Tag: finance

Authored by Brandon Smith via Birch Gold Group,

During the first wave of pandemic lockdowns, America became a rather surreal place. The initial shock that I witnessed in average people in my area was disturbing. Half the businesses in the region closed and a third of the grocery store shelves were empty. The look in people’s faces was one of bewilderment and fear; their eyes were like saucers, no one was staring into their cell phones as they usually do, and people huddled over their shopping carts like wild dogs protecting a carcass.

Luckily, this tension has subsided, but only because the majority of Americans have been assuming for the past couple months that the pandemic was going to fade away in the summer and that the “reopening” was permanent. Sadly, this is a delusion that is going to bite people in the ass in the next month or two.

In “The Economic Reopening Is A Fake-Out”, published at the end of May, I stated:

“The restrictions will continue in major US population centers while rural areas have mostly opened with much fanfare. The end result of this will be a flood of city dwellers into rural towns looking for relief from more strict lockdown conditions. In about a month, we should expect new viral clusters in places where there was limited transmission. I suggest that before the 4th of July holiday, state governments and the Federal government will be talking about new lockdowns, using the predictable infection spike as an excuse.”

I also noted:

Certainly, it appears that most Americans hate the lockdowns. But will they be fooled by the “reopening” into complacency for the next several weeks while the government gets ready to hit them with the next round of restrictions? Will they be so caught off guard they won’t know how to react? Imagine the economic devastation of just one more nationwide lockdown event? It will be carnage, and a lot of hope within the population will be lost.

In “Pandemic And Economic Collapse: The Next 60 Days”, published in April, I predicted:

The extent of the crisis will become much more clear in the next two months to the majority. The result will be civil unrest in the summer, likely followed by extreme poverty levels in the winter. No measure of “reopening” is going to do much to stop the avalanche that has already been started.

My position at the time, on secondary infection spikes in the summer as well as renewed lockdown restrictions, appears to have proven correct. Currently, daily reported infections in the U.S. are at a record 50,000 per day or more and cases are rising in 40 out of 50 states. Many of the new infection clusters are in more rural areas and states that a lot of people thought had dodged the initial wave, including California. There has been a massive rush of home buyers moving to rural and suburban America away from the cities. The great migration has begun.

Subsequently, public anxiety is rising yet again. Protests such as those in Michigan over the lockdowns were overwhelmingly peaceful, yet liberty movement activists were demonized and accused of “inciting violence” and “spreading the virus”. Some groups with left-leaning political agendas used the death of George Floyd to create civil unrest. The mainstream media mostly lavished these groups with praise and refused to acknowledge that they might be spreading the virus.

The double standard is clear, but this is just the beginning.

As I have argued for the past few months, the REAL public crisis will strike when the secondary lockdowns are enforced, either by state governments or the federal government. Make no mistake, these orders are coming. We can already see restriction in some states being implemented, though they refuse yet to call the situation a “lockdown”.

California has recently added 24 counties to its “Covid watchlist”, and most of these counties have added new restrictions, including many non-essential businesses being ordered to remain closed.

The governor of Arizona announced statewide restrictions including business shutdowns, suggesting there may be a reopening at the end of July. If the previous lockdown is any indication, this means the next reopening will probably not happen until early September.

Similar restrictions have been announced in Texas, Florida, Georgia, etc. This is essentially a new shutdown that has not yet been officially labeled a “shutdown”.

So what does this mean for the U.S. economy going forward?

Well, the first lockdowns caused an explosion in unemployment, with 40 million jobs lost on top of around 11 million existing jobless. Beyond that, you can add the 95 million people without work that are no longer counted on the rolls by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only a portion of these jobs were regained when the reopening occurred. According to Shadowstats.com, the real unemployment rate including U-6 measurements is 31% – around the same level as it was during the Great Depression.

So far in 2020 there have been 4,300 major retail store closings, added onto the thousands of businesses already hit in 2019 in what many are calling “The Retail Apocalypse”. Small business closings are harder to gauge at this time, but according to Yelp, over 41% of their listed participants are announcing they are closing for good.

This outcome was easy to predict when it became clear that only 13% to 18% of businesses applying for the small business bailout loans received aid, and half of those businesses were actually large corporations

What happens next? The companies that did survive the first phase lockdowns are now going to get hit again, hard. I expect another 50% of small businesses to either close permanently or announce bankruptcy over this summer and fall. This means a second huge surge in job losses in the service sector.

It’s important to remember that the U.S. economy is 70% service based, and around 50% of total jobs are provided by small businesses. The lockdowns hit both these areas of our system mercilessly. And, with most of the aid from the government bailouts being diverted to major corporations, it’s as if someone was trying to deliberately crush the small business pillar of support for our economy. If you were attempting to drag the U.S. into an economic collapse, the Covid lockdowns are a perfect cover to make this happen.

Another economic threat is the slowdown in the supply chain. There will be renewed shortages in many goods. I have received numerous emails from readers who work in manufacturing, repair and acquisitions of vital parts for major companies who have told me that simple components, such as electronic and industrial parts that are required for factories to produce goods and repair goods, are almost gone. Meaning they are not being produced overseas in places like China, either due to the pandemic or geopolitical conflict. They tell me there is a maximum of two months before these components are completely gone.

