- Mayor Of Nice Demands "Health Passports" To Enter/Leave France
Mayor Of Nice Demands “Health Passports” To Enter/Leave France
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared a new antibody test from diagnostics giant Roche Holding AG on Sunday, who is expected to flood the Western world with more than 100 million tests by the end of 2020, will determine if individuals have already been exposed to COVID-19 and presumably have immunity from it.
What the antibody test is, is a precursor to “immunity cards” or, as some call it “health passports.” Already, even before the tests are rolled out, some countries have suggested that health passports could be next. France is the latest country to call for new travel rules during the pandemic that would firmly restrict movement in the country, reported RT News.
The Mayor of Nice urged French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe last week to introduce new travel controls by using health passports in regions of France that border other countries.
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, posted a letter on Facebook one day after Philippe unveiled plans to ease stay-at-home restrictions for the country that would start in May, these rules could limit a person’s travel distance to 62 miles from their home.
Philippe said people need to adjust to a post-corona world where they must “learn to live with the virus” as restrictions are lifted.
Estrosi said the new passport would show the bearer tested negative for COVID-19 in the past 48-hours before travel. The proposal comes as severe lockdowns introduced on March 17 are being relaxed. He said health passports are likely the only method in fully relaxing lockdown measures.
France is not the only country that has spoken about introducing health passports. Other countries in Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Germany, and the UK, have also talked about the new travel rules. Even in the US, Bill Gates has pushed for immunity passports and the erection of the surveillance state to combat the virus.
Last month, we noted with the global economy in freefall as global cases surged to new highs, the suggestion by Western government officials to open crashed economies was through immunity passports.
We have raised several questions with immunity passports: First, nobody knows how long immunity lasts, and second, antibody tests are not ‘sufficiently accurate’. And a third issue we brought attention to are concerns over the social implications of immunity passports.
The proposal of immunity passports across the Western world is a sign that governments will seize greater control over people’s lives. And just what happens when someone is not considered immune? The government denies them a passport? Which means they would be out of work and can’t travel. But, oh yes, that’s why universal basic income will become a more concrete thing.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/05/2020 – 02:45 - Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome
Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome
Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,
Stockholm Syndrome:
A condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.
Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome:
A psychological state of mind that causes its sufferers to come to love seeing their economies and liberties being destroyed, whilst simultaneously being incapable of accepting that Sweden kept its society going without resorting to such measures.
I continue to be baffled by those who cannot bring themselves to admit that Sweden has carried out a relatively sensible policy on Covid-19, whilst the response of so many other countries has been authoritarian and frankly unhinged. The idea of quarantining millions of perfectly healthy people and stopping them from doing normal, healthy things is something that has apparently never occurred to any national leaders in the past, or at least if it did, they presumably never enacted it for fear of revolt.
No such fear today. It is simply staggering to see how so many people have not only come to accept the inevitable destruction of the economy and curtailment of civil liberties as a price worth paying to deal with an illness which is killing numbers on roughly the same levels as a bad flu season, but have actually become cheerleaders for the giant social experiment being done to them. It reminds me of the chilling and dispiriting line at the end of 1984: “He loved Big Brother.” Today, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, many appear to “Love Lockdown” — that is, they appear to be absolutely fine with having their liberties taken away from them; absolutely fine with having the right to do lawful work taken from them; and absolutely fine with having the right to do normal, healthy things taken away from them. If anyone has an explanation, do be sure to let me know.
But it gets worse. Not only do they seem to be perfectly willing to go along with these things, but they are appear to be utterly oblivious and even apathetic to the economic train wreck headed their way because of the policy they support. Why? What will shake them out of that apathy and complacency? Will it be when they hear about the Great Depression-era unemployment levels coming on us? No! Even that doesn’t do it. The chart below is one of the most genuinely frightening I’ve ever seen, showing as it does US unemployment rising by over 30,000,000 in just seven weeks to levels not seen since the 1930s. And yet when I show it, many just airily dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders as if it’s irrelevant. Perhaps it will only be if they lose their own jobs and can’t pay the rent or can’t get stuff in the shops like they used to that it’ll hit home! Who knows?
If you try to show such people that it didn’t have to be this way, comparing the UK with Sweden, or Sweden with other countries, or Sweden with what the Imperial College model might have predicted, they either dismiss it, or get angry, or ignore it. It’s a thought they don’t want to entertain, presumably because they have thoroughly convinced themselves that “lockdown” is the only policy that can possibly work, and any data that shows that this is not the case must either be wrong or ignored (for those who want to see a real expert thoroughly debunk the idea that lockdown was or is necessary, I recommend this interview with Professor Knut Wittkowski).
Despite studying the data for a number of weeks, I have yet to find any discernible evidence that the Swedish policy has hurt that country in anything like the way the doom-mongers predicted. Just as importantly, I have been unable to find any discernible evidence that destroying your economy and wrecking civil liberties — which is what the policy of “lockdown” is — was necessary.
For instance, the chart below shows two countries with a very different policy — Sweden and the UK — by daily deaths per million population (note, the UK figures are somewhat skewed on 29th April, as the Government decided to count deaths in care homes on that day ((extraordinary that these were missed off before)). What is actually clear is that Sweden has in fact fared better than the UK, with total recorded deaths at 256.6 per million, compared to 419.1 per million for the UK, as at 3rd May:
Or we could look at weekly recorded deaths for 13 European countries, plus the US. Interestingly, in all cases (except the UK because of that care home spike on 29th April), the numbers of deaths are now clearly falling and — it would seem — beginning to peter out — including Sweden:
Or here’s a cumulative way of looking at the same data:
What I have noticed, however, is the more Sweden’s figures have failed to shoot up into the stratosphere, the more some people have ground their teeth, digging in and claiming that because Sweden’s death numbers are worse than Denmark’s, Finland’s and Norway’s, this somehow proves the point that they messed up big time. Does it? Here’s another way of looking at it.
As of today, the country has seen just short of 2,700 deaths. This is:
-
Approximately 265.62 deaths per million population
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Approximately 0.0265% of their entire population.
This is not even close to what the doom-mongers were predicting. My own very conservative estimate of what Imperial College’s model might have predicted for them, under the measures they have taken, came out at approximately 32,500 deaths (approximately 3,250 deaths per million). However, a study carried out by Sweden’s Uppsala University in April applied the Imperial College model to Sweden and came out with far bigger numbers than my conservative estimate. According to their projections, if Sweden continued its current response:
-
It would pass 40,000 deaths shortly after 1st May
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This would continue to rise to almost 100,000 deaths by June.
But let me again remind you: so far, Sweden has had just under 2,700 deaths, and we’ve now passed 1st May. That’s many orders of magnitude below what the Imperial College model would have predicted for it.
I think we can safely say (if we didn’t know it already) that the Imperial College model overestimated deaths from Covid-19 by a huge margin. Bit like their estimates for Mad Cow Disease. And Swine Flu. And H5N1 Bird Flu. In fact, perhaps the question we should ask is if anyone knows of an instance when Neil Ferguson’s team have got their predictions right — or at least within say a few tens of thousands at least?
And yet here’s the thing: not only is the UK Government’s draconian policy based on these faulty predictions, but many have taken to these draconian measures based on faulty so-called science like ducks to water. I find it extraordinary. I’d love to know why. Any one?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/05/2020 – 02:00 -
- The Dubious COVID Models, The Tests, & Now, The Consequences
The Dubious COVID Models, The Tests, & Now, The Consequences
Authored by William Engdahl via GlobalResearch.ca,
Since late in January the world has undergone staggering changes which in many cases may be irreparable. We have given decisions over every aspect of our lives to the judgment of tests and to the projections of computer models for the coronavirus first claimed to have erupted in Wuhan China, now dubbed SARS-CoV-2. With astonishing lack of transparency or checking, one government after the other has imposed China-model lockdowns on their entire populations. It begins to look as if we are being led like sheep to slaughter for corrupted science.
The Dubious COVID Models
Two major models are being used in the West since the alleged spread of coronavirus to Europe and USA to “predict” and respond to the spread of COVID-19 illness. One was developed at Imperial College of London. The second was developed, with emphasis on USA effects, by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, near the home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. What few know is that both groups owe their existence to generous funding by a tax exempt foundation that stands to make literally billions on purported vaccines and other drugs to treat coronavirus—The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In early March, Prof. Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London issued a widely-discussed model that forecast possible COVID-19 deaths in the UK as high as 500,000. Ferguson works closely with the WHO. That report was held responsible for a dramatic u-turn by the UK government from a traditional public health policy of isolating at risk patients while allowing society and the economy to function normally. Days after the UK went on lockdown, Ferguson’s institute sheepishly revised downwards his death estimates, several times and dramatically. His dire warnings have not come to pass and the UK economy, like most others around the world, has gone into deep crisis based on inflated estimates.
Ferguson and his Imperial College modelers have a notorious track record for predicting dire consequences of diseases. In 2002 Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people in UK would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, “mad cow disease”, possibly to 150,000 if the epidemic expanded to include sheep. A total of 178 people were officially registered dead from vCJD. In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million (!) people worldwide would be killed by bird-flu or H5N1. By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus. Then in 2009 Ferguson’s group at Imperial College advised the government that swine flu or H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of 457 people. Ferguson and his Imperial College group have a notoriously bad track record for predicting disease consequences.
Yet the same Ferguson group at Imperial College, with WHO endorsement, was behind the panic numbers that triggered a UK government lockdown. Ferguson was also the source of the wild “prediction” that 2.2 million Americans would likely die if immediate lockdown of the US economy did not occur. Based on the Ferguson model, Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID reportedly confronted President Trump and pressured him to declare a national health emergency. Much as in the UK, once the damage to the economy was begun, Ferguson’s model later drastically lowered the US fatality estimates to between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths. In both US and UK cases Neil Ferguson relied on data from the Chinese government, data which has been shown as unreliable.
Neil Ferguson and his modelling group at Imperial College, in addition to being backed by WHO, receive millions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ferguson heads the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium at Imperial College which lists as its funders the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates-backed GAVI-the vaccine alliance. From 2006 through 2018 the Gates Foundation has invested an impressive $184,872,226.99 into Ferguson’s Imperial College modeling operations.
Notably, the Gates foundation began pouring millions into Ferguson’s modelling operation well after his catastrophic lack of accuracy was known, leading some to suggest Ferguson is another “science for hire” operation.
University of Washington—Gates too…
More recently, the forecast models being used to justify the unprecedented lockdown measures across the United States have been developed at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle.
Its COVID-19 model forecasts deaths and the use of hospital resources such as hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators. At the end of March the model from IHME also “predicted” up to 2.2 million American coronavirus deaths unless drastic lockdown measures were followed. By April 7 IHME models revised that down to up to 200,000 deaths. Their last down revision puts deaths at just over 60,000. The claim is that the down revisions are informed by actual data. Yet the wildly inaccurate projections were the ones used to impose catastrophic social and economic restrictions across the USA.
Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter questioned the IMHE model:
“Aside from New York, nationally there’s been no health system crisis. In fact, to be truly correct, there has been a health system crisis, but the crisis is that the hospitals are empty,” he said. “This is true in Florida where the lockdown was late, this is true in southern California where the lockdown was early, it’s true in Oklahoma where there is no statewide lockdown. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the lockdown and whether or not the epidemic has spread wide and fast.”
IHME claims its revisions are result of the lockdown taking effect even though that would take weeks to show up.
Like Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College London, the University of Washington’s IHME is another project of the Gates Foundation. It was created in 2007 with a major grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In May 2015 IHME and the World Health Organization signed a major agreement to collaborate on data used to estimate world health trends. Then in 2017 IHME got an additional $279 million from the Gates Foundation to expand its work over the next decade. That, in addition to another a $210 million gift in 2016 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund construction of a new building to house several UW units working in population health, including IHME. In other words, IHME has been a crucial piece of the Gates global health strategy for more than 13 years.
They have been turning out highly inflated models for state-by-state emergency room demands. Those inflated projections, from New York to California and beyond have wreaked havoc on the entire health care system. When one IHME model predicted need for 430,000 intensive care beds across the US in March, states went into panic mode from New York to California to Pennsylvania and beyond. By the third week of April the reality was that hospital beds were empty and untold numbers of other operations had been canceled to make room for covid19 patients who never materialized.
Faulty Tests
The wide variety of different tests that are supposed to tell whether one is infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus have added a crucial element to the perfect dystopian storm that is raging globally. Simply put, the tests are not that reliable.
