Month: April 2022

Is The Worst Behind Us?

Is The Worst Behind Us?

Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities,

Monday had the almost obligatory relief rally followed by an extremely ugly day on Tuesday. Wednesday, the Nasdaq attempted rally after rally, only to falter, yet again, into the close.

This morning, futures are awash in green, and we are regaining the “support” line on the Nasdaq from this Weekend’s Not So Good T-Report.

The Good

There are a few things that we can point to as good now (some of which were highlighted in the wonderwall section of that report (yes, I still cannot get that song out of my head):

  • Most Earnings. MSFT was strong yesterday post earnings. This morning QCOM and FB look to open much higher post earnings. That leaves us with AMZN and AAPL tonight, which may continue that trend.

  • Discretionary Share Repurchases. As companies end their quiet periods, there is chatter that they will take advantage of recent price declines, to buy up more shares, which is a powerful flow, if it occurs.

  • Was Tuesday “Capitulation”? There are certainly a lot more bears around and Tuesday’s selling pressure was quite relentless.

  • Equities are not rate sensitive at the moment. This week has exhibited a risk-off/risk-on trading pattern where treasuries are moving in the opposite direction of equities. A more “healthy” pattern in many respects, especially given the hawkish Fed stance.

  • Credit hasn’t been a disaster. I’m getting some mixed signals, but at the very least, credit didn’t lead the way lower, so there can be support from resilient credit markets (though by no means is the picture super clear).

Definitely some things to make me question remaining bearish.

The Not So Good

I won’t rehash the risks laid out on Sunday, which included Russia, Ukraine, Covid, China, Weak Europe, etc., as little has changed there. I will highlight a few things that tempter any desire to turn very bullish here:

  • Aggressive fund inflows. Despite all  of the “capitulation” talk, QQQ has had large inflows, but more indicative of speculation is the large inflows into TQQQ (triple leverage QQQ) and ARKK (though ARKK did have small outflows yesterday). SQQQ (triple short QQQ) had significant outflows every day this week showing people taking off aggressive short positions. I’m not convinced that the “capitulation” actually occurred.

  • Buy the dip remains popular. Yes, I’m seeing more doom and gloom, but my stream also flooded with the “buy the dip” messages that have become de regur for this market. Again, just another hint that we may not have seen capitulation.

  • I’m seeing more reports touting QT as a headwind. We’ve been on that bandwagon for awhile, but it seems that more people are discussing it as the Fed meeting nears. I still don’t think this is fully priced in, though it is getting there.

  • The Fed Meeting. Will investors get nervous as we approach May 4th? Last FOMC meeting, the markets sold off into it, but, the rally started as Powell was at the podium and it was a very strong rally. Will we in fact be reluctant to sell-off because of that reaction? Or will investors be to calm about it, because of the last reaction? I’m very torn on this subject, and for now will leave it in the “bad” camp, mostly because we’ve been in Fed quiet period, so we haven’t had to react to a barrage of hawkish headlines, but I could be convince that the FOMC meeting should be in the “good” category.

  • Liquidity is abysmal both directions. Liquidity is awful in both directions, and that could lead to a melt up, but I’m once again getting images of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (the bridge that oscillates wildly and then crumbles) as I don’t think the lack of liquidity will resolve itself well (especially as the Fed starts taking liquidity out of the system).

I’m less cautious than I was on Sunday, but more bearish than I was yesterday as we’ve had a nice opportunity to trade this around.

I’m still in sell the rips mode as opposed to buy the dips for equities and risk assets, but like buying dips in bonds here.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/28/2022 – 11:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/5faomwN Tyler Durden

Watch Live: President Biden Explains Why Ukraine Needs Another $33 Billion Of US Taxpayer Money

Watch Live: President Biden Explains Why Ukraine Needs Another $33 Billion Of US Taxpayer Money

President Biden will deliver remarks this morning to explain why US taxpayers need to send another $33 billion of “aid” to Ukraine to “Support Ukrainians Defending Their Country and Their Freedom Against Russia’s Brutal War.”

As AP reports, Biden’s latest proposal – which the officials said was expected to last for five months – has more than $20 billion in military assistance for Ukraine and for bolstering defenses in nearby countries.

There is also $8.5 billion in economic aid to help keep Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government functioning and $3 billion for food and humanitarian programs to help civilians and other spending, said the officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The proposal would more than double the initial $13.6 billion package of defense and economic aid for Ukraine and Western allies that Congress enacted last month.

Biden last week warned that $6.5 billion earmarked for security assistance for Ukraine could soon be “exhausted” and that Congress would need to approve supplemental funding. More than half of the approved money for weapons and equipment for Ukraine’s military has already been drawn down.

…

It seemed to signal a long-term U.S. commitment to staving off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to expand his nation’s control of its neighbor, and perhaps beyond.

We have one quick question – how many billions of dollars does it take to turn a ‘proxy’ war into a ‘direct conflict’?

Watch live below (due to start at 1045ET):

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/28/2022 – 10:41

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U.S. East Coast Inventories Hit With Supply Shock Ahead Of Summer Driving Season 

U.S. East Coast Inventories Hit With Supply Shock Ahead Of Summer Driving Season 

A perfect storm of decades-low gasoline and diesel stockpiles on the US East Coast and what is expected to be a busy summer driving season could send fuel prices even higher. 

Severe supply crunches have sent East Coast distillates inventories (including diesel and heating oil) to the lowest level since 1996.

Gasoline stockpiles are at an eight-year low, and the ones in New England have hit their lowest level since 1991. 

Depleted stockpiles have sent diesel prices to record highs, and gasoline prices are hovering near all-time highs. This all comes one month before Memorial Day unofficially kicks off the US summer driving season, which typically ends on Labor Day. 

Notably, diesel futures trading in New York surged to the highest level in records going back to 1986 on East Coast supply woes and global demand for the fuel remain robust. 

This is terrible news for President Biden ahead of the midterm elections as retail gas prices are set to rise once again. 

Meanwhile, Biden’s decision to release 180 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve – one million barrels per day for 180 days, ending just before the midterms — was meant to help lower US gasoline prices “because Putin price hike.” Instead, Biden has been sending some crude to Europe while SPR releases have yet to pressure WTI prices sufficiently lower.  

So what does this all mean? The summer fuel markets will be extremely tight and even more expensive at the pump. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/28/2022 – 10:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/lB7nbZG Tyler Durden

Is Twitter “Burning The Evidence” By Unshackling Conservative Accounts?

Is Twitter “Burning The Evidence” By Unshackling Conservative Accounts?

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Conservative Twitter users have noticed a massive uptick in followers and engagement following Elon Musk’s Twitter buy, while leftists on the platform are experiencing the inverse, prompting some to wonder if the company is undoing evidence that it rigged the reach of people it deemed to be undesirable.

The trend is so extreme that it prompted Twitter to address it, claiming that it is all organic owing to new accounts being created and existing accounts being deactivated.

“We’ve been looking into recent fluctuations in follower counts. While we continue to take action on accounts that violate our spam policy which can affect follower counts, these fluctuations appear to largely have been a result of an increase in new account creation and deactivation,” the company said in a statement.

Not everyone is buying Twitter’s explanation, however.

Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec noted Wednesday, “They’re deboosting liberal accounts right now. Anna Navaro had a post up that said that she’s losing followers, Meanwhile, myself, Cernovich, LibsofTikTok… Everybody on our side got a massive boost out of nowhere.”

“You know what it is, they’re pulling the breaks out, they’re trying to cover up all of their tracks, because they know what they’ve been doing. James O’Keefe proved this with the shadow banning,” Posobiec continued, adding “He proved it. James O’Keefe found the algorithms within Silicon Valley, they do this stuff.”

“Elon… He didn’t just purchase a company, he purchased evidence. He purchased evidence in criminal cases. That’s what he’s got here, and that’s what you’re seeing. He called it himself, an antibody-like response to his action,” Posobiec further asserted.

Watch:

Fox News host Sean Hannity also covered the development Wednesday, suggesting that Twitter is attempting to “cover their tracks” before Musk’s takeover is complete.

