Tag: finance

Two Americas were visible on Tuesday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 30,000 for the first time. Simultaneously, hundreds of vehicles were snaked around a parking lot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, waiting in line at a local food bank. 

This suggests the K-shaped economic recovery, one where the rich grow richer and the working-poor are crushed with job loss and insurmountable debts, is getting much worse by the month. 

For more on the rapid reemergence of food bank lines, or what will be the new normal in a severely broken economy that is in desperate need of structural reform, Eric Cooper, CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank in Texas, on Tuesday, told CNBC’s Shepard Smith that demand at his food bank has more than doubled this year. 

“Pre-pandemic we fed about 60,00 people a week and now we’re seeing about 120,000 per week, and most of those are new to the food bank, and have never had to ask for help before,” Cooper told Smith during an interview on Tuesday evening. 

He said, “today, we had a distribution that fed 2,000, and we have these distributions all the time.” 

“Food banks around the country have seen this unprecedented demand, and we’re just working as hard as we can to balance the private donations we get, with the public assistance to try to make sure people are fed,” he explained. 

Cooper continued: “A child would miss ten meals in a week, and if a mom has two to three kids in school, she’s now feeling the impact of the cost of that food at home, and without employment, kids are going hungry. We hear from schools that kids struggle with their education because they don’t have access to good nutrition.” 

Watch Full Interview 

It was just last week that a food bank in Dallas, Texas, handed out, in one day, the “largest-ever” food distribution. 

Thousands of cars lined up to collect food in Dallas, Texas, over the weekend, stretching as far as the eye can see. pic.twitter.com/xLFGOcBkPK

— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 16, 2020

Nationwide, internet searches for “drive-thru food bank near me” is erupting.  

And the problem we see here is that many of the key provisions in the CARES Act are set to expire on Dec. 31 – this could be catastrophic for millions of unemployed Americans and risk derailing the economic recovery. 

“We just hope that Congress acts quickly, the stimulus package needs to support families to put food on their table,” Cooper said.

And if elevated demand for food banks continues to persist, “meal shortage” could be seen within the next 12 months. 

The new normal for millions of America’s working poor appears awfully similar to the 1930s. 

 Maybe each future stimulus check should include a one-year subscription to Blue Apron or HelloFresh? 

Submitted by Joseph Jankowski of Planet Free Will

Under Joe Biden’s proposed gun control plan, American gun owners would cough up tens of billions dollars in taxes as millions of rifles and magazines now in their possession would be subject to a tax under the National Firearms Act.

The center piece of Biden’s gun plan is to place a ban on the manufacture and sale of “assault weapons,” while bringing the regulation of possession of such firearms under the 1934 National Firearms Act.

Currently, the NFA of 1934 applies to fully automatics firearms, silencers and short-barreled rifles. But Biden would drag “assault weapons”, meaning semiautomatic rifles, pistols and shotguns (think the AR-15) along with “high capacity magazines”, which have generally been understood to be magazines that carry more than 10 rounds, under the act.

According to a National Shooting Sports Foundation report on firearm production figures, Americans in total own at least 20 million rifles and 150 million ammunition magazines that would be subject to the NFA regulations if Biden’s plan were put in place.

Under the NFA, each rifle and each magazine would be taxed at $200 per item. On top of that, gun owners would be subjected to complicated paper work and an identification process.

As Americans for Tax Reform reports:

As detailed on Biden’s campaign website, “Biden will also institute a program to buy back weapons of war currently on our streets. This will give individuals who now possess assault weapons or high-capacity magazines two options: sell the weapons to the government, or register them under the National Firearms Act.” This triggers the $200 tax.

In order to register a firearm (or a magazine, under Joe Biden’s plan), you have to send in a 13-page, complicated application form with the $200 tax included, your fingerprints, and a photograph of yourself. In this way, the hurdles to legally own your weapon or high-capacity magazine go far beyond the expensive tax. 

With 20 million rifles and 150 million magazines to fall under the NFA with Biden’s plan, the amount of taxes paid by American gun owners would equate to $34 billion dollars.

