Month: March 2020

“Project Kennedy” Escalates: JPMorgan Splits Trading, Sales Teams In Virus Response

“Project Kennedy” Escalates: JPMorgan Splits Trading, Sales Teams In Virus Response

As we detailed yesterday, America’s largest bank is going on lockdown…

And today has seen JPMorgan escalate their resiliency plan by sending some of its New York and London sales and trading staff to backup locations in response to the coronavirus.

“We are starting to shift people as a precautionary measure at this stage,” the bank said Thursday in a memo to staff.

“Dividing our workforce into different locations improves our ability to serve clients continuously while reducing the health risks associated with physical contact should a case arise.”

Reuters reports that Brian Marchiony, a bank spokesman, confirmed the plans and said they are “precautionary.”

And this comes after we noted yesterday that, according to Bloomberg, JPMorgan is asking thousands of US-based employees to work from home in test of “virus contingency plan” for closing domestic offices should the coronavirus spread. As part of the test, managers have requested that about 10% of staff across its consumer bank work remotely as part of the plan’s resiliency testing, which has been code-named “Project Kennedy” (it wasn’t clear why JPM picked that name for the project). And since JPMorgan’s consumer bank has 127,137 employees, the most of any of the firm’s divisions, that means that over 12,000 workers will be working from home for the foreseeable future.

As the coronavirus spreads, banks around the world have been scrambling ensure they can keep their businesses running and avoid a worst-case scenario by restricting travel, splitting up teams and traders amid different locations, and quarantining staff. As Bloomberg notes, some are also “dusting off regulatory plans for keeping “critical operations” open through a potential pandemic, some of which describe things like how far apart traders should sit from each other, or how many can work remotely.”

The key test for JPM’s will assess its telecommuting policy on a sampling of employees across businesses to ensure kinks are worked out before the plan needs to be rolled out more broadly in the event of a pandemic, one of the people said.

In other words, JPMorgan thinks it’s just a matter of time before it gets… worse.

It wasnt exactly clear how JPM’s client-facing bank tellers will do their job by teleconference. While technology has made it possible for more professionals to do their jobs remotely, working from home generally isn’t an option for branch workers like tellers and bankers who deal directly with customers. JPMorgan had 4,976 branches around the country as of the end of December that are filled with thousands of employees who have to show up to work for business to run.

JPMorgan’s leaders have been double-checking contingency plans to be sure the firm can continue to serve customers in the event of widespread disruptions.  The moves are part of broader resiliency planning at the bank. The firm last week followed the lead of major US corporations in restrictring non-essential international travel for all employees and has been urging workers to test their remote-access capabilities.  JPMorgan has also been testing systems at backup trading sites over the past few days in case workers need to be moved off of the main trading floors in New York and London.

There is a silver lining: with hand sanitizer sold out virtually everywhere, the bank is providing that precious commodity – extra hand sanitizer – to customer-facing branch workers and taking extra steps to sanitize offices, branches and equipment, including elevator call buttons and door handles, according to a memo from Co-President Gordon Smith to consumer bank staff on Friday.

And just to nip any potentially viral problems at the bud, JPMorgan has been encouraging consumers to access bank services and products through digital channels instead of walking into branches when they can.

“This can make their life easier all the time,” Smith wrote.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 12:04

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Iranian General: Coronavirus Is A Manmade Bio-Weapon

Iranian General: Coronavirus Is A Manmade Bio-Weapon

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

An Iranian military leader has suggested that the coronavirus is not a naturally occurring disease, and that it is a manmade bioweapon cultivated and released against China and Iran by a ‘hostile state’.

Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, an Iranian officer in charge of the country’s Civil Defense Organization claimed Tuesday that:

“A study of the consequences of the virus in terms of tolls or the extent of the epidemic and the type of media propaganda over this issue that is aimed at increasing fear and panic among people strengthens the speculations that a biological attack has been launched against China and Iran with economic goals.”

Strongly hinting that the the virus is a bio-attack by the US, Jalali told Iranian Fars News Agency, state media, that he is seeking “laboratorial investigations and comparing the genome of the primary virus and the new genomes” to confirm his theory.

Iran has been accused of covering up the real extent of the outbreak within its borders. At time of writing it has officially recorded only 92 deaths from 2,922 cases, but those numbers are significantly lower than what independent reports and claims from dissident groups within the country suggest. The real number of deaths is thought to be in the high hundreds or thousands.

Videos uploaded to YouTube by the dissident groups purport to show people collapsing in the streets of Tehran from the effects of the virus, and are reminiscent of previous videos from China:

The BBC published footage that is said to be from Iran, showing hundreds of bodies in bags at a local morgue in Qom. Mideast-based correspondent Joyce Karam commented that “If these are confirmed to be from Corona as videos claim, death toll is higher than the government claims.”

Other videos show preparations for mass graves, and health workers in full Hazmat gear burying victims:

Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei issued a statement Tuesday urging that the “jihad” against coronavirus is proving successful, and that the outbreak “is not such a big tragedy.”

“I don’t want to say it’s unimportant, but let’s not exaggerate it either. The Coronavirus will affect the country briefly & leave. But the experience it brings, and the actions of the people & the govt sectors, are like a public exercise that will remain as an achievement,” Khamenei said.

The idea that the virus originated in a lab has been a talking point ever since the outbreak started, with some US officials and western biological experts expressing concern that coronavirus may be a Chinese bio-weapon.

 

Mike Adams joins Alex Jones live via Skype to confirm that the coronavirus is a bioweapon released by the Chinese Communist government to destroy the United States’ economy.

One US official who hasn’t shied away from probing the bio-weapon angle is Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has stated several times that Beijing needs to address the questions, and that the “burden of proof” is on “the communists” to explain where the virus came from.

Cotton has noted that “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that works with the worlds most deadly pathogens that include the coronavirus.”

 

Other officials, such as senior White House advisor Peter Navarro have admitted that they are not ruling out any possibilities:

Dr. Francis Boyle joins The Alex Jones Show to expose the smoking gun linking the weaponized Wuhan virus to the U.S.

 


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 11:55

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2wv5Y5V Tyler Durden

COVID-19 and QALYs

How bad is COVID-19? That is far too complex a question for a blog post, so let’s focus on a much simpler question: What would an answer to the previous question look like? COVID-19 will cause deaths and illness, and attempts to reduce the deaths and illness will themselves impose economic costs. We could use a metric like QALYs (quality-adjusