump said at a White House briefing on Tuesday evening. “We must first take care of the American worker.”
The pause will be for 60 days and will apply only to individuals seeking permanent residency such as green card applicants, Trump said. He added that certain exemptions would be allowed in an executive order, which he said would be signed, “most likely” by Wednesday. “There will be some people coming in.” According to Bloomberg, agricultural laborers are exempt with Trump stating that “the farmers will not be affected by this at all.”
President Trump says his immigration ban will last 60 days and after will assess any “need for any extension or modification:”
“It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad.” pic.twitter.com/v0mKes9If5
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 21, 2020
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“I have determined that we cannot jump start the domestic economy if Americans are forced to compete against an artificially enlarged labor pool caused by the introduction of foreign workers,” Trump said in the draft. “I have determined that the entry of most aliens as permanent or temporary workers in the immediate term would have adverse impacts on the national interest.”
A draft of the executive order obtained earlier by by Bloomberg News, which said the suspension would last for 90 days, includes exceptions for people seeking jobs in “food production and directly helping to protect the supply chain,” which could apply to farm workers. The ban would also not apply to health care or medical research professionals, according to the draft.
Technology industry workers living in the U.S. on H-1B visas, however, would have to provide updated certifications to the government that they are not displacing American workers. Refugees and asylum seekers would not be affected by the order, nor would spouses and children of U.S. citizens or permanent residents. The draft order, which has not been finalized, frames the immigration curbs as crucial to the Trump administration’s effort to revive the economy devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, by protecting what it calls “the marginal worker.”
In response to a question on Tuesday evening, Trump said he was considering a “secondary order” that would include more immigration restrictions. “I’ll be signing the primary order and then we have a secondary order that, if I want to do that, we’ll make that determination. We could that — yeah we could do that at a little bit different time if we want.” He did not elaborate.
Trump announced the measure in a tweet late Monday. As of midday Tuesday, the White House had provided no detail, but the Justice Department is reviewing the executive order for form and legality, one department official said. The substance remains up for debate internally as does whether it applies to non-immigrant visas held by students, physicians, teachers, or researchers, among others, according to a person close to the administration, who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity.
While the White House had asked the Department of Homeland Security to begin working on a ban last week, Trump’s tweet Monday caught immigration officials off guard. Early Republican reaction was mixed, and carve-outs were already emerging, such as the abovementioned farm and agriculture workers.
Trump’s sudden announcement comes as he looks to contain the health, economic and political fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, while shuttering the economy whose strength had been the base of his campaign only two months ago. At the same time the president has been pushing to reopen the economy which is losing $25BN in output per day according to Federal Reserve estimates for every day it remains closed. Previously, Trump had cited the virus as evidence to stay the course on his agenda, by further restricting U.S. borders and pushing to manufacture more goods domestically.
According to Bloomberg, “the practical effect of the order remains unclear” as immigration agencies and embassies have already stopped processing visas, meaning many of those seeking to immigrate to or visit the U.S. cannot do so. Meanwhile,
refugee admissions have been suspended since March 19 after the United Nations and International Organizations for Migration temporarily halted refugee travel. The U.S. suspension has been extended to May 15.While some have debated if Trump has a right to enforce such as uniform ban, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2018 found that the president has sweeping authority to restrict entry into the country — and might not even have to explain why. The ruling upheld Trump’s earlier controversial travel ban, which barred entry into the country from a group of mostly Muslim countries.
Providing further details, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, spoke to reporters Tuesday at the White House and called the suspension “a temporary issue” and said he didn’t know how long it would last. “We’ll have to wait and see. Look, we don’t know what the time horizon is going to be for the fight against this virus,” O’Brien said. “No one likes it. The president didn’t want to put travel restrictions in place, he didn’t want to put immigration restrictions in place, but we have to because of this terrible virus that’s been unleashed from foreign shores.”
The president has often said the pandemic has strengthened his desire to further restrict access to the U.S., and even to manufacture certain products on home soil. Meanwhile, Congressman Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, wrote on Twitter that the suspension was “not only an attempt to divert attention away from Trump’s failure to stop the spread of the coronavirus and save lives, but an authoritarian-like move to take advantage of a crisis and advance his anti-immigrant agenda.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 21:37 - Why China Is Unlikely To Be Held Liable For The Pandemic
Why China Is Unlikely To Be Held Liable For The Pandemic
Update: Shortly after this post was completed, two members announced that they would be introducing the amendment to the federal law discussed below. There are now at least seven lawsuits filed against China which is pushing a public relations campaign to deflect blame.
Joseph Stalin once said “a single death is a tragedy” and “a million deaths is a statistic.” The observation was chilling because it has a grain of truth about how we process tragedies. The same is sometimes true legally. If a government kills one person, it is a murder.
If it kills thousands of people, it is a policy. That cold fact soon may be evident in a growing number of class action lawsuits now brought against China over its failure to notify the world promptly of the coronavirus, along with renewed allegations that the outbreak may have started in a laboratory in Wuhan.
The question of Chinese responsibility, and of potential liability, became more acute this week. Many in the media have dismissed allegations of a release from the lab as a politically motivated conspiracy theory. It is the same narrative aggressively pushed by China. For some of us, however, the dismissal of the lab as the possible source always seemed willfully blind. It might not prove to be true, but it hardly seems a baseless idea since the lab was working on coronavirus research. We also know that China arrested and silenced people who tried to raise alarms.
The true origin of the coronavirus may be incredibly difficult to prove. The media reported on an account by scientists that the genome sequence of the coronavirus does not show any signs of being artificially manipulated or engineered. The coverage suggested that it is now established that it was a purely natural outbreak rather than the fault of China. That would not seem to definitively answer the question, however, of whether a lab employee had been infected by a bat carrying the coronavirus.
Two years ago, the State Department raised concerns over coronavirus research on bats at the lab and its allegedly lax practices. Both American and British intelligence officials recently found a credible possibility that the lab was the source and that the outbreak then spread at first through the Huanan Seafood Market. There is no proof of this, but dismissal of the theory occurred as some in the media condemned President Trump for his use of the terms “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese virus.” That narrative seemed to demand universal rejection of the theory that the outbreak might have been the result of negligence at the lab. There remains no evidence that supports the theory of an intentional release of the coronavirus.
While legitimate questions surround the origin, there is little debate that the Chinese government cost the world crucial weeks of preparation and containment by hiding the outbreak and by silencing those brave doctors who tried to warn of a new highly contagious respiratory illness.
There are even reports that the coronavirus may not have really emerged in Wuhan. Needless to say, had China fulfilled its responsibility to alert global experts and be transparent on early testing and data, many countries might have restricted international travel, ramped up production of medical supplies, or imposed social distancing rules much sooner than they did.