If a gun-owner chooses not to hand in his NFA regulated rifle or magazine, he or she would face up to 10 years in federal prison, and a potential $10,000 fine.

The move would be in total violation of Biden’s pledge not to tax those who make under $400,000 annually and would put an even greater financial burden on Americans who have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and state induced economic shutdowns.

More from Americans for Tax Reform:

Many families who have already been struggling due to the economic damage done by the coronavirus would find themselves incapable of paying for the ability to practice a constitutional right of theirs.

According to the Biden campaign, any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds is a “high capacity” magazine. Even if someone owns only one AR-15, if they have just four standard capacity magazines, they would owe the federal government $1,000.

Suddenly, gun control becomes less about mere firearm ownership and more about controlling working-class Americans. In urban areas, where people are most vulnerable to crime, it’s not hard to imagine how crushing this could be. There is nothing new about leftist politicians taxing urban residents in order to dictate behavior, ownership, and lifestyle.

While Biden’s gun control plan likely wont catch much fan fair in the more red, new congress taking hold at the start of 2021 – especially if Republicans can take at least one of the upcoming Georgia run-offs – the idea lends more credence to the suspicion that Trump’s America is likely to be flipped on its head under a Biden presidency.

We recently highlighted the possibility that the US and China “may well be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable.” For years, we’ve discussed the relentless quest of Washington elites, preparing the empire for the inevitable collision with China as the battle for economic supremacy nears.

The rapid modernization of the military under the Trump administration, costing taxpayers $2 trillion, was an important signal in gauging Washington Warhawks’ level of military preparedness as the threat of rising China increases by the day.

President Trump has described the trillions of dollars allocated to the military as a “colossal rebuilding” effort – something he says has ‘never been done before.’ Trump has routinely described all sorts of new military technology, including fifth-generation stealth jets, hypersonic missiles, and increased nuclear weapon capability. 

While dangers of confrontation have increased in 2020 as US warships continue to sail through the South China Sea, or Chinese warplanes buzz Taiwan’s airspace – Trump is still president for 57 days, meaning that anything is possible in the next two months. 

In a show of force, the Air Force released a video Monday showing a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II dropping a mock nuclear bomb at Sandia National Laboratories’ Tonopah Test Range over the Nevada desert. 

“We’re showing the B61-12’s larger compatibility and broader versatility for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and we’re doing it in the world of COVID-19,” said Steven Samuels, a manager with Sandia’s B61-12 Systems Team.

Samuels said, “We’re not slowing down. We’re still moving forward with the B61-12 compatibility activities on different platforms.”

We noted in June that another F-35 dropped a mock nuclear bomb at a test range in the California desert.  

In 2018, the Pentagon upgraded its B61 nuclear gravity bombs, a move that would increase the lifespan for decades. 

“The upgraded, B61-12 LEP will replace all of the bomb’s nuclear and non‐nuclear components for another two decades, and improve the bomb’s safety, effectiveness, and security. This life extension program will address all age-related issues of the weapon, and enhance its reliability, field maintenance, safety, and use control,” the National Nuclear Security Administration said in a tear off sheet. 

“This was the first test to exercise all systems, including mechanical, electrical, communication and release between the B61-12 and the F-35A,” Samuels said.

“The latest test is a critical piece in the F-35A and B61-12 program Aboard the newest fighter, the B61-12 provides a strong piece of the overall nuclear deterrence strategy for our country and our allies,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the Navy disclosed last week that a missile interceptor from one of its warships at sea shot down and destroyed a “mock ICBM” that was put into flight for testing purposes.

Authored by Justin MacLachlan via TheMindUnleashed.com,

An astrophysicist at the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona have claimed that the brain resembles the universe. The two Italian researchers came up with the galaxy-brain theory that is out of this world: The structures of the perceptible universe, they say, are astonishingly comparable to the neuronal networks of the human brain.

