Washington DC Mayor Renames Street Near White House After Black Lives Matter Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 15:15
Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and President Trump are still battling it out for control of DC’s streets, according to the Washington Post, Bowser has officially renamed a section of 16th street right in front of the White House after the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
By her order, the street was painted with the slogan in large bright yellow letters. The positioning put the message in a way that it could be read from the White House and the Washington Monument, forcing President Trump to look at it when he gazes out of windows facing the street.
“…I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn’t force them to do it.” Dr Martin Luther King Jr #BlackLivesMatterpic.twitter.com/SNccbPXonQ
— Muriel Bowser #StayHomeDC (@MurielBowser) June 5, 2020
NBC 4 reported that the lettering is so large the message stretches onto two city blocks and can only be fit into a single photo frame from a very high vantage point. A bright yellow DC flag was also painted after the message.
“It’s super pointed, it helps to correct from the terrible thing that happened at the church that’s right there,” one woman told NBC 4’s reporter. She was referring to the tear gassing and firing of rubber bullets on peaceful protesters to make room for a presidential photo-op.
Just after 10:30a, the mural is largely complete. Crowds are coming over to watch the progress. Mayor Bowser is set to speak from nearby St. John’s Church in the 11a hour pic.twitter.com/MJKnrFYXuu
The Price Of Half The World’s Staple Food Is Up 70% In 2020 Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 15:00
First the good news: after soaring to record highs one month ago due to widespread shutdowns of meat processing plants and supply chain impairments, wholesale beef prices have tumbled sharply and are just barely higher than where they were before the coronavirus pandemic struck.
Now the not so good news: as Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett notes in his Flow Show today, while beef may be affordable again, rice – the staple food for half of world’s population – is becoming increasingly unaffordable, “surging 70% since Jan on COVID-19 labor supply chain hit & stockpiling.”
Should rice prices not revert to normal and soon, how long before the protests, riots and looting that are currently sweeping the US and various European countries spread across the entire world, this time over a far more tangible cause: hunger. As a reminder, it was the surge in food prices in late 2010 and early 2011 that precipitated the Arab Spring protests that toppled numerous political regimes and eventually culminated with the mass exodus of migrants from northern Africa and the middle east toward Europe.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BD1uwJ Tyler Durden
Terror group ISIS has celebrated Black Lives Matter protests and riots taking place in multiple major cities, gleefully hoping that they will serve to “weaken” the west.
Numerous major American cities have been rocked by civil unrest over the past 10 days, with the riots claiming 17 lives. Other cities in Europe, Canada and Australia have also been hit with violent protests.
This has greatly pleased the Islamic State, which welcomed the riots in the latest edition of its al-Naba newspaper.
“ISIS has commented for the first time on the protests across the US over the death of George Floyd,” commented jihad specialist Mina Al-Lami. “In its paper al-Naba, IS said the civil unrest must not be seen as a problem for the US alone, and that other “infidel” countries should brace themselves for the repercussions.”
It compared the potential spread of the unrest across Western countries to the spread of Covid-19 in the West. IS gleefully reported on the protests, hoping that together with coronavirus they would weaken the West and “distract” its countries from “meddling” in Muslim affairs.
“It compared the potential spread of the unrest across Western countries to the spread of Covid-19 in the West. IS gleefully reported on the protests, hoping that together with coronavirus they would weaken the West and “distract” its countries from “meddling” in Muslim affairs,” she added.
Given that many of the protesters share ISIS’s goal of collapsing the west, it’s unsurprising that the terror group and the hard left demonstrators are on common ground.
Indeed, the vision is so similar that ISIS once even suggested recruiting and arming anti-American protesters to turn them into jihadists.
That time when ISIS announced its plan to recruit social justice warriors because they broadly share the same goals. pic.twitter.com/t2WgzUbsFL
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A British research team has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment for COVID-19 and has halted its use in the United Kingdom’s RECOVERY trial. That trial was established in March to evaluate the efficacy of various medicines for the treatment of COVID-19.
The Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the trials conducted an unblinded review of the hydroxychloroquine data. Based on that review, the researchers have concluded that “there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19.” Martin Landray, one of the principal investigators, told reporters: “This is not a treatment for COVID-19. It doesn’t work.”
According to the statement from the RECOVERY trial investigators,
A total of 1542 patients were randomised to hydroxychloroquine and compared with 3132 patients randomised to usual care alone. There was no significant difference in the primary endpoint of 28-day mortality….There was also no evidence of beneficial effects on hospital stay duration or other outcomes.
These data convincingly rule out any meaningful mortality benefit of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19.
“The RECOVERY Trial has shown that hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment in patients hospitalised with COVID-19,” said Peter Horby, the chief investigator for the trial, in the statement. “Although it is disappointing that this treatment has been shown to be ineffective, it does allow us to focus care and research on more promising drugs.”
While the RECOVERY researchers was looking into hydroxychloroquine’s effects on hospitalized patients, an American-Canadian team of researchers was concluding that the drug also does not work as preventive treatment.
Based on some observational studies, some proponents of hydroxychloroquine remain enthusiastic about the possibility that adding zinc will boost the drug’s efficacy. Forthcoming results from ongoing trials will eventually corroborate or refute that lingering hope.
In the wake of the now scandalously discredited observational hydroxychloroquine study published on May 22 in The Lancet, these results should help clinicians, patients, the public and policymakers make better decisions about how best to treat COVID-19.
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019–2020 term is rapidly reaching its conclusion. By the end of June, the Court is expected to decide several high-profile cases that involve some of the most contested issues in American law, from abortion to school choice to federal anti-discrimination rules. Here are three cases to watch in the coming weeks.
June Medical Services v. Russo
The state of Louisiana requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. That restriction sparked a constitutional challenge from abortion providers, who argue that the law serves no valid health or safety purpose and violates the Court’s own precedents forbidding regulations that place an “undue burden” on abortion rights.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Court decided a nearly identical dispute in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), striking down a Texas law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Among other things, June Medical Services will show whether a majority of the Court is interested in following Whole Woman’s Health or in crafting a new jurisprudence that is more deferential towards state restrictions on abortion.
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue
In 2015 the Montana legislature created a scholarship program “to provide parental and student choice in education.” It operates by creating a tax credit for individuals and businesses that donate to private, nonprofit scholarship organizations, which then use such donations to fund educational scholarships. Families who qualify may use the money to help send their children to a “qualified education provider,” a category which includes religiously affiliated K–12 private schools.
But the Montana Supreme Court killed the program off three years later, holding that it violated a provision of the Montana Constitution which bans the use of public funds “for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination.”
The question for the U.S. Supreme Court is whether the state may prohibit the sort of school choice initiatives that the Court itself has previously upheld under the First Amendment. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), for example, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a school choice program in Cleveland, Ohio. The program’s opponents claimed it was unconstitutional to provide tuition aid to parents who opted to send their children to religiously affiliated magnet schools. But the Court said such a system passes constitutional muster as long as it is “neutral with respect to religion, and provides assistance directly to a broad class of citizens who, in turn, direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice.”
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate against a job applicant or employee “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Gerald Lynn Bostock argues that Clayton County, Georgia, violated this provision when it fired him from his job as a child welfare services coordinator solely because of his sexual orientation. The far-reaching question before the Supreme Court is whether employment discrimination because of sexual orientation qualifies as employment discrimination “because of…sex” under Title VII.
As I’ve previously noted, Bostock and his lawyers have enlisted the support of a surprising legal ally in the case:
In their principal brief to the Supreme Court, Bostock and his lawyers rely in part on Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s unanimous 1998 ruling in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. At issue was whether same-sex workplace harassment violated Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination “because…of sex.” Scalia held that it did.
“Male on male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII,” Scalia acknowledged. “But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.” The protections of Title VII, Scalia concluded, “must extend to sexual harassment of any kind that meets the statutory requirements.”
Scalia, a self-described textualist, often argued that the plain meaning of a statute should trump the ostensible intentions, purposes, or expectations of the statute’s authors and supporters. That was one of the reasons why Scalia famously rejected the use of legislative history in such statutory cases.
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A British research team has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment for COVID-19 and has halted its use in the United Kingdom’s RECOVERY trial. That trial was established in March to evaluate the efficacy of various medicines for the treatment of COVID-19.
The Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the trials conducted an unblinded review of the hydroxychloroquine data. Based on that review, the researchers have concluded that “there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19.” Martin Landray, one of the principal investigators, told reporters: “This is not a treatment for COVID-19. It doesn’t work.”
According to the statement from the RECOVERY trial investigators,
A total of 1542 patients were randomised to hydroxychloroquine and compared with 3132 patients randomised to usual care alone. There was no significant difference in the primary endpoint of 28-day mortality….There was also no evidence of beneficial effects on hospital stay duration or other outcomes.
These data convincingly rule out any meaningful mortality benefit of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19.
“The RECOVERY Trial has shown that hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment in patients hospitalised with COVID-19,” said Peter Horby, the chief investigator for the trial, in the statement. “Although it is disappointing that this treatment has been shown to be ineffective, it does allow us to focus care and research on more promising drugs.”