The greater danger, however, is the higher likelihood of civil unrest. I’ve heard many people suggest that Americans will “never” put up with another round of shutdowns. I think it depends on the state you live in. If you live in places like California, Illinois, New York, or even Florida, the majority of people are going to conform to lockdowns even in the face of financial calamity. Interior states with more conservatives are not as certain. Regardless, I expect at least half the country to be shut down in the next few weeks, and those places that don’t shut down will be accused of “selfishly endangering others”.

As I have said many times since this crisis began, it does not matter how dangerous or deadly a virus is; shutting down the economy is assured destruction and is not an acceptable response.

Of course, certain special interest groups benefit greatly from the increased fear and chaos that economic instability brings. Right now, states like Georgia are pushing to stage the national guard to quell unrest, and I think this will spread to many places in the U.S. over the summer. They know what is coming, and they are worried about people hitting the wall of poverty that is ahead and reacting angrily.

As the globalist Imperial College of London published in March, the plan is for lockdowns to continue on and off for the next 18 months or more. This is not going away, and after the next wave of lockdowns, most Americans are finally going to realize it.

Rather than promoting localized production, independent economies and self-sufficiency, the establishment is going to suggest martial law and medical tyranny as the solution to the pandemic problem. In other words, they will demand total control over the population and the erasure of constitutional liberties in the name of “the greater good”.

These are the same people that downplayed the pandemic at the beginning of the year and refused to stop travel from China until it was too late. They are also the same people (including Dr. Anthony Fauci) who gave the Chinese millions of dollars to play around with the coronavirus at the Level 4 lab in Wuhan, which is the likely source of the current outbreak. I’m not sure why ANYONE would want to give more power to the people that caused the crisis in the first place.

Three factors are working hand-in-hand to undermine U.S. stability and create a rationale for totalitarian controls including the economic crash, civil unrest and the pandemic itself. Understand that preparations to protect yourself and your family must be finalized NOW. There will not be even a minor recovery after the next shutdown.

*  *  *

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As the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in India passes 800k, pushing India past Russia and into third place on the ranking of most global cases…

…the country’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hard-pressed to come up with a solution, particularly after an economy-crippling shutdown.

Earlier this month, local officials in Mumbai and New Delhi, the country’s two hardest-hit areas, launched an effort to perform a ‘COVID-19 audit’ on the city’s inhabitants in an ambitious testing program that would ideally test everyone in the two cities.

Now, local media are reporting that the WHO has praised an effort to contain an outbreak in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, said to be the largest slum in all of Asia, and also one of the densest.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during the WHO’s press conference in Geneva on Friday that the situation in Dharavi is an example of how even some of the most intense outbreaks can be brought under control with a proactive strategy.

“And some of these examples are Italy, Spain and South Korea, and even in Dharavi – a densely packed area in the megacity of Mumbai,” he had said.

According to local officials, the strategy they used to successfully start suppressing the outbreak relied on proactive testing first and foremost, along with the support of medical professionals and other medical resources focused on the area aside from the tests and the people needed to administer them.

The neighborhood, once deemed a global COVID-19 hotspot, has managed to flatten its curve.

One of the top hospital officials who participated in the effort said that the linchpin of the strategy was going out into the community and proactively testing individuals – especially the most vulnerable –  instead of waiting for patients to come to get tested at a facility.

“Proactive screening helped in early detection, timely treatment and recovery,” he said.

When positive cases were found, officials diligently guided the subject to care (if they needed it) or quarantine, then made sure to trace cases back to the point of infection while keeping confirmed patients from spreading it to others.

Across Dharavi, 14,000 people were reportedly tested and 13,000, were placed in institutional quarantine with medical facilities and community kitchen for free,” the senior official said. That’s across a slum that measures 2.5 square kilometers, with a population density of 2,27,136 people per square kilometer.

Soon, officials noted progress in the data. In April, the doubling rate was 18 days. It was gradually improved to 43 days in May and slowed down to 108 and 430 days in June and July respectively.

As many as 2,359 COVID-19 cases have been recorded in Dharavi so far, of which 1,952 patients have recovered from the deadly infection, while there are only 166 active cases at present. However, achieving this monumental feat was not easy for the local authorities, who had to overcome their fair share of challenges.

“At least 80% of Dharavi’s population depends on 450 community toilets and the administration had to sanitize and disinfect these toilets several times a day,” Dighavkar said.

[…]

“Our approach to tackle the virus was focused on four Ts – tracing, tracking, testing and treating,” he said.

Social distancing was next to impossible in Dharavi, where families of eight to 10 people live in 10×10 huts, and travel requires walking through narrow lanes in between the tenement houses.

Doctors and private clinics, as part of proactive screening and fever camps, covered as many as 47,500 houses, while 14,970 people were screened in mobile vans, the official said.

Apart from this, special care was taken for the elderly residents and 8,246 senior citizens were surveyed, he said.

Manpower was a major issue for organizing fever camps and proactive screening in high-risk zones.

“We mobilised all private practitioners. At least 24 private doctors came forward and the civic body provided them with PPE kits, thermal scanners, pulse oxymetres, masks, gloves, and started door-to-door screening in high risk zones and all suspects were identified,” he said.

City officials also cleared schools and other buildings to transform them into makeshift hospitals and quarantine units. In just 2 weeks, a 200-bed hospital was devised.

Like the US, India saw a surge in cases after exiting a lengthy lockdown. The lockdown imposed by the Indian government was by all accounts far more strict than what most Americans experienced. Still, the virus has made a comeback, suggesting that lockdowns in India aren’t a sustainable way to deal with the problem. But proactive testing sounds like it could certainly go a long way.