A leading German laboratory reported in early April that, according to WHO recommendations, Covid19 virus tests are now considered positive, even if the specific target sequence of the Covid19 virus is negative and only the more general corona virus target sequence is positive. This can lead to other corona viruses such as cold viruses also triggering a false positive test result. That means you can have a simple cold and you are deemed coronavirus positive. Little wonder that the tally of coronavirus “infected” is exploding over the past weeks. But what does that number really mean? We simply don’t know. Yet our politicians are glibly shutting down entire economies and causing inconceivable social damage based on false model projections and WHO’s dodgy testing guidelines.
In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the government agency leading the COVID19 response, has deliberately refused to list the actual daily number of persons tested despite requests. Prof. Christopher Kuhbander, author of a detailed study states,
“The reported figures on new infections very dramatically overestimate the true spread of the corona virus. The observed rapid increase in new infections is almost exclusively due to the fact that the number of tests has increased rapidly over time. So, at least according to the reported figures, there was in reality never an exponential spread of the coronavirus. The reported figures on new infections hide the fact that the number of new infections has been decreasing since about early or mid-March.”
Yet the uncritical media presentation of endless statistics from the head of the RKI have fostered unprecedented anxiety and fear in the population of Germany.
Californian physician Dr. Dan Erickson described his observations regarding Covid19 in a press briefing. He stated that hospitals and intensive care units in California and other states have remained largely empty so far. Dr. Erickson reports that doctors from several US states have been “pressured“ to issue death certificates mentioning Covid19, even though they themselves did not agree. In Pennsylvania the state was forced to remove some 200 “coronavirus” deaths after doctor autopsy revealed death from pre-existing causes such as heart or lung diseases.
The more that actual facts are emerging around this pandemic and its consequences, it is becoming clear were are being told to commit economic and social suicide based on wrong methods and wrong information.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 23:50 - Democrat 'Disinfo' Group Using DARPA-Funded Tech; Will Pay Shills To Target Pro-Trump Accounts
Democrat ‘Disinfo’ Group Using DARPA-Funded Tech; Will Pay Shills To Target Pro-Trump Accounts
An anti-Trump political action committee will use DARPA-funded artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of President Trump’s claims over social media and target pro-Trump accounts during the 2020 election.
The PAC, advised by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, will deploy the technology originally developed to counter propaganda from the Islamic State, according to the Washington Post.
The group, Defeat Disinfo, will use artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of the president’s claims on social media. It will seek to intervene by identifying the most popular counter-narratives and boosting them through a network of more than 3.4 million influencers across the country — in some cases paying users with large followings to take sides against the president. –Washington Post
Spearheaded by Curtis Hougland – who says he received initial funding for the technology from the Pentagon’s shadowy research arm; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the initiative raises questions over whether taxpayer funds were being repurposed for political purposes, notes Fox News‘ Greg Re.
In a statement to Fox News, DARPA outright rejected the Post’s reporting, and said that Hougland was misrepresenting their work.
“Hougland’s claim DARPA funded the tech at the heart of his political work is grossly misleading,” DARPA tweeted. “He advised briefly on ways to counter ISIS online. He was not consulted to design AI or analysis tools, nor certainly anything remotely political. DARPA is strictly apolitical.”
Hougland’s claim DARPA funded the tech at the heart of his political work is grossly misleading. He advised briefly on ways to counter ISIS online. He was not consulted to design AI or analysis tools, nor certainly anything remotely political. DARPA is strictly apolitical.
— DARPA (@DARPA) May 4, 2020
“Hougland had a tertiary consulting role advising an agency program on how to explore new and better ways to counter America’s adversaries online,” a DARPA spokesperson told Fox News, adding “He was not consulted for technical expertise designing artificial intelligence or network analysis tools, nor certainly any research that was remotely political. … Unequivocally, DARPA funding did not help advance the technology with which Hougland now works any more than does his use of other agency technologies like the internet or mobile phone.”
Meanwhile, Hougland’s PAC will pay influencers to convey their messaging, according to the Post – a tactic which Mike Bloomberg’s campaign took heat for earlier this year.
“I have no trepidation about paying content creators in seeking out and amplifying the best narratives.”
McChrystal told the Post that while the operation might appear unseemly, it’s necessary.
“Everyone wishes the Pandora’s box was closed and none of this existed, but it does.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 23:30 - Protests Across California Show You Can Only Push People So Far
Protests Across California Show You Can Only Push People So Far
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Even in California, a heavily socialist, overbearing tyrannical nanny-state, people are standing up for their rights. Human beings were never meant to be caged by a few elitists and people have finally gotten sick of their enslavement to the political overlords.
Protests raged all over the United States over the weekend as millions of people begged the very government that enslaved them to free them. Obviously, that’s not how it works, but the fact they are realizing no other human has a higher claim over them is at least, a step in the right direction.
People have finally grown tired of obeying the commands of the ruling class, and they have taken to disobeying orders to imprison themselves in their homes so they won’t spread a virus that even by government’s exaggerated numbers is still no worse than the flu.
The primary threat to freedom and justice is not greed, or hatred, or any of the other emotions or human flaws usually blamed for such things. Instead, it is one ubiquitous superstition that infects the minds of people of all races, religions, and nationalities, which deceives decent, well-intentioned people into supporting and advocating violence and oppression. Even without making human beings one bit more wise or virtuous, removing that one superstition (the belief in authority, that some have the right to command, and others have to obey) would remove the vast majority of injustice and suffering from the world.
The solution to these lockdowns has been with us the whole time. We outnumber the police state and politicians by “orders of magnitude.” If we decide to live our lives as the free human beings we were meant to be, there’s nothing the ruling class can do to stop us short of trying to make an example of a handful of people. But once we stick together and disallow them to make examples of those people, we will be free.
There is no need for violence or begging. Being free is our birthright and we should disobey any command that imprisons us and harms ourselves or others. We all need to realize it’s time to do the right thing, not the “legal” thing.
If you’re afraid of getting sick, stay in your home. If you don’t want to open your business, don’t. But it’s the height of privilege to look down on those who are simply living their lives free of the chains the ruling class is desperately trying to force them into. People all over are finally realizing that they were not born to be slaves to the elite few and the “order followers” such as police and the military need to take a hard look at themselves and what they are enforcing.
Cops and military: your children will have to live the world you are enforcing. If you want them to bow to a totalitarian police state, by all means, keep “enforcing” the will of tyrants on free people. But if you crave liberty, and want your children to have a life free from slavery, it’s time to stand up and say so.
This has become black and white. You are either free, or you are not. You either enforce tyranny or you do not. It’s not a gray area.
To those few cops who have stood up and refused to violate the rights of people, it’s appreciated. Now stand with those who want freedom, or align yourself with enslavement and tyranny. There’s no middle ground.
This all ends when WE say it does. I’ve said this from the beginning. They cannot enslave us once we all realize it’s our birthright to be free and we go about our lives in defiance of their orders, and peacefully coexist with each other. We are more powerful than they will ever allow us to know, and all we have to do is realize it.
This is just the beginning of humanity getting off its knees. It started when the government attempted to force falsified data about a virus down our throats, and it ends when we say it does. Take their power away by being uncontrollable. Take your mind back from the mainstream media, and never again allow yourself to be enslaved.
If you want to hear an uplifting message about why it’s important to speak truth to power and take your power back and just live as the free human you are, watch the video below. It’s long, but just the first few minutes are positive and will help you realize you are more powerful than any politician, tyrannical police state enforcer, or elitist. You just have to realize it.
This is the truth the “cabal” doesn’t want you to know:
“The universe is not working in humanity’s favor right now, because humanity has externalized its power to other entities. And everything that happening…everything that’s happening right now on the planet is…because of humanity’s ignorance.” –Ralph Smart
It’s time to wake up and be free as we were all meant to be. You don’t need the government, the elitists, or the cops permission to be free. That’s what the ruling class doesn’t want you to know.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 23:10 - New Mexico Governor Quarantines Entire City, Closes All Roads That Lead Into Town
New Mexico Governor Quarantines Entire City, Closes All Roads That Lead Into Town
Today in “monitoring your civil liberties” news…
Taking a page out of the Wuhan coronavirus playbook, one New Mexico city has invoked the state’s Riot Control Act to lock down the entire city of Gallup, shutting down all roads leading into the city.
The decision was made by New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and was done “to mitigate the uninhibited spread of COVID-19 in that city,” according to CBS News.
The governor’s office said on Friday of last week: “Effective at 12 p.m., May 1, all roads into Gallup are closed. Businesses in the city of Gallup will close from 5 p.m. through 8 a.m. Vehicles may only have a maximum of two individuals. Residents of the city should remain at home except for emergency outings and those essential for health, safety and welfare.“
The city has a population of about 22,000 people and is located 100 miles west of Albuquerque. The city has grappled with coronavirus disproportionately, posting 1,027 of the state’s 3,411 cases and 19 deaths as of last Friday. Its county has the highest number of cases in all of New Mexico.
Authorities are closing off sections of roadway into the city as a result.
McKinely County, where Gallup is located, has “more than 30 percent of the state’s total positive COVID-19 cases and the most positive cases in the entire state, outstripping even far more populous counties,” the governor’s office stated.
“Its infection trend has shown no sign of flattening. The county has reported an additional 207 positive cases in the last two days alone, more than every other county in the state has reported total over the length of the pandemic save three.”
🚨COVID-19 UPDATE🚨
Effective noon today I am enacting further temporary restrictions to slow the spread of #COVID19, temporarily locking down the city of Gallup at the mayor’s request. pic.twitter.com/ThtMmZgieo
— Michelle Lujan Grisham (@GovMLG) May 1, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In a cry for help to the state government, Gallup mayor Jack McKinney wrote to the governor’s office, calling the city’s outbreak a “crisis of the highest order.”
He wrote: “The virus has caused many deaths, stretched medical facilities and resources to their capacity, and adversely impacted the welfare of the city of Gallup. Our community is unable to adequately address the outbreak without the imposition of certain restrictions necessary to regulate social distancing, public gatherings, sales of good, and the use of public streets.”
Meanwhile, in the neighboring city of Grants, New Mexico, Mayor Martin Hicks rallied Monday to encourage business owners to ignore the state’s guidelines and re-open for business.
The governor responded that Hicks’ plan makes “absolutely no sense whatsoever.”
She concluded: “These changes do not make our fight against the virus any easier; in fact, New Mexicans’ obligation to our social contract only deepens as we enter the next phase. The best defense against this virus, until there is a vaccine, is physical distance from other people.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 22:50 - Beef Prices Explode To Record High As More Stores Limit Meat Purchases
Beef Prices Explode To Record High As More Stores Limit Meat Purchases
Just a few days ago we marveled as wholesale beef prices had soared over 60% from their February lows to a record $331 per 100 pounds. Well, that was then, because today alone, the wholesale price soared by 8.6% or $32.60 to a new all time high of $410.05, almost doubling in less than a month.
The reason: an unprecedented collapse of the nation’s food supply chain as over a dozen meat processing plants have been shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Beef prices are soaring even after Trump issued an executive order to address meat shortages, however with food workers scared and unwilling to return to work, Trump’s attempt to normalize prices has backfired, because all it has achieved was a frantic scramble by consumers to hoard beef resulting in even bigger shortages and higher prices.
Call it a bacon run.
As a result of the wave of panic-shopping at supermarkets, more grocery stores are imposing limits on meat purchases. On Friday, we reported that supermarket chain Kroger said that it has put “purchase limits” on ground beef and fresh pork at some of its stores following growing concerns over meat shortages due to coronavirus-induced supply disruptions. Other large grocers said they expect to be out of stock on different types of cuts soon.
Sure enough, on Monday Costco joined Kroger, announced it was limiting customers to three packages of meat.
Product Limitations
Costco has implemented limits on certain items to help ensure more members are able to purchase merchandise they want and need. Our buyers and suppliers are working hard to provide essential, high demand merchandise as well as everyday favorites.
Fresh meat purchases are temporarily limited to a total of 3 items per member among the beef, pork and poultry products.
Most if not all other supermarkets will follow suit in enforcing similar strict purchase limits.
With Trump’s EO failing to ease the shortage, and beef supply chains crippled, it is unclear when or how the beef shortage will be resolved, even as prices explode with each passing day, making beef a luxury for America’s 30 million suddenly unemployed who don’t know when their next paycheck will arrive.
