Tag: news

For Better Health, Find a Cure for Government

If the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no situation so severe that government can’t make it worse. Government’s recent crimes are legion: standing in the way of testing; complicating efforts to acquire protective equipment; imposing authoritarian and uniform lockdown rules across very different populations; and enforcing those rules in dangerous and ill-considered ways.

If you can assess the conduct of government officials through the pandemic and conclude that what we really need is more of that, then we’re probably going to cure the novel coronavirus long before we find a treatment for whatever it is that ails you.

The societies over which governments exert their power are made up of myriad individuals, businesses, churches, and organizations interacting with one another for purposes of their own. The people in a society may inhabit dense urban areas or sparsely settled countryside. They may have deep pockets or meager resources. They may have high tolerances for risk or shy away from danger. Often, they have little in common except goods, services, and ideas to exchange for mutual benefit. Forcing them to walk in lockstep makes little sense.

“Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules—with all the hardships they entail—despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes,” Bret Stephens pointed out in The New York Times last weekend.

Other than a few basic rules like “don’t murder” and “don’t steal,” there is very little you can impose from the top-down on a diverse society that can help and please one group without hurting and offending another. But that’s exactly what government does—inflicting one-size-fits-all-mandates that don’t fit many people at all and are usually poorly considered, at that. And during this pandemic, the government has exercised its taste for incompetence and draconian rules with a vengeance.

Famously, the federal government produced a dumpster fire of a COVID-19 test rather than adopt proven tests developed elsewhere. It also prevented universities, researchers, and private laboratories from developing their own tests, throwing bureaucratic hurdles in their way for weeks and allowing the disease to spread.

When it became obvious that available stocks of personal protective equipment were insufficient, federal regulators told aspiring new mask producers that getting approval for their efforts could take anywhere from 45 to 90 days.

Distilleries that tried to shift to producing much-sought hand sanitizer discovered they would be required to pollute their production lines with “denaturant” meant to make the product unpalatable—and therefore complicating the return to producing beverages after the crisis passed.

When hospitals and state officials do find supplies, they have to worry that they’ll be flat-out stolen by federal agencies who think they would be better used by somebody else.

Rules closing businesses, limiting gatherings, and even restricting outdoor excursions were supposed to “flatten the curve” to slow the spread of COVID-19 so that hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed. But the virus didn’t hit the same way everywhere. Instead, New York City and a few other hot spots got slammed. Elsewhere, most medical facilities found themselves tending empty beds, pondering the fate of patients whose “elective” cancer, heart, and back surgeries are deferred to some uncertain date in the future, and watching cash reserves dwindle for lack of patients to treat.

“Mayo Clinic is furloughing or reducing the hours of about 42 percent of its 70,000 employees across all of its campuses in an attempt to mitigate the financial losses from the COVID-19 pandemic,” reports the Rochester Post-Bulletin of the famed medical system. “About 60 percent of Mayo Clinic’s business comes from elective procedures of the kind that are now on hold.”

Furloughs and pay cuts are “a function of clumsy, if well-intentioned, federal and state directives to halt all non-emergency procedures,” writes Rick Jackson of Jackson Healthcare, a medical staffing company. He wants the government to get out of the way so doctors and patients can decide for themselves.

Idled doctors and untreated patients are the consequences of rules intended to help the healthcare system. Stay-at-home orders take an even bigger toll on people and industries that are collateral damage.

With 26.5 million jobs lost since governments started ordering businesses closed, the unemployment rate is estimated to have topped 20 percent and could be headed north of 30 percent. Some of those jobs aren’t coming back—at least not in the short term—because the businesses that offered them are themselves on the brink of extinction.

A few sectors—such as department stores—were already on the ropes and lockdowns are the final straw. Others are small businesses that can’t suspend operations indefinitely and expect to pick up where they left off. They’ll eventually be replaced, but only after bankruptcies, impoverishment, and a period of rebuilding inflicted by government decree. Those are costs rarely considered by those who insist, under penalty of law, that we focus on one set of risks and disregard others.

Governments have brought the same lack of judgment behind the formulation of their stay-at-home orders to their enforcement. Violators have been tossed into crowded jail cells, chased through the lonely ocean for daring to venture outside, fined for attending church services while isolated in their cars, and arrested for playing with their children in public.

Inevitably—if to the surprise of those who reflexively defer to government officials—people push back.

This past weekend saw thousands gather to protest in Madison, Wisconsin, echoing demonstrations elsewhere. Some attendees see rules tailored to help densely settled cities “driving resentment among people who live in areas with many fewer cases of the virus and are being subject to the same economic restrictions,” according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

True, individuals can exercise poor judgment, gathering too closely in a time of contagion. But their choices are relatively limited in their impact, putting at risk mostly others who choose to gather with them. By contrast, government amplifies the effect of every decision, imposing rules—good or bad—favored by the loudest and most influential across the population. When the decisionmakers are foolish, or panic-stricken, or corrupt, or just idiots, they get to spread the damage they do far and wide.

As we’ve seen, there is lots of foolishness, panic, corruption, and idiocy to go around in government. That’s why it’s not enough to say that better people would give us better rules and rule-enforcement. Yes, the president seems utterly clueless when he weighs in on the pandemic. And yes, the governors who are often in conflict with the president appear alternately power-hungry and eager to punish political enemies. But these are the actual officials our system produces, not the philosopher kings some election of the future is supposed to produce once the current officeholders are swept away.