University of Bologna astrophysicist Franco Vazza and University of Verona neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti document the extraordinary similarities between the cosmic network of galaxies and the complex web of neurons in the human brain. The detailed study was published in the journal Frontiers in Physics showcasing the human brain has roughly 27 orders of magnitude separated in scale, while similarly, the composition of the cosmic web shows comparable levels of complexity and self-organization, according to the researchers.

The brain itself contains an estimated 69 billion neurons, while the visible universe is comprised of at least 100 billion galaxies, strung together like a mesh network. Even more intriguing both galaxies and neurons only account for about 30 percent of the total masses of the universe and brain. Further, both galaxies and neurons arrange themselves like pearls on a long string.

Beginning from the shared features of the two systems, the two researchers examined a simulation of the network of galaxies in comparison to sections of the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum. Their purpose was to inspect how matter variations propagate.

In the case of galaxies, the remaining 70 percent of mass is dark energy. The equivalent in the human brain, the pair said was water.

“We calculated the spectral density of both systems,” Vazza said in a statement about the experiment. “This is a technique often employed in cosmology for studying the spatial distribution of galaxies. Our analysis showed that the distribution of the fluctuation within the cerebellum neuronal network on a scale from 1 micrometer to 0.1 millimeters follows the same progression of the distribution of matter in the cosmic web,” he added, “but, of course, on a larger scale that goes from 5 million to 500 million light-years.”

The amount of interwoven connections originating from each node also were strangely alike sparking further interest to the researchers.

“Once again, structural parameters have identified unexpected agreement levels,” Feletti said in the statement. “Probably, the connectivity within the two networks evolves following similar physical principles, despite the striking and obvious difference between the physical powers regulating galaxies and neurons.”

The team is anticipating that their preliminary research could lead to new analysis procedures advancing knowledge about both cosmology and neurosurgery. Which would enable scientists to better comprehend how these compositions have developed over time.

Since 2015 the Saudi coalition which has been bombing Yemen back to the stone age with the close cooperation of the Pentagon has essentially gotten a “free pass” by the mainstream media, despite the United Nations within the past two years classifying the war as the world’s “worst humanitarian disaster”. 

International rights groups and press reports commonly estimate the death toll at over 100,000 and with some putting it at up to a quarter million people killed, with a large percentage being civilian deaths.

The war-torn country has also faced severe famine, rampant disease, malnutrition and a lack of medical supplies crisis especially impacting children.

A recent report from In These Times included the following appeal to President-Elect Joe Biden ahead of him taking office on January 20:

One thing Biden can do, start­ing on day one, is end U.S. involve­ment in the Yemen war — involve­ment that he helped ini­ti­ate. ​“By exec­u­tive order, Biden could get the Pen­ta­gon to end intel­li­gence shar­ing for the Sau­di coali­tion airstrikes, end logis­ti­cal sup­port, and end spare parts trans­fers that keep Sau­di war­planes in the air,” Has­san El-Tayyab, lead Mid­dle East pol­i­cy lob­by­ist for the Friends Com­mit­tee on Nation­al Leg­is­la­tion, a pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tion, tells In These Times. ​”He could restore human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance to north­ern Yemen. He could use his pow­er as pres­i­dent to put pres­sure on oth­er nations that are sup­port­ing the Sau­di coali­tion — like France, the Unit­ed King­dom and Cana­da — and get them to fol­low suit. He could have the State Depart­ment put a stop on all arms sales to Sau­di Ara­bia unless they meet cer­tain benchmarks.” 

But given he’s stacked his top national security posts with Liberal Hawks, some of which had an active hand in forming the interventionist policies in Libya and Syria under Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this is very unlikely.

Yemen has long been the “forgotten war” and will likely remain so, and all the while major defense contractors (tied closely to the incoming administration) will rake in the cash. 

Will Biden finally end the Yemen War which he and Obama started in the first place?  The Grayzone delves into this very question in its latest interview:

The segment introduces: “On the campaign trail, Joe Biden pledged to end US support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, which the Obama-Biden administration authorized in 2015. Shireen Al-Adeimi, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, discusses Biden’s responsibility to end the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

Authored by Adrian Mak via AdvisorSmith.com,

With the Thanksgiving holiday fast approaching, Americans around the country are preparing their menus for the traditional holiday. This year, Thanksgiving celebrations may be a bit different given the effects of the coronavirus pandemic leading to smaller family gatherings with fewer people and potentially less holiday travel. Additionally, the pandemic has led to some disruption in food supply chains, as some food supply workers have been sickened with the virus. 

AdvisorSmith examined a basket of staple foods from the Thanksgiving table to understand how these trends have affected the pricing of the ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner. We compared recent prices for common Thanksgiving foods in October and November compared with the previous year at both retail and wholesale, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to find the change in the cost of a basket of Thanksgiving foods.

Increase in Cost of Thanksgiving Foods

AdvisorSmith found that a basket of Thanksgiving foods costs approximately 9.8% more in 2020 when compared to Thanksgiving of 2019. The foods included in our analysis were turkey, vegetables, and baking & bread. Vegetables included were potatoes, cranberries, squash, sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, and pumpkin. Baking and bread products included flour, white bread, milk, eggs, and butter.

Turkey

AdvisorSmith found that the average price of turkeys at wholesale increased by 11.9% from 2019 to 2020 as of mid-November. Fresh turkeys increased in price an average of 11.6% year-over-year, while frozen turkeys increased in price by about 12.2%.

As Political Calculations notes, the population of farm-raised turkeys in the United States has generally fallen since 1996. In 2020, an estimated 222 million turkeys were raised on American farms, which is down some 27% from the peak of 302.7 million raised in 1996.

The figure for 2020 also represents a decline of 7 million from 2019’s level, which itself was revised downward from an initial estimate of 240 million.

By contrast, the collective live weight of farm-raised turkeys has generally plateaued since 1996, falling within a range between 6.877 billion pounds (1999) and 7.922 billion pounds (2008). The initial estimate of the live weight of 2020’s 222 million farm-raised turkeys is 7.175 billion pounds.

The combination of a generally flat total live weight for all turkeys produced on American farms with a falling number of birds can only be explained by the growing size of individual turkeys. In 2020, we estimate the average weight of a live farm-raised turkey in the U.S. is 32.3 pounds, down slightly from 2019’s revised figure of 32.5 pounds.

Compared to the decade of the 1970s, when the average farm-raised turkey tipped the scale at 18.7 pounds, that represents a 73% increase in the typical size of turkeys produced in the U.S., where their average weight has steadily risen over the last four decades.

That trend may be changing for 2020 however, because smaller turkeys are in high demand as Americans downsize for 2020’s Thanksgiving. With celebrations limited to immediate family members with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, American consumers have been bypassing larger birds in favor of smaller ones.

Vegetables

We examined a basket of vegetables that are common for Thanksgiving, including potatoes, cranberries, squash, sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, and pumpkin. We found that prices for this basket increased an average of 7.4% during the period of October to mid-November 2020 compared with the same period in the prior year.

Baking & Bread

AdvisorSmith selected a basket of baking and bread products, which included flour, white bread, milk, eggs, and butter. The cost of these staples increased by approximately 7.1% on average during the period of October to mid-November compared with the prior year.

Methodology

AdvisorSmith selected a basket of common Thanksgiving staples from three major categories: turkey, vegetables, and baking & bread. To determine the average increase of the basket of Thanksgiving foods, we examined the difference in prices at retail or wholesale for each of the items individually. We then weighted each of the items to represent their percentage composition of a Thanksgiving meal. Turkey received the highest weight, at 55% of the meal, as the turkey accounts for a majority of the costs of the Thanksgiving meal. We used these weights to calculate the percentage increase in costs for the basket of Thanksgiving foods.

To calculate the increase in turkey prices, we examined wholesale turkey prices for fresh and frozen turkeys from the USDA’s Turkey Market News Report from November 13, 2020. This report included turkeys weighing 8-16 pounds and 16-24 pounds. We used the average price of turkeys per pound from each of these turkey types, and compared the prices to a year ago, which were also included in the report.