While so far the food crisis is limited to beef and to a lesser extent pork (whose price rose to the highest in 6 years today), how long before all other food supply chains are similarly crippled resulting in the kind of food hyperinflation that sparked the Arab Spring protests and rebellions which culminated with overthrown governments across much of northern Africa and the Middle East?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 22:31 - It Is Not Our Ignorance That Will Kill Us, But Our Arrogance
It Is Not Our Ignorance That Will Kill Us, But Our Arrogance
Authored by Peter Boettke via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance is horrible. When the social reform movement in the late 19th and early 20th century emerged it took aim at five giants: want (poverty), ignorance (education), disease (public health), squalor (housing) and idleness (unemployment). From a social science point of view, heck from a humanitarian point of view, these do lead to misery and their eradication represents a worthy goal for any “Good Society.” As Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations long ago, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” (Smith 1776, Bk I, chap 8, 88)
Economics was never heartless, and economists didn’t stand by in the face of human suffering and, as Dickens has Scrooge, declare: “If they would rather die,” “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” As Carl Menger wrote in his Principles of Economics, man with his purposes and plans, and the means at his disposal to pursue them, is the beginning and end of economic analysis.
Ludwig von Mises, building on this Mengerian program in economic science titled his treatise simply Human Action and a core chapter early in the book demonstrates how “human society” is grounded in peaceful social cooperation achieved through productive specialization and mutually beneficial exchange. Economics, practiced in the tradition of the classical liberal political economist and the modern liberal political economists is humanistic in its method and humanitarian in its concern.
But that doesn’t mean policy deliberations to address want, ignorance, disease, squalor, and idleness are easy and straightforward. The question has always been what is the most effective way to address these social problems in a manner that reduces human suffering while encouraging the chances for human flourishing. There are always hard and difficult trade-offs, and economics as a discipline trains its practitioners to think in terms of trade-offs and to be attuned to unintended consequences.
The tragedy in human affairs is when policies chosen to reduce human suffering, especially among the most vulnerable, fail to do so, and in the process also reduce the opportunity for human flourishing.
The communist experiments of the 20th century are the more egregious examples of tragic consequences, but one could reasonably point to the historical experiences with social democratic welfare policies/politics as well that have destroyed lives, families and communities all in the noble effort at slaying the five giants.
The failure and frustration of the modern welfare state to effectively address social problems while threatening to bankrupt their respective economies is what led to at least a modicum of reconsideration by policy elites over the past 30-40 years throughout Europe and the US. A close examination of the public finances in the western social democracies should give pause to any simpleminded claim, if spending is any indicator, that a conscious effort was made to abandon our collective efforts to slay the giants.
Vito Tanzi’s Government versus Markets (2011) provides a balanced overview of the tax burden and public spending. Tanzi for decades was the Director of Fiscal Affairs at the IMF, so he had a front row seat to the changing and expanding role of the state in economic affairs of the Western democracies. Lawrence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns in their The Clash of Generations (2012), argue using the basic analytics of intergenerational accounting that the US public economy is bankrupt, not in 50 years, but right now.
They document how the political system has produced a six-decade plus, off-balance-sheet, unsustainable financing scheme to pay for not only the ordinary business of politics, but our foreign adventures and our domestic desires to address social problems. And, any analysis of this growth of government in both scale and scope would be woefully inadequate if it didn’t take into account the vested interest groups that form around each of the initiatives.
Again, pointing this out isn’t heartless, it is social science. We choose policy paths and government spending is committed to pursue those paths and not others, and those decisions have consequences that we can study. Deliberating about trade-offs does not commit one to this side or that side of any issue; it just means conceptually that if the costs are greater than the benefit for any particular policy there better be an overwhelming moral consensus among the population for it to be judged “the right thing” to do. In most instances, the claim in fact was always that the “right thing” was also the “good thing” to do – translated into econospeak, the benefits of the policy choice will outweigh the costs of that choice.
The political economy of the “good society” strives to maximize the opportunities for human betterment and minimize the experience of human suffering. The debate among thinkers is one of means, not one of ends. We must engage in a civil yet contested conversation over economic policy and human welfare.
In Deirdre McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works (2019) she asks her readers to just listen, to really listen, to the other side, and to weigh the historical evidence and moral thrust of the argument for liberalism. She admits that liberalism has been imperfectly pursued, but even an imperfect liberalism has delivered unimagined benefits not just in terms of our material well-being.
Imagine, she asks us, to consider what a fully consistent liberalism might deliver for us. But to achieve that, we have to give up our arrogance and our will to rule over others. We are instead, one another’s dignified equals. And, we are called to interact with one another accordingly, with mutual respect for each other. A society of self-governors doesn’t need a nanny, let alone a boss, to guide and direct us.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776, Book IV, chap. 9, 183) talks about “the liberal play of equality, liberty, and justice.” And, as he writes later in that chapter:
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simply system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employment most suitable to the interests of the society. (ibid., 208, emphasis added)
Smith’s good friend David Hume argued that in crafting the institutions of government, we would be wise to assume all men are knaves. By this he meant opportunistic power seekers intent on acquiring for themselves fame and fortune. Smith certainly understood this form of opportunistic motive in man, but he is addressing himself to something slightly different in the above passage, and that is ideological delusion and arrogance.
In the paragraph immediately following his famous invisible hand passage, Smith actually writes that:
“The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.” (Smith 1776, Book IV, chap. 2, 478, emphasis added)
In the closing passages of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990, 215) she states that the “intellectual trap” of much of modern economic theory and public policy is that scholars “presume that they are omniscient observers able to comprehend the essentials of how complex, dynamic systems work by creating stylized descriptions of some aspects of those systems.” This is what their models enable them to do if they come to be exclusively relied upon. The implication for public discourse is damaging because this enables the social scientist to assume the mantle of advisor to a government presiding over a society. “With the false confidence of presumed omniscience,” Ostrom continues, “scholars feel perfectly comfortable in addressing proposals to governments that are conceived in their models as omnicompetent powers able to rectify the imperfections that exist in all field settings.”
It is not our ignorance that kills us, it is our arrogance. This is Hayek’s “fatal conceit,” and it is not limited to the would-be socialist planner, but permeates modern social science and politics. Rather than trade-offs, we get one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather than binding rules, we get discretionary authority. Rather than listening and learning from one another, we get a rigid insistence that one side is right and all other viewpoints are either woefully ignorant of the science, or morally bankrupt, or some combination of both.
So join me in collectively repeating the following — I do not know what is best for everyone to do. If we internalize that, we begin to realize that is true for everyone. This prevents us from falling prey to what Adam Smith referred to as innumerable delusions. There is no panacea to our social ills. There are social ills, but there is no one size fits all solution to it.
Let me be clear. There are experts in science, in art, and in culture (including sports). I prefer painting my Mondrian to the watercolors of one of my old professors who painted for fun, and I prefer to watch my Yankees play, rather than a battle of softball teams between two bar teams along the Jersey shore of my youth. And, I want to listen to scientists and learn from them. But listening and learning doesn’t mean blindly following. Let me be clear again – I DO NOT KNOW – so that means I must try to learn, and that requires listening.
What I do know, and can say with more confidence, is that people are people, and that we all face incentives in making our decisions, and we rely on flows of information to inform those decisions. When I hear a politician talk, I understand that whatever they say it is against the constraint that they must garner votes and campaign contributions to continue being a politician. When I hear a journalist talk, I understand that they do so against the constraint that they must grab my attention in a world full of activities that could draw my attention away from them.
And, when I hear an expert speak, I understand that they have a position and reputation to maintain in the public space, and that is the constant constraint against which they weigh how and what they will say. So, when I hear a question about on-the-ground contradictory facts being raised to an expert, and the expert answers by retreating to the forecasts of their model unencumbered by that tough empirical check implied in the question, my critical antennae go on high alert.
And, when I hear a political leader asked about policies put in place under one set of assumptions which have proved to be off – sometimes by an order of magnitude – and they insist that they not only did the right thing but would do it again with all the information that has since been revealed in the actual historical experience, those critical antennae go up again.
Here is what I can say: question presumed authority, value earned authority, treat others with dignity and respect, as you would want them to treat you, and listen and learn. It is this path, rather than marching in lockstep with the crowd, that will lead to you balancing your trade-offs and choosing your appropriate risk preference, and living your life as a fallible but capable self-governing individual.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 22:30 - "Ordinary Americans Are Going To Get Super-Pissed…"
“Ordinary Americans Are Going To Get Super-Pissed…”
Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
Spring is popping now with a ferocious energy that can only remind the sullenly sequestered masses that life is going on without them. Every living thing is busy making-and-doing out there, except the poor humans, idled without work or purpose. That won’t last long. People don’t submit automatically to zombification when some pissant bureaucrats issue them $1200 checks. They yearn to bust out like everything else on this living planet. And if they can’t do it in a good way, well….
The mega-machine we constructed to drive this society has sucked a valve and thrown a rod. The machine is broken, no matter how much more fuel the mechanics pump in. (One suspects somebody may have topped it off with Karo syrup.) Anyway, the machine got too big and too complex, with too many extraneous bells and whistles, and with way too much computerized cybernetic control built-in, so the mechanics barely noticed it was coming apart (they were too busy partying). That big machine is smoldering in a ditch for the moment. The dazed and bloodied passengers realize that the ride is over, and now they must march on to get somewhere, anywhere, away from this miserable ditch and the wreckage in it. The fine spring weather is their only consolation.
And so here we are at a fraught moment in the convergent crises of corona virus and the foundering economic system that it infected, with all its frightful pre-existing conditions. Of course, it isn’t capitalism, so-called, that is failing, but the perversions of capitalism, starting with the appendage of the troublesome term: ism. It isn’t a religion, or even a pseudo-religion like Zoroastrianism or communism. It’s simply the management system for surplus wealth. In a hyper-complex society, the management of wealth naturally grows hyper-complex, too, with lavish opportunities and temptations for chicanery, cheating, fraud, and swindling (the perversions of capital). It’s in the interest of the managers to cloak all that hyper-complex perversity in opaque language, to make it seem okay.
How many ordinary Americans have a clue what all the Municipal Liquidity Facilities, Primary Dealer Credit Facilities, Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities, Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facilities, Main Street New Loan Facilities and Expanded Loan Facilities, Commercial Paper Funding Facilities currency swap lines, the TALFs TARPs, PPPs, SPVs represent - besides the movement, by keystrokes, of “money” from one netherworld to another (both conveniently located on Wall Street), usually to the loss of non-elite citizens generally and to their offspring’s offspring’s offspring?
Real capital is grounded in the production of real things of real value, of course, and when it’s detached from all that, it’s no longer real capital. Money represents capital, and when the capital isn’t real, the money represents…nothing! And ceases to be real money. Just now, America is producing almost nothing except money, money in quantities that stupefy the imagination — trillions here, there, and everywhere. The trouble is that money is vanishing as fast as it’s being created. That’s because it’s based on promises to be paid back into existence that will never be kept, on top of prior promises to pay back money that were broken or are in the process of breaking. The net result is that money is actually disappearing faster than it can be created, even in vast quantities.
All this sounds like metaphysical bullshit, I suppose, but we are obviously watching money disappear. Your paycheck is gone. That activity you started — a brew-pub, a gym, an ad agency — no longer produces revenue. The HR department at the giant company you work for told you: don’t bother coming into the office tomorrow, or possibly ever again. Your bills are piling up. The numbers in your bank account run to zero. That sure smells like money disappearing. Wait until the pension checks and the SNAP cards mysteriously stop landing in the mailbox.
There’s going to be a lot of trouble. Ordinary Americans are going to get super-pissed if money doesn’t disappear from the stock markets, too. They’ve seen this movie before. They will know for sure that they were played, that the class of people who hold most of the stocks are doing just fine while everybody else stares into that old abyss staring back at them.
I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the Hamptons on that fateful day.
All this because we just can’t face the task of reorganizing our national home economics to suit new circumstances. So, nature will do it for us. Nature will furnish us with a marvelously efficient black hole where we can conveniently stash our fake money so that we’ll never have to see it again. Nature will bust up our giant institutions, our giant corporations, our giant networks of financial obligations. And after a period of confusion and social disorder, some clever humans will aggregate into smaller networks and re-organize their activities on a smaller scale that actually supports truthful relationships between the production of things deemed to hold value and money that represents those things.
The beauty of springtime is sublime and, as Edmund Burke noted, that very beauty provokes our thoughts of pain and terror.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 22:11 - Renters Now Have 12 Months To Repay Unpaid Rent In Santa Monica
Renters Now Have 12 Months To Repay Unpaid Rent In Santa Monica
In a move that is undoubtedly going to cause chaos for landlords in Santa Monica, the city extended its moratorium on residential and commercial evictions to June 30 and extended from six to twelve months the time tenants have to pay rent they were unable to pay late last week.
But it was both tenants and landlords who critiqued the city’s previous bill allowing 6 months when neighboring Los Angeles had passed a bill allowing tenants to have 12 months to repay, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press.
Interim City Manager Lane Dilg said: “The city is constantly monitoring the emergency situation and updating our local orders to provide the most sensible and meaningful response. The extensions of the moratorium period and the time to pay the unpaid rents, are intended to provide some relief to our residents and small businesses, restaurants, stores and offices, in light of the uncertainties we face as to when the safe-at-home orders will be lifted, and when we can all go back to work.”