Submitted by The Swam Blog,

For years, I have heard fund managers and economists claiming that “a financial crisis is unlikely as long as central banks intervene”. This postulate has been the foundation of the well-known “Fed put”. Stocks should only go up thanks to monetary policy.

The past ten years have reinforced that conviction, since all the actions of the Fed and the ECB had strong positive impact on risky assets. But, as Tyler Durden would say, “on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero”.

In fact, if you study economic history, then you are likely to realize that such relationship between money supply and asset prices has no real foundations. Besides, the purchasing power of money theory tells us that increasing money supply can lead to higher prices, but only if the so-called velocity of money does not decrease. Thus, velocity is a key variable. When it comes to investment, it seems that velocity is mostly driven by psychological factors. In other words, if QE has become so bullish for stocks or bonds, it is mainly because people believe that it is.

Therefore, everyone should remember that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. Not only can the market drop despite the Fed, but it might crash precisely because of such dominant belief.

Intersubjective Markets and Narratives

Intersubjectivity can be thought as a share agreement of meanings between multiple people. According to Yuval Noah Harari, without intersubjective frameworks like religions, governments, money, firms, etc., anatomically modern humans would not be able to form and control large social groups.

Financial markets can also be treated as an intersubjective framework. From that perspective, a market narrative can be defined as a subculture (or ideology) common to multiple investors, sharing a common vision on how markets work and how assets are priced.

Without narratives, there would be no bull or bear markets. Of course, bull markets can be driven by positive news such as earning growth. However, speculative bubbles would make no sense without intersubjectivity. The concept of narratives is the key to understand how markets work and how investor price assets.

The “Fed put” can regarded as the dominant narrative since 2009. And it has become so dominant that Nasdaq stock prices have disconnected from economic fundamentals like they did in 1999.

Fractals and Avalanches

Today, equity markets seem to display a macro-behavior, since almost everyone has turned bullish. Despite a few skeptical folks, even pessimistic investors have resigned themselves to the idea that markets would not drop anymore because of Jerome Powell. In other words, a form of order has emerged (i.e. low entropy), and the market has reached a critical state.

The problem is that such a state is very unstable, and a fast reversal becomes more and more likely. What could be the trigger?  It could be anything like the acceleration of the pandemic, bankruptcies, geopolitical tensions, etc. However, answering this question is not essential.

Indeed, the bubble has been driven by endogenous feedback loops. So, the market can crash without any obvious reason. This is what we observed on US equity markets in 1929, 1987 and 2000. And this is also how ended the bitcoin mania in 2017, and the China A shares rally in 2015.

What we know so far is that a reversal can lead to a significant volatility spike since the apparent order will be suddenly broken.

Hidden Risks Behind the Tech Rally

Some physicists state that the whole boom and bust process can be captured using the so-called log-periodicity power law singularity (LPPLS) model. Whether it is purely theoretical or not, the model indicates that Nasdaq euphoria is likely to terminate by the end of the summer (see It is All About Waves – Tech Stocks and The Log-Periodicity Power Law Singularity Model and We Are Warned – Precisions About the Log-Periodicity Power Law Singularity Model).

Beyond that statistical prediction, it is important to have a look at technicals as the current trend looks quite unsustainable (see Sven Henrich’s chart above) with numerous unfilled gaps below. And while the Nasdaq is breaking records every day, the VIX remains at historically high levels.

At this stage, the question is, what will support the market if the dominant narrative is broken? The Fed has our backs, until it has not. Extreme concentration and short-volatility bets are major risks for equity investors, especially Robinhood retail traders.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “missing a train is only painful if you run after it”.

The scene can be somewhat dystopian and third world when you look at it: as a result of the pandemic and the new way that our economy is forced to do business, Americans all over the country are waiting in line – even for the most basic of essentials. 

For example, Bloomberg points out that food banks in Vermont have to deal with “miles long” lines of cars and at Covid testing sites in Florida, people have to show up with full tanks of gas because of how long they have to wait. 

People applying for unemployment have similar horror stories – as we have detailed – trying to pile onto an overwhelmed website to collect benefits and left with no one to call when the system doesn’t function properly. The physical waits in unemployment lines are similarly distressing.

Kara Eaton, a 27-year-old industrial welder from Eufaula, Oklahoma, said: “We have to hope that the person next to us in line will hold our place while we use the bathroom — Subway usually doesn’t mind if we use theirs.”

Rachelle Basaraba of Oregon said: “Having to be patient and wait your turn — I don’t know if that’s necessarily the American way.” She says that a “herd mentality” and respect for rules bring order to waiting in line in Denmark, where her company is based. She called this a “a positive thing,” though was unsure about how it would catch on the U.S.

This time in America is the first since the Great Depression to make Americans wait in line for limited resources. 

J. Jeffrey Inman, a marketing professor and associate dean at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business, said: “The U.S. is getting a dose of the scarcity economy, and we don’t like it. The U.S. has gotten spoiled where we’ve always had a plentiful, efficient supply chain. Now we’re seeing what can happen once it gets disrupted.”

But capitalism is trying to swoop in and solve the problem. For example, a company called Lavi Industries, that usually makes post-and-rope systems for Homeland Security, is now involved in making plastic sneeze guards and portable stations for lines to make the waiting for bearable. They are also working on their “virtual queueing technology,” which is a smart phone technology that can summon customers out of line from afar. 