“Conservatives on the platform—all of a sudden out of nowhere—enjoyed a massive bump in followers and interactions,” Hannity said, explaining “For example, in just two days, Donald Trump Jr.—wow, magically—he got 200,000 new followers. That is roughly a 2,000 percent increase daily. Wow. It’s almost as if Twitter employees lifted a broad anti-conservative, anti-Trump shadow ban—which we all knew was taking place anyway—in an effort to cover their tracks before the new boss takes over.”

Elon Musk is, of course, completely aware of the evidence pointing to shadow banning:

Meanwhile…

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/28/2022 – 10:00

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Cops Find Suspected Murder Weapon After Years of Searching. It Was in Their Evidence Already.


max-kleinen-ugdKmhDg1m8-unsplash

A judge has dismissed murder charges against a man accused of killing a Cincinnati teen after revelations of extreme bungling by local police. After spending more than two years looking for the murder weapon they said would tie Delrico Peoples to the 2019 crime, Cincinnati cops think they’ve found it—in their own evidence.

On Monday, during jury selection for the case, Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Jeff Heile told prospective jurors the murder weapon had never been found. But that same day, “the lead Cincinnati police detective found a gun believed to be the murder weapon as he was going through the evidence,” reports The Enquirer. “Cincinnati police have had the gun since 2019, but never had it thoroughly tested to see if it matched shell casings found in Peoples’ car or at the shooting scene.”

After actually analyzing the gun, police think they’ve now found their murder weapon. It was seized from another man back in 2019, four months after a stray bullet killed 18-year-old Brandon Phoenix as he waited at a bus stop. At that point, Peoples had already been charged with murder and felonious assault and was in jail.

Testing the gun back then could have helped catch a killer earlier—and saved Peoples from years of prosecution for a crime he may not have committed.

Peoples has admitted to driving the car during the shooting but says he didn’t know the man in the back seat who fired the gunshots and didn’t know the man was going to do so. Peoples “had no knowledge of why his passenger began shooting, or the identity of his passenger,” according to court documents.

Prosecutors asked Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Melba Marsh to delay Peoples’ trial as they sorted out their evidence problems. But the judge said no—Peoples has the presumption of innocence on his side and had already been waiting more than two years for a trial.

“I can’t justify holding him for a longer period of time, so the State of Ohio can do tests that take four to six weeks,” Marsh said. “That’s just not going to happen.”

The charges were dismissed without prejudice, which means that prosecutors are allowed to refile them in the future if they deem it necessary.

FREE MINDS

Judge rejects partisan gerrymander in New York. Democrats frequently accuse Republicans of partisan gerrymandering of election districts—even though they aren’t above doing the same thing themselves. Now, New York’s highest court has “blocked the state’s Democratic-drawn congressional map Wednesday, concluding that the new boundaries represented a partisan gerrymander that violates the state constitution,” CNN reports. “The court ruled that a new map must be created for the 2022 election. New York’s primary election is scheduled for June 28, but the judges wrote it will ‘likely be necessary’ to move the congressional elections to August.”

FREE MARKETS

Student loan debt debate heats up again. The White House is signaling that it may be ready to forgive student loan debt. Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced a bill—the Stop Reckless Student Loan Actions Act —to stop this from happening.

The legislation “would end President Biden’s untargeted, budget-busting suspension of repayments on qualifying federal student loans, following 24 months of non-payment and six executive actions extending the payment pause,” explains a press release from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.). “The bill would still allow the president to temporarily suspend repayment for low- and middle-income borrowers in future national emergencies and would prohibit the president from cancelling outstanding federal student loan obligations due to a national emergency.”

Charles C.W. Cooke thinks this doesn’t go far enough and Republicans should end the federal student loan program entirely. “Given the obvious political temptations that program was always going to create, the federal government should never have gotten into the student-loan business in the first place,” Cooke writes in National Review:

But it did, and so here we are. If President Biden goes through with his threat, we will have been shown once and for all that the government cannot be trusted to issue these loans on behalf of America’s taxpayers, and that it must not be allowed to do so again. In 2010, Congress authorized a loan program, not a system of politically motivated rolling jubilees. If the program becomes that — as it would under Biden’s loan-forgiveness scheme — it must be killed. Such a repeal would not only inoculate Americans against this happening again, it would help to limit the government-created increases in tuition that, paradoxically, are being used to justify further federal action.