The kicker is that under the previous moratorium, renters needed to prove that their earnings had been affected by coronavirus. Under the new bill, tenants can simply describe in a written notice – without definitive proof – how their earnings have been impacted.
City spokesperson Constance Farrell said: “Landlords must notify tenants of the moratorium and may not require tenants to enter into payment plans for delayed rent, although tenants must repay any unpaid rent 12 months after the city lifts its emergency orders.”
The order also clears up that commercial eviction bans do not apply to “multi-national companies, publicly traded companies and companies that employ more than 500 employees.”
Santa Monica’s coronavirus tally is now at just 159. Cases have increased just 10% week over week, down from a 44% clip from the week prior.
But the facts like are that, regardless of when things return to normal, we’re certain tenants are going to use their full 12 months before eventually paying their landlords – or deciding to stiff them. Regardless, even though they may not understand it yet, it seems to us that landlords in Santa Monica will be getting the short end of the stick.
Here at Zero Hedge, we’ll be poised on watch for crashing housing prices in the area after landlords finally decide the income isn’t worth dealing with the red tape and eventually turn around and hit the housing market bid with a barrage of properties.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 22:10 - After Cuomo, Clintons And Newsom Call For 'Army Of Contact Tracers' To Monitor Citizens, DC Posts Job Openings For 'Trace Force'
After Cuomo, Clintons And Newsom Call For ‘Army Of Contact Tracers’ To Monitor Citizens, DC Posts Job Openings For ‘Trace Force’
After former President Clinton, NY Governor Cuomo, Chelsea Clinton and CA Governor Newsom called for an ‘army of contact tracers’ to monitor citizens who have tested positive for COVID-19 and their contacts, Washington DC posted job openings to become an investigator with “Trace Force.”
Operating under the Department of Health (DC Health), Trace Force investigators will interview those who have tested positive for the virus – collecting “demographic, clinical, social and historical data,” while “conducting an assessment to determine whether safe isolation can be achieved at home.” The program is a 13-month appointment.
Those who have been in contact with a positive case will be contacted to assess whether they have symptoms and require quarantine, and will ‘appropriate escalate’ cases when needed. Investigators will also use ‘data management systems’ to log interactions.
Entry level investigators will earn between $51,059 and 65,747 per year, while lead investigators will make between $76,126 and $97,375. The program manager, who will provide “management oversight and direction” to multiple contact tracing units, will earn between $119,706 and $167,586 per year.
Trace Force is the new Space Force https://t.co/pVQeEmx20M
— Kayla Tausche (@kaylatausche) May 5, 2020
DC currently employs 65 contact tracers according to Mayor Muriel Bowser, who said last week that the district will add 135 more workers, and will eventually need 900.
“The goal of contact tracing is to identify nearly all cases of COVID-19, isolate infected individuals, find and alert their contacts, and then quarantine all the contacts,” said Bowser, adding “How we identify [the sick], isolate them, reach their contacts, and quarantine them, will determine how successful we are in reopening” the city.
According to DC Health contact tracer Malachi Stewart, contact tracers will call people to let them know they may have been in an area where coronavirus was detected, reports WUSA9. Beyond that, “[We’ll ask] what health equipment did you have on?” adding “Were you wearing a mask? Were you staying 6 feet away from people?”
During a recent Clinton Global Initiative University livestream, former President Bill Clinton spoke of the need to track people “who are positive” with COVID-19, and described the need for an “army” of young people, according to DC Dirty Laundry.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom agreed, responding that “The predicate for getting back to some semblance of normalcy is our ability to identify individuals through testing; to be able to trace their contacts; to isolate individuals that have either been exposed or quarantine people that are testing positive.”
This can only be accomplished if people “allow for their privacy to be impacted by that kind of acuity of attention based upon where they’ve been and who they talked to.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 21:50 - Here Is JPMorgan's Latest Trade Idea: Buy Bond ETFs Before The Fed Does
Here Is JPMorgan’s Latest Trade Idea: Buy Bond ETFs Before The Fed Does
It’s strange how capital markets work under central planning.
Late last Friday bond king Jeff Gundlach tweeted something which we had observed just one day earlier, namely that “the Fed has not actually bought any Corporate Bonds via the shell company set up to circumvent the restrictions of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913” adding that this “must be the most effective jawboning success in Fed history if that is true”…
I am told the Fed has not actually bought any Corporate Bonds via the shell company set up to circumvent the restrictions of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Must be the most effective jawboning success in Fed history if that is true.
— Jeffrey Gundlach (@TruthGundlach) May 1, 2020
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This followed our own musings on the latest Fed balance sheet (currently at $6.66 trillion) in which we pointed out that “what is most interesting is that so far the Fed has not yet purchased a single corporate bond, whether investment grade of fallen angel junk. In other words, without lifting a finger, the Fed’s “whatever it takes” jawboning managed to inject trillions “in value” in countless debt and credit products.”
Bank of America also chimed one day later, which published a “A Note To Fed” which was meant to precipitate the Fed’s decision to get off the fence and to start waving bonds in, as “a lot of investors (including non-credit ones) have bought IG corporate bonds the past two months on the expectation they can sell to you. So would be helpful if you soon began buying broadly and in size.”
So in response to Gundlach’s query and BofA’s lament, and concerned there may be some selling by trapped LQD and JNK bagholders who suddenly are worried the Fed isn’t buying corporate bonds as it had promised, today the NY Fed unveiled that it expects to begin purchasing eligible ETFs under its Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility “in early May.”
The SMCCF is expected to begin purchasing eligible ETFs in early May. The PMCCF is expected to become operational and the SMCCF is expected to begin purchasing eligible corporate bonds soon thereafter. Additional details on timing will be made available as those dates approach.
And so, just a few hours later, perhaps inspired by Blackrock’s Rick Rieder, head of the firm’s global allocation team, who in April wrote a blog post explaininghow the world’s largest asset manager will invest going forward, namely “follow the Fed and other DM central banks by purchasing what they’re purchasing, and assets that rhyme with those“, none other than JPMorgan had a brilliant trade idea for its clients, which basically boils down to this: buy corporate bond ETFs before the Fed does.
As JPM’s Shawn Quigg explains, “with the CCFs officially entering the market this month, it may further solidify the market’s perception of the Fed’s perceived put, and tighten credit spreads further.“
Of course, since such a simple trade reco would be frankly humiliating for such a “sophisticated” group of people as JPM’s derivatives team led by the rocket scientist Marko Kolanovic who every week or so writes a report on how stocks are undervalued when – it appears – all he means is one should simply frontrun the Fed…
… not to mention not generate any commission revenues for the bank, JPM had to make its trade reco sexier and more complex, and instead of simply buying the LQD, JPM recommended buying an LQD July 125p/ 130c/ 135c call spread collar – i.e., selling the put to fund the purchase of the call spread – for a zero cost, indicatively and a $128.66 reference price.
Also, since a stated rationale of simply “frontrun the Fed” would make a mockery out of JPM – and every other sellside strategist whose job is to divine the future of risk prices based on such obsolete anachronisms as fundamentals not how much money a central bank is going to print – the bank felt compelled to embellish just a bit, and that’s precisely what the Kolanovic-led team did:
Rationale & Considerations: The combined size of the CCFs will be up to $750 billion. The PMCCF and SMCCF will leverage the Treasury’s equity at 10 to 1 when acquiring corporate bonds of issuers that are investment grade and for ETFs whose primary investment objective is exposure to U.S. investment grade corporate bonds. The CCFs will cease purchasing eligible corporate bonds and ETFs no later than September 30, 2020, unless extended by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury. If at expiration shares close at/below the put strike, investors will purchase shares at $125, representing spread levels in early April (and below its 50/100/200d technical moving averages). Conversely, the LQD spreads still trade substantially above the pre-COVID-19 levels, leaving much room for potential compression.
Current 3M volatility skew (95%-105%) ranks in its 85th %-ile over the last year, but with the execution of the CCFs we believe there is an argument to be made that volatility skew should cheapen further moving forward.
An even simpler argument to be made, yet one which won’t be, is that in this day and age of what Deutsche Bank accurately calls “administered markets” where “market outcomes will be dictated by the policy goals of the Fed and Treasury, and the tools they select to implement policy”…
…all that matters is what the Fed will or won’t be buying, and since by endorsing this trade JPM effectively agrees that frontrunning central banks is the only thing that matters, we wonder if JPM realizes the irony in that it has effectively “reco-ed” itself right out of all relevance, because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read a Fed press release and figure out what asset class the central bank will buy next (spoiler alert: after the next crash, it will be equities. At that point Wall Street becomes meaningless).
Incidentally, another side effect of Wall Street analysts admitting they are now irrelevant in this time of centrally-planned markets, is that as Jeff Gundlach tweeted in a follow up to his original Friday observation, closing the loop on a process that he himself started with a tweet just three days earlier, once Main Street realizes that the Fed is buying ETFs “broadly and in size” to not “let down” the buyers who front ran the Fed, it will “not be well received on Main Street.”
If the Fed does start buying ETFs “broadly and in size” in response to recent requests they do so as to not “let down” the buyers who front ran the Fed April 9th will not and should not be well received on Main Street.
— Jeffrey Gundlach (@TruthGundlach) May 4, 2020
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We doubt JPM is too worried about condemning its clients to a fate of angry Main Street pitchforks, because unlike Gundlach, we are confident that the vast majority of Americans neither care, nor have any idea about the vast wealth transfer that is taking place below the surface of what was one a market courtesy of the Fed’s helicopter money, which is now openly destroying future generations of Americans by burying them under simply laughable amounts of debt just to keep a handful of millionaires and billionaires filthy rich here and now.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 21:26 - The Pseudo-Science Behind The Mysterious Assault On Hydroxychloroquine
The Pseudo-Science Behind The Mysterious Assault On Hydroxychloroquine
Authored by Leo Goldstein via WattsUpWithThat.com,
This is a research article published as information for health care professionals and public officials, and for an open peer review. It is not medical advice.
Summary
I reviewed the scientific literature on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin (AZ), and their use for COVID-19. My conclusions:
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HCQ-based treatments are effective in treating COVID-19, unless started too late.
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Studies, cited in opposition, have been misinterpreted, invalid, or worse.
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HCQ and AZ are some of the most tested and safest prescription drugs.
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Severe COVID-19 frequently causes cardiac effects, including heart arrhythmia. QTc prolonging drugs might amplify this tendency. Millions of people regularly take drugs having strong QTc prolongation effect, and neither FDA nor CDC bother to warn them. HCQ+AZ combination, probably has a mild QTc prolongation effect. Concerns over its negative effects, however minor, can be addressed by respecting contra-indications.
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Effectiveness of HCQ-based treatment for COVID-19 is hampered by conditions that are presented as precautions, delaying the onset of treatment. For examples, some states require that COVID-19 patients be treated with HCQ exclusively in hospital settings.
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The COVID-19 Treatment Panel of NIH evaded disclosure of the massive financial links of its members to Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of a competing drug remdesivir. Among those who failed to disclose such links are 2 out of 3 of its co-chairs.
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Despite all the attempts by certain authorities to prevent COVID-19 treatment with HCQ and HCQ+AZ, both components are approved by FDA, and doctors can prescribe them for COVID-19.
Intro
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was accepted as a COVID-19 treatment by the medical community in the US and worldwide by early April. 67% of the US physicians said they would prescribe HCQ or chloroquine CQ for COVID-19 to a family member (Town Hall, 2020-04-08). An international poll of doctors rated HCQ the most effective coronavirus treatment (NY Post, 2020-04-02). On April 6, Peter Navarro told CNN that “Virtually Every COVID-19 Patient In New York Is Given Hydroxychloroquine.” This might explain decrease in COVID-19 deaths in the New York state after April 15. The time lag is because COVID-19 deaths happen on average 14 days after showing symptoms.
But on April 21, several perfectly coordinated events took place, attacking HCQ’s use for COVID-19 patients.
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The COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel of the National Institute of Health issued recommendations with negative-ambivalent stance regarding the use of HCQ as a COVID-19 treatment. This surprising stance was taken contrary to the ample evidence of the efficacy and safety of HCQ and despite absence evidence of its harm. The panel also strongly recommended against the use of hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin (AZ), the combination of choice among practitioners.
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On the same day, a paper (Magagnoli, 2020) was posted on a pre-print server medRxiv, insinuating that HCQ is not only ineffective, but even harmful. This not-yet peer reviewed paper, by unqualified authors with conflicts of interest, received wall-to-wall media coverage, as it if were a cancer cure. It used data from Veterans Administration hospitals, spicing its effects. The paper has shown to be somewhere between junk science and fraud.