Perry Kuklin, Lavi’s marketing director, put it simply: “People hate to wait. If you make it more pleasant, make it more efficient, you as a business can not only profit from it, but you create a better passenger experience or theater experience.”

Richard Larson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and expert on queuing theory, says the issue is just temporary: “My parents had to wait in a bank queue line between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and now ATMs are everywhere. We have umpteen more gas station pumps you can stop at. A lot of traditional pesky queuing is gone.”

Some Americans are trying to make the best of the situation. “It was time to stop and notice, to look around and watch, to not be on my phone. I tried just to be there,” said Dena Babb of Torrance, California, about trying to be mindful while enjoying waiting in line.

But other Americans continue to grow more and more skittish about the practice, leading to another vein of increased tension across the nation. Francisco Salazar of East Meadow, New York, concluded: “Earlier in the pandemic, they were checking people for masks, cleaning the carts, giving sanitizer — they’re no longer doing any of it. I feel paranoid. I don’t want to be on these long lines.”

 

Authored by Thomas Smith via Elemental,

Even if you recover from Covid-19, you may not escape unscathed…

At the moment, official record-keeping offers only three options when it comes to Covid-19: infection, recovery, or death. This misses a broad range of other potential outcomes for people who catch the virus — many of them bad.

In medicine, physicians talk about “M&M,” or “Mortality and Morbidity.” Many hospitals even hold closed-door “M&M” conferences, where their providers discuss everything that’s gone wrong with their patients over the last week or month.

Mortality is a pretty straightforward concept. Have patients died from a particular disease process, and if so, how? Were their deaths avoidable? Can the field of medicine learn anything from them which will improve patient care in the future?

Morbidity, though, is a much trickier concept. It includes the complications, health issues, and other negative outcomes (other than death) that a disease causes. Basically, it’s all the ways that a disease can make you unwell, even if it doesn’t actually kill you.

Official statistics capture deaths that occur from Covid-19 reasonably well. Reporting methods are often updated, and epidemiologists have gone back and attempted to quantify Covid-19 deaths that were originally missed. But overall, death counts are a relatively easy metric to apply. Patients are either alive or dead. Knowing the difference is comparatively simple.

But these official statistics miss quite a lot. Specifically, they fail to represent Covid-19 morbidity — the harm that the disease causes, even in people that it doesn’t kill. In terms of measuring the long-term impact of the disease — and accurately evaluating risk — that’s a big problem.

Mounting evidence shows that even if Covid-19 kills less than 1% of patients, it doesn’t necessarily leave the others it infects unharmed. Even those who have “recovered” may have long-term impacts from it.

Morbidity can happen over a long-term period, so it is a harder variable to study and track in the early stages of a pandemic than death. Anecdotal reports and early data, though, show that Covid-19 morbidity may be a very real concern. According to a report in The Atlantic which followed several people with Covid-19 over multiple months, many had long-lasting symptoms and impairments (including headaches and debilitating fatigue) that didn’t resolve when their active infection stopped.

All of these cases were considered “mild” and didn’t result in the use of a ventilator or a stay in the ICU. And they occurred in people from a variety of age groups, not only older adults and the infirm. Yet despite these “low risk” factors, patients were still experiencing major impacts from the disease months after contracting it.

A handful of studies about Covid-19 (as well as scholarship on previous coronaviruses) bears this out. Covid-19 infection can have long-term impacts on the lungs, heart, immune system, and even the brain. These include an increased risk for heart attacks, future respiratory infections (including more severe cases of flu), and neurological impacts like cognitive impairment.

These are in addition to the known risks for hospitalization, especially if a hospitalization results in an ICU stay and might trigger ICU delirium, a condition that can be permanent. Just because you’ve recovered from Covid-19 doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily escaped unscathed — especially if the disease landed you in the hospital.

Even more concerning is emerging data showing that “asymptomatic” Covid-19 infections can cause long-term damage. Recent studies, including one published in Nature Medicine, have found “ground-glass opacities” in the lungs of asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 — evidence of inflammation which could be causing damage internally, even if the patient feels completely fine.

And although earlier evidence suggested that children are less affected by the disease, the emergence of a new condition, Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, suggests that the virus may be having longer-term impacts even on the young. MSIS symptoms can emerge weeks or months after the original infection and can be deadly without prompt treatment.

All these early reports point to the possibility that Covid-19 causes acute infection, but also long-term inflammatory damage. Inflammatory diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. If Covid-19 worsens these conditions — or causes its own long-term inflammatory damage — the result could be millions of additional deaths from heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and the like, especially in already vulnerable populations. These effects of the disease may not be apparent for years or decades.

At the moment, official statistics largely fail to take such ongoing health impacts of the coronavirus into account. Traditional epidemiology does have metrics for morbidity. But they tend to focus on disease prevalence. Once a person’s active infection has passed, they are often no longer followed or counted.

As risk professionals like Nassim Nicholas Taleb have pointed out, the failure to measure Covid-19 morbidity makes it far harder to evaluate the true risk from the pandemic. Simply looking at deaths is not enough. Mortality statistics fail to account for the people who survive the disease but suffer long-term harm — or those who die from its complications long after their initial infection has subsided.

This blindness to morbidity may push populations toward more aggressive reopening, or away from risk-reduction measures like mandating face coverings. If deaths are declining, the picture may appear rosy. But in reality, the disease may be causing irreparable harm to millions of people — just in a way that’s invisible in current statistics.