Many continue to advance the narrative that the outbreak is not the fault of China.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said “we are in the crisis that we are today” not “because of anything that China did” but “because of what this president did.” Some critics now call it the “Trump virus” and attack those who focus on the responsibility of China as Trump supporters peddling conspiracy theories. Such narratives are music to the ears of Chinese officials, and they undermine any hope of an investigation by Congress that examines the issue with no bias or agendas.
The single advantage to private litigation is that it comes with evidentiary discovery if that is even allowed. Such lawsuits are exceptionally difficult, and China is known for blocking depositions and document disclosures. At least four class action lawsuits have recently been filed in the United States. One lawsuit claims the coronavirus was designed as a biological weapon, an allegation that both experts and intelligence officials have rejected. All of the lawsuits allege intentional or negligent acts.
The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 extends blanket immunity to countries from most lawsuits in the United States. The exceptions are rather narrow and rarely accepted by American courts, which read this statute as clearly conveying the intent to discourage such lawsuits. The United States can be sued just as easily in foreign courts and thus favors immunity as the general rule. The most common exception under this law concerns commercial activities by foreign nations. For that reason, some lawsuits have stretched the facts to suggest that the wet market or lab in Wuhan were commercial enterprises effectively run or directed by China. That argument is likely to be far too attenuated for the courts.
One legal question could turn on Congress. In 2008, a lawsuit with some interesting analogies was filed against Saudi Arabia over the financing of the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. The kingdom had been accused of effectively releasing terrorists, rather than a virus, but the courts rejected those claims under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Congress then amended it to allow for such lawsuits with the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. President Obama vetoed it, but Congress overrode his veto. It is possible that Congress could do so again for this virus, which has now cost tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in losses.
Even with a legislative fix, China is unlikely to make people or information freely available and, even if it was found to be liable, we are back to what Stalin said. There is corollary in tort law for personal injuries in causation theory. Courts tend to cut off liability when causation gets too attenuated. In cases such as James Ryan versus New York Central Railroad, courts cut off liability for spreading fires by limiting it to natural direct damage rather than the ultimate damage. Courts ruled that spreading fires is caused by many reasons. Courts could also balk at liability for millions of cases, tens of thousands of deaths, and trillions of dollars in losses. They could rule that the outbreak was due to negligent decisions by countries.
Some of us would welcome an evidentiary discovery into the origin of the coronavirus. But Democrats and Republicans appear wedded to political narratives for their advantage. With questions about financial support for the lab by the Obama administration and allegations over a slow response by the Trump administration, we may have another farcical commission or investigation in which each party appoints loyalists to protect its interests. The 9/11 commission skillfully avoided holding anyone responsible despite negligent acts by government officials. However, litigation means building a provable case rather than maintaining a narrative. The brutal fact is that, in politics as in war, tens of thousands of deaths can just be a statistic. For some politicians, the real tragedy is who ends up with the blame.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 21:30 - Pentagon Pressures Mexico To Reopen Factories Vital To Making US Weapons
Pentagon Pressures Mexico To Reopen Factories Vital To Making US Weapons
It apparently took a global pandemic and corresponding economic shutdown of entire nations’ economies for the American public to realize that surprisingly, the US military relies heavily for supplies involved in weapons systems manufacturing just south of the border.
The Pentagon’s defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, Ellen Lord, urged at the start of this week that Mexico reopen those factories which many US defense firms rely on, especially aircraft manufacturers, previously shuttered due to COVID-19.
Image via Safran Group “I think one of the key things we have found out are some international dependencies,” Lord said Monday at a Pentagon press briefing. “Mexico right now is somewhat problematical for us but we’re working through our embassy, and then there are pockets in India, as well.”
This follows Lord previously saying she would write Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard “to ask for help to reopen international suppliers” in Mexico. “We are seeing impact on the industrial base by several pockets of closure internationally,” she had warned.
Lord said further in her Monday comments:
Domestically, we are seeing the greatest impacts in the aviation supply chain, ship-building, and small space launch. We are seeing impacts on the industrial base by several pockets of closure internationally. Particularly of note is Mexico, where we have a group of companies that are impacting many of our major primes.
Among major defense suppliers that have outsourced vital portions of their supply-chain to Mexico include General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Textron, General Electric, Honeywell, and others.
File image: S-70i Black Hawk helicopter For example, key electrical components in Lockheed’s Black Hawk and S-92 helicopters as well as fighter jets are manufactured in Chihuahua, Mexico under the aegis of French firm Safran – Mexico’s largest aerospace employer.
Military news site Defense One cites a United States International Trade Commission 2013 report which helps explain why over the past decade US defense firms’ supply chains have increasingly relocated to America’s southern neighbor.
“Lower manufacturing costs (largely due to a lower wage structure), proximity to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the United States, duty-free access to other important aerospace markets, and a Bilateral Aviation Safety Agreement (BASA) with the United States all contribute to Mexico’s greater appeal compared with other global manufacturing locations,” the report outlined.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 21:10 - China Slams Australia For "Taking Orders From The US" As Canberra Questions Coronavirus Origins: Live Updates
China Slams Australia For “Taking Orders From The US” As Canberra Questions Coronavirus Origins: Live Updates
Summary:
- Singapore extends lockdown until end of June, longest in the world
- Demonstrators fill the streets of Paris
- Cuomo holds Tuesday briefing in Buffalo
- Yonhap denies reports that NK’s KJU is dying
- Schumer revives hopes for Tuesday night Senate vote on relief bill
- Italy bond yields climb as PM Conte says EU rescue package proposal not enough
- US cases jump 5.7% on Tuesday, biggest jump since April 10
- Air Canada suspends flights to the US
- AG Barr says DoJ may sue some states with strict virus limits
- Congressional leaders strike deal on $320 billion bailout
- Spain caves, decides to let children under 14 leave the house unaccompanied
- Fla. reports 835 new cases
- Georgia, Tennessee & South Carolina unveil plans to start reopening economies by Tuesday
- Trump orders 60-day stop to immigration into US
- China slams Aussies for “taking instructions from US” by questioning virus response
- Cuomo had a good meeting with Trump, he says
- Senate passes bill to top off ‘PPP’
- Sweden sees another jump in cases
- Gottlieb says true # of US cases likely “10x higher” than official total
- New York sees total new cases decline for 6th day
- Gavin Newsom says “now is not the time” to reopen the country
- France suspends flights outside the Schengen area
- JPM has developed plan to get employees back in the office
- Global cases pass 2.5 million
- Ireland won’t allow mass gatherings until August “at the earliest”
- 540 federal inmates now infected
- US cases near 800k, with deaths passing 170k
* * *
Update (2045ET): Before we call it a night, we’re going to do a quick roundup of the major virus-related headlines from the last couple of hours.