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Rick Bright, a government official who was probably more responsible for the low level of preparedness to the epidemic than most others, and had been re-assigned to a lower position earlier, emerged as a “whistleblower.” He claimed he had been demoted for opposing hydroxychloroquine, the claim to be soon debunked by documents bearing his signature. The media also gave him a wall-to-wall coverage.
On April 24, the FDA struck its own blow, issuing a stern warning against use of HCQ for COVID-19 treatment.
While these warnings are not binding to doctors, they do produce a chilling effect. Consequently, either patients do not receive necessary treatment, or they receive it with a delay, sharper decreasing its effect. This allows detractors to question HCQ efficacy even more aggressively. Below, I review problems in the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines and other sources, used to wage anti-HCQ propaganda.
NIH Panel Guidelines
The relevant section of (COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel, 2020) is Potential Antiviral Drugs. The antiviral treatment recommendations (more accurately, failure to provide recommendations) include:
“Remdesivir
- There are insufficient clinical data to recommend either for or against the use of the investigational antiviral agent remdesivir for the treatment of COVID-19 (AIII).
Clinical Data to Date:
Only anecdotal data are available.“
“AIII” means a strong position based on expert opinion rather than on evidence.
“Chloroquine or Hydroxychloroquine
- There are insufficient clinical data to recommend either for or against using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19 (AIII).
- When chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine is used, clinicians should monitor the patient for adverse effects (AEs), especially prolonged QTc interval (AIII).
Clinical Data in COVID-19
The clinical data available to date on the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 have been mostly from use in patients with mild, and in some cases, moderate disease; data on use of the drugs in patients with severe and critical COVID-19 are very limited.
[Follows is a description of some studies]“
Notice that CQ and HCQ are addressed together, although these are two different drugs, and HCQ is clearly superior to CQ both in efficiency and safety.
Also notice that the basic recommendation of “insufficient clinical data to recommend either for or against” is given to both HCQ and Remdesivir. However, the recommendation for HCQ goes further to state that when using HCQ, “clinicians should monitor the patient for adverse effects (AEs), especially prolonged QTc interval”. Practically, this means that HCQ should be used only in hospital settings. No such restrictions are set for Remdesivir, for which there is no clinical data available. It goes against all logic.
The demand to use HCQ only in hospital settings means:
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HCQ treatment will be delayed until a patient decides to be admitted to a hospital, thus lowering HCQ’s efficiency
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Hospitals will quickly become overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients
Then the Panel nixes HCQ+AZ:
“Hydroxychloroquine plus Azithromycin
- The COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel recommends against the use of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin for the treatment of COVID-19, except in the context of a clinical trial (AIII).“
This drug combination is the most effective and widely used treatment for COVID-19, and the Panel recommends against it!
The Panel criticizes some studies of patients’ treatment with HCQ+AZ for the absence of a control group. Stephen McIntyre tweeted about this argument long before the Panel used it: “there’s a very large control group of COVID19 patients not receiving this drug combination: hospitals and morgues are full of them.”
There are only two studies, quoted by the Panel against HCQ+AZ, (Molina, 2020) and (Chorin, 2020). Both are misinterpreted by the Panel.
Molina et al.
Despite (Molina, 2020)’s angry tone and aggressiveness, it reports no results contradicting efficiency of HCQ or HCQ+AZ. The paper describes treatment of 11 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, five of which had cancer, one had AIDS, and almost all were in a bad shape: “at the time of treatment initiation, 10 of the 11 patients had a fever and received nasal oxygen therapy.” Using HCQ+AZ, 10 of the patients’ lives were saved. The article’s point of contention is that when they tested these patients, 5-6 days after the treatment initiation, they still found CoV2 RNA in 8 out of 10. Virus RNA is a molecule. Some viral RNA remains in patients for weeks after full recovery, but it is neither harmful nor infectious. Detecting viral RNA depends on the sensitivity of the testing equipment. The study’s title is No evidence of rapid antiviral clearance or clinical benefit with the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in patients with severe COVID-19 infection seems to be lost on the Panel.
Chorin et al.
The Panel also quotes (Chorin, 2020) as evidence that HCQ+AZ therapy causes QTc prolongation. QTc prolongation is not a health condition itself, but a warning sign that a person is at higher risk of torsades de pointes (TdP), heart arrhythmia, or tachycardia, which might lead to cardiac arrest and death (Simpson, 2020).
Nevertheless, none of the patients, treated with HCQ+AZ, suffered TdP or arrhythmia. Four patients died, but none of them had an arrhythmia. Other studies, in which COVID-19 patients are treated with HCQ+AZ, reported taking patients off this medicine after QTc exceeds 500ms. But the treatment may have already had its effect at that time or later, while HCQ remained in the bloodstream.
This study has no control group. It provides no information on whether QTc prolongation was caused by the disease or the therapy.
FDA Warning
(FDA WARNING, 2020), issued on April 24, piggybacks on the COVID-19 Panel Guidelines. It says
Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine can cause abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation and a dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia.
This statement is confused, and probably not true about hydroxychloroquine. See below.
Be aware that there are no proven treatments for COVID-19 …
I think that HCQ+AZ is a proven treatment for COVID-19. There is a difference between proven treatment and approved treatment. HCQ+AZ is not approved but proven, because many patients have been treated with this combination and have recovered.
We have reviewed case reports … concerning serious heart-related adverse events and death in patients with COVID-19 receiving hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, either alone or combined with azithromycin or other QT prolonging medicines. These adverse events were reported from the hospital and outpatient settings for treating or preventing COVID-19, and included QT interval prolongation, ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, and in some cases death.
These are manifestations of COVID-19! See (Bansal, 2020) and (Wang, et al., 2020). The media hysteria played its role, too. The articles about the supposed dangers of HCQ, with detailed description of the symptoms, triggered complaints even before the April 24 warning. And there are people who tried to self-medicate – in the situation when authorities make it difficult to obtain prescription for HCQ – and took the wrong drug or overdosed. Also, QT interval prolongation is not an event, but an early warning.
To help FDA track safety issues with medicines, we urge patients and health care professionals to report side effects involving hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine or other medicines to the FDA MedWatch program, using the information in the “Contact FDA” box at the bottom of the page.
Such an urging and advertisement guarantee that the FDA will receive mountains of complaints.
HCQ and AZ Safety
HCQ, CQ, and AZ
HCQ & CQ are two different drugs. HCQ is clearly superior to CQ. HCQ has already been selected over CQ. Discussing these two drugs as if they were co-equal in COVID-19 treatment is misleading and a sign of bad faith.
HCQ and AZ are some of the most widely prescribed drugs and have been prescribed for decades. HCQ is as safe as a prescription drug can be. AZ is an antibiotic, and it is as safe as an antibiotic can be.
Because these drugs have been prescribed so widely, their adverse effects have been studied. A few adverse events associated with them have been reported. Combining these few anecdotal cases, some medical researchers have raised some concern, as a precaution. Doctors understand this. Statisticians understand this. But unscrupulous media uses this information to mislead the naïve public and even public figures
Remdisivir is the opposite. It has been developed very recently and has been scarcely used. There is little information about its adverse effects. The corrupt news networks present this lack of evidence of adverse effects as evidence of the absence of adverse effects.
CredibleMeds
The leading objection against HCQ / HCQ+AZ is possible QTc prolongation. Most professionals refer to (CredibleMeds.org, 2020) which puts both HCQ and AZ in the category of Known Risk of TdP (KR).
I think that HCQ was listed in that category by mistake. A review of the literature reveals only few anecdotal cases. Some of them are poisoning by large overdoses of HCQ. Then there are patients who were on HCQ for years, suddenly got sick and recovered when HCQ was withdrawn. While there are millions of people continuously taking HCQ, only a few cases of cardiac events have been reported. Even if HCQ was the cause of these rare cases, which is usually unknown, it is still statistically insignificant. It is much safer than driving. Other antivirals are known to cause QTc prolongation too but are not being pulled from practice. In the case of HCQ, it seems that a precaution principle has prevailed over statistical reasoning and common sense.
AZ is in the KR category, just like many other antibiotics, including Erythromycin. I have never heard of patients requiring QTc monitoring, when taking Erythromycin.
Attention of the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd: many widely used psycho-active drugs are also listed in the KR category. That includes anti-psychotic Haloperidol, anti-depressants Escitalopram (Cipralex, Lexapro) and Citalopram (Celexa).
American College of Cardiology
The most reliable source of information about arrhythmia risks is the American College of Cardiology. (Simpson, 2020) in the Cardiology Magazine:
Chloroquine, and its more contemporary derivative hydroxychloroquine, have remained in clinical use for more than a half-century as an effective therapy for treatment of some malarias, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. … Despite these suggestive findings, several hundred million courses of chloroquine have been used worldwide making it one of the most widely used drugs in history, without reports of arrhythmic death under World Health Organization surveillance.
HCQ is even milder than CQ.
Azithromycin, a frequently used macrolide antibiotics lacks strong pharmacodynamic evidence of iKr inhibition [associated with QT prolongation]. Epidemiologic studies have estimated an excess of 47 cardiovascular deaths which are presumed arrhythmic per 1 million completed courses, although recent studies suggest this may be overestimated.
In other words, after over 50 years of effective use, HCQ and AZ have proven their safety and efficacy. There is no reason for fear, except the fear itself. But some people might be vulnerable, so the article explains how to calculate an individual Risk Score for QTc prolongers. Individuals with higher Risk Score might need QTc monitoring. Also, the authors suggest avoiding other QTc prolonging medications in the time of HCQ+AZ treatment.
The cardiologists who wrote this article did not dismiss the concern. They explained the science pertaining to it and suggest proper mitigation measures.
Other literature also suggests low risk of HCQ and AZ. (Prutkin, 2020):
Limited data on hydroxychloroquine suggest it has a low risk of causing TdP, based on its use for rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and antimalarial therapy. … For these medications [HCQ and AZ], their time window of use is short duration, which is another reason the risk of TdP may be lower
HCQ and AZ have other known contra-indications, but they are out of the scope here.
COVID-19 caused Arrhythmia
Many studies show that COVID-19 causes heart arrhythmia. Cardiac arrest, not directly caused by respiratory damage, is one of the leading direct causes of COVID-19 deaths.
(Bansal, 2020) is a review. It finds that
COVID-19 is primarily a respiratory illness but cardiovascular involvement can occur through several mechanisms.
Acute cardiac injury is the most reported cardiovascular abnormality in COVID-19, with average incidence 8-12%
Both tachy- and brady-arrhythmias are known to occur in COVID-19. A study describing clinical profile and outcomes in 138 Chinese patients with COVID-19 reported 16.7% incidence of arrhythmia. The incidence was much higher (44.4%) in those requiring ICU admission …
It also notes that CoV2 virus might cause cardiac injury directly or indirectly. The possibility of a treatment impact is mentioned as a less likely one.
(Wang, et al., 2020) finds that 44% of the patients transferred to ICU developed arrhythmia. None of them received HCQ or CQ. Most of the patients received an unrelated anti-viral and an antibiotic. Only in 18% of the patients the antibiotic was AZ. At least some of the patients developed an arrhythmia before the treatment.
(Hawryluk, 2020):
Doctors have found that the infection can mimic a heart attack. They have taken patients to the cardiac catheterization lab to clear a suspected blockage, only to find the patient wasn’t really experiencing a heart attack but had COVID-19.
Thus, the hypothesis that CVOID-19 patients experience QTc prolongation and arrhythmia because of the disease, rather than due to HCQ+AZ treatment, is well founded. AZ may increase the odds of QTc prolongation in COVID-19 patients, who would otherwise die from cardiac arrest or multiple organs failure.
The media and professional publications report a sharp increase of mortality from cardiac arrest at home in the last few weeks. Some of these cases are known to be COVID-19, but most of them are not tested. Could many of them be happening due to the cardiac damage caused by COVID-19? Can the cardiac impact of COVID-19 be aggravated by strong QTc prolongers that many people take regularly? There are countless variables confounding this statistic. There is an especially sharp increase in home cardiac arrests in New York, which is usually explained by people’s reluctance to call an ambulance or ER.
(Kochi, 2020) provides in-depth explanation of the cardiac effects of respiratory infections and interaction with QTc prolongation medications.
Positive Cardiac Effects of HCQ
Gone unmentioned are HCQ’s positive cardiac effects. They were widely reported before HCQ had misfortune of being mentioned by President Trump. For example, Taking Hydroxychloroquine for RA or Lupus Can Reduce Heart Risk by 17%
If you take the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) as part of your treatment for lupus or rheumatoid arthritis (RA), you may be getting cardiovascular protection as an added bonus.