Besides, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who screwed up testing and hamper companies trying to respond to the crisis are precisely the sort of experts to whom we’re supposed to defer. They’re no better with coercive power than anybody else.

And because government and one-size-fits-all rulemaking are involved, the lockdowns and protests are yet more stress for an already politically fractured country. A new working paper by economists from Stanford, Harvard, and New York University finds “substantial gaps between Republicans and Democrats in beliefs about the severity of COVID-19 and the importance of social distancing.”

Pandemic politics are certain to make coming elections and factional battles of the future even nastier than they were going to be.

The common problem here is government itself. In a time of health crisis, government has proven to be a crippling underlying condition that weakens society, slows our ability to battle a dangerous disease, and turns us against one another. Fighting COVID-19 is an important short-term goal but eradicating or at least mitigating the plague of government would be an even greater victory for health.

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A Quite Unusual 5-4 Split on the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court issued three opinions in argued cases today, punting (correctly) in one of the biggest cases of the term.

The most interesting decision came in Georgia v. Public.Resource.org, in which the Court rejected the state of Georgia’s attempt to assert copyright in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated. I’ll leave to others whether the opinion properly concluded that the Georgia Code Revision Commission is, in fact, an arm of the state legislature, and whether the majority correctly applied the relevant conceptions of authorship to this dispute. What I find most interesting is the line-up in this 5-4 decision.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority, joined by the Court’s four most junior justices: Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Justice Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Alito and (in part) Justice Breyer. Justice Ginsburg dissented separately, also joined by Breyer. This is a 5-4 split one does not see every day. Indeed, I cannot think of another case dividing the Court in this way (even if one were to substitute Kennedy for Kavanaugh and/or Scalia for Gorsuch). Just another reminder that not all 5-4 cases can be understood in political or ideological terms.

The Court resolved an important Affordable Care Act case in Maine Community Health Options v. United States. Writing for eight justices, Justice Sotomayor held that health insurers were entitled to risk corridor payments under the ACA, despite Congress’s failure to appropriate funds to fulfill the legal obligation. Among other things, this opinion stresses the norm against recognizing implied repeals of legislation. Justice Alito wrote the lone dissent.

Many were anticipating a big Second Amendment ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York, but it was not to be. The New York legislature revised the laws in question while the litigation was pending, rendering moot the precise question before the Court. Accordingly, in a brief Per Curiam opinion the Court sent the case back down to the lower court for consideration of the relevant Second Amendment claims against the rules currently in force. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurrence. Justice Alito, joined by Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, dissented.

For what it’s worth, I think the Court got this one right: The case as argued is moot. At the same time, the dissenters are correct that additional guidance to lower courts (and states) on the permissibility of gun restrictions is long overdue. In this regard, I think Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence got things right: “petitioners’ claim for injunctive relief against New York City’s old rule is moot and that petitioners’ new claims should be addressed as appropriate in the first instance by the Court of Appeals and the District Court on remand.” In addition, there is ample cause for concern that “some federal and state courts may not be properly applying Heller and McDonald.” Accordingly, Kavanaugh wrote: “The Court should address that issue soon, perhaps in one of the several Second Amendment cases with petitions for certiorari now pending before the Court.”

The Court also released orders today. While it did not grant any new cases for argument, it did something interesting in Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank:

The parties and the Solicitor General are directed to file supplemental letter briefs addressing whether the political question doctrine or related justiciability principles bear on the Court’s adjudication of these cases. The briefs, not to exceed 15 pages, are to be filed simultaneously with the Clerk and served upon opposing counsel on or before 2 p.m., Friday, May 8, 2020.

What does this mean? One possibility is that one or more justices see the political question doctrine as a potentially attractive way to resolve the cases without having to decide on the precise limits of legislative authority to demand the disclosure of documents. Note that while this resolution might look like a “punt,” it would almost certainly be a loss for Donald Trump. If the Court were to conclude that these two cases present a nonjusticiable political question, this would mean Trump’s efforts to quash the congressional subpoenas necessarily fails, and it’s hard to imagine private firms refusing to comply in such circumstances. On the other hand, such a resolution could strengthen the Trump Administration’s hand in cases demanding documents from the White House.

While this is one possibility, it’s important not to read too much into this supplemental briefing request. It’s equally possible that some justices want to make sure they’ve covered all of their bases, and have thought about the implications of any ruling here for other doctrines (and, potentially, for other cases in the pipeline). Just because the Court asked for supplemental briefing on this question does not mean this issue will be central in the resulting opinion(s).  As always, time will tell.

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For Better Health, Find a Cure for Government

If the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no situation so severe that government can’t make it worse. Government’s recent crimes are legion: standing in the way of testing; complicating efforts to acquire protective equipment; imposing authoritarian and uniform lockdown rules across very different populations; and enforcing those rules in dangerous and ill-considered ways.

If you can assess the conduct of government officials through the pandemic and conclude that what we really need is more of that, then we’re probably going to cure the novel coronavirus long before we find a treatment for whatever it is that ails you.

The societies over which governments exert their power are made up of myriad individuals, businesses, churches, and organizations interacting with one another for purposes of their own. The people in a society may inhabit dense urban areas or sparsely settled countryside. They may have deep pockets or meager resources. They may have high tolerances for risk or shy away from danger. Often, they have little in common except goods, services, and ideas to exchange for mutual benefit. Forcing them to walk in lockstep makes little sense.

“Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules—with all the hardships they entail—despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes,” Bret Stephens pointed out in The New York Times last weekend.

Other than a few basic rules like “don’t murder” and “don’t steal,” there is very little you can impose from the top-down on a diverse society that can help and please one group without hurting and offending another. But that’s exactly what government does—inflicting one-size-fits-all-mandates that don’t fit many people at all and are usually poorly considered, at that. And during this pandemic, the government has exercised its taste for incompetence and draconian rules with a vengeance.

Famously, the federal government produced a dumpster fire of a COVID-19 test rather than adopt proven tests developed elsewhere. It also prevented universities, researchers, and private laboratories from developing their own tests, throwing bureaucratic hurdles in their way for weeks and allowing the disease to spread.

When it became obvious that available stocks of personal protective equipment were insufficient, federal regulators told aspiring new mask producers that getting approval for their efforts could take anywhere from 45 to 90 days.

Distilleries that tried to shift to producing much-sought hand sanitizer discovered they would be required to pollute their production lines with “denaturant” meant to make the product unpalatable—and therefore complicating the return to producing beverages after the crisis passed.

When hospitals and state officials do find supplies, they have to worry that they’ll be flat-out stolen by federal agencies who think they would be better used by somebody else.

Rules closing businesses, limiting gatherings, and even restricting outdoor excursions were supposed to “flatten the curve” to slow the spread of COVID-19 so that hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed. But the virus didn’t hit the same way everywhere. Instead, New York City and a few other hot spots got slammed. Elsewhere, most medical facilities found themselves tending empty beds, pondering the fate of patients whose “elective” cancer, heart, and back surgeries are deferred to some uncertain date in the future, and watching cash reserves dwindle for lack of patients to treat.

“Mayo Clinic is furloughing or reducing the hours of about 42 percent of its 70,000 employees across all of its campuses in an attempt to mitigate the financial losses from the COVID-19 pandemic,” reports the Rochester Post-Bulletin of the famed medical system. “About 60 percent of Mayo Clinic’s business comes from elective procedures of the kind that are now on hold.”

Furloughs and pay cuts are “a function of clumsy, if well-intentioned, federal and state directives to halt all non-emergency procedures,” writes Rick Jackson of Jackson Healthcare, a medical staffing company. He wants the government to get out of the way so doctors and patients can decide for themselves.

Idled doctors and untreated patients are the consequences of rules intended to help the healthcare system. Stay-at-home orders take an even bigger toll on people and industries that are collateral damage.

With 26.5 million jobs lost since governments started ordering businesses closed, the unemployment rate is estimated to have topped 20 percent and could be headed north of 30 percent. Some of those jobs aren’t coming back—at least not in the short term—because the businesses that offered them are themselves on the brink of extinction.

A few sectors—such as department stores—were already on the ropes and lockdowns are the final straw. Others are small businesses that can’t suspend operations indefinitely and expect to pick up where they left off. They’ll eventually be replaced, but only after bankruptcies, impoverishment, and a period of rebuilding inflicted by government decree. Those are costs rarely considered by those who insist, under penalty of law, that we focus on one set of risks and disregard others.

Governments have brought the same lack of judgment behind the formulation of their stay-at-home orders to their enforcement. Violators have been tossed into crowded jail cells, chased through the lonely ocean for daring to venture outside, fined for attending church services while isolated in their cars, and arrested for playing with their children in public.

Inevitably—if to the surprise of those who reflexively defer to government officials—people push back.

This past weekend saw thousands gather to protest in Madison, Wisconsin, echoing demonstrations elsewhere. Some attendees see rules tailored to help densely settled cities “driving resentment among people who live in areas with many fewer cases of the virus and are being subject to the same economic restrictions,” according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

True, individuals can exercise poor judgment, gathering too closely in a time of contagion. But their choices are relatively limited in their impact, putting at risk mostly others who choose to gather with them. By contrast, government amplifies the effect of every decision, imposing rules—good or bad—favored by the loudest and most influential across the population. When the decisionmakers are foolish, or panic-stricken, or corrupt, or just idiots, they get to spread the damage they do far and wide.

As we’ve seen, there is lots of foolishness, panic, corruption, and idiocy to go around in government. That’s why it’s not enough to say that better people would give us better rules and rule-enforcement. Yes, the president seems utterly clueless when he weighs in on the pandemic. And yes, the governors who are often in conflict with the president appear alternately power-hungry and eager to punish political enemies. But these are the actual officials our system produces, not the philosopher kings some election of the future is supposed to produce once the current officeholders are swept away.

Besides, the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials who screwed up testing and hamper companies trying to respond to the crisis are precisely the sort of experts to whom we’re supposed to defer. They’re no better with coercive power than anybody else.

And because government and one-size-fits-all rulemaking are involved, the lockdowns and protests are yet more stress for an already politically fractured country. A new working paper by economists from Stanford, Harvard, and New York University finds “substantial gaps between Republicans and Democrats in beliefs about the severity of COVID-19 and the importance of social distancing.”

Pandemic politics are certain to make coming elections and factional battles of the future even nastier than they were going to be.

The common problem here is government itself. In a time of health crisis, government has proven to be a crippling underlying condition that weakens society, slows our ability to battle a dangerous disease, and turns us against one another. Fighting COVID-19 is an important short-term goal but eradicating or at least mitigating the plague of government would be an even greater victory for health.

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Tyson Foods Warns “Food Supply Chain Is Breaking”

Tyson Foods Warns “Food Supply Chain Is Breaking”

News feeds in April have been inundated with food supply chain disruption stories due to coronavirus-related shutdowns. At least a third of US meatpacking facilities handling hogs have shifted offline this month, other plants that process cows and chickens have also shuttered operations, forcing farmers to cull herds and flocks. This is because each plant closure diminishes the ability for a farmer to sell animals at the market, leaves them with overcapacity issues similar to the turmoil facing the oil industry. Only unlike oil where pumped oil must be stored somewhere (as one can’t just dump it in the nearest river) even if that ends up costing producers money as we saw last Monday when oil prices turned negative for the first time ever, food producers have a simpler option: just killing their livestock.

We previously explained what this imbalance has created: crashing live cattle spot prices while finished meat prices are soaring, which doesn’t just affect farmers but also consumers simultaneously and could spark a shortage of meat at grocery stores as soon as the first week of May.  

And in the starkest warning yet that high food prices could last for a long time, Tyson Foods warned in a full-page ad  in the New York Times on Sunday that the “food supply chain is breaking.”

“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” wrote Tyson Chairman John Tyson, patriarch of the company’s founding family, in a Tyson Foods website post that also ran as a full-page ad in several newspapers. “The food supply chain is breaking.”

Confirming the worst fears of American pork and bacon consumers, Tyson wrote that the company has been forced to close plants, and that federal, state and local government officials needed to coordinate to allow plants to operate safely, “without fear, panic or worry” among employees. He warned that supply shortages of its products will be seen at grocery stores, as at least a dozen major meatpacking plants close operations for virus-related issues. 

Brett Stuart, president of Denver-based consulting firm Global AgriTrends, calls the situation “absolutely unprecedented.” 

“It’s a lose-lose situation where we have producers at the risk of losing everything and consumers at the risk of paying higher prices.” 

Last week, Smithfield Foods, one of the top pork producers in the world, closed another operation in Illinois. That news came directly after Hormel Foods closed two of its Jennie-O turkey plants in Minnesota. Then it was reported over the weekend that major poultry plants across Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia had reduced hours because of worker shortages due to virus issues. And then on Sunday, JBS USA closed a large beef production facility in Wisconsin. 

“During this pandemic, our entire industry is faced with an impossible choice: continue to operate to sustain our nation’s food supply or shutter in an attempt to entirely insulate our employees from risk,” Smithfield said in a statement Friday. “It’s an awful choice; it’s not one we wish on anyone.”

Bloomberg’s map shows the latest closures of meatpacking plants: 

Even before the Tyson warnings, last week we cautioned that it was appropriate to label virus outbreaks at meatpacking plants as the “next disaster zones” of the pandemic. This wasn’t just because of workers and USDA inspectors were contracting the virus, and in some cases dying – but because food shortages could also add to social instabilities during a pandemic and economic crisis. 

The distress in the agricultural space has not been limited to just livestock. Dairy and produce farmers have had to dump or throw out spoiled products due to a collapse in demand for bulk products, mostly because of shifting supply chains with the closure of restaurants, cruise ships, hotels, resorts, education systems, and anyone else who is not deemed essential in a lockdown. 

What this means is that farmers who generally sell bulk products do not have the means at the moment to convert product lines into individual items for direct to consumer selling. This will take time for the conversion. So, in the meantime, with no customers, farmers have to dump. 

Politico has outlined some of this disruption: 

“Images of farmers destroying tomatoes, piling up squash, burying onions and dumping milk shocked many Americans who remain fearful of supply shortages. At the same time, people who recently lost their jobs lined up for miles outside some food banks, raising questions about why there has been no coordinated response at the federal level to get the surplus of perishable food to more people in need, even as commodity groups, state leaders and lawmakers repeatedly urged the Agriculture Department to step in.”

Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration, put it this way: “It’s not a lack of food, it’s that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven’t been able to connect the dots. You’ve got to galvanize people.”

The immediate outcome of this food supply chain collapse will be even more rapid food inflation, hitting Americans at a time of unprecedented economic hardships with at least 26.5 million now unemployed since the pandemic struck the US.

And with a sharp economic recession, if not outright depression unfolding, more Americans are ditching grocery stores for food banks, putting incredible stress on these charities, which has forced the government to deploy National Guard troops at many locations to ensure food security to the neediest. 


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/27/2020 – 10:45

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Freight Trucking Demand Plunges To All Time Lows; Rates Crash And Industry Grapples With Lockdown

Freight Trucking Demand Plunges To All Time Lows; Rates Crash And Industry Grapples With Lockdown

Bank of America’s Truckload Diffusion Indicator for shippers continues to paint a grim picture not only of freight, but of the overall economy. Put simply, the pandemic has led to record lows and some of the ugliest survey numbers since the bank started conducting it back in 2012. 

Heavy duty trucking was already in the midst of trying to shake off the results of a bloated Class 8 order backlog that started in 2018, as we document on a month-by-month basis here on Zero Hedge. Not unlike the auto industry, it was a terrible time for the industry to be hit with demand interruption and the coronavirus has forced the sector from “bad” to “worse”.

Bank of America’s Truckload Diffusion Indicator for shippers’ 0- to 3-month freight demand outlook dropped to 33.3 from 37.2 last issue, a -10% sequential decline. It’s the fourth survey in a row that sets an all time low. 

The bank wrote in a note on Friday of last week: “The Demand Indicator is down -39% after hitting a temporary peak of 54.6 on January 30. The survey is down 43% year-over-year, its 43rd consecutive decline (its longest stretch), and posting the largest ever year-year decline, accelerating from last survey’s -39% decline.”

The note continued: “Shippers’ short-term positive outlooks was stable at 21% from last survey, neutral outlooks fell to 15% from 22%, while negative outlooks increased to 64% from 56% (the highest level in our survey history). For the week of April 23, we surveyed 39 shippers across the US to get current views on freight demand and supply.”

Meanwhile, freight supply has ballooned: “The Truck Capacity Indicator rose to 80.8, up 12% from 72.0 last issue, matching the all-time survey high, highlighting the over-supply of trucking capacity that emerged in May.”

Inventory has also risen while capacity frees up and prices fall: “The Inventory Indicator is at 53.8, up 13% from 47.6 last issue, indicating shipper’s inventory levels are building rapidly. With respect to rates, 44% of shippers expect rates to be flat, mirroring last issue, 54% expect rates to fall, rising from 44%, and only 3% expect rates to rise, down from 12%. On capacity, 67% of shippers expect capacity to increase, up from 56% last survey, 28% expect the fleet to remain flat, down from 32% and only 5% expect capacity to be lower, down from 12%.”

The bank is also getting pessimistic feedback from the corporations that utilize freight as an integral part of their business. For instance, a shipper from the consumer staples industry noted “there remains heightened uncertainty around the timing of resumption of non-essential businesses, and how the remaining truckload carriers will be able to manage that influx.”

Finally, there doesn’t seem to be any help coming from Class 8 producers, who produced 18,123 heavy duty trucks in March versus just 7,610 orders. The nearly 11,000 truck spread was the largest since September 2019 and will likely continue to weigh on rates.

 


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/27/2020 – 10:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KAbbNJ Tyler Durden

Deaths Spike in New York City and Around the World

Excess deaths seen in countries around the world. Everyone keeps arguing past each other when it comes to whether COVID-19 is “like the flu” in terms of death toll. Things look a lot different depending on whether we’re estimating the percentage of people with the virus who will die from it or overall deaths within a population.

COVID-19 could kill people infected by it at a rate similar to that seen with the flu and lead to vastly more deaths than seen in a typical flu season, by virtue of infecting a whole lot more people. And the data are starting to bear this out.

Research on the percentage of infected people killed by the new coronavirus still shows conflicting results; that will continue to until we have a reliable and widespread way of testing for virus antibodies in people who don’t now and maybe never had symptoms. When it comes to how many people who get COVID-19 will die from it, the missing piece of the puzzle is how many people already had the disease but were asymptomatic or had symptoms assumed to be from something else.

But there are other ways of looking at COVID-19 mortality. What percentage of a given population, including both healthy and sick people, will be killed by it? How will COVID-19 affect all-cause mortality rates?

Financial Times compared the number of deaths (from all causes) in 14 countries for March and April 2020 with death numbers for these countries over the same period of time in 2015–2019. Regardless of whether the COVID-19 death rate is 0.1 percent or three times that high, the new coronavirus is drastically driving up deaths.

“Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations,” reports the Financial Times (a number “considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods”). This increase “amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.”

Individually, the countries studied saw between 100 and 27,600 excess deaths.

At the low end are Denmark and Austria, where overall death numbers are up 5 and 12 percent, respectively. Sweden, also on the lower end, has seen an 18 percent uptick in deaths.

In France, overall deaths are up 34 percent; in England and Wales, the figure is 37 percent. In Spain, deaths have more than doubled. Italy is seeing 90 percent more deaths than usual.

“Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments,” the newspaper notes. “But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.”

COVID-19 is killing more people than does a typical flu season in part because it’s infecting more people, though just how many more remains unclear.

Influenza, with its roughly 0.15 percent mortality rate, “is constrained by the fact that a high percentage of the population has already developed immunity to the disease, either through previous infections or via vaccination,” notes Reason‘s Ron Bailey. But we don’t have that advantage on COVID-19.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 16 percent of American adults got the flu during the 2017–2018 sick season. With COVID-19, estimates say somewhere between 20 and 60 percent of American adults could get the virus.

“In a more optimistic scenario, only 20 percent of adult Americans are infected and the (infection fatality rate) is only 0.1 percent, thus implying that only 50,800 adult Americans would likely die of the disease,” writes Bailey. However:

Considering that the current death toll from the epidemic as of April 21 is nearly 44,000, this optimistic scenario seems implausible.