In an increasingly polarized world, morbidity is an issue that cuts across political lines. Even if your primary goal is to restart the American economy, you should care about Covid-19 morbidity. Chronically sick people often have a hard time working, or the efficiency of their work suffers. Several of the patients profiled in The Atlantic experienced “brain fog” and other neurological effects from the virus, and have found even simple activities like housework and yoga challenging. These patients would almost certainly have a hard time returning to work. To achieve lasting economic recovery with minimal burden from worker illness, Covid-19 morbidity has to be accounted for.

Thankfully, tracking Covid-19 morbidity doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. Medicine and risk management already have a robust tool for measuring the impact (health-wise and financial) of morbidity: the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) and its sister statistic, the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY).

QALYs and DALYs take into account both a person’s life expectancy and their quality of life (defined, broadly, by how much a disease affects their ability to perform daily tasks). Lowered life expectancy affects QALYs, but so do long-term disease effects like the kind we’re beginning to see from Covid-19.

QALYs and DALYs are often used to evaluate new treatments. But there’s no reason QALYs and DALYs couldn’t be applied more broadly, to estimate and measure the disease burden of the Covid-19 pandemic on a given population.

In the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, QALYs and DALYs could be applied by deciding on an estimate for a “weight factor” measuring the severity of Covid-19’s impact on patients’ health (this is usually done on a scale of 0 for “perfectly healthy” and 1 for “dead”). This weight factor could be set differently for different populations. For example, older people with Covid-19 or those with more preexisting conditions could receive a higher weight factor.

Using demographic data for a particular population (mean age, prevalence of existing diseases, etc.) and these weight factors, an estimate of the impact of Covid-19 morbidity could be established for a population. This could then be multiplied by the number of confirmed infections in the population to arrive at a crude estimate of the overall burden of Covid-19 morbidity.

Accounting for morbidity in this way could have some major impacts on plans for reopening. Regions with highly vulnerable populations (those expected to suffer more morbidity as a result of Covid-19 infections) could reopen more slowly. And those with relatively lower projected morbidity might be emboldened to open more quickly.

As the pandemic continues and more data on the long-term impact of Covid-19 becomes available, weights could be adjusted. If it emerges that certain populations are less vulnerable than expected, their weights could be adjusted downward. If more long-term impacts of Covid-19 infection emerge (like breathing issues in asymptomatic carriers), weight factors could be adjusted upward.

QALYs and DALYs are not perfect metrics. Setting weight factors is inherently subjective, and can reflect biases present in a society. At the early stage of a pandemic, very little data is available, so estimating morbidity is more an art than a science. There are also ethical concerns with QALYs and DALYs since they’re often used to weigh the value of one life against another. QALYs and DALYs can also miss the hard-to-measure impacts of disease, like their impact on mental health.

But given that Covid-19 morbidity is basically invisible in current public health models, measuring morbidity with metrics like QALYs and DALYs would at least be a helpful start. It could begin to give us a way to estimate not only how many people will die from Covid-19, but how many lives will be negatively impacted by the disease.

Measuring morbidity could also provide better treatment and follow-up. Current approaches assume that once an asymptomatic carrier of Covid-19 tests negative, their disease has run its course. Follow-up for these patients is likely to be limited. If it turns out that Covid-19 causes ongoing morbidity in patients who appear healthy, providers could shift toward monitoring them months or years after their infection (looking for evidence of inflammation and lung damage, for example).

On a personal level, if you’ve tested positive for Covid-19 and feel fine now, don’t assume your disease is over. Especially in the longer term, be aware of potential Covid-19 symptoms, and talk with your doctor about testing for any long-term impacts that emerge.

And if you still have symptoms after your Covid-19 test has turned negative, and are told that these are unrelated to the disease, be skeptical. In the grand scheme, very little is known about Covid-19. You may be experiencing lingering effects from your infection, which your doctor should help you address and manage.

Tracking deaths and recoveries is a start. But current approaches to tracking Covid-19 are binary — you’re either positive or negative, alive or dead. To truly measure (and react to) the long-term impacts of the pandemic, we need more nuanced measures.

Specifically, we need a way to measure morbidity. Otherwise, we risk missing impacts of Covid-19 which could have massive, invisible consequences — especially for our most vulnerable.

We have a feeling you won’t see this on the evening news.

In another bloody incident of violent crime caught on tape, an assailant armed with a knife slashes at least two terrified men on a subway car in NYC. The incident was filmed by one very steady-handed bystander.

BREAKING – Man with knife stabs multiple passengers on NYC subway.pic.twitter.com/ZGMfhgpWPu

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) July 11, 2020

Since the riots that swept NYC and other cities during the George Floyd protests, crime in New York has come soaring back to levels not seen in decades as Mayor de Blasio has taken hundreds of undercover officers off the streets and moved to lay off thousands of NYPD employees as part of a massive budget cut to the country’s biggest policing force.

This isn’t the only stabbing incident we’ve seen lately. In Houston, a group of bystanders were recently filmed helping police subdue an unhinged attacker at a gas station on Fuqua Street in southeast Houston.

At first, it seems the man filming had the audacity to tell the officers who were arresting the attacker “don’t put your hands on his neck now”.

In response, the officer calmly explained his technique, clearly showing how he had his hand on the suspect’s back, before inviting the person filming and other bystanders to help hold the man down while he was being handcuffed.