We calculated the increase in retail prices as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the following items: flour, white bread, milk, eggs, and potatoes. We compared the average retail price for these items in October 2020 compared with October 2019. 

For the following vegetable items, and butter, we used the weekly advertised retail price as recorded by the USDA: cranberries, squash, sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, and pumpkin. We compared the average price this year to the price a year ago for the week of November 7th through November 13th.

The staff at Penguin Random House Canada had a meltdown at an “emotional town hall” over the company’s decision to publish psychologist Jordan Peterson’s latest book, according to Vice. Dozens of additional employees have filed “anonymous complaints”, the report notes.

On Monday, the publisher said they would publish Peterson’s new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Peterson, which is going to be out in March 2021. We’re guessing none of these additional 12 rules includes setting fire to a Wendy’s or throwing a brick through a Target window to steal T-shirts. Hopefully instead, the book offers up a take on how to conduct yourself as an employee of a company without throwing an emotional temper tantrum anytime the boss makes a decision you don’t like. 

One “junior employee” at PRH said of Peterson: “He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him.”

“I feel it was deliberately hidden and dropped on us once it was too late to change course,” they continued. 

Perhaps Penguin Random House Canada can inform this person they can be a “junior employee” just about anywhere else instead of coddling them with “town hall” meetings and giving them the impression that their feelings actually matter to PRH’s bottom line.

A second employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.”

“The company since June has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative,” they said.

Another employee said: “[Peterson’s] the one who’s responsible for radicalizing and causing this surge of alt-right groups, especially on university campuses.”

“They’re not going to acknowledge the reason they’re doing it is for money. I feel that would be the more honest route to go rather than making up excuses for Jordan Peterson,” one employee said, as though making money isn’t the main idea of running a business anyway. 

The publisher said it welcomes the feedback from its employees. It put out a statement saying: “We announced yesterday that we will publish Jordan Peterson’s new book Beyond Order this coming March. Immediately following the announcement, we held a forum and provided a space for our employees to express their views and offer feedback.”

It continued and appeared to stand firm on its decision: “Our employees have started an anonymous feedback channel, which we fully support. We are open to hearing our employees’ feedback and answering all of their questions. We remain committed to publishing a range of voices and viewpoints.” 

We wouldn’t bet on Penguin Random House backing down. The book, which dares to offer a clinal professional’s uncensored opinion about the increasingly “woke” world we live in, will likely be wildly successful – just as Peterson’s first book “12 Rules for Life” was – selling 5 million copies.

We think the folks over at PragerU put it best:

Adults literally crying over Jordan Peterson writing a book need more Jordan Peterson in their life

— PragerU (@prageru) November 25, 2020

By Becker’s Hospital Review

To expand capacity at its northwest Wisconsin hospitals, Mayo Clinic Health System is placing beds in waiting rooms, surgical spaces and a heated parking garage, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.

The rush to boost bed capacity comes two weeks after the health system warned that 100 percent of its beds were occupied at its hospitals in northwest Wisconsin and more than three weeks after it began postponing elective care.  That number fluctuates by the hour, but emergency room physician Paul Horvath said hospitals and emergency rooms have been forced into what is known as “diversion status.”

“I worked a shift in one of the emergency departments the other evening,” Horvath said, “and literally every bed in northwest Wisconsin was full, and hospitals just weren’t able to admit new patients. Which means that I had the challenge of managing ICU level care in my ER for hours, which is obviously not routine.”

Mayo Clinic’s hospital in Eau Claire, Wis., set up four emergency beds with privacy curtains in an ambulance garage due to an influx of COVID-19 patients. The hospital said all four beds were filled Nov. 18, but haven’t needed to be used since, according to WQOW.

Additionally, a surge at Mayo’s hospital in Barron, Wis., forced it to move beds into a room designated for preparing patients for surgery. 

Mayo’s surge plan also includes moving beds into lobbies, emergency room physician Sue Cullinan, MD, told Wisconsin Public Radio. 

“Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” she said, though it “may have to happen.”

Mayo said that although patients may be placed in different spaces, they are all equipped with the necessary supplies to safely care for patients. 

“We would never put them in any unsafe or unclean environment,” Pam White, DNP, RN, chief nursing officer for Mayo Clinic Health System Northwestern Region, told WQOW. “It’s very clean, it’s warm, it’s an environment that’s not ideal and we wouldn’t do this every day, but if you needed to be in there to receive the care, I would absolutely go there. It’s a comfortable environment and temporary.”

Mayo Clinic Health System has clinics, hospitals and other facilities across Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

A new analysis out this week suggests that clients of FinTech companies PayPal and Square are responsible for helping drive the recent boost in Bitcoin, as it approaches $20,000. But we’re not entirely sold on that analysis, and we’ll explain why.

First, a primer. Square clients have made up 40% of the buying of new bitcoin entering the market over the last two years, Hedge Fund Pantera Capital suggested to CNBC  this week. PayPal has also driven demand, as denoted by a spike in volume on Paxos’ exchange, which is crypto firm that has partnered with PayPal.

Volumes on Paxos have “more than tripled” since PayPal’s service went live, the analysis notes, stating that PayPal clients were buying “roughly 70%” of new Bitcoin supply hitting the market. About 800 to 900 Bitcoin are hitting the market on a daily basis, as the total number of outstanding Bitcoin marches to its terminus at 21 million. 

 

Dan Morehead, founder and chief investment officer of Pantera Capital said: “It’s having a significant increase on price. You bring on two corporates that are already buying all of the newly issued bitcoins — supply and demand says the price has to go up.”

CNBC talking head Brian Kelly says that the spike is about new demand, as FinTech companies make it easier to buy the crypto: “It’s now easier to buy and transact with, and it’s opening up new demand by taking down a barrier to entry.”

But we’re not entirely sold on this analysis and we believe that institutions are playing a major role in keeping a bid under the crypto. As we noted over the weekend, large established banks like JP Morgan are starting to experiment with cryptocurrencies as Yahoo Finance reported: 

“Indeed, at the DealBook Summit on Nov. 18, (Jamie) Dimon said, “The blockchain itself will be critical to letting people move money around the world cheaper. We will always support blockchain technology.”

In May, JPMorgan went a step further when it began allowing customer transfers to and from Coinbase and Gemini, two U.S.-based regulated crypto exchange sites. And Dimon on Wednesday acknowledged that some “very smart people” are investing in bitcoin these days.”

This stands in contrast to Dimon’s comments in 2017:

“In September 2017, about three months before bitcoin hit an all-time high of nearly $20,000 per unit and crashed shortly thereafter, Dimon dropped a bomb on the crypto world. He called bitcoin a “fraud.”

But, despite the naysyers, JPMorgan admits that Bitcoin continued to rally strongly over the past two weeks, nearing the $19k mark, challenging their previous assessment that bitcoin’s overbought positions by momentum traders such as CTAs could potential trigger profit taking or mean reversion flows over the near term. Other major investment banks have also released bullish scenarios for the crypto, including Citi who leaked a $300,000 possible target. 

This is shown in the chart below by the open interest of CME bitcoin futures contract, a likely vehicle used by momentum traders such as CTAs, which continued to rise steeply over the past two weeks pointing to position build up rather than position unwinding.

The failure to see mean reversion flows kicking in in recent weeks might reflect the smaller role of momentum traders such as CTAs in bitcoin trading vs. their role in more traditional asset classes, such as gold and other commodities. 

Indeed, the exponential ascent of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust in recent weeks suggests that other institutional investors who look at bitcoin as a long-term investment have been playing perhaps a bigger role in recent weeks than quantitative funds, such as CTAs.

There is also the idea that some investors that previously invested in gold ETFs, such as family offices, may be looking at bitcoin as an alternative to gold.

As JPMorgan previously highlighted, the potential longterm upside for bitcoin is considerable if it competes more intensely with gold as an “alternative” currency, given that the market cap of bitcoin (at $340B) would have to rise 8 times from here to match the total private sector investment in gold via ETFs or bars and coins which stands at $2.6T. 