Now let’s go full pessimism: Assume 60 percent of adult Americans are infected and the IFR is 0.3 percent. In that case, the number of COVID-19 deaths among American adults would exceed 450,000.

The Financial Times looked at excess deaths in select cities around the world. It reports that so far, New York City has seen 299 percent more deaths than usual. That means some 12,700 more people died than historically have over the same time period.

New York City’s numbers are higher than in Jakarta (where deaths are up 47 percent over historical averages), London (up 96 percent), Madrid (up 161 percent), Stockholm (up 75 percent), or the Île-de-France region (up 122 percent). Of the locales studied, only part of Italy was faring worse.

“The region surrounding the Italian city of Bergamo registered the worst increase internationally with a 464 per cent rise in deaths above normal levels,” according to the Financial Times.

QUICK HITS

  • The World Health Organization tweeted this weekend that there “is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from #COVID19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.” Robby Soave reacts: “That’s technically true: There’s no evidence of immunity. But that’s because COVID-19 is new and the matter hasn’t been conclusively studied yet. Scientists have good reason to expect COVID-19 survivors to have some immunity to the virus, though they’re unsure how strong it will be or how long it will last.”
  • In Las Vegas, “where a full one-third of the local economy is in the leisure and hospitality industry, more than in any other major metropolitan area in the country,” almost 350,000 people have already filed for unemployment.
  • The Chattanooga Times Free Press looks at “how the #FreeTN protest movement was formed in one week: a Zoom meeting, a Facebook page and a terrified mother with friends.”
  • “People need to eat. Governments shouldn’t make that harder than it has to be,” suggests Baylen Linnekin.

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Oil Tumbles As Traders Frontrun USO Liquidation Of Entire June Exposure

Oil Tumbles As Traders Frontrun USO Liquidation Of Entire June Exposure

While the culprits behind last week’s historic oil plunge to a negative $40/barrel have yet to be conclusively identified, with some pointing fingers at US retail traders, while others blaming tremendous losses in Chinese structured products, one clear usual suspect is the USO, the largest oil ETF and the preferred crude oil investment derivative for thousands of retail investors everywhere. As Bloomberg’s Laura Cooper writes, oil trading negative last week brought to light the risks inherent in ETF’s easy liquidity: “while the market appears to be viewing the USO episode as an outlier, proof that funds can become unhinged from their benchmark leaves risk assets exposed.”

Of particular interest remains the composition of USO’s WTI futures holdings, with some speculating that the nearly 100,000 barrels held for May delivery may have precipitated the liquidation wave observed last Monday. Well, as it turns out, the CFTC data was actually stale, because as Bloomberg writes this morning, the USO wasn’t holding May WTI futures last Monday as it began rolling its underlying assets to June futures contracts in early to mid April – by construction to avoid trading complications near the date of contract expiry.

Even so, the tumble in both May WTI and USO quickly became a mutually reinforcing – and self-fulfilling – prophecy, and as the June price tumbled towards zero as May collapsed, the risk of liquidation from a negative NAV prompted the fund to take the unprecedented step to change its structure to lessen sensitivity to the moves and shift its mandate for future flexibility.

The chart below courtesy of Bloomberg summarizes how the USO – which historically only held the forward month leading to much pain during times of contango when the USO suffered major losses as it rolled its contract into a more expensive one – changed its composition in the past three weeks,.

These color-coded changes in the USO’s exposure to carious WTI contracts reflect the ETF’s ongoing near-death experience, as the fund’s managers scramble to prevent it from going negative by having extensive exposure to a contract month that could go negative next… such as June.

Then, in the latest update published this morning, the USO got out of the June WTI contract altogether, rolling out of the June contract on April 27, 2020 through April 30, 2020, well ahead of the scheduled roll out which was supposed to take place on May 5-8th, while adding to other, longer-dated contracts:

And as it sells June, this is what the USO is buying as per the latest 8K:

  • 30% of its portfolio in the July contract,
  • 15% of its portfolio in the August contract,
  • 15% of its portfolio in the September contract,
  • 15% of its portfolio in the October contract,
  • 15% of its portfolio in the December contract,
  • 10% of its portfolio in the June 2021 contract.

And since USO manager, USCF, said it will roll the current portfolio positions into the positions described above over a three-day period with approximately 33.3% of the investment changes taking place each day on each of April 27, 2020, April 28, 2020, and April 29, 2020, that explains why the June WTI contract is tumbling this morning as traders frontrun the USO selling.

It’s not just WTI – June Brent also fell as much as 7% to take it back below $20/bbl. And unlike worst of last week’s bloodbath, the pain was also felt further along the curve, with CL3 down 9.1%, as traders now are frontrunning future USO rolls.

Looking ahead, Cooper speculates that USO is likely to shift back to 100% front-end contracts once the ‘exceptional market conditions’ ease, but last week’s events brought to retail participants’ light the negative carry paid in perpetuity by crude-tracking funds, rolling over at higher price much of the time.