Field’s video has hundreds of thousands of views. On Thursday, musician Timbaland shared it on his Instagram page with the comment, “they got it right this time‼️”

Authored by Daphne Howland of RetailDive,

• Nordstrom June 3 notified landlords of its full-line and off-price Rack stores that it will pay only half the occupancy costs for the remainder of the year, according to a letter from President of Stores Jamie Nordstrom to property owners, which was obtained by Retail Dive. A Nordstrom spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to Retail Dive’s request for more information or comment.

• In the letter, the company also said it will use store comps as the basis for any “true up rent payment, up to a full reconciliation should 2020 sales reach 90% of sales made in that location in 2019.” The department store said it “will continue to maintain insurance coverage, pay utilities on which we are the account holder, and maintain your building(s) as required by the lease.”

• Separately, Nordstrom on Wednesday confirmed that it’s “realigning and reducing our workforce to support our market strategy, including in our corporate support teams.” The layoffs are part of a 20% reduction “to non-occupancy related overhead expenses,” a spokesperson told Retail Dive in an email, but declined to say how many people are affected. Sourcing Journal last week, citing unnamed sources, said plans are to cut up to 25% of its workforce. Those don’t include layoffs at the 16 stores slated for permanent closure, according to that report. In 2019, the retailer employed about 68,000 full- or part-time employees.

 

Dive Insight:

Even as stores reopen in most areas, retailers are scrambling to hold onto as much cash as possible, in order to run a business that is entertaining precious few customers in the middle of a pandemic.

While Nordstrom executives in remarks to analysts in May expressed confidence in their overall strategy, which is to knit together the company’s full-price, off-price and Local stores into one retail ecosystem, the pandemic and its economic fallout have interfered with that. The department store in May said first quarter net sales fell 40% year over year, with full-line sales down 36% and off-price sales down 45%. The retailer experienced loss before interest and taxes of $813 million, from EBIT of $77 million a year ago, and swung to a net loss of $521 million, including after-tax COVID-19 charges of $173 million, from net earnings of $37 million a year ago.

“COVID-19 has had a very real impact on Nordstrom, accelerating the importance of our market strategy and capabilities we’ve invested in for years,” the Nordstrom spokesperson said Wednesday, noting the company’s recent permanent store closures and executive salary cuts. “Our new operating model helps us serve customers across our business as one company, while enabling us to be more agile and flexible. We’ll continue to invest in critical capabilities across technology, data analytics and supply chain to deliver for our customers.”

But with its outreach to landlords, the company is flirting with litigation, warns Nick Egelanian, president of retail real estate firm SiteWorks​. Simon Property Group, Brookfield and others in recent weeks have gone to court to force rents out of their retail tenants. Nordstrom’s letter was sent out en masse “apparently with no forewarning or prior discussion,” Egelanian said.

Along with ominous signs of the depth of Nordstrom’s struggles — including the pullback of its fleet and under-merchandising in some locations that Egelanian said has been part of an effort to cut costs and stem losses at those stores — the letter was an inelegant attempt at negotiation, he said.

“Many landlords, apparently unimpressed with the company’s slipshod approach to rent reduction and generally less enamored with a company once considered the gold standard in service and apparel retailing, are opposing Nordstrom’s action vigorously,” he told Retail Dive in an email. In addition to possibly heading to court with its landlords, Nordstrom “has become the subject of wide-spread speculation that it could end up in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization before the story of the pandemic is fully written.”

Update:

A Nordstrom spokesperson declined to answer specific questions about the letter from Jamie Nordstrom, but acknowledged that its pandemic-related cost cuts involve pushing back against lease obligations. “As part of our continued efforts to navigate this situation and achieve the expense reductions announced previously, we are modifying our rent payments until January 2021, at which point we’ll fully reconcile our payments,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We’re working closely with our store landlords to find a mutually agreeable path forward.”

Currently the United States is looking to seize gasoline aboard the next group of Iranian tankers bound for Venezuela, after the last delivery by five sanctions-busting tankers last month were successful despite being accompanied by similar US threats. 

President Trump on Friday signaled the US is indeed about to “move” on Venezuela and its sanctions thwarting activities with the help of ‘rogue states’ like Iran. He told the Spanish-language American channel Noticias Telemundo on Friday that—  

“Something will be happening with Venezuela” and that the United States will “be very much involved.”

The president was also asked about the future of election in the country, especially related to US-backed opposition leader and self-styled ‘Interim President’ Juan Guaido.

Trump said the US would “take care of the people of Venezuela” and ultimately support whoever was legitimately elected. But of course, it remains that the US deems any support to Nicolas Maduro by definition “illegitimate”.

The interviewer, Jose Diaz-Balart, asked Trump point-blank: “For you, Venezuela, is it Guaido, is it Maduro, is it U.S. intervention?”

Trump said in response: 

“It’s freedom for their people. It’s freedom. Venezuela was a rich country 15 years ago, and it’s been destroyed by two people, but a system, a horrible system. … And something will happen with Venezuela. That’s all I can tell you. Something will be happening with Venezuela.”

And when pressed over precisely through what route this “something big” will occur in Venezuela, Trump responded: 

“We’ll be very much involved.”

“We’re going to take care of the people of Venezuela,” Trump emphasized.

Since last year the president has reportedly been pressing his generals and admirals on enacting some kind of naval blockade off Venezuela’s coast.

However, top Pentagon leadership has reportedly been by and large against the idea, citing the impracticability of such an operation, and likelihood of unnecessary escalation without clear overall goals of how far US military force would be willing to go against pro-Maduro forces. 