Just as many were beginning to fear a vote on the package might be pushed back until Friday or even next week, the Senate managed to pass a $484 billion bill to replenish the ‘PPP’ as President Trump resorts to bashing Harvard and other recipients who don’t exactly ‘need’ the money to give it back, as it looks like criticisms that the program allotted too much money to too many applicants who didn’t really need it, leaving thousands of small businesses to shut down permanently. The bill also boosts spending for hospitals and coronavirus testing. The House plans to vote on the measure Thursday, and the bill is expected to pass but…who knows what might change between now and then.
Andrew Cuomo had some comments on his Tuesday meeting with the president:
I am heading to the White House to meet with President Trump to address testing.
We need partnership between the states and the federal government.
We will work together to ensure a safer, stronger future for everyone.
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) April 21, 2020
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I had a productive meeting with President Trump today.
We agreed that the state will be responsible for managing the actual tests in our laboratories.
The federal government will take on the responsibility of supply chain issues that are beyond states’ control.
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) April 21, 2020
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And in a warning that was reminiscent to the reaction to Australia’s restrictions on Huawei and support for the US during the Meng Wanzhou incident, China’s foreign ministry has accused the Aussies of “taking instructions from the US” by questioning the origins of the coronavirus.
SYDNEY, April 22 (Reuters) – China accused Australia of taking instructions from the United States over its criticism of Beijing’s handling of the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus, marking a further deterioration in ties between the two major trading partners.
— Vincent Lee (@Rover829) April 22, 2020
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Reuters: “It is well known that recently some people in the U.S. including high-level officials have been spreading anti-China ‘information virus’,” a statement from the Chinese embassy in Canberra said late on Tuesday.
— Vincent Lee (@Rover829) April 22, 2020
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Reuters: “These days, certain Australian politicians are keen to parrot what those Americans have asserted and simply follow them in staging political attacks on China.”
— Vincent Lee (@Rover829) April 22, 2020
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Australia recently joined the US in calling for a probe into the origins of the outbreak following reports that the virus may have leaked from a nearby biolab.
A second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire, the CDC warned Tuesday, in response to several governors announcing plans to start reopening their economies.
And, of course, President Trump officially suspended immigration into the US for 60 days.
Finally, the US Bureau of Prisons just reported that 540 federal inmates and 323 BoP employees have tested positive as the virus continues to spread through America’s federal prisons.
* * *
Update (1620ET): New York reported 4,178 new cases of coronavirus and 481 new deaths, bringing its statewide total to 251,690 cases and 14,828 deaths, still far and away the highest numbers in the country. It’s the lowest number of new cases since March 21, and represents the latest indication that the state is indeed on the “downward slope” as Cuomo has insisted…
* * *
Update (1605): The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the US climbed by 5.7% on Tuesday, the biggest jump since April 10. The US has a total of 814,587 cases as of 4pmET, according to JHU.
The big milestone today was cases broke above 800k earlier. We’re coming up on the three-month anniversary of when cases broke above 8,000, shocking everybody who thought that this outbreak wouldn’t even be as bad as SARs, and would fade in a few weeks without every really making an impact outside China. The US also has more than 41,000 recorded COVID 19-linked deaths now, nearly double the nearest rival (Italy), though nobody can say for sure how many thousands or millions remain uncounted around the world.
The ‘just the flu’ truthers laughed at the thought of it back then; but nobody’s laughing now.
* * *
Update (1600ET): Congressional leaders have purportedly reached a deal to provide $320 billion in additional funding for US small businesses, part of a $484 billion interim stimulus package announced on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in Spain, the government has caved to pressure and decided to roll back additional restrictions on children under 14 leaving the house unsupervised.
* * *
Update (1520ET): Just as the states expected to stay closed the longest are facing newfound pressure to reopen, California and New Jersey are posting record single-day increases in new cases and deaths. NJ reported a record 379 deaths over the last 24 hours, while California reported a 7% jump in cases and 5% jump in deaths, disrupting what had been an encouraging slowdown. Cali also announced that ICU cases have climbed 3.8% from Monday.
Is it just a coincidence that two blue states reported such alarming numbers hours after a Newsom interview triggered backlash by Californians pressing the governor to reopen the state more quickly?
Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez is facing criticism after announcing over the weekend that children under the age of 14 won’t be allowed to leave their homes without being accompanied by an adult. Spaniards had expected children to be allowed to leave home as part of a batch of new measures allowing more businesses to reopen and lifting other restrictions, even as Spain extends its lockdown deadline into May.
Meanwhile, the Dutch government has announced plans to gradually relax the country’s lockdown, beginning with the partial reopening of primary schools next month. Prime minister Mark Rutte on Tuesday said primary school children can attend school beginning May 1 and held open the possibility of secondary schools following from June 1.
The numbers of new hospitalizations of coronavirus patients needing intensive care and of COVID-19 deaths have continued to decline in France after more than a month of confinement for the population, the government said on Tuesday. Jérôme Salomon, director-general of health, released figures showing an additional 387 hospital deaths and another 144 deaths in old people’s homes and other care homes over the previous 24 hours. France’s total death toll rose to 20,796, of which 12,900 were recorded in hospitals and 7,896 in homes. The number of COVID-19 cases confirmed by testing in the country is 117,324. “The epidemic is massive,” Salomon said, noting that 83,000 people had been hospitalized while suffering from coronavirus since the beginning of March.
* * *
Update (1450ET): Global Times editor Hu Xijin issued another tweet mocking President Trump’s support for the ‘reopen now’ protesters, claiming “the president supports protesters, not scientists”…”the America is lost.”
Fighting COVID-19 is bound to be a protracted battle, which will test endurance of each country. The American society is obviously impatient as anti-lockdown protests are spreading. The president supports protesters, not scientists. The America is lost.
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) April 21, 2020
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Just in case Trump was wondering how his geopolitical adversaries (and probably more than a few allies) view his decision to court the protesters.
* * *
Update (1405ET): Sweden reports 545 new cases of the coronavirus, and 185 new deaths, for a total of 15,322 cases and 1,765 deaths, as cases continue to accelerate in the Scandinavian country which opted to skip lockdowns and never really shuttered its economy, or its borders.
And in another notable milestone for the outbreak, the number of confirmed cases in India has surpassed 20k, as the government finally takes its first tentative steps toward alleviating the lockdown.
Banxico announced a few minutes ago that it would slash its benchmark interest rate by 50 bp, sparking a slide in the Mexican peso against the dollar.
* * *
Update (1340ET): As Canada reels from its worst shooting in history (the death toll has been revised up to 19), the total confirmed cases climbed to 37,933, while its total deaths hit 1,753.
Meanwhile, Air Canada has cancelled all fights between Canada and the US after April 26.
Air Canada says it is suspending all Canada-US cross-border flights after April 26, until at least May 22. The airline says it had been maintaining ‘limited service to 11 U.S. destinations from its three Canadian hubs, primarily to facilitate the repatriation of Canadians.’ pic.twitter.com/QKV8WSzLXD
— CBC News Alerts (@CBCAlerts) April 21, 2020
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Speaking of mass flight cancellations – something we’d finally thought we’d seen the end of, but… – France cancelled all flights from France to destinations outside the Schengen area.
* * *
Update (1210ET): The National Institutes of Health has released new treatment guidelines for doctors and other health-care providers treating patients sickened by COVID-19.
#NIH issued treatment guidelines for #COVID19. The Guidelines, developed by an expert US panel, are intended to help healthcare providers on the frontlines fighting COVID-19. Posted online, they will be updated often as new data & information emerges. https://t.co/CrLz1x2LXs pic.twitter.com/Y5ACYYsw7s
— NIH (@NIH) April 21, 2020
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Political news out of Washington over the last 24 hours has mostly fixated on negotiations on another relief bill to replenish the ‘PPP’, aside from more evidence showing more FBI mismanagement and rule-breaking associated with the Russia probe.
On Tuesday, AG Barr said that states with “strict virus limits” might be prosecuted by the DoJ to, we assume, push them to reopen their economies more quickly.
Again, this is a move with terrible political consequences for President Trump, as it will drag more responsibility for the outcome of the outbreak – an outcome that can only be negative – to the president’s door.
Italy has also seen the total number of recovered patients reach 50,000, another positive milestone.
* * *
Update (1200ET): With European markets closed for the day, Italy has just reported its coronavirus stats from the past 24 hours, and they started with a jump in deaths day-over-day: 534 were reported over the past day, compared with 454 reported on Monday. It also reported a notable uptick in new cases, though the single-day jump on Tuesday remained below the highs from a couple of weeks ago.
Italy’s Civil Protection Service reported 2,729 new cases, compared with 2,256 new cases reported a day earlier. The countrywide total was 183,957.
Though some blamed the weekend and a larger number of tests run on Tuesday vs Monday for the jump in new cases and deaths. Moreover, there was a silver lining: for the first time, the number of patients deemed ‘recovered’ over the last 24 hours nearly passed the number of new cases confirmed.
Italian bond yields shot higher on Tuesday as Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte criticized the EU’s rescue package for economies that have been most badly hurt by the outbreak, like Italy’s. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that the EU could break apart if not enough is done to help countries like Italy and Spain (and, presumably, France).
The parsimonious Germans might doom the whole thing by allotting plenty of their tax dollars for their own people, and none for the Italians.
These tensions are bound to come to a head on Thursday, when the EU holds a summit on Thursday to discuss the fiscal response to the virus.
Following a controversy over Wall Street’s cultural resistance toward working from home where traders at JPM reportedly sickened a whole floor after refusing to stop coming to work despite being infected with the coronavirus (which they didn’t learn until later), JPM has reportedly formulated a plan to get its employees back in the office.
Finally, back in the UK, 4,301 new cases were reported as the number of tests rose, bringing the countrywide total to 129,044.
* * *
Update (1140ET): Florida reported that it’s case total jumped 835 cases to 27,495, which leaves it in 8th place in the US. The state reopened beaches over the weekend, a decision that has aroused much outrage.
Hundreds of people are gathering in Florida’s re-opened beaches, as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the state. pic.twitter.com/EikH2DQyhY
— AJ+ (@ajplus) April 20, 2020
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As the continued begging the federal government for more tests, Cuomo explained that one reason for the shortage was the lack of chemical reagents from overseas.
* * *
Update (1130ET): Three months ago, when we reported that the global total of confirmed coronavirus infections might number in the millions – citing projections released by credible epidemiologists who had begun publicly sharing their views – we were dismissed by some as ‘alarmists’.
Now, almost three months to the day when the number of confirmed coronavirus cases (almost all in mainland China) surpassed the global total from the SARS outbreak, the total cases have surpassed 2.5 million.
The Irish Times just reported that Ireland will ban all mass gatherings until August “at the earliest.”
* * *
Update (1115ET): Just when Britain had hoped that the pace of COVID-19 deaths had finally started to flatten, the UK has reported a sharp jump in deaths, one of its highest single-day readings in the last 2 weeks.
The news broke a two-day streak of falling fatalities.
The Department of Health and Social Care reported 828 today, up from 449 yesterday.
As of 9am 21 April, 535,342 tests have concluded, with 18,206 tests on 20 April.
397,670 people have been tested of which 129,044 tested positive.
As of 5pm on 20 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus, 17,337 have sadly died. pic.twitter.com/rLnm7MWxEw
— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) April 21, 2020
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As of 5pm London Time on Monday, the UK’s confirmed deaths stood at 17,337, the health department said. The more than 800 deaths reported Tuesday is above last week’s average of 778.
Too bad…it seems every time the UK takes one step forward, the virus seems to invade another nursing home, or some other densely populated area, producing a dramatic resurgence.
The UK and the US have seen some of the highest mortality rates in the West in recent weeks. As of 9am on Tuesday, 535,342 tests have been completed in the UK, including 18,206 on April 19. England again reported 778 of the deaths, in keeping with precedence of almost all the deaths and cases coming from England. Meanwhile, England has recorded an 82% rise in deaths compared with yesterday’s figures.
Finally, as Cuomo wrapped up his press conference in Buffalo, he confirmed that the total cases in NY have risen 4,178 to 251,690. It’s the 6th straight day of declining pace of new cases.
* * *
Update (1100ET): Gov Cuomo is holding Tuesday’s briefing in Buffalo.
In Buffalo holding a briefing on #Coronavirus. Watch Live. https://t.co/pxL3diFNii
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) April 21, 2020
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The theme of today’s press conference: “Think regionally” – Cuomo said that different regions of his enormous state are experiencing differences in the rate at which the ‘curve’ of new cases is flattening. This means different areas of the state will reopen at different times. “We have to think regionally…and act based on the facts on the ground,” the governor tweeted.
As always, Cuomo released data on the deaths in the state over the last 24 hours at the beginning of the press conference: On Tuesday, the state reported 481 deaths, only slightly higher than the 478 virus-related deaths reported on Monday.
The number of patients requiring hospitalization has also stabilized, according to the charts below:
As we noted above, Cuomo is starting to plan out how to reopen his state one region at a time, while also continuing to cooperate with other northeastern states who joined his ‘alliance’.
* * *
Update (1030ET): During an appearance on “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom says now is “not the time” to start pulling back on coronavirus restrictions, as his state gives millions of dollars away to undocumented aliens while insisting that its poorest residents stretch their dwindling dollars further and further.
The worst is not over for Calif. and “if we all pull back, we could see a second wave that makes this pale in comparison,” Newsom said.
“ICU numbers are beginning to flatten but we’re not seeing the decline that we need” to roll back restrictions, Newsom said.
Hundreds of people converged on California’s state capital in Sacramento to protest the state’s indefinite stay at home order, and Newsom’s signaling that the order will remain into place well into May.
Asked whether students would return to school in September, whether baseball would happen in the summer and whether – crucially – we’ll vote “as normal” in November, Newsom said “no” on all three.
So much needs to happen before life can return to normal, Newsom said. Schools and all businesses will need to reconfigure floor plans and the notion of people coming together in large crowds until a vaccine or “successful widely distributed…treatment” is found.
Our question: As these super-progressive governors keep talking about a “new normal” where people must maintain social distancing at all times until we get herd immunity or a vaccine. But do they realize that this simply isn’t realistic? Restaurants won’t be able to do business, full stop. Even if widespread WFH policies become the new normal, these drastic reconfigurations of everything from schools to businesses to entertainment to life…as we know it…sound increasingly fanciful – especially when places like Norway have had some success combatting the outbreak without mass shutdowns.
With some southern states preparing to reopen, the big shutdown theory is going to be put to the ultimate test: initially, we were told the shutdowns would only be necessary to ensure that hospitals won’t be overwhelmed. Though hospitals in NYC and a few other places came close, there’s no question that the rate of hospitalizations and ICU patients has been falling across the country. Even Italy is starting to relax its lockdown, and so is Spain, despite extending some of the country’s notably strict restrictions until May 9.
Does Newsom really think that small businesses will simply be able to “stay closed” for 2 years, living off government handouts during the interim? We’re really starting to wonder.
Watch the interview below:
* * *
Update (0820ET): The word out of Washington overnight was that a vote on the next relief bill likely won’t happen until tomorrow. But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that there’s a chance that a vote in the Senate could happen tonight, as new progress has been made on negotiations for a $125 billion slug of cash that will go directly to ‘unbanked’ and ‘mom-and-pop’ stores. The Democratic leader added that “we will not be able to open up America without a national testing strategy.” This, despite Dr. Fauci saying last week that universal testing is not a mandatory condition to start reopening economies.
* * *
Update (0730ET): Last night, just as Georgia Gov Brian Kemp was beginning his Monday press briefing, the conservative Republican made an announcement that instantly horrified the mainstream media: The state would begin loosening some lockdown restrictions on Friday, and that by Monday, businesses from gyms to beauty salons in his state would be allowed to reopen.
Hundreds of talking heads immediately pointed out that the state is hardly on track to meet the guidelines set out by the White House. But by Tuesday morning, several additional states, including Tennessee and South Carolina, had joined Georgia in planning to begin lifting restrictions before May 1.
As new hotspots continue to form across the country, including in Ohio, Michigan and other states that appear to be headed toward reopening in a few weeks, these states have made the calculation that the damage to their economies simply isn’t worth the risk to life and health. Georgians will be able to dine in restaurants again by the end of the day on Monday.
Some states are flinging the doors back open. In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee said he had opted not to extend his “safer-at-home” order that is set to expire on April 30. According to Lee, “the vast majority of businesses in 89 counties” will be allowed to reopen on May 1. Businesses in Ohio are expected to reopen on that date as well.
Others are taking a slightly more measured approach. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster will allow some retail businesses, including department stores, that had previously been labeled “nonessential” would be allowed to reopen on Tuesday. But even after opening, they must abide by social distancing guidelines, the governor said. Residents will also be able to access the state’s beaches on Tuesday.
Ohio Gov.Mike DeWine said on “Meet the Press” that he would move to “try and open this economy…[without getting] a lot of people killed,” though he didn’t give an exact date, it has been reported that the process will begin next month.
While the global case total hovered slightly below 2.5 million, as of 8amET, Johns Hopkins had tallied 787,960 cases of the virus in the US (while some estimates have put the true total infected at closer to 5 million). As we pointed out Sunday night, recent signs suggest that the lockdowns have worked to flatten the curve: In the US, daily new cases are down 33% from the peak 10 days ago. 6% of the US counties have reported zero new cases in the past 7 days. And 7 states have announced plans to start reopening in the next two weeks, equivalent to roughly one-fifth of GDP.
Speaking on “Squawk Box” Tuesday morning, former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb said “it might be possible” that 1 million people have been exposed to the virus in metro New York (meaning NYC alone; that’s roughly 1/9 people), the latest suggestion that the US mortality rate is much lower than the official numbers reflect – one more reason for governors to move ahead with reopening.
If you’re wondering what the situation is in your state, here’s a roundup of what
Before we go, we just wanted to highlight this tweet from the Federalist’s Sean Davis.
Democrats and media aren’t demanding indefinite lockdowns for public health reasons. Democrats know the booming economy was Trump’s biggest political advantage, so they made the deliberate decision to destroy tens of millions of jobs and livelihoods for their own political gain.
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 21, 2020
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Just some food for thought.
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After a day of historic insanity in the American oil market, the Brent international oil benchmark is down more than 40% already Tuesday morning as investors continue to digest reports from late last night that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un might be in critical condition (a Trump Administration source said ‘yes’ while South Korea’s Yonhap said ‘no’) and a Tweet from President Trump that he would be “suspending” immigration into the US due to the coronavirus. The news prompted a whipsaw in equity futures late last night.
While liberals lose their minds, it’s worth remembering that immigration into the US is already effectively shut down. Refugee resettlement has been put on hold, visa offices have been shuttered, and citizenship ceremonies have been put on hold. CNN said it’s unclear how this will impact green-card holders.
In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2020
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Meanwhile, in the latest indication that nobody really knows what’s going to happen with this outbreak, Singapore announced just minutes ago that it will extend its mandatory stay-at-home order until June, making Singapore’s lockdown the longest currently on record.
Singapore’s Straits Times reported that, in a televised national address, Singapore’s leader PM Lee Hsien Loong said that after yet another record jump in new cases – an outbreak that has been tied to camps of migrant workers who represent a ‘forgotten class’ in Singapore society – his government has decided to extend the densely-populated city-state’s lockdown for another month until June, making Singapore’s the longest lockdown extension in the world.
In addition to extending the lockdown, Singapore is paring down the number of ‘essential’ businesses allowed to remain open, in effect ratcheting up the pressure on its economy.
The city-state reported another 625 new cases on Tuesday, bringing its total case number to 7,213 according to BNO News, in a country of 5.7 million.
While Lee insisted that Singapore’s ‘circuit breaker’ – don’t call it a lockdown – has been effective at suppressing the spread, Lee stressed that Singapore cannot be complacent, and that the number of “unlinked” cases has been stubbornly high, suggesting a “hidden reservoir” of cases in the community still.
Singapore was praised for its rapid and intense methods to combat the outbreak, rolled out back in February when the virus first started to spread outside Wuhan and mainland China. Among its toolkit was a protocol that required a team of investigators to trace contacts of newly positive patients within 2 hours to prevent further spread.
If you’re curious about how Singapore went from poster-child of effective virus response to one of the worst-hit countries in Asia ex-China, the WSJ can explain.
The virus found a blind spot: migrant workers. Hundreds of thousands of workers from Bangladesh, India and other countries live in dormitories, often 10 to 20 people to one room. They climb into packed vans on their way to build the city’s gleaming office towers and condominiums.
More than three-quarters of Singapore’s 9,125 cases now come from dormitories. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an address Tuesday that the clusters in these facilities had remained “largely contained” and not spread to the wider community. Authorities were working to detect any transmission from dormitories to populations outside them early, he said.
Mr. Lee said Singapore’s lockdown – which began earlier this month and was intended to last four weeks – would be extended by four weeks beyond that, until June 1. The list of essential services allowed to remain open would be pared down, he said, to further reduce the risk of transmission among workers who keep these going.
But the big flaw was that Singapore overlooked the densely populated camps of migrant workers who typically fill the lowest level of jobs in Singaporean society. The second round of Singapore’s outbreak has been largely centered around these camps, with thousands of migrant workers becoming infected.
During Lee’s fourth national address to the nation since the virus emerged, the PM explained that the current measures would remain in place until May 4, at which time the city-state will start trying to slowly reopen society, using some of the same cautious criteria adopted by New Zealand and Germany.
To accomplish this, workplaces will be closed to further reduce the number of workers keeping essential services going. Some hot spots, such as popular wet markets, remain a problem, as large groups of people continue to congregate there, Lee said.
Lee noted that while there will be some “privacy concerns”, ramping up contact tracing via the “TraceTogether” contact tracing app – which all residents of Singapore have been asked to download – is a critical priority for the government as it moves to stamp out the virus.
“There will be some privacy concerns, but we will have to weigh these against the benefits of being able to exit from the circuit breaker and stay open safely.”
And as far as migrant workers are concerned, Lee promised that “we will take care of you like we take care of Singaporeans.”
Roughly one-fifth of the world, led by India, is starting the painful process of reopening. And countries that are refusing to start lifting some restrictions are facing growing unrest, including in France, where protesters poured into the streets of Paris to protest the lockdown and alleged mistreatment of minorities under lockdown conditions.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 20:59 - The Twisted Political Considerations That Will Extend Lockdowns & Deepen This Depression
The Twisted Political Considerations That Will Extend Lockdowns & Deepen This Depression
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
For better or worse, COVID-19 has become the most important political issue of the 2020 election. And it is very unfortunate that this pandemic has erupted in an election year, because for many of our politicians finger pointing has become much more important than finding solutions. In particular, Democrats seem quite eager to exploit any stumbles by President Trump, and many on the left are absolutely thrilled that Joe Biden’s poll numbers have improved over the past couple of weeks. But if this pandemic rapidly subsides over the next few months and the economy dramatically improves by November, that could potentially be enough to put Trump over the top. The stakes are incredibly high for both sides, many regard this upcoming election as the most important in modern American history, and no quarter will be given as operatives from both parties seek any advantage that they can possibly get.
From the very beginning of his presidency, top Democrats, the mainstream media and activists on the left have usually responded to any stance that Trump has taken by immediately taking the exact opposite position.
If Trump said the sky was blue, they would say it was red. And if Trump said that the sky was red, they would say that it was blue.
This coronavirus pandemic has given us quite a few examples of this phenomenon. When Trump decided that this pandemic was serious enough that travel with China should be shut down, they immediately slammed him for being “racist” and they insisted that he was overreacting.
And when Trump started touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment, they immediately started coming up with all sorts of reasons why people should not be taking it.
Whatever Trump does or says, the left instinctively has a negative reaction to it.
In recent days, Trump has encouraged states all over the country to start reopening their economies, and anti-lockdown protests all over America have become very pro-Trump in nature…
Anti-lockdown protests continued to gather momentum across the United States Monday as armed demonstrators waving Trump 2020 flags and ignoring social distancing rules called for America to reopen immediately.
Crowds gathered close to one another in North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California, calling for their ‘liberty’. Armed militia groups protested alongside young families and Americans out of work, all calling for businesses to be reopened.
Meanwhile, those on the left have been loudly denouncing the anti-lockdown protests, they have been arguing that it would be “dangerous” to end the lockdowns too soon, and top Democrats on both coasts are telling us that the lockdowns in their states could last for several more months at least.
And on Monday, a group of 45 “leading thinkers” on the left released a report which warned that reopening the country too soon could cause “a resurgence of COVID-19 that would cost the US economy trillions of dollars”…
In a report titled ‘Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience’ released Monday, more than 45 leading economists, social scientists, lawyers and ethicists warned that sending Americans back to work too quickly will likely cause a resurgence of COVID-19 that would cost the US economy trillions of dollars.
The experts labeled COVID-19 ‘a profound threat to our democracy, comparable to the Great Depression and World War II’ as they outlined the three main components to safely ending quarantine: testing, tracing and supported isolation – a combination known by the acronym TTSI.
So how long do these “leading thinkers” believe that we should extend the lockdowns for?
Well, their report suggests that we will need to be cranking out 20 million tests a day before it will be safe to reopen the entire country…
Test producers will need to deliver 5 million tests per day by early June to safely open parts of the economy by late July, according to the report. To “fully re-mobilize the economy,” the country will need to see testing grow to 20 million a day, the report suggests.
“We acknowledge that even this number may not be high enough,” according to the report.
It is difficult to believe that the authors of that report were serious when they put that in there.
I don’t think that we will ever get to the point where 20 million Americans are being tested per day, and that is certainly not going to happen in 2020.
Needless to say, there is a perverse incentive for those on the left to drag out these lockdowns for as long as possible, because the worse the economy does the harder it is going to be for Trump to win in November.
So whether they are doing it consciously or unconsciously, there seems to be a desire on the left to squeeze as much drama out of this pandemic as they possibly can and to blame Trump for everything that has gone wrong.
I think that one nominee for the biggest drama queen during this crisis so far should be CNN host Brian Stelter. Just check out what he tweeted on Saturday…
“Last night, I hit a wall,” Stelter tweeted on Saturday. “Gutted by the death toll. Disturbed by the govt’s shortcomings. Dismayed by political rhetoric that bears no resemblance to reality. Worried about friends who are losing jobs; kids who are missing school; and senior citizens who are living in fear.”
“I crawled in bed and cried for our pre-pandemic lives,” he said. “Tears that had been waiting a month to escape. I wanted to share because it feels freeing to do so. Now is not a time for faux-invincibility. Journos are living this, hating this, like everyone else. ”
Yes, this pandemic has been a great tragedy, but as I pointed out yesterday it isn’t the end of the world.
Life will go on, and as long as our hospitals are not being overwhelmed, we need to let people get back to work.
But most Democratic governors are not willing to even consider such a move yet, because ending the lockdowns now would be seen as an admission that Trump and the anti-lockdown protesters were right.
Plus, many of them realize that ending the lockdowns “too quickly” could give Trump a boost in November.
So even though some conservative states such as Georgia are moving very quickly to lift their “shelter-in-place” orders, many liberal states are going to drag their lockdowns out for as long as they think they can.
All of this is extremely unfortunate, because our approach to this pandemic should have nothing to do with political considerations.
But these days virtually everything in America has taken on a political tone, and that is only going to intensify the closer we get to election day.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 20:50 - Trump Demands Harvard Return Stimulus Money; Harvard Responds It Has No Idea What Trump Is Talking About
Trump Demands Harvard Return Stimulus Money; Harvard Responds It Has No Idea What Trump Is Talking About
The resentment against publicly-traded companies and major corporations and enterprise who abused the Treasury’s $349 billion small and medium business bailout by applying for the Paycheck Protection Program is growing.
Earlier today, we reported that over 80 publicly listed companies tapped the PPP – which is really a grant if used to pay wages – which not surprisingly ran out of funds just days after it was launched. The most prominent public company to take the funds was Shake Shack, which sparked backlash after receiving $10 million in PPP funds through JPMorgan. Sensing pitchforks in its its immediate future, the company announced on Monday that it would be returning the funds. It then sold 3.4 million shares of stock raising $136MM in gross proceeds.
Another company which tapped into the PPP was Ohio-based biotech Athersys, which received $1 million through the program despite raising nearly $60 million in a Monday stock offering after its shares have nearly doubled YTD. Meanwhile Nikola Motor – backed by Fidelity and hedge fund ValueAct, announced a $4 billion valuation in early March when it announced a merger with VectoIQ. The company borrowed $4 million from the PPP according to a disclosure. Ruth’s Chris steakhouse made $42 million in profit on $468 million in revenue last year, yet tapped $20 million from the PPP.
The figure below lists the 40 largest PPP loans that inexplicably went not to small businesses but to major corporations which not only have access to institutional debt capital markets – unlike most mom and pop shops – but can also sell stock and raise cash overnight, a luxury that America’s small business – which employ over half the US labor force -do not have.
One especially large organization that supposedly received millions in bailout loans was none other than Harvard.
Yesterday we reported that as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act, $14 billion was set aside to support higher education institutions – ostensibly those without billions already in the bank. Harvard, which has a $40 billion endowment, was set to receive $8.7 million in federal aid. Harvard points out that at least half of which has been mandated for emergency financial aid grants to students, which we would note that they can cover themselves
Hilariously, Harvard’s Crimson pointed to the risk that their endowment could shrink due to market volatility – maybe it will request a bailout next too? – and that the University’s financial situation is “grave.”
None of the made an impression on President Donald Trump, however, who during Tuesday’s Wu Flu briefing, said he plans on asking Harvard University to give back more than $8 million given to them under the CARES ACT.
“I’m going to request it,” Trump told reporters at the White House, singling out the Ivy League school. “Harvard is going to pay back the money. They shouldn’t be taking it.”
“I’m not going to mention any other names, but when I saw Harvard — they have one of the largest endowments anywhere in the country, maybe in the world. They’re going to pay back the money,” the president added.
Asked if he was confident he would be successful in asking Harvard to return the money, Trump said that if the university “won’t do that, then we won’t do something else.” The president also noted the size of the university’s $40 billion endowment.
President Trump: “Harvard’s going to pay back the money… They shouldn’t have taken it.” pic.twitter.com/moC8WrWJ54
— The Hill (@thehill) April 21, 2020
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Harvard responded shortly after Trump’s demand, saying it did not receive funds through the Paycheck Protection Program and that the school is committed to using all of the funds to cover financial assistance to students.
“Like most colleges and universities, Harvard has been allocated funds as part of the CARES Act Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. Harvard has committed that 100% of these emergency higher education funds will be used to provide direct assistance to students facing urgent financial needs due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain said. Again, it was unclear how said funds were so critical to the Harvard educational system – which charges $70,000 a year (for video conferences) and has $40 billion in its piggybank – that the college would be unable to provide “assistance” to students facing financial needs if it did not get money that could have gone to some other business that actually needs it.
“This financial assistance will be on top of the support the University has already provided to students – including assistance with travel, providing direct aid for living expenses to those with need, and supporting students’ transition to online education,” Swain added.
So, basically, bailout funds that are footed by the US taxpayer – in the form of trillion in new debt that will be repaid by all Americans, are now going to poor Harvard students. Wait, did we say “poor” Harvard student? According to the NYT, the median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800 (95 percentile), and 67% of students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households. About 15% come from families in the top 1% of American wealth distribution.
* * *
Harvard is just one example of the thousands of companies which used their banker connections to get to the front of the line in getting “much needed” stimulus funds, even as millions of small business are waiting to this day for their loans.
“I will comment there have been some big businesses that have taken these loans. I was pleased to see that Shake Shack returned the money,” Mnuchin said. “The intent of this was not for big public companies that have access to capital.”
Mnuchin also said he wanted to give companies the “benefit of the doubt” by assuming they didn’t understand the requirements but warned of consequences for large businesses that take advantage of the program. Asked to expand on what those consequences could be, Mnuchin did not provide any specifics.
“We’re going to put up very clear guidance so that people understand what the certification is, what it means if you are a big company,” Mnuchin said.
Some have called for reform to the program, run by the Small Business Administration, in order to ensure that the funds go to small businesses in need.
The good news is that so far there has been little rampant fraud as some feared. Instead, the crony capitalism that the US has become so famous for was on full display, and instead of bailing out the poor, the US government – together with the Fed – has once again bailed out those who spend $10 million for their annual private jet maintenance.
In short, nothing has changed.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 20:35 - Whitney Tilson Spams Inboxes Selling "Partnerships" In Newsletter That Don't Come With Any Equity
Whitney Tilson Spams Inboxes Selling “Partnerships” In Newsletter That Don’t Come With Any Equity
Things appear to be going off the rails for Whitney Tilson. Just days ago we wrote about how the failed hedge fund manager was spamming inboxes across Wall Street congratulating himself for calling the market bottom.
What followed appeared to be collective groaning among people on social media about how often Tilson’s e-mail spam was hitting their inbox and how some people were having trouble unsubscribing from his list. In response, one social media user said of Tilson’s e-mail list:
“They say herpes stays with you forever, but even it doesn’t come 3-5 times per day.”
Now Tilson is using his inbox spamming skills to try and sell a $6,000 “Founding Partner” membership to his newsletter. The catch? There’s no real equity stake. The deal appears to just be $6,000 to gain “lifetime access” to Tilson’s research. As part of Tilson’s used-car-salesman-esque pitch of these $6,000 memberships, he recently put out what can only be described as an insanely cringeworthy video where he:
1. Says his newsletter “could be the most profitable financial relationship you ever enter”
2. Uses the term “the sky’s the limit”
3. Says he envisions a day when becoming a “founding partner” could cost over $30,000
4. Compares membership in his newsletter to “an elite country club, like Augusta National”
5. Tells people they can find financial success that allows them to “Go on that dream vacation you’ve always wanted to”
6. …Or “Pay off your mortgage early”
7. …Or “Buy a condo in Costa Rica”
Finally, he assured the saps willing to hand over $6,000 to him that they will “become a part of my inner circle and I will always treat you like a VIP.”
We’ll pay $6,000 to not become a part of your inner circle, Whitney.
Failed Fund Manager @WhitneyTilson marketing $6000 “partnerships” in his firm, without offering any equity…#Readthefineprint
cc: @BillAckman @SethKlarman @DavidEin @SECEnfDirectors pic.twitter.com/ytYMUt4BQd— GuruLeaks (@Guruleaks1) April 20, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Oh and again – don’t get confused by the word “partner”. You will be offered zero equity stake in Tilson’s business for forking over $6,000. One of Tilson’s recent e-mails states:
I’d love for you to become my “partner” – and watch the value of your “partnership” stake grow as our business grows.
Now by “partner”, I do not mean receiving shares of my company or anything. Instead, Founding Partners gain access to every research product we at Empire Financial Research ever publish for life.
He finished that e-mail, which went out about noon EST on April 20, by stating:
You will never have another chance to become a “Founding Partner” in my business. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. You might kick yourself down the road if you do.
Just three hours later, another e-mail was sent out to his list that said:
This is your last chance….Remember, Whitney Tilson’s “founding partner” offer will be much higher the next time you see it. Please, call us right away if you are still on the fence.
So, which is it? Never have another chance or inevitably will be available again in the future?
Recall, Tilson is most famous for blowing up two hedge funds before becoming a newsletter writer. As a reminder, Tilson famously
blew upclosed Kase Capital Management in 2017 (5 years after shuttering its predecessor T2) aftergetting his ass handed to him by the market“sustained underperformance”.“My returns my first 12 years were much better than my returns the last 5 years,” he said during a CNBC interview in 2016. “And that’s sort of irritating and embarrassing. Because I’m a very public figure.”
“Reporting sustained underperformance to you was making me miserable,” Tilson wrote to his investors in 2017.
He continued: “I couldn’t in good conscience continue to manage your money unless I had a high degree of confidence that I could turn things around within a reasonable time frame.” And with that, he wasn’t managing money anymore.
Recall, Tilson had relaunched his first fund, T2 Partners, as Kase Capital in 2012 after losing 24.9% in 2011.
In addition to hawking his newsletter, Tilson has also been spotted sending out e-mails about his most recent colonoscopy.
“I had a colonoscopy last week and, while the prep wasn’t so fun, overall it was a perfectly tolerable experience and I’m glad I did it,” Tilson said in a 2017 e-mail he fired out to his mailing list.
He also made PowerPoint slides.
If you look really close at Whitney Tilson’s asshole you can see that there is a Mariachi band in there. pic.twitter.com/n2OX4TY1sd
— Senator Eloise Williams, CFA, MBA, PHD (doctor), (@thestinkmarket) April 16, 2020
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 20:30 - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Rejoices At Negative Oil Prices
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Rejoices At Negative Oil Prices
Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejoiced at the news that U.S crude oil prices had dropped into negative territory earlier this week, tweeting “You absolutely love to see it.”
In the tweet, which she later deleted, Ocasio-Cortez also wrote:
“This along with record low interest rates means it’s the right time for a worker-led, mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet.”
Ocasio-Cortez is perhaps the most vocal opponent of the U.S. oil industry in Congress, along with Bernie Sanders, and she was also the author of a Green New Deal that envisaged a shift to a completely renewable energy future.
Some analysts have estimated that this shift would cost tens of trillions of dollars.
Oil prices turned negative yesterday, with West Texas Intermediate falling below minus $37 a barrel as traders scrambled to ditch their May delivery oil contracts to avoid actual delivery that would have come at a steep cost as free storage space shrinks.
However, Ocasio-Cortez’s joy at this price development may be both ill-timed and misguided. As Senator Ted Cruz tweeted in response,
“Which part of the millions of blue-collar workers losing their jobs & small refineries closing their doors forever is what you ‘love to see’ (per your deleted tweet) @AOC? Asking for those in Texas & across USA whose livelihoods (ability to put food on the table) are AT RISK.”
But job loss aside, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez appears to be confused about the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the renewable energy industry. The nature of this relationship is striking: when oil is cheap, renewable energy reaps no benefits because consumption of the cheap commodity increases.
Granted, right now, we are in a unique situation when oil is cheap because there is no demand for it and the supply is too high. However, demand for electricity, including from renewable sources, is also down because of the lockdowns. Solar and wind industry representatives even warned of massive job losses in their industry because of the pandemic. In other words, the renewable energy industry is also in trouble—it’s not just bad old oil. And this trouble, along with the 22 million workers that lost their jobs over than last four weeks alone, will make her mass green investment vision particularly challenging to materialize.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/21/2020 – 20:10
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