The article is based on (Jorge, 2019). These findings might be applicable only to long term taking of HCQ, not a 5-day course for COVID-19, but the same can be said about the alleged negative cardiac effects.
Articles/Studies criticizing HCQ
Listed here are several other papers, influential in the media, but not in the science. These papers span the range from erroneous to … non-existent.
Magagnoli et al.
(Magagnoli, 2020) is a not peer-reviewed pre-print. It makes a retrospective statistical comparison of the outcome in COVID-19 patients, who received HCQ or HCQ+AZ treatment prior to April 11, in Veterans Affairs hospitals. In the Abstract, it claims that a larger percentage of HCQ treated patients died compared to untreated patients. This ignores the fact that HCQ or HCQ+AZ treatment was given only in the most desperate cases, frequently as compassionate care. Deep inside of the manuscript, it does acknowledge that initial conditions of the HCQ and HCQ+AZ groups was much worse than those of the untreated group, but then ignores it
The original version (archived) of the “study” was published on April 21. It received crushing criticism in the comments and was replaced with another one on April 23, hiding those comments. Casting even further doubt on the credibility of this study, one of the authors disclosed Gilead funding for another research. This work was funded by a NIH grant.
Despite its multiple flaws, lack of peer review, and obscurity of the authors, this pre-print immediately received wall-to-wall media coverage. Given these circumstances, this work looks like a criminal fraud, rather than a scientific one.
Tang et al.
(Tang, 2020) is a not peer-reviewed pre-print. It reports results of a clinical trial in China, in which HCQ was given to patients 16-17 days after onset of the disease. This is too late for an anti-viral to work. Thus, this study describes the incorrect use of HCQ, rather than efficacy or safety of the drug. From the comments:
With an average delay of 16 days from symptom onset to enrollment and treatment in this trial, those patients are pretty much past the viral phase of the disease, where an antiviral treatment would have the most value, and are well on their way to pneumonia and a cytokine storm problem, which is ultimately what kills.
Once again, despite its obvious errors, the study was widely covered, including the New York Times and LA Times. Neither headline nor article addresses the obvious lateness of the drug’s application.
Mahevas et al.
(Mahevas, 2020) is another not peer-reviewed pre-print. Didier Raoult and his colleagues replied to it with a bluntness, rare in scientific journals: Scientific fraud to demonstrate the lack of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine compared to placebo in a non-randomized retrospective cohort of patients with Covid: Response to MAHEVAS et al. , MedRxiv, 2020. (Brouqui, et al., 2020). (Mahevas, 2020) also gathered many negative comments on MedRxiv.
Oral Statements of Holtgrave & Cuomo
A study of 600 patients at 22 hospitals in New York is being conducted by the University at Albany School of Public Health under the management of dean David Holtgrave. Although the study was not finished, Mr. Holtgrave already announced that the results are negative: “We don’t see a statistically significant difference between patients who took the drugs [HCQ, HCQ+AZ] and those who did not,” according to CNN. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo referred to the results as neither positive nor negative, per CNN and ABC.
No paper, or even pre-print, reporting these results, has been published, as of April 29 (searches on Google Scholar, PubMed, and medRxiv were conducted for Holtgrave hydroxychloroquine; Holtgrave COVID-19).
New York and other “resistance” states make patients jump through hoops to obtain HCQ. As an anti-viral, it should be taken as soon as possible. Dr. Vladimir Zelenko explained that in his letter, which is worth reading in its entirety:
It is essential to start treatment against Covid-19 immediately upon clinical suspicion of infection and not to wait for confirmatory testing. There is a very narrow window of opportunity to eliminate the virus before pulmonary complications begin. The waiting to treat is the essence of the problem.
He refers to patients in the high-risk category – older than 60, having certain health conditions, or shortness of breath. The resistance states established onerous requirements that delay HCQ treatment for days. This sharply lowers the efficiency of the treatment, and possibly increases TdP risks. The mixed results, promised by Mr. Holtgrave, might be caused by this delay.
Russia
On March 28, Russia announced a COVID-19 treatment based on Mefloquine. Mefloquine, invented in the US in 1970s, is another anti-malaria drug, similar to HCQ. In the West, Mefloquine was withdrawn from use after a controversy about its long-term effects. Russia might also use HCQ. From a Russian brochure (Nikiforov, 2020):
These drugs have a comprehensive negative effect on the coronavirus. It may take years of scientific experimentation to understand how and what exactly they affect. Now the fact of a positive effect has been established, and the drugs should and will be used.
The mechanisms of HCQ and HCQ+AZ action are explained (Hache & Raoult, 2020).
WHO
On March 27, WHO erected another roadblock to treating COVID-19 patients with HCQ. WHO stated that HCQ was not only insufficiently tested (which was true at that time), but that it was considered for COVID-19 at much higher doses than for malaria.
In the context of the COVID-19 response, the dosage and treatment schedules for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine that are currently under consideration do not reflect those used for treating patients with malaria. The ingestion of high doses of these medicines may be associated with adverse or seriously adverse health outcomes.
This is dangerous misinformation. HCQ dosage for COVID-19 is the same or lower than for malaria (Drugs.com, 2019). WHO was aware of this, because it was already conducting clinical trials including HCQ and a number of other Big Pharma drugs. Yet, as of April 29, this paragraph still appears there. This act alone justifies not only defunding but ignoring WHO.
Google and Facebook adhered to WHO on everything related to COVID-19. Together with Twitter, they purged information favorable to HCQ. This is outrageous behavior for telecommunications and computational services providers.
Remarks
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It seems that the main contra-indication for HCQ treatment of COVID-19 is that no treatment is needed for healthy individuals below age 50.
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Persons in the President’s circle were claiming that HCQ / HCQ+AZ are unproven treatments. That might have been true a month ago, but not now. These drugs are proven by practice and by failure of its opponents to disprove their efficacy and relative safety.
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The Guidelines are accompanied by a financial disclosure of the panel members. Weirdly, this disclosure covers a period of 11 months: May 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020. The latest three weeks were excluded for some reason. Nevertheless, 9 out of 50 members of the panel disclosed financial ties to Gilead. Gilead’s Remdesivir is an inferior competitor to HCQ – more expensive, almost untested, and less efficient (as far as the little testing with it has shown). HCQ is a generic drug with low profit margin. Gilead Sciences directly participates in WHO trials of Remdesivir as a COVID-19 treatment.
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HCQ / HCQ+AZ are prescribed by a doctor. They are not OTC and should not be used for self-medication.
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HCQ+AZ is the most common treatment. HCQ acts on its own but is much more effective with Zinc; AZ is an antibiotic and a source of Zinc. See Dr. Zelenko’s regimen is HCQ+AZ+Zinc.
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There is a live document by Michael J. A. Robb, M.D., tracking effectiveness of HCQ-based treatments https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w6p_HqRXCrW0_wYNK7m_zpQLbBVYcvVU/view
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 21:10 -
- Trump Administration "Turbocharging" Efforts To Grapple Global Supply Chains From China
Trump Administration “Turbocharging” Efforts To Grapple Global Supply Chains From China
President Trump’s trade war is back. It’s an election year, and the efforts by the administration to ‘turbocharge’ an initiative to deglobalize that world by removing critical supply chains from China could be seen with new rounds of tariffs to strike Beijing for its handling of the COVID-19 outbreak, US officials told Reuters.
It’s clear that coronavirus lockdowns have resulted in a crashed economy with more than 30 million people unemployed have derailed President Trump’s normal campaigning process and the promises of a vibrant economy. This could suggest President Trump is about to unleash tariff hell on Beijing as it would do two things: First, it would pressure US companies with supply chains in China to exit, and second, the president can say the tariffs are a punishment for the more than 68,000 Americans that have died from the virus.
“We’ve been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbocharging that initiative,” Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.
“I think it is essential to understand where the critical areas are and where critical bottlenecks exist,” Krach said, adding that the matter was key to U.S. security and one the government could announce new action on soon.
Current and former officials said the Commerce Department and other federal agencies are investigating ways to push US companies away from sourcing and manufacturing in China. “Tax incentives and potential re-shoring subsidies are among measures being considered to spur changes,” they said.
“There is a whole of government push on this,” said one. Agencies are probing which manufacturing should be deemed “essential” and how to produce these goods outside of China.
Another official said, “this moment is a perfect storm; the pandemic has crystallized all the worries that people have had about doing business with China.”
“All the money that people think they made by making deals with China before, now they’ve been eclipsed many-fold by the economic damage” from the coronavirus, the official said.
Amid a pandemic and recession, it appears the comments from US officials suggest geopolitics could soon become major headaches for global markets. President Trump’s latest comments have stirred new concerns that an economic war with China is about to restart. This could be potentially dangerous for investors who are looking for V-shaped recoveries.
Last week, President Trump said China “will do anything they can” to make him lose his re-election bid in November. He said Beijing faced a “lot” of possible consequences for the virus outbreak.
He told Reuters: “There are many things I can do. We’re looking for what happened.”
President Trump recently said he could slap new tariffs of up to 25% tax on $370 billion in Chinese goods currently in place. Officials said the president could introduce new sanctions on officials or companies or project closer relations with Taiwan, all moves that would infuriate Beijing.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the administration is working with allies, including Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam, to “move the global economy forward.”
Conversations among US officials have so far been about “how we restructure … supply chains to prevent something like this from ever happening again,” Pompeo said.
And it appears Beijing is preparing for President Trump to strike. We noted on Monday that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing for a worst-case scenario of armed conflict with the US.
For years, we have documented the possibility of Thucydides Trap playing out between the US and China. That is when a dominant regional power (the US) feels threatened by the rise of a competing power (China). Read:
The evolution of the pandemic and economic crash appears to be deepening geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 20:50 - America Is A Technocracy, Not A Democracy
America Is A Technocracy, Not A Democracy
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Perhaps never before in American history have the unelected technocrats played such an enormous role in shaping public policy in America…
In recent weeks, members of Congress have been missing in action. Late last month, the House of Representatives passed the biggest spending bill in history while most members were absent. Member votes were not recorded and the legislation was passed with a voice vote, which required only a tiny handful of members.
Weeks later, the Senate refuses to even meet, and may finally get around to debating some legislative matters in May. As with the House, a handful of members assembled earlier to approve another enormous stimulus bill. Many Senators stayed home. This is “representative government” in modern America.
But if you thought this lack of congressional action means not much is happening in Washington in terms of policymaking, you would be very wrong. It’s just that the democratically elected institutions have now become a largely irrelevant sideshow. The real policymaking takes place among unelected experts, who decide for themselves—with minimal oversight or control from actual elected officials—what will happen in terms of public policy. The people who really run the country are these experts and bureaucrats at the central banks, at public health agencies, spy agencies, and an expanding network of boards and commissions.
The Rise of the Technocracy
This is not a new trend. Over the past several decades—and especially since the New Deal—official experts in government have gradually replaced elected representatives as the primary decision-makers in government. Public debate has been abandoned in favor of meetings among small handfuls of unelected technocrats. Politics has been replaced by “science,” whether social science or physical science. These powerful and largely unaccountable decision-makers are today most noticeable in federal courts, in “intelligence” agencies, at the Federal Reserve, and—long ignored until now—in government public health agencies.
Technocracy as a style of governing has been around at least since the Progressive Era, although it has often been restrained by traditional legislative and elected political actors and institutions. Globally, it has gained prominence in a variety of times and places, for example in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s.
But the technocracy’s power has long been growing in the United States as well.
This may seem odd in a world where we are told democracy is among the highest political values, but technocrats have nonetheless managed to justify themselves through myths asserting that technocrats make scientific decisions guided only by The Data. These technocrats, we are told, care nothing of politics and only make sound decisions based on where the science leads.
Although that all may sound more reasonable or logical to some, the truth is that there is nothing nonpolitical, scientific, or evenhanded about government by technocrat. Technocrats, like everyone else, have their own ideologies, their own agendas, and their own interests. Often, their interests are greatly at odds with those of the general public that pays the technocrats’ salaries and is subject to the technocracy’s edicts. The rise of technocracy has only meant that the means of influencing policy is now limited to a much smaller number of people—namely those who are already influential and powerful in the halls of government. Technocracy seems less political, because the political wrangling is limited to what used to be called “smoke-filled rooms.” That is, technocracy is really a sort of oligarchy, although not limited to the financially wealthy. It’s limited to people who went to the “right” schools or control powerful corporations such as Google or Facebook, or work for influential media organizations. It’s branded “nonpolitical,” because ordinary voters and taxpayers are excluded from even knowing who is involved or what policies are being proposed. In other words, technocracy is government by a small exclusive club. And you ain’t in it.