Meanwhile, as Bloomberg ETF strategist Eric Balchunas notes volatility in commodity markets is still fueling the rise of sector-specific ETFs with April on track for the third-best month in past six years. But, as Cooper concludes, one has to wonder whether the cracks revealed in exchange-traded products that offer oil exposure will result in cratering ahead. One look at the surge in USO short interest should answer that question.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/27/2020 – 10:04

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White-Collar Workers Logging Three More Hours Per Day During Pandemic Lockdown

White-Collar Workers Logging Three More Hours Per Day During Pandemic Lockdown

While nearly 27 million American workers have lost their jobs over the past five weeks – and millions more are coping with reduced hours, desk jockeys forced to work from home (WFH) amid the coronavirus pandemic are logging three more hours per day on the clock, according to Bloomberg.

A month and a half later, people are overworked, stressed, and eager to get back to the office. In the U.S., homebound employees are logging three hours more per day on the job than before city and state-wide lockdowns, according to data from NordVPN -Bloomberg

According to NordVPN, US workers are logging the most additional hours, while those in France, Spain and the UK are tracking at about two extra hours per day. Italy saw no change at all.

NordVPN’s findings are echoed by other VPN providers such as Surfshark, which has seen spikes in activity between midnight to 3 a.m. which weren’t happening before the COVID-19 outbreak.

And sure, there’s an argument to be made that people are less productive working from home while they polish off bottles of Jameson or take COVID-defying bong-rips, early data suggest that productivity is up – at least at some companies.

“We’ve seen, anecdotally, some increases in productivity for some of our developers as they’re hunkered and focused at home,” said bank of New York Mellon CFO, Mike Santomassimo.

At JPMorgan, where 70% of the bank’s quarter-million employees are working remotely, productivity has gone up for certain types of jobs as workers spend less time going to meetings, attending town halls or completing training sessions, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment.

An internal case study at Publicis Sapient, an IT consulting company that tracked work by 410 employees on roughly 40 tech-focused projects for a large New York-based investment bank also found a productivity bump. Between March 16 and April 10, tasks were completed at either the same rate or faster than those before the crisis.

…

Huda Idrees, the chief executive officer of Dot Health, a Toronto-based technology startup, confirms her 15 employees are working, on average, 12-hour days, up from 9 hours pre-pandemic. “We’re at our computers very early because there’s no commute time,” she said. “And because no one is going out in the evenings, we’re also always there.” -Bloomberg

“When you’re virtual you’re less distracted—nobody’s disappearing for coffee for a while or going and disappearing to socialize,” said Dave Donovan – head of the Americas global financial-services practicis for Publicis Sapient. “Clients are more reachable too.”

Boundary issues and expectations

Another factor adding to the stress of working from home (which is, of course, far preferable to unemployment), is that there’s no escape from ‘the office.’ Without an excuse for being unavailable, people feel like they have to be ‘on’ all the time for co-workers and bosses.

At Toronto-based Constellation Software, over 100 employees received an email from a superior which read “Don’t get distracted because you are on your own. It is easy to get into bad habits, the lure of the internet, the endless box sets. Just think, would I do this in the office? If it’s a no, don’t do it.”

“You know we will be watching closely,” wrote the same manager in an earlier email.

Burnt out

According to a survey of 1,001 US employees by Eagle Hill Consulting, around 45% of workers said they were burnt out by early April – with nearly half attributing the burnout to an increased workload, and the challenge of maintaining a work-life balance.

Meanwhile, 2/3 of HR professionals surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management report that maintaining employee morale has proven difficult amid the global pandemic.

And in what seems like an obvious finding, those who live in smaller quarters are also at risk of developing high blood pressure vs. people with extra rooms they can turn into an office, according to NYU associate professor of psychology, Tessa West.

“I honest to goodness am wearing the exact same outfit that I started with on Monday,” said Intel VP and general manager of US sales and marketing, Rachel Mushahwar. “I think I’ve showered three times.“

 


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/27/2020 – 09:50

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2zuKiIx Tyler Durden

Deaths Spike in New York City and Around the World

Excess deaths seen in countries around the world. Everyone keeps arguing past each other when it comes to whether COVID-19 is “like the flu” in terms of death toll. Things look a lot different depending on whether we’re estimating the percentage of people with the virus who will die from it or overall deaths within a population.

COVID-19 could kill people infected by it at a rate similar to that seen with the flu and lead to vastly more deaths than seen in a typical flu season, by virtue of infecting a whole lot more people. And the data are starting to bear this out.

Research on the percentage of infected people killed by the new coronavirus still shows conflicting results; that will continue to until we have a reliable and widespread way of testing for virus antibodies in people who don’t now and maybe never had symptoms. When it comes to how many people who get COVID-19 will die from it, the missing piece of the puzzle is how many people already had the disease but were asymptomatic or had symptoms assumed to be from something else.

But there are other ways of looking at COVID-19 mortality. What percentage of a given population, including both healthy and sick people, will be killed by it? How will COVID-19 affect all-cause mortality rates?

Financial Times compared the number of deaths (from all causes) in 14 countries for March and April 2020 with death numbers for these countries over the same period of time in 2015–2019. Regardless of whether the COVID-19 death rate is 0.1 percent or three times that high, the new coronavirus is drastically driving up deaths.

“Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations,” reports the Financial Times (a number “considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods”). This increase “amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.”

Individually, the countries studied saw between 100 and 27,600 excess deaths.

At the low end are Denmark and Austria, where overall death numbers are up 5 and 12 percent, respectively. Sweden, also on the lower end, has seen an 18 percent uptick in deaths.