While the RECOVERY researchers was looking into hydroxychloroquine’s effects on hospitalized patients, an American-Canadian team of researchers was concluding that the drug also does not work as preventive treatment.
Based on some observational studies, some proponents of hydroxychloroquine remain enthusiastic about the possibility that adding zinc will boost the drug’s efficacy. Forthcoming results from ongoing trials will eventually corroborate or refute that lingering hope.
In the wake of the now scandalously discredited observational hydroxychloroquine study published on May 22 in The Lancet, these results should help clinicians, patients, the public and policymakers make better decisions about how best to treat COVID-19.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Y6lLlH
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019–2020 term is rapidly reaching its conclusion. By the end of June, the Court is expected to decide several high-profile cases that involve some of the most contested issues in American law, from abortion to school choice to federal anti-discrimination rules. Here are three cases to watch in the coming weeks.
June Medical Services v. Russo
The state of Louisiana requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. That restriction sparked a constitutional challenge from abortion providers, who argue that the law serves no valid health or safety purpose and violates the Court’s own precedents forbidding regulations that place an “undue burden” on abortion rights.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Court decided a nearly identical dispute in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), striking down a Texas law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Among other things, June Medical Services will show whether a majority of the Court is interested in following Whole Woman’s Health or in crafting a new jurisprudence that is more deferential towards state restrictions on abortion.
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue
In 2015 the Montana legislature created a scholarship program “to provide parental and student choice in education.” It operates by creating a tax credit for individuals and businesses that donate to private, nonprofit scholarship organizations, which then use such donations to fund educational scholarships. Families who qualify may use the money to help send their children to a “qualified education provider,” a category which includes religiously affiliated K–12 private schools.
But the Montana Supreme Court killed the program off three years later, holding that it violated a provision of the Montana Constitution which bans the use of public funds “for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination.”
The question for the U.S. Supreme Court is whether the state may prohibit the sort of school choice initiatives that the Court itself has previously upheld under the First Amendment. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), for example, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a school choice program in Cleveland, Ohio. The program’s opponents claimed it was unconstitutional to provide tuition aid to parents who opted to send their children to religiously affiliated magnet schools. But the Court said such a system passes constitutional muster as long as it is “neutral with respect to religion, and provides assistance directly to a broad class of citizens who, in turn, direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice.”
Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate against a job applicant or employee “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Gerald Lynn Bostock argues that Clayton County, Georgia, violated this provision when it fired him from his job as a child welfare services coordinator solely because of his sexual orientation. The far-reaching question before the Supreme Court is whether employment discrimination because of sexual orientation qualifies as employment discrimination “because of…sex” under Title VII.
As I’ve previously noted, Bostock and his lawyers have enlisted the support of a surprising legal ally in the case:
In their principal brief to the Supreme Court, Bostock and his lawyers rely in part on Justice [Antonin] Scalia’s unanimous 1998 ruling in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. At issue was whether same-sex workplace harassment violated Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination “because…of sex.” Scalia held that it did.
“Male on male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII,” Scalia acknowledged. “But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.” The protections of Title VII, Scalia concluded, “must extend to sexual harassment of any kind that meets the statutory requirements.”
Scalia, a self-described textualist, often argued that the plain meaning of a statute should trump the ostensible intentions, purposes, or expectations of the statute’s authors and supporters. That was one of the reasons why Scalia famously rejected the use of legislative history in such statutory cases.
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“Seeding Event” For Fresh COVID-19 Explosion: CDC Chief Urges Protesters To Get Tested Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 14:30
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s gruesome death at the hands of police a “seeding event” for the rapid spread of coronavirus.
CDC chief Robert Redfield in testimony at a House appropriations subcommittee on Thursday said the sheer size and frequency of the past nine days of protests leaves cause for alarming concern. “I do think there is a potential, unfortunately, for this to be a seeding event,” he said according to The Washington Post.
CDC Director Robert Redfield, via AP
He repeated the call of some county and state health officials across the nation, who have warned protesters they need to get tested.
“And the way to minimize it is to have each individual to recognize it’s to the advantage of them to protect their loved ones, to [say]: ‘Hey, I was out. I need to go get tested.’ You know, in three, five, seven days, go get tested. Make sure you’re not infected.”
He identified specifically events unfolding in Minnesota and Washington D.C. as potential super-spreader events.
When pressed also on riot control measures such as tears gas as related to coronavirus, he said this can significantly add to the level of fluids and droplets people are collectively exposed to: “Definitely, coughing can spread respiratory viruses, including COVID-19,” he said.
Image via AP
“We have advocated strongly the ability to have face coverings and masks available to protesters so that they can at least have those coverings,” Redfield added in his testimony.
Last weekend after protests and riots gripped parts of downtown Atlanta, the city’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, also addressed this issue, warning demonstrators: “If you were out protesting last night, you probably need to go get a COVID test this week.” She added: “There is still a pandemic in America that’s killing black and brown people at higher numbers.”
Meanwhile…
BREAKING on CNN: Confirmed Coronavirus Cases Are Rising Faster Than Ever
I mean who besides *absolutely everyone everywhere* anticipated this? https://t.co/SnT52btLwi
And last week Minneapolis health commissioner warned protestors that the large-scale gatherings and crowd riot behavior will “very predictably accelerate the spread.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3dAUgHy Tyler Durden
Fed Again Tapers Daily Treasury Purchases To $4 Billion Per Day For Next Week Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 14:21
From an initial $75 billion per day when the Fed announced the launch of Unlimited QE in mid-March, the US central bank first reduced its daily buying to $60 billion per day, then announced a series of consecutive ‘tapers’ as follows:
$50 billion per day for April 6-9
$30 billion per day for April 13-17
$15 billion per day for April 20-24
$10 billion per day for April 27-May 1
$8 billion per day for May 4-May 8
$7 billion per day for May 11-May 15
$6 billion per day for May 18-May 22
$5 billion per day for May 25-May 29
Then, after again shrinking the average daily POMO to $4.5 billion for the week of June 1-June 5, in its latest just published schedule, the Fed unveiled that in the coming week it would purchase “only” $4BN per day, or a total of $20BN for the week, the lowest weekly total since the launch of Unlimited QE on March 23.
The Fed continues the practice of incremental tapering, and providing a weekly preview of its purchasing operations, which in the coming week will amount to just $20BN in TSYs, down $2.5BN from the current week.
At the same time as it continues to shrink its TSY purchases, for the third week in a row the Fed decided not to taper its daily MBS buying, which will average $4.5 billion per day next week, the same as last week, and now above the buying of Treasuries for the coming week. Also, the coming week’s MBS POMO schedule is identical to last week’s:
Mon: $4.47BN vs $4.47BN
Tue: $4.545BN vs $4.545BN
Wed: $4.47BN vs $4.47BN
Thur: $4.545BN vs $4.545BN
Fri: $4.47BN vs $4.47BN
The chart below summarizes all the Fed Treasury and MBS buying completed and scheduled since the relaunch of QE on March 13:
In aggregate, the Fed will buy a total of $42.5 billion of TSYs/MBS next week and ever closer to spark concerns that the Fed is no longer monetizing all the Treasury issuance, of which there is and will be trillions in the coming quarters.
And while yields did not react to the latest POMO schedule, after weeks of trading in the mid-0.60% range, today we have finally seen some movement in the 10Y shich was last trading around 0.92%, with bond buyers set to become much more curious if and when the Fed will either launch more QE or announce Yield Curve Control at next week’s FOMC meeting.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3h0WdPB Tyler Durden
It’s called survivor’s or survival euphoria. Having just gone through a traumatically dangerous experience, and lived, a person might naturally become euphoric for it. Not uncommon in combat situations, your body marshals all its resources including many physiological responses and counteractions. When it’s all over, there’s evolution working overtime in your brain rewarding these survival instincts.
And it can be a huge problem if left unchecked. Long-term mental health issues, yes, but more immediate, too. Whilst dosed up with pleasurable neurotransmitters like dopamine you might not notice just how badly you were yourself wounded in the process, unable to more precisely appreciate the gravity of your situation beyond the very short run.
There’s a common sort of community response along similar lines, too. The expression lightning never strikes the same place twice is this idea that having experienced tragedy once nothing so bad should happen again. Irrational euphoria at the first instance, depressed reality when the precursor feelers of that second bolt begins charging the air around you.
Unexpectedly, of course.
I highly doubt many people remember that the best percentage day for Lehman Brothers stock was the Tuesday following Bear Stearns’ engineered demise (some call it a rescue; posterity has judged otherwise). It was March 18, 2008, and Bear had dominated the headlines the prior weekend having emerged on March 17 owned by JP Morgan (only with considerable assistance from the Federal Reserve, courtesy of 13-3).
That particular Tuesday was earnings day for Lehman, and the numbers it published were absolutely atrocious. Revenue was down 31% compared to the same three-month period the year before, while earnings per share plummeted 57%. For major banks, these were unheard of.
But the stock finished March 18 up 46% from a March 17 when all eyes were on Bear. Not just Lehman, but the entire system was just beginning its bout with survivor’s euphoria.