QUICK HITS

• Some patients are reporting rebound COVID-19 after taking the antiviral pill Paxlovid. A spokesperson from Paxlovid maker Pfizer told The Washington Post that trial data show “a small number” of people experience this but the rates are similar among people given a placebo.

• No, the Federal Communications Commission can’t block Elon Musk from buying Twitter.

• Cliff Maloney Jr., the former head of Young Americans for Liberty, has been charged with two felony counts of rape and two felony counts of aggravated indecent assault.

• Should senators be barred from running for president?

• A new study examines the impact of coronavirus-related school shutdowns on student outcomes.

• Ohio is the latest state to consider a near-total abortion ban.

• SpaceX has already begun its next mission, after its last one landed earlier this week. This is the private space travel company’s 16th launch this year.

• Thomas Raynard James spent 31 years in prison on a wrongful conviction of murder.

The post Cops Find Suspected Murder Weapon After Years of Searching. It Was in Their Evidence Already. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Ukraine Says Russia Increasing Pace Of Attack In “Almost All Directions”

Ukraine Says Russia Increasing Pace Of Attack In “Almost All Directions”

Ukraine’s military command posted a public social media message warning the public that Russia is “increasing the pace of the offensive operation” which is coming “in almost all directions”. 

The Ukraine armed forces’ statement said of the stepped up attacks that “in almost all directions, the Russian occupiers are exerting intense fire,” with the most concentrated military activity “observed in [the] Slobozhansky and Donetsk directions” of Ukraine’s north and east. Starting earlier in the month Russia’s defense ministry made it clear it’s seeking full control primarily of Ukraine’s east and south.

Via Reuters

“Russian occupiers continue to suffer losses on land,” the statement went on to say. “In the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts only, six enemy attacks have been repulsed in the past 24 hours, five tanks, one artillery system, twenty-two armored vehicles, one car and one anti-aircraft gun have been destroyed.” 

The warning to the public and to inform Kiev’s Western backers come the day after Russia’s President Putin threatened “lighting”-fast retaliatory strikes on “decision-making centers” if foreign countries meddle in the conflict. He said during an address before the Council of Legislators in St. Petersburg that the armed forces remain undeterred as “all the objectives will definitely be carried out” in the Ukraine operation, before warning:

“If someone intends to interfere in what is going on from the outside they must know that constitutes an unacceptable strategic threat to Russia.

“They must know that our response to counter-strikes will be lightning-fast.”

Ukrainian officials have also said Russia has begun imposing parallel local governments, for example in the now fallen city of Kherson the Kremlin has appointed its own mayor and a pro-Russian administration over the region, which declared that Kherson’s return to Ukrainian control is now “impossible”. 

Since Tuesday the strategically crucial Kherson region is in full Russian control, and is expected to serve as a vital land bridge linking Crimea to pro-Russian separatist areas of the Donbas in the east.

Meanwhile there are growing fears that the war could soon spill outside of Ukraine’s borders, into neighboring Moldova given rising tensions in the tiny breakaway region of Transnistria, where some 1,500 Russian troops have long been stationed.

BBC notes that tit-for-tat accusations are raging after a series of bombings under mysterious circumstances have rocked the territory:

Mysterious explosions in Transnistria, a breakaway Russian-controlled territory in Moldova bordering on Ukraine, have raised fears that the Ukraine conflict may be spreading.

Separatist authorities said Ukrainian “infiltrators” were responsible. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has blamed Russian special services.

Russia says it is concerned. It has about 1,500 troops in Transnistria. An official has said Russian-speakers in Moldova are being oppressed.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested Thursday that Russia could act to bring order to Transnistria, bringing Russia into more direct conflict with Moldova. “We are alarmed by the escalation of tension in Transnistria, where in recent days there have been several incidents of shelling, blowing up social and infrastructure facilities,” she said. “We regard these actions as acts of terrorism aimed at destabilizing the situation.”