In France, overall deaths are up 34 percent; in England and Wales, the figure is 37 percent. In Spain, deaths have more than doubled. Italy is seeing 90 percent more deaths than usual.

“Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments,” the newspaper notes. “But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.”

COVID-19 is killing more people than does a typical flu season in part because it’s infecting more people, though just how many more remains unclear.

Influenza, with its roughly 0.15 percent mortality rate, “is constrained by the fact that a high percentage of the population has already developed immunity to the disease, either through previous infections or via vaccination,” notes Reason‘s Ron Bailey. But we don’t have that advantage on COVID-19.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 16 percent of American adults got the flu during the 2017–2018 sick season. With COVID-19, estimates say somewhere between 20 and 60 percent of American adults could get the virus.

“In a more optimistic scenario, only 20 percent of adult Americans are infected and the (infection fatality rate) is only 0.1 percent, thus implying that only 50,800 adult Americans would likely die of the disease,” writes Bailey. However:

Considering that the current death toll from the epidemic as of April 21 is nearly 44,000, this optimistic scenario seems implausible.

Now let’s go full pessimism: Assume 60 percent of adult Americans are infected and the IFR is 0.3 percent. In that case, the number of COVID-19 deaths among American adults would exceed 450,000.

The Financial Times looked at excess deaths in select cities around the world. It reports that so far, New York City has seen 299 percent more deaths than usual. That means some 12,700 more people died than historically have over the same time period.

New York City’s numbers are higher than in Jakarta (where deaths are up 47 percent over historical averages), London (up 96 percent), Madrid (up 161 percent), Stockholm (up 75 percent), or the Île-de-France region (up 122 percent). Of the locales studied, only part of Italy was faring worse.

“The region surrounding the Italian city of Bergamo registered the worst increase internationally with a 464 per cent rise in deaths above normal levels,” according to the Financial Times.

QUICK HITS

  • The World Health Organization tweeted this weekend that there “is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from #COVID19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.” Robby Soave reacts: “That’s technically true: There’s no evidence of immunity. But that’s because COVID-19 is new and the matter hasn’t been conclusively studied yet. Scientists have good reason to expect COVID-19 survivors to have some immunity to the virus, though they’re unsure how strong it will be or how long it will last.”
  • In Las Vegas, “where a full one-third of the local economy is in the leisure and hospitality industry, more than in any other major metropolitan area in the country,” almost 350,000 people have already filed for unemployment.
  • The Chattanooga Times Free Press looks at “how the #FreeTN protest movement was formed in one week: a Zoom meeting, a Facebook page and a terrified mother with friends.”
  • “People need to eat. Governments shouldn’t make that harder than it has to be,” suggests Baylen Linnekin.

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Tara Reade’s Mother Allegedly Discussed Joe Biden’s Abusive Office With Larry King in 1993

New evidence has emerged that supports—albeit weakly—former Senate staffer Tara Reade’s claim that she was mistreated while working for Joe Biden.

In recent weeks, Reade has alleged that Biden—then a senator, now the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee—sexually assaulted her in 1993. That’s a different story than she told last year, when The Washington Post interviewed her about an alleged climate of sexual harassment in his office. Back then, Reade said that there was rampant sexism among Biden staffers but that the problem was not Biden himself.

The Post, The New York Times, and other outlets have handled Reade’s recent, more serious allegation—that Biden had digitally penetrated her without her permission—with extreme caution. Liberal columnists who emphatically believed Christine Blasey Ford’s story of suffering sexual misconduct at the hands of future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh are nevertheless skeptical of Reade, and it’s hard to process this as anything other than hypocrisy. Some more fair-minded commentators, including Reason contributor Cathy Young, agree that there may be a double standard at play but nevertheless have argued that Reade’s accusation is less plausible than Ford’s.

But there’s now somewhat more corroboration of Biden’s alleged misconduct than of Kavanaugh’s. Reade has claimed that she informed her mother about her broader mistreatment in Biden’s offices at the time, and that her mother called in to Larry King’s CNN show to talk about the issue. The Intercept has now acquired audio of a call along those lines. While no one can say for absolute certain that the speaker is Reade’s mother, the dialogue does fit the description, and Reade confirmed that it was her mother’s voice:

KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.

CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?

CALLER: That’s true.

The caller is not specific about the nature of her daughter’s problems; there is no reference to a physical assault. But the call does represent a small amount of additional evidence in Reade’s favor. The Washington Examiner‘s Tiana Lowe writes that Reade “now has more evidence than Blasey Ford’s claim against Kavanaugh,” and it’s hard to disagree. There was never any contemporaneous evidence that Kavanaugh and Ford were ever actually at the same party, and in fact, one of the alleged eyewitnesses could not recall the episode in question.

This is by no means proof that Reade is telling the truth, and the fact that she changed her story as recently as a year ago continues to be a valid justification for maintaining healthy skepticism. But everyone who took Ford, Julie Swetnick, Deborah Ramirez, and (separately) E. Jean Carroll at face value—including the television networks that aired these women’s claims immediately—should explain why this time it isn’t good enough. And there’s no excuse for declining to ask Biden about this. The candidate is famously committed to giving accusers at least an initial presumption of belief, no matter how long ago the allegations occurred or how reticent the victim was to discuss them.

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