Washington reportedly does have naval ships in the Caribbean Sea, however, to crack down on what the White House previously described as Maduro’s “narco-trafficking” as well as illegal sanctions-busting activities. 

Authored by Gareth Porter via TheGrayZone.com, 

The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.”  A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.

But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.

In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.

In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it.

The Times Quietly Reveals Its Own Sources’ Falsehoods

The Times not only broke the Bountygate story but commissioned squads of reporters comprising nine different correspondents to write eight articles hyping the supposed scandal in the course of eight days. Its coverage displayed the paper’s usual habit of regurgitating bits of dubious information furnished to its correspondents by faceless national security sources. In the days after the Times’ dramatic publication, its correspondent squads were forced to revise the story line to correct an account that ultimately turned out to be false on practically every important point.

The Bountygate saga began on June 26, with a Times report declaring, “The United States concluded months ago” that the Russians “had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.” The report suggested that US intelligence analysts had reached a firm conclusion on Russian bounties as early as January. A follow-up Times report portrayed the shocking discovery of the lurid Russian plot thanks to the recovery of a large amount of U.S. cash from a “raid on a Taliban outpost.” That article sourced its claim to the interrogations of “captured Afghan militants and criminals.”

However, subsequent reporting revealed that the “US intelligence reports” about a Russian plot to distribute bounties through Afghan middlemen were not generated by US intelligence at all.

The Times reported first on June 28, then again on June 30, that a large amount of cash found at a “Taliban outpost” or a “Taliban site” had led U.S. intelligence to suspect the Russian plot.  But the Times had to walk that claim back, revealing on July 1 that the raid that turned up $500,000 in cash had in fact targeted the Kabul home of Rahmatullah Azizi, an Afghan businessmen said to have been involved in both drug trafficking and contracting for part of the billions of dollars the United States spent on construction projects.

The Times also disclosed that the information provided by “captured militants and criminals” under “interrogation” had been the main source of suspicion of a Russian bounty scheme in Afghanistan. But those “militants and criminals” turned out to be thirteen relatives and business associates of the businessman whose house was raided.

The Times reported that those detainees were arrested and interrogated following the January 2020 raids based on suspicions by Afghan intelligence that they belonged to a “ring of middlemen” operating between the Russian GRU and so-called “Taliban-linked militants,” as Afghan sources made clear.

Furthermore, contrary to the initial report by the Times, those raids had actually been carried out exclusively by the Afghan intelligence service known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). The Times disclosed this on July 1. Indeed, the interrogation of those detained in the raids was carried out by the NDS, which explains why the Times reporting referred repeatedly to “interrogations” without ever explaining who actually did the questioning.

Given the notorious record of the NDS, it must be assumed that its interrogators used torture or at least the threat of it to obtain accounts from the detainees that would support the Afghan government’s narrative. Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have documented as recently as 2019 the frequent use of torture by the NDS to obtain information from detainees.  The primary objective of the NDS was to establish an air of plausibility around the claim that the fugitive businessman Azizi was the main “middleman” for a purported GRU scheme to offer bounties for killing Americans.

NDS clearly fashioned its story to suit the sensibilities of the U.S. national security state. The narrative echoed previous intelligence reports about Russian bounties in Afghanistan that circulated in early 2019, and which were even discussed at NSC meetings. Nothing was done about these reports, however, because nothing had been confirmed.

The idea that hardcore Taliban fighters needed or wanted foreign money to kill American invaders could have been dismissed on its face. So Afghan officials spun out claims that Russian bounties were paid to incentivize violence by “militants and criminals” supposedly “linked” to the Taliban.

These elements zeroed in on the April 2019 IED attack on a vehicle near the U.S. military base at Bagram in Parwan province that killed three US Marines, insisting that the Taliban had paid local criminal networks in the region to carry out attacks.

As former Parwan police chief Gen. Zaman Mamozai told the Times, Taliban commanders were based in only two of the province’s ten districts, forcing them to depend on a wider network of non-Taliban killers-for-hire to carry out attacks elsewhere in the province. These areas included the region around Bagram, according to the Afghan government’s argument.

But Dr. Thomas H. Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School, a leading expert on insurgency and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan who has been researching war in the country for three decades,  dismissed the idea that the Taliban would need a criminal network to operate effectively in Parwan.

“The Taliban are all over Parwan,” Johnson stated in an interview with The Grayzone, observing that its fighters had repeatedly carried out attacks on or near the Bagram base throughout the war.

With Withdrawal Looming, the National Security State Plays Its Bountygate Card

Senior U.S. national security officials had clear ulterior motives for embracing the dubious NDS narrative. More than anything, those officials were determined to scuttle Trump’s push for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. For Pentagon brass and civilian leadership, the fear of withdrawal became more acute in early 2020 as Trump began to demand an even more rapid timetable for a complete pullout than the 12-14 months being negotiated with the Taliban.

It was little surprise then that this element leapt at the opportunity to exploit the self-interested claims by the Afghan NDS to serve its own agenda, especially as the November election loomed. The Times even cited one “senior [US] official” musing that “the evidence about Russia could have threatened that [Afghanistan] deal, because it suggested that after eighteen year of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.”

In fact, the intelligence reporting from the CIA Station in Kabul on the NDS Russia bounty claims was included in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on or about February 27— just as the negotiation of the U.S. peace agreement with the Taliban was about to be signed. That was too late to prevent the signing but timed well enough to ratchet up pressure on Trump to back away from his threat to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.