These sporadic explosions earlier this week have been blamed on competing factions, though ultimately have remained murky in terms of responsibility and the attackers’ intent. Some have also suggested ‘false flags’ designed to justify the Russian military’s deepened involvement in Transistria and therefore Moldova. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/28/2022 – 09:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/ZkSrGnz Tyler Durden

Cops Find Suspected Murder Weapon After Years of Searching. It Was in Their Evidence Already.


max-kleinen-ugdKmhDg1m8-unsplash

A judge has dismissed murder charges against a man accused of killing a Cincinnati teen after revelations of extreme bungling by local police. After spending more than two years looking for the murder weapon they said would tie Delrico Peoples to the 2019 crime, Cincinnati cops think they’ve found it—in their own evidence.

On Monday, during jury selection for the case, Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Jeff Heile told prospective jurors the murder weapon had never been found. But that same day, “the lead Cincinnati police detective found a gun believed to be the murder weapon as he was going through the evidence,” reports The Enquirer. “Cincinnati police have had the gun since 2019, but never had it thoroughly tested to see if it matched shell casings found in Peoples’ car or at the shooting scene.”

After actually analyzing the gun, police think they’ve now found their murder weapon. It was seized from another man back in 2019, four months after a stray bullet killed 18-year-old Brandon Phoenix as he waited at a bus stop. At that point, Peoples had already been charged with murder and felonious assault and was in jail.

Testing the gun back then could have helped catch a killer earlier—and saved Peoples from years of prosecution for a crime he may not have committed.

Peoples has admitted to driving the car during the shooting but says he didn’t know the man in the back seat who fired the gunshots and didn’t know the man was going to do so. Peoples “had no knowledge of why his passenger began shooting, or the identity of his passenger,” according to court documents.

Prosecutors asked Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Melba Marsh to delay Peoples’ trial as they sorted out their evidence problems. But the judge said no—Peoples has the presumption of innocence on his side and had already been waiting more than two years for a trial.

“I can’t justify holding him for a longer period of time, so the State of Ohio can do tests that take four to six weeks,” Marsh said. “That’s just not going to happen.”

The charges were dismissed without prejudice, which means that prosecutors are allowed to refile them in the future if they deem it necessary.

FREE MINDS

Judge rejects partisan gerrymander in New York. Democrats frequently accuse Republicans of partisan gerrymandering of election districts—even though they aren’t above doing the same thing themselves. Now, New York’s highest court has “blocked the state’s Democratic-drawn congressional map Wednesday, concluding that the new boundaries represented a partisan gerrymander that violates the state constitution,” CNN reports. “The court ruled that a new map must be created for the 2022 election. New York’s primary election is scheduled for June 28, but the judges wrote it will ‘likely be necessary’ to move the congressional elections to August.”

FREE MARKETS

Student loan debt debate heats up again. The White House is signaling that it may be ready to forgive student loan debt. Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced a bill—the Stop Reckless Student Loan Actions Act —to stop this from happening.

The legislation “would end President Biden’s untargeted, budget-busting suspension of repayments on qualifying federal student loans, following 24 months of non-payment and six executive actions extending the payment pause,” explains a press release from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.). “The bill would still allow the president to temporarily suspend repayment for low- and middle-income borrowers in future national emergencies and would prohibit the president from cancelling outstanding federal student loan obligations due to a national emergency.”

Charles C.W. Cooke thinks this doesn’t go far enough and Republicans should end the federal student loan program entirely. “Given the obvious political temptations that program was always going to create, the federal government should never have gotten into the student-loan business in the first place,” Cooke writes in National Review:

But it did, and so here we are. If President Biden goes through with his threat, we will have been shown once and for all that the government cannot be trusted to issue these loans on behalf of America’s taxpayers, and that it must not be allowed to do so again. In 2010, Congress authorized a loan program, not a system of politically motivated rolling jubilees. If the program becomes that — as it would under Biden’s loan-forgiveness scheme — it must be killed. Such a repeal would not only inoculate Americans against this happening again, it would help to limit the government-created increases in tuition that, paradoxically, are being used to justify further federal action.

QUICK HITS

• Some patients are reporting rebound COVID-19 after taking the antiviral pill Paxlovid. A spokesperson from Paxlovid maker Pfizer told The Washington Post that trial data show “a small number” of people experience this but the rates are similar among people given a placebo.

• No, the Federal Communications Commission can’t block Elon Musk from buying Twitter.