The subprime mortgage crisis, as everyone had been told that’s what was going on, had finally claimed a big-name victim. For half a year the world had held its collective breath completely captured by the worried fascination over events everyone felt were much more appropriate for the Great Depression rather than our modern, 21st century world.
Banks on the brink, money markets broken down, the stock market tanking almost 20% in mere months. Armageddon! It appeared like some nightmare which, after so many generations without one, was beyond surreal. Everyone started to brace for impact, an economic collision whose outcome could not be anticipated by regular folks. There was simply nothing in their experience for them to go on.
Instead, Bear had unleashed a huge sigh of relief: We’ve been scared out of our minds by all this horrible news in the media…and that’s it? Just one crummy Wall Street bank?
Euphoria, as was written right into the pages of the Financial Times in London on March 18. It wrote:
Relief is coursing through the veins of bankers and investors with the Federal Reserve apparently having circumvented an immediate Wall Street banking crisis.
Prices in equity markets rose on Tuesday and, in the credit markets, spreads narrowed across all types of corporate bonds.
Bill O’Donnell, strategist at UBS, said global markets had “that strong whiff of ‘survivor’s euphoria’ as equity markets are up nicely”.
Of course, none of that was true; sorry, Mr. UBS, it really was just the euphoria talking. And it didn’t last very long, either. By the summer of 2008, a very different reality dawned on the public once lurking damage hidden underneath it all became too obvious again to ignore.
The monetary system hadn’t survived Bear at all, in fact more deeply wounded by the event than anyone could imagine (even those like Bill Dudley who actually said the words “long-term damage” but apparently didn’t really understand what he was saying). The difference was entirely expectations, more so the lack of appreciation for timing. If X then Y, but sometimes Y takes its sweet time arriving in data and our collected consciousness.
Bear hadn’t immediately turned into Lehman and AIG, but they were all very much connected; the same thing in each. The fact they were all separated by six months only added to the confusion, and contributed much to the interim ecstasy and jubilation. People were led to believe that if the worst hadn’t happened right away, then there could be nothing worse.
A sinister form of confirmation bias, I suspect.
We are in the window of euphoria again. Having, seemingly, survived the shutdown as well as the market events of March 2020 there’s no other feeling quite like it. The whole world has turned a corner, and increasingly the data shows that’s just what happened.
Yesterday’s ISM and other PMI’s adding still more to the impression.
April, maybe early May, that was the worst; that had been the bottom. We’ve made it through to the other side!
No second wave of COVID-19. No more stock market routs. Not even a Bear Stearns this time. We’ve been scared out of our minds by all this horrible news in the media…and that’s it? Not one crummy Wall Street bank?
And Jay Powell, man. Did he ever come through! Sure, he very much looked like he was kitten for awhile there, but, boy, he proved himself a lion and a tiger. Screw the bears*!
Having pictured the breadlines of the 1930’s, the idea of escaping that tragic fate and actually getting back to normal now seems more than possible. Likely, perhaps. A bad memory we’ll soon sort of laugh about in that uncomfortable way people do after the fact.
But, like 2008, ask yourself if the economy and the monetary system really have made it through this ordeal unscathed? Not in the media sort of way, where central bankers are never criticized and their word taken as the new gold standard. Unemployment. Bankruptcies. Dollar shortage. Have those critical issues really been handled and solved, or is it simply another matter of timing and confirmation bias?
The 2008 crash was no instantaneous event, the word crash, after all, hugely misleading, and it ultimately had very little to do with subprime mortgages. Even the Great Depression with its Great Contraction phase is misunderstood in the same way. The stock market crash in October 1929 wasn’t close to the whole thing, nor even much of it; at most, the firing of the starter’s pistol announcing the beginning of that great marathon of destruction.
It took three and a half years for that “crash” to finally, well, crash into its bottom. GFC1 was just about two years top to trough.
These things are processes and because these involve complex systems they don’t evolve (or devolve) in a straight line or often in a straightforward manner. The ebbs and flows, twists and turns, each minor change in direction will be savagely bought (or sold) until that critical point is reached. What Economists like to call an equilibrium, only much harsher and full of long-term pain.
The Fed, most importantly, is no help whatsoever in finding and achieving a pain-free one. The best it can do is to keep hope alive a little longer, to prolong these intermittent stages of euphoria in the vain attempt to convince the world it possesses magical powers, its alphabeted programs imbued with mystical properties, all of which can transport the universe back in time to the last safe equilibrium. If only you believe.
So many really, really want to believe. But that just may be the dopamine talking.
*Bond bears, unlike all other species of market bears, are to be encouraged at every stage no matter how ridiculous.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XCwLbA Tyler Durden