So how does technocracy survive in a system to claims to base its legitimacy on democratic institutions? After all, technocracy is by its very nature designed to be antidemocratic. Indeed, as the Left has soured on democracy, leftists have taken to demanding that more technocratic methods be implemented to do an end run around democratic institutions. In a much-quoted 2011 article for the New Republic, influential banker and economist Peter Orszag complains that democratic institutions such as Congress aren’t implementing enough of his preferred policies. Therefore, he insists that it’s time to “jettison the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy and instead begin to build a new set of rules and institutions.” He wants rule by technocrat through a system of “commissions” staffed by “independent experts.”
This is the new model of “efficient” government. But in many areas, this is already how the United States is governed. There is no shortage of boards, panels, courts, and agencies that are controlled by experts who function largely without any oversight from the voters, taxpayers, or elected officials.
We can point to several institutions in which the spirit of technocracy is both well established and highly influential.
One: The US Supreme Court
This tendency toward technocracy first manifested itself in the form of the US Supreme Court. The court, of course, had long been considered to be a body of legal experts, of sorts. They were supposed to consider technical legal issues apart from the vicissitudes of electoral politics. But this expertise did not come without limitations. The court was expected to limit its own power or risk charges of attempting to meddle in the workings of democracy. By the mid-twentieth century, however, these limitations had been largely abandoned. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court created a wide variety of new “rights” that Congress had never shown any willingness to create. Roe v. Wade, for example, created a new federal legal right to abortion based purely on the desires of a handful of judges and regardless of the fact it had always been assumed by virtually everyone that abortion was a matter for state legislatures.
Prior to this period any changes of such magnitude would have required a constitutional amendment. That is, prior to the rise of the modern supercharged SCOTUS, it was assumed that major changes to the Constitution required a long public debate and the involvement of many voters and legislators. But with the rise of the Supreme Court as expert creators of new law, it became the norm for the judges to dispense with public debate and electoral decision-making. Instead, the experts would “discover” what the Constitution really meant and create their own new laws based on legal “expertise.”
Two: The Federal Reserve
A second building block of the technocracy has been the Federal Reserve. Since its creation in 1935, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has increasingly acted as a policymaking board of technocrats who function outside the legislative process, yet enact regulations and policies that have enormously large effects on banking systems, the financial sector, and even fiscal policy.
The Fed policymakers are quintessential technocrats in that they allegedly make decisions based only on “the data” and unbent by political concerns. The sacrosanct nature of these technocrats’ decisions has been buttressed by years of implausible claims about the Fed’s “independence” from political pressure from the White House or Congress.
In reality, of course, the Fed has never been an apolitical institution, and this has been shown by a variety of scholars, many of them political scientists. Fed Boards have always been influenced by presidents and others. (Most economists are too willfully naïve to understand the political dimensions of the Fed.) Nowadays, it has become painfully obvious that the Fed exists to prop up the regime and the financial sector through whatever means necessary. The idea this process is guided by a dispassionate consideration of “the data” should be regarded as risible.
Three: The Medical Experts
A new addition to the growing ranks of the technocrats in America is the legion of medical experts—at all levels of government—who have attempted to dictate policy during the COVID-19 panic of 2020. Led nationally by lifelong government bureaucrats such as Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, the public health experts have taken on the typical persona of the technocrat: they are guided only by “the science,” they insist, and it is claimed that only these experts have the ability to correctly implement and dictate public policies that will address the risks posed by various diseases.
As with the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court, those who oppose the medical experts are said to be sacrificing apolitical objectivity—a virtue enjoyed only by the technocrats (and their supporters)—on the altar of gaining political advantage.
Four: The Intelligence Agencies
Since 1945, the United States government has built up an increasingly large network of intelligence agencies, composed of more than a dozen agencies staffed by career military officers. As we have seen in recent years though a variety of scandals at the CIA, NSA, and the FBI, these technocrats have no qualms about attempting to undermine the elected civilian government in order to assert their own agenda in its place. These bureaucrats at the so-called deep state in many cases regard themselves as unanswerable to the elected government, and even seek to override foreign policy decisions it has made.
Why Elected Politicians Empower Technocrats
In all of these cases, elected officials could intervene to limit the power of the technocrats, yet they choose not to.
In the case of Supreme Court, Congress could limit the jurisdiction of the appellate courts—and thus the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court itself—simply through changes in legislation. Similarly, Congress could abolish or heavily limit the powers of the Federal Reserve. Again Congress chooses not to. And, of course, Congress and the state legislatures could easily intervene to roll back not only the powers of medical technocrats, but the emergency powers of the executive branch itself. Yet this has not happened.
The reason is because politicians like to “outsource” policymaking to unelected technocrats. This makes it easier for elected officials to later claim that they were not responsible for unpopular measures implemented by technocratic institutions. By putting more power in the hands of technocrats, elected politicians can also later claim that they were respecting the “apolitical” nature of these institutions and that they sought to respect the “expertise.” “Don’t blame me,” the politicians will later claim, “I was only trying to respect ‘the science’ or ‘the data’ or ‘the law.'”
Empowering the technocracy is a useful way to spread blame around in Washington, and it’s also a way to, as Orszag suggests, get around legislative institutions that do what they’re supposed to do: prevent government actions when there aren’t enough votes.
But with technocracy, a lack of votes in Congress isn’t a problem: just hand everything over to a dozen technocrats who will decide what to do. It can then all be done outside the public eye, and with the added advantage of being the decision of nonpolitical “experts.”
Unfortunately, this scheme has worked. Voters are inclined to “trust the experts” and polls often show that the public trusts unelected “experts” more than they trust Congress. This is a great victory for the bureaucrats and for those who push for an ever more powerful state.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 20:30 - Why A New Diplomatic Crisis With China Is Critical For Trump If He Wants To Be Re-elected
Why A New Diplomatic Crisis With China Is Critical For Trump If He Wants To Be Re-elected
Amid all the discussion of whether (or not) it is time to reopen the economy, and take the potential risk of a second wave of infections and deaths resulting in what could be a far more devastating second shutdown, one overlooked angle on the Corona-lockdowns as pointed out by Nordea’s FX strategist Andreas Steno Larsen, is that it emphasizes the already growing barriers between the “Elite” and the “Workers.”
In his latest FX weekly observations, Larsen writes that while “the big cities are the main epicenters (also per capita) of the Covid-19 virus, containment measures have been forced upon entire states and countries.” As a result, regions with low density have been faced with the same kind of measures as more dense areas, even if these regions haven’t seen a material spread of the virus.
In other words, “One size fits all, even if density has proven to be maybe the biggest issue when trying to contain the virus spread.” This means that in addition to the outsized gains to the elite as a result of the trillions in new stimulus injections which have promptly buoyed capital markets, the current virolocracy could also be seen as “both extraordinary elitist and gentrification-supportive in its nature, since a much larger part of the urban population can work from home etc.”
Expanding on this argument, Larsen notes that “workers lives matters” has seen tailwind in important swing states such as Michigan as most of the spread has been seen around Detroit, while the less dense parts of the state haven’t seen any material spread of the virus. The movement argues that the big cities are relatively better off in the lockdowns, and that less dense areas should never have been forced to close the economy anyway. And as the Nordea strategist writes, “it is KEY for The Donald to win over such “movements” if he wants to triumph in the election later this year.”
The problem is that neither Nordea, nor the Fed, think the economy will be in a good shape by then, which is why The Donald needs something else to convince his base, in particular since wage growth could be about to fall of a cliff.
Indeed, wages are another reason why workers are about to get a double whammy of corona pain: as Larsen continues, core inflation (and wage growth) are cyclical laggards, which means that first
- activity comes to a halt,
- commodity prices and headline inflation drop,
- workers are laid off in size,
- wages and prices decelerate or even decline.
Nordea believes that we are probably in between phase three and four now, and why news on prices and wages will be the next to surprise negatively during H2-2020 and in to 2021 (in Q1 and Q2 activity data has been the negative surprise).
So faced with record unemployment coupled with growing labor class anger, Trump’s weapon of choice to win over the workers again, will be an escalation of his China-bashing strategy in combination with renewed isolationism.
According to Nordea Trump deeming Chinese equities a “national security risk” is not really newsworthy since the EU has been talking about the same thing for a while – though, mostly with a focus on blocking potential hostile Chinese take-overs of Euro area companies, but it suddenly seemed to revive the focus on geopolitical risks on the other side of the Corona mess.
And while the US/China trade deal has been stone-dead for months already (as it was from the outset), so that is in itself not exciting, no-one had an interest in saying so until after the US election. The corona virus – and the coming elections – have offered Trump a chance to “reveal” that the trade deal is 100% off, and to take a renewed China aggressive stance into the election instead.
This inevitable deterioration in diplomatic relations, as Larsen concludes, is bad for Asian FX (versus USD), and risk assets and equities in general, and why Rabobank earlier today said that “There Is One Key Thing To Watch Today: The Yuan.“
As Larsen concludes, “Before the March melt-up in markets, USD/CNY was THE global bellwether for risk appetite, and it may very well return as such very soon. You should buy USD/CNY (and sell risk assets) on tariff threats.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 20:10 - Advanced Russian Radar System Discovered Near Israeli Border: Report
Advanced Russian Radar System Discovered Near Israeli Border: Report
A Russian publication reported this week that the Russian Armed Forces have deployed their Resonance radar system in an area near the Israeli border. According to the NZIV publication, the Russian Resonance radar was identified in two locations in the eastern Mediterranean region, including an area along the Israeli-Egyptian border.
Last year, the think tank and reputable military analysis source GlobalSecurity.org wrote: “the Egyptian Resonance-NE radar tracks the movement of all objects in the airspace not only over Egypt, but also Israel and Syria. According to a number of sources, in 2020 Russia will begin regular deliveries of Resonance-NE to the Middle East.”
Russian Resonance radar system, file image via Al Masdar News “Eli Dekel, a retired military systems researcher, has found the exact location and location of two radar stations that can detect planes and missiles up to 1,100 km away,” the publication said.
“One station was built in Javelin Oved at a distance of about 40 km, east of the Suez Canal,” NZIV reported, adding that a “second post was in the Gulf of Suez on a hill between Jabel al-Galla and Kabir.”
NZIV said the locations of these radar stations will allow early detection of various types of aircraft and missiles at long distances, as well as provide early warnings to the Egyptian Air Force and defense forces about timely preparation for any threat.
“Equipping Egypt with state-of-the-art radars is part of the accelerating process of arming and building military infrastructure, mainly in eastern Egypt and the Sinai. The system also provides data for intercept systems within 350 km. This area includes all of Israel,” they added.
Via aviation analysis site avia-pro.net According to Global Security:
The Rezonans-NE very high frequency [VHF] counter-stealth early warning phased-array radar is designed to effectively detect a wide range of current and future air targets, including low-observable cruise and ballistic missiles, hypersonic aerial vehicles, as well as stealthy ones, in severe electronic countermeasures (ECM) and clutter environment. It is in service with the Russian Air Force, Iran (since 2009) and Algeria (since 2017).
The radar can operate in circular scan mode or within a specified sector. In addition to peacetime tasks, it can provide early warning of an air attack and information support for air and air defense warfare operations. The Rezonans-NE includes up to four radar modules, each of which provides control in the azimuth sector of 90 degrees and can operate independently.
It was not said when Russia deployed these radar systems near the Israeli border; however, given Israel’s military intelligence capabilities, it is highly likely that they were aware of these movements.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 19:50 - Global Coronavirus Deaths Surpass 250,000: Live Updates
Global Coronavirus Deaths Surpass 250,000: Live Updates
Summary:
- Deaths decline for 5th day
- Japan extends state of emergency
- Global coronavirus deaths pass 250,000
- Spanish opposition threatens to torpedo vote to extend lockdown
- Charlie Gasparino says NFL to announce schedule on Thursday
- JHU confirms 3k/day projection reported by NYT is no longer relevant
- Cali gov says businesses can begin “limited” reopening as soon as Thursday
- European clinical trial “Project Discovery” results to be released May 14
- NY reports uptick in deaths, still lower than last week’s average
- UK reports drop in new cases, deaths
- Macron warns European borders may remain closed until September
- Florida becomes latest state to reopen much of economy on Monday
- Italy, Spain and other European and Asian economies are also reopening
- Iran to allow Friday prayers
- UK defense secretary says China owes the world ‘an explanation’
* * *
Update (1750ET): Coronavirus deaths have surpassed 250,000, according to JHU.
* * *
Update (1700ET): Germany is apparently plowing forward with its plans to reopen the economy despite a recent uptick in “R” – the rate of spread for SARS-CoV-2 – that helped rattle the market’s confidence in the rebound narrative that had been taking shape before the most famous investor reminded the market that many industries are facing serious long-term obstacles, and that the long slog back to growth has only just begun.
German state ministers have reportedly agreed with Chancellor Merkel to begin the next step in Germany’s phased reopening: Allowing the rest of the student population to return to class, albeit on a staggered schedule that, in its seemingly absurd complexity, can perhaps best be described as ‘Kafkaesque’.
- GERMAN STATES TO REOPEN SCHOOLS FOR ALL GRADES WITH CHILDREN ONLY ALLOWED TO GO TO CLASS IN ROTATING SHIFTS, NOT ON DAILY BASIS GERMAN STATES TO ALLOW BUNDESLIGA SOCCER LEAGUE TO RESUME MATCHES FROM MAY 15 UNDER STRICT CONDITIONS WITHOUT FANS IN STADIUMS -SOURCES
Oh, and while the mainstream media continues to run with the NYT’s meaningless 3k figure, Johns Hopkins University has independently confirmed that the numbers obtained by the paper are no longer relevant.
UPDATE: Researchers at @JohnsHopkinsSPH say data predicting 3k deaths a day from COVID-19 was preliminary and “not accurate to present them as forecasts.” pic.twitter.com/JDFvvYJ3Y2
— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) May 4, 2020
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But we suspect the reporters were probably aware.
* * *
Update (1550ET): Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino just reported that the NFL is planning to announce its schedule for the 2020-2021 season on Thursday.
SCOOP-@NFL schedule likely to be announced Thursday night; fan attendance will likely be left up to states meaning Texas could have some fans at stadium more now @FoxBusiness @LizClaman
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) May 4, 2020
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It’s Charlie – so take it with a grain of salt. But the prospect of an NFL season – however limited – should warm the hearts of all those sports fanatics about to start placing bets on South Korean baseball.
* * *
Update (1530ET): Monday’s coronavirus data out of the UK was pretty solid.
As of 9am 4 May, there have been 1,291,591 tests, with 85,186 tests on 3 May.
945,299 people have been tested of which 190,584 tested positive.
As of 5pm on 3 May, of those tested positive for coronavirus, across all settings, 28,734 have sadly died. pic.twitter.com/5KhmQy9k9W
— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) May 4, 2020
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Here are the highlights.
Good news from the UK:
– Number of new cases down
– Number of new deaths down
– Number of new people tested up— Norbert Elekes (@NorbertElekes) May 4, 2020
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* * *
Update (1530ET): Apparently, the NYT’s fearmongering efforts (which we mentioned below and also wrote about here) haven’t dissuaded the progressive governor of California, who will allow some retail businesses to begin a “limited” reopening as soon as Thursday.
- CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR SAYS SOME RETAIL BUSINESSES MAY BEGIN LIMITED REOPENING AS EARLY AS THURSDAY
That’s quite the 180 from last week, when he refused to even give an expected date for when limited reopenings might begin. The difference? Some counties are starting to consider flouting state-wide rules and moving ahead on their own. And then there’s the federal bailout money.
* * *
Update (1520ET): California Gov. Gavin Newsom has started his daily press briefing by announcing a new testing record for his state of 30,000 tests run in a single day.
TUNE IN NOW. https://t.co/NyM7l2DOXS
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) May 4, 2020
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* * *
Update (1205ET): As expected, Andrew Cuomo said during his press briefing on Monday that areas of the state with few cases of the virus and even fewer deaths should start preparing “now” for what’s expected to be a May 15 reopening.
- CUOMO: URGES N.Y. REGIONS TO START PREPARING NOW FOR MAY 15
- CUOMO: STARTING MAY 15 REGIONS CAN DO OWN REOPENING ANALYSIS
This, as the NYT publishes “internal projections” from the CDC calling for average daily US deaths to accelerate to 3,000 a day by June 1. However, most of the hardest hit states are seeing cases and deaths decline, while some states are seeing a slight acceleration. Overall US mortality has plateaued. According to the CDC’s own coronavirus weekly summary, “nationally, levels of influenza-like illness (ILI) declined again this week. They have been below the national baseline for two weeks but remain elevated in the northeastern and northwestern part of the country. Levels of laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 activity remained similar or decreased compared to last week.”
The NYT reported that the White House continues to expect up to 3,000 deaths a day in June while Trump continues to ‘press’ for states to reopen.
The report also claimed the projections “confirm” public health experts “primary fear” that a premature reopening will instigate a rebound putting us right back where we were in March.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.
The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the C.D.C. warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded.
But even states that have pressed ahead with reopening aren’t seeing anywhere near the activity they saw as recently as mid-March, just as the stay-at-home orders and lockdowns were beginning.
Trump smartly stopped egging on protesters and pushing states to reopen before federal guidelines say it’s acceptable. But at this point, the notion that these projections represent anything more than a “worst case” scenario for the CDC seems far-fetched.
* * *
Update (1140ET): Andrew Cuomo is beginning is daily press briefing by announcing a slight uptick in the daily death toll (off its lowest level in more than a month) and a continued drop in hospitalizations.
Holding a briefing with updates on #Coronavirus. Watch Live: https://t.co/ynd2dc2lnB
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) May 4, 2020
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The pace of deaths in New York State climbed 1.2% yesterday (according to the data released Monday); that’s compared with an average jump of 1.3% last week.
* * *
Update (1055ET): French President Emmanuel Macron just announced that the results of “Project Discovery”, a massive pan-European trial to try to find a coronavirus cure, will be released in a couple of weeks. He also said he believes the borders of the Schengen area will be shut until September.
* * *
Update (1030ET): As WSJ reports, Florida joined the ranks of US states easing restrictions related to the coronavirus outbreak, while Italy allowed factories to reopen along with more stores while allowing Italians to visit relatives.
The first phase of Florida’s reopening plan calls for restaurants and shops in most parts of the state – with the notable exception of a few counties in South Florida – to operate at 25% of their indoor capacity starting Monday. Schools, bars, gyms and salons will remain closed.
Even in parts of the US where restrictions likely won’t start to be lifted for a couple more weeks or longer, local officials are starting to draw up plans to move even faster than their governors might ideally like. As WSJ points out, two California counties, Sutter and Yuba, have said some businesses including salons, spas and tattoo parlors can open Monday under “modified” guidelines.
As we mentioned earlier, most Italians were allowed to see family members for the first time in almost two months on Monday. They were also allowed to restart exercising in parks, while also being permitted to enter restaurants to pick up takeout (like they say, it’s the little things that count).
After allowing children to play outside for the first time last week, Spain permitted hairdressers, beauty salons and small shops to open by appointment only on Monday.
Greece, Belgium, India, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand also lifted some restrictions, allowing certain businesses and government offices to reopen after weeks of closure. German students in their final year of school were allowed to return to their classrooms.
France, which is being extremely cautious and slow with lifting its lockdown, is stretching that out even further. The country’s Labor Minister said people who can should work from home until at least mid-summer.
* * *
As most of the US and most of Europe start yet another week under lockdown, the FT reports that the rate of global coronavirus deaths slowed for the fifth straight day: The worldwide single-day total of deaths reported yesterday (typically, those deaths occurred during the prior 24 hour period) hit 3,481, falling for the fifth day in a row.
Sunday’s total represents the smallest daily increase in deaths since the end of March, reflecting trends seen in New York, the UK, Italy and elsewhere on Sunday.
Globally, the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases climbed by 82,260 yesterday, the biggest spike on a Sunday since the pandemic began. It brought the total number of ‘confirmed’ infections to 3.4 million, with hundreds of thousands more potentially left uncounted.
The US suffered an additional 1,158 deaths to push the total there to 61,760. This is the lowest daily figure since April 6, though the US still accounts for a third of all daily fatalities.
Meanwhile, in Japan, PM Shinzo Abe has made it official.
As was widely expected, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe officially extended Japan’s nationwide state of emergency – which had been due to expire on Wednesday – through May 31.
While Japan has escaped the massive death tolls seen in Europe and the US, the number of confirmed cases has exploded over the last month, a sign that the world’s third-largest economy is still struggling with the first wave of the virus, which has now burrowed deep into Japanese society, according to Nikkei.
While Tokyo hasn’t been devastated by the virus on the level of NYC or Wuhan, the spike in infections has left hospital systems strained around the country.
“Nearly one more month is needed to improve the medical system, which has been stretched thin,” Abe told reporters at a news conference on Monday evening. “The reduction of new infections has still not attained the necessary level.”
Abe promised that a panel would examine the effectiveness of the state of emergency, and if allowable, would order it to be lifted before the May 31 deadline if enough progress has been made.
While Japan ramps up its restrictions, Spain is heading for a political confrontation over its lockdown – possibly the most restrictive in Europe – as the death toll lingers near its lowest point since the outbreak began.
It had been taken as a given that PM Pedro Sanchez would manage to win the votes for a planned two-week extension of the lockdown. However, the main leader of the opposition in the Spanish Parliament – a lawmaker named Pablo Casado – claims his People’s Party (a center-right party) plans to vote against the extension, which gives Sanchez extraordinary power to rule by decree.
Sanchez argues that the lockdown must be lifted gradually to guarantee that the progress the country has made will be protected: According to health ministry figures released on Monday, the daily death toll remained at 164 for the second consecutive day, the lowest level since March 18, when the lockdown was just 3 days old.
Iran is set to hold Friday prayers this week and has re-opened mosques in a handful of towns believed to pose a low risk to public health after about two months of closure. Though the reopenings come with rules: Worshippers can spend a maximum of half an hour in mosques and have to wear face masks and gloves.
Iran’s death toll reached 6,277 on Monday, up from 6,203 a day before. A total of 98,647 individuals have now tested positive.
Last night, a US intel leak appeared to confirm what many China hawks had already suspected: That China withheld information – like the confirmation of human-to-human transmission – and used the time to hoard PPE and other medical supplies, which would explain the inexplicable global shortage that seemed to already be in place by the time American buyers started finding that warehouses had already been mysteriously emptied.
Now, as the UK reconsiders its decision to allow telelcoms components manufactured by Huawei to be used as part of its 5G network, the British Defense Minister said Monday that China has some explaining to do about the US report cited above – though he added that there would be time for an inquiry after all of this is over.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 19:35 - Supreme Court Cases Go 'Remote' Over Fears Of Aging Justices; Already Beset By Audio 'Hiccups'
Supreme Court Cases Go ‘Remote’ Over Fears Of Aging Justices; Already Beset By Audio ‘Hiccups’
How long before all branches of government and federal agencies stop meeting in person? Is it perhaps an overly hasty, drastic and dangerous precedent Constitutionally speaking? This rush to move all proceedings to online ‘remote’ interaction – even the highest levels of government – at the very least heightens the possibility of our democracy being hacked, as many prior media reports have acknowledged in the case of Congressional remote voting procedures.
And now another unprecedented and historical first: the Supreme Court will now go to hearing cases remotely via telephone, the AP reports Monday.
“The changes are a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which has made holding courtroom sessions unsafe, especially with six justices aged 65 or older and at risk of getting seriously sick from the virus,” AP reports.
US Supreme Court, file image. The court has ten cases to hear over the next week, and it’s as yet unclear whether the “experiment” will work. One advantage is that livestream proceedings will reportedly be able to be heard by the public, while at the same time shielding elderly justices from the possibility of infection.
The new livestreamed sessions began Monday mid-morning. The AP details some of the high profile cases as follows: “Cases that will be heard over the next two weeks include President Donald Trump’s effort to shield tax and other financial records and whether presidential electors have to cast their Electoral College ballots for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.”
And lo and behold, there are already problems:
The session, being held by phone because of the coronavirus outbreak, included a few minor hiccups. Roberts had to call on Justice Sonia Sotomayor twice when it was her turn to question Ross. Sotomayor said, “I’m sorry, chief,” before asking her questions.
Later, Justice Stephen Breyer’s audio was distorted when he had questions for Blatt. The audio improved after a few seconds and Blatt was able to answer the question.
The case being argued Monday will determine whether businesses can get federal trademark protection for website names such as Booking.com that center on a commonly used word. Booking.com, owned by Booking Holdings Inc., is seeking to be put on a government registry that provides nationwide benefits.
The ‘remote’ sessions will to some extent alter procedural elements and order of arguments. “The court sometimes issues opinions at the start of argument sessions, with the justice who wrote for the majority reading a summary of the opinion and, more rarely, a second justice summarizing a dissent,” AP continues.
“But in another change wrought by the virus outbreak, opinions are being posted online without any statements from justices. The court will next issue opinions on Thursday.”
It’s as yet unclear as to when the court would meet in person again, in yet another pandemic-driven alteration which the American founding fathers likely never envisioned would possibly have happened.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 05/04/2020 – 19:30
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