• Cliff Maloney Jr., the former head of Young Americans for Liberty, has been charged with two felony counts of rape and two felony counts of aggravated indecent assault.

• Should senators be barred from running for president?

• A new study examines the impact of coronavirus-related school shutdowns on student outcomes.

• Ohio is the latest state to consider a near-total abortion ban.

• SpaceX has already begun its next mission, after its last one landed earlier this week. This is the private space travel company’s 16th launch this year.

• Thomas Raynard James spent 31 years in prison on a wrongful conviction of murder.

The post Cops Find Suspected Murder Weapon After Years of Searching. It Was in Their Evidence Already. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Mask-Wearing in Airports Post-Vacatur

Last week I was at the airport, and in the air, when the mask mandate was vacated and lifted. On Sunday, I took a flight from Houston. By my count, about 5% of the passengers in the terminal were wearing masks. On Tuesday, I flew back home from Washington National. By my count, about 20% of the passengers are wearing masks. Virtually all of the pilots and flight attendants were unmasked. The only people consistently masked were airport employees.

At this point, in the absence of a mandate, passengers wearing masks are doing so by choice. Yet, most of those masking up were wearing cloth masks. We have known since at least January that cloth masks are relatively ineffective against Omicron. They provide minimal filtering of the air you breath in, and because of the loose fit, are poor at blocking whatever you exhale. Moreover, people do not keep their cloth masks free from moisture, further decreasing their usefulness. Paper masks are marginally better, since they are disposal. But again provide minimal filtering, and often have poor fits.  Starting in January, I had switched to wearing N95 masks exclusively. If I was wearing a mask, I wanted to wear something that would actually provide protection against the new variant.

Gary Leff from View From The Wing asks why passengers are sticking with the ineffective cloth masks, even in the absence of the mandate:

What I didn’t understand was that a majority of people who were wearing masks were wearing either cloth or medical masks. I understand why people don’t wear masks. And I understand why people choose to wear them when they are no longer required – to protect themselves – but I do not understand the choice to wear a cloth mask, which doesn’t provide that protection.

Those who are critical of the mask mandate’s end point out that masks protect the people around you from you, if you’re infected, and the infectious period of Covid-19 prior to showing symptoms. Cloth masks didn’t help with this. Medical masks likely do little against current variants. But better masks do help.

Perhaps cost is a factor. Though I think people who can afford to fly generally are able to purchase better masks, if they so choose Discomfort may also be a factor, as N95 masks may be tougher to breathe in. (I found the N95 pouch variants yielded the least amount of fog on my glasses.) But on balance, I don’t understand why passenger who voluntarily wear masks are sticking with cloth masks.

I think these same questions exist for people wearing masks in other contexts where they are not mandate: why stick with cloth masks that are not effective against Omicron?

The post Mask-Wearing in Airports Post-Vacatur appeared first on Reason.com.

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Oops! Our Bad! IMF Director Admits “We Printed Too Much Money”

Oops! Our Bad! IMF Director Admits “We Printed Too Much Money”

Authored by Michael Maharrey via SchiffGold.com,

Mostly we get lies, spin and obfuscation from central bankers, politicians and bureaucrats. But every once in a while, one of these people accidentally wanders into the truth.

IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva did just that during a recent panel discussion hosted by CNBC. She conceded that central banks globally “printed too much money and didn’t think of unintended consequences.”

I think we are not paying sufficient attention to the law of unintended consequences. We take decisions with an objective in mind and rarely think through what may happen that is not our objective. And then we wrestle with the impact of it.

“Take any decision that is a massive decision, like the decision that we need to spend to support the economy. At that time, we did recognize that maybe too much money in circulation and too few goods, but didn’t really quite think through the consequence in a way that upfront would have informed better what we do.”

How this economic brain trust missed failed to consider that injecting trillions into the economy would cause prices to rise is a bit of a head-scratcher. This is economics 101. Expanding the money supply pushes prices higher than they otherwise would be. I knew this would happen. Peter Schiff knew this would happen. Heck, you probably knew this would happen. But the people charged with running the global economy didn’t?

These people are either wildly incompetent, or they are lying to you.

Either way, they are “bad economists” as defined by Frédéric Bastiat.

Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.”

Good on Georgieva, I guess. They say admitting your problem is the first step on the road to recovery. So, you might think this confession is a step forward. But I assure you, it’s not. The ego, arrogance, and hubris that make these people think they can micromanage the global economy remain firmly in place. They just think they need to try a little bit harder.

Although Georgieva admits a mistake, the rest of her comment reveals she hasn’t learned the lesson.

We act sometimes like eight years old playing soccer. Here is the ball, we are all at the ball. And we don’t cover the rest of the field.

“Our ability to deal with more than one crisis at one time is very, very limited. and we have to zero in on the really big things that could determine the future and keep our attention on them.”

Basically, she’s saying, “Oops! Our bad! We messed up because we didn’t consider the unintended consequences. But we’re going to do better next time because our focus is going to be right on point.”

Georgieva, Powell, Biden, LaGarde, and the whole lot of these central planners don’t understand that it is impossible for them to take into account all of the unintended consequences of a given policy prescription. That’s why central planning is always doomed to failure.

Economist F.A. Hayek got to the root of the problem in his seminal paper,  “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In a nutshell, Hayek concluded that central planning will always fail because it is impossible for the central planners to possess all of the information necessary to factor in all of the ramifications of any given policy.

The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

Or as FEE put it in its introduction to Hayek’s work:

Hayek points out that sensibly allocating scarce resources requires knowledge dispersed among many people, with no individual or group of experts capable of acquiring it all.”

Simply put, unintended consequences are inevitable in central planning. No matter how hard the central planner try, they are going to miss stuff. No matter how smart an individual or a group of individuals might be, they don’t have all of the knowledge they need. They can’t have it. It’s impossible.

The problem is that people like Georgieva don’t understand this. They they their crew is smart enough, wise enough and that they care enough to get the job done. If the make a mistake, they just need to try harder.

And that’s where they’re wrong. They need to quit trying, get out of the way and let the market function.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/28/2022 – 09:24

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/BWia7Px Tyler Durden

Mask-Wearing in Airports Post-Vacatur

Last week I was at the airport, and in the air, when the mask mandate was vacated and lifted. On Sunday, I took a flight from Houston. By my count, about 5% of the passengers in the terminal were wearing masks. On Tuesday, I flew back home from Washington National. By my count, about 20% of the passengers are wearing masks. Virtually all of the pilots and flight attendants were unmasked. The only people consistently masked were airport employees.

At this point, in the absence of a mandate, passengers wearing masks are doing so by choice. Yet, most of those masking up were wearing cloth masks. We have known since at least January that cloth masks are relatively ineffective against Omicron. They provide minimal filtering of the air you breath in, and because of the loose fit, are poor at blocking whatever you exhale. Moreover, people do not keep their cloth masks free from moisture, further decreasing their usefulness. Paper masks are marginally better, since they are disposal. But again provide minimal filtering, and often have poor fits.  Starting in January, I had switched to wearing N95 masks exclusively. If I was wearing a mask, I wanted to wear something that would actually provide protection against the new variant.

Gary Leff from View From The Wing asks why passengers are sticking with the ineffective cloth masks, even in the absence of the mandate:

What I didn’t understand was that a majority of people who were wearing masks were wearing either cloth or medical masks. I understand why people don’t wear masks. And I understand why people choose to wear them when they are no longer required – to protect themselves – but I do not understand the choice to wear a cloth mask, which doesn’t provide that protection.

Those who are critical of the mask mandate’s end point out that masks protect the people around you from you, if you’re infected, and the infectious period of Covid-19 prior to showing symptoms. Cloth masks didn’t help with this. Medical masks likely do little against current variants. But better masks do help.

Perhaps cost is a factor. Though I think people who can afford to fly generally are able to purchase better masks, if they so choose Discomfort may also be a factor, as N95 masks may be tougher to breathe in. (I found the N95 pouch variants yielded the least amount of fog on my glasses.) But on balance, I don’t understand why passenger who voluntarily wear masks are sticking with cloth masks.

I think these same questions exist for people wearing masks in other contexts where they are not mandate: why stick with cloth masks that are not effective against Omicron?

The post Mask-Wearing in Airports Post-Vacatur appeared first on Reason.com.

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