As JPM recently concluded:

“the potential long-term upside for bitcoin is considerable we think as it competes more intensely with gold as an “alternative” currency given that Millennials would become over time a more important component of investors’ universe.”

While it may be easy for CNBC or Pantera to cop out with the same “retail momentum” analysis they used for Bitcoin’s first run up to $20,000, as @BullyEsq recently noted, it is different this time…

2017 was marked by unsustainable retail FOMO driven by scammy ICOs.

2020 is being driven by institutions.

 

 

Authored by Gilbert Berdine, MD, via The Mises Institute,

Pfizer recently announced that its covid vaccine was more than 90 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Shortly after this announcement, Moderna announced that its covid vaccine was 94.5 percent “effective” at preventing covid-19. Unlike the flu vaccine, which is one shot, both covid vaccines require two shots given three to four weeks apart. Hidden toward the end of both announcements, were the definitions of “effective.”

Both trials have a treatment group that received the vaccine and a control group that did not. All the trial subjects were covid negative prior to the start of the trial. The analysis for both trials was performed when a target number of “cases” were reached. “Cases” were defined by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing. There was no information about the cycle number for the PCR tests. There was no information about whether the “cases” had symptoms or not. There was no information about hospitalizations or deaths. The Pfizer study had 43,538 participants and was analyzed after 164 cases. So, roughly 150 out 21,750 participants (less than 0.7 percent) became PCR positive in the control group and about one-tenth that number in the vaccine group became PCR positive. The Moderna trial had 30,000 participants. There were 95 “cases” in the 15,000 control participants (about 0.6 percent) and 5 “cases” in the 15,000 vaccine participants (about one-twentieth of 0.6 percent). The “efficacy” figures quoted in these announcements are odds ratios.

There is no evidence, yet, that the vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths. The Moderna announcement claimed that eleven cases in the control group were “severe” disease, but “severe” was not defined. If there were any hospitalizations or deaths in either group, the public has not been told. When the risks of an event are small, odds ratios can be misleading about absolute risk. A more meaningful measure of efficacy would be the number to vaccinate to prevent one hospitalization or one death. Those numbers are not available. An estimate of the number to treat from the Moderna trial to prevent a single “case” would be fifteen thousand vaccinations to prevent ninety “cases” or 167 vaccinations per “case” prevented which does not sound nearly as good as 94.5 percent effective. The publicists working for pharmaceutical companies are very smart people. If there were a reduction in mortality from these vaccines, that information would be in the first paragraph of the announcement.

There is no information about how long any protective benefit from the vaccine would persist. Antibody response following covid-19 appears to be short lived. Based on what we know, the covid vaccine may require two shots every three to six months to be protective. The more shots required, the greater the risk of side effects from sensitization to the vaccine.

There is no information about safety. None. Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) appear to have two completely different standards for attributing deaths to covid-19 and attributing side effects to covid vaccines. If these vaccines are approved, as they likely will be, the first group to be vaccinated will be the beta testers. I am employed by a university-based medical center that is a referral center for the West Texas region. My colleagues include resident physicians and faculty physicians who work with covid patients on a daily basis. I have asked a number of my colleagues whether they will be first in line for the new vaccine. I have yet to hear any of my colleagues respond affirmatively. The reasons for hesitancy are that the uncertainties about safety exceed what they perceive to be a small benefit. In other words, my colleagues would prefer to take their chances with covid rather than beta test the vaccine. Many of my colleagues want to see the safety data after a year of use before getting vaccinated; these colleagues are concerned about possible autoimmune side effects that may not appear for months after vaccination.

These announcements by Pfizer and Moderna are encouraging. I certainly hope that these vaccines protect people from the harm of covid-19. I certainly hope that these vaccines are safe. If both of these conditions are true, nobody will need to be coerced into taking the vaccine. However, you should pay even more attention about what is left out of an announcement than about what is stated. The pharmaceutical companies are more than happy for patients to misunderstand what is meant by efficacy. Caveat emptor (buyer beware)!