Trump may have been briefed orally on the issue at the time, but even if he had not been, the presence of a summary description of the intelligence in the PDB could obviously have been used to embarrass him on Afghanistan by leaking it to the media.

According to Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who was responsible for preparing the PDB for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the insertion of raw, unconfirmed intelligence from a self-interested Afghan intelligence agency into the PDB was a departure from normal practice.

Unless it was a two or three-sentence summary of a current intelligence report, McGovern explained, an item in the PDB normally involved only important intelligence that had been confirmed.  Furthermore, according to McGovern, PDB items are normally shorter versions of items prepared the same day as part of the CIA’s “World Intelligence Review” or “WIRe.”

Information about the purported Russian bounty scheme, however, was not part of the WIRe until May 4, well over two months later, according to the Times. That discrepancy added weight to the suggestion that the CIA had political motivations for planting the raw NDS reporting in the PDB before it could be evaluated.

This June, Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) convened a meeting to discuss the intelligence report, officials told the Times. NSC members drew up a range of options in response to the alleged Russian plot, from a diplomatic protest to more forceful responses. Any public indication that US troops in Afghanistan had been targeted by Russian spies would have inevitably threatened Trump’s plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan.

At some point in the weeks that followed, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency each undertook evaluations of the Afghan intelligence claims. Once the Times began publishing stories about the issue, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directed the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for managing all common intelligence community assessments, to write a memorandum summarizing the intelligence organizations’ conclusions.

The memorandum revealed that the intelligence agencies were not impressed with what they’d seen. The CIA and National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) each gave the NDS intelligence an assessment of “moderate confidence,” according to memorandum.

An official guide to intelligence community terminology used by policymakers to determine how much they should rely on assessments indicates that “moderate confidence” generally indicates that “the information being used in the analysis may be interpreted in various ways….” It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the NDS intelligence when the CIA and NCTC arrived at this finding.

The assessment by the National Security Agency was even more important, given that it had obtained intercepts of electronic data on financial transfers “from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,” according to the Times’ sources. But the NSA evidently had no idea what the transfers related to, and essentially disavowed the information from the Afghan intelligence agency.

The NIC memorandum reported that NSA gave the information from Afghan intelligence “low confidence” — the lowest of the three possible levels of confidence used in the intelligence community. According to the official guide to intelligence community terminology, that meant that “information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”

Other intelligence agencies reportedly assigned “low confidence” to the information as well, according to the memorandum. Even the Defense Intelligence Agency, known for its tendency to issue alarmist warnings about activities by US adversaries, found no evidence in the material linking the Kremlin to any bounty offers.

Less than two weeks after the Times rolled out its supposed bombshell on Russian bounties, relying entirely on national security officials pushing their own bureaucratic interests on Afghanistan, the story was effectively discredited by the intelligence community itself. In a healthy political climate, this would have produced a major setback for the elements determined to keep US troops entrenched in Afghanistan.

But the political hysteria generated by the Times and the hyper-partisan elements triggered by the appearance of another sordid Trump-Putin connection easily overwhelmed the countervailing facts. It was all the Pentagon and its bureaucratic allies needed to push back on plans for a speedy withdrawal from a long and costly war.

Hot on the heels of his CNBC interview in which he praised both bitcoin and gold, predicting that in a world where central banks are doing nothing but printing money “gold is going to take old highs and keep going”, billionaire investor Mike Novogratz, Galaxy Digital founder appeared on Bloomberg TV, where he essentially confirmed what we have been saying for years: that the stock market has become totally “unhinged from reality” as it rises higher due to now relentless central bank intervention, and said that small investors should get out before it crashes.

“We are in irrational exuberance – this is a bubble,” he told Bloomberg TV on Friday adding that “the economy is grinding, slowing down, we’re lurching in and out of Covid, yet the tech market makes new highs every day. That’s a classic speculative bubble.”

Echoing what BofA CIO Michael Hartnett said on Friday, when he cautioned that the disconnect between macro and markets has never been greater, which however is to be expected now that “government and corporate bonds have been fixed (“nationalized”) by central banks, so why would anyone expect markets to connect with macro, why should credit & stocks price rationally“, Novogratz – like Stan Druckenmiller and David Tepper – has been sounding alarms about the stock market for months, yet the S&P 500 index has inched higher, erasing losses spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and notching its best quarter since 1998.

While so far Novogratz’ warnings have fallen on deaf ears, with Robinhooders clearly chasing momentum in such mega-bubble stocks as Tesla…

… whose market cap is now greater than that of Ford + GM + BMW + Daimler + Volkswagen combined…

… the man who made a killing buying bitcoin and ethereum ahead of the herd, said that the surge in equities, especially tech stocks, reminds him of the rally in Bitcoin prices in 2017, when the cryptocurrency went from $8,000 to almost $20,000 within a couple months due to retail interest… before crashing just as fast. It now trades at roughly half the price it reached during the December 2017 peak.

Of course, there is the possibility that Novogratz is merely talking his book, admitting to Bloomberg that he largely missed out on the tech-stock rally, and has been investing instead in gold and Bitcoin, which are also benefiting from the liquidity propping up the stock market.

Then again, with gold the best performing asset of 2020 we won’t begrudge him for being right.

“We’re at really dangerous valuations on the growth side, on the tech side,” he said. “If it’s Zoom or Tesla or Beyond Meat, whatever stock has a story, everyone’s rushing in. That gets me worried.”

Watch the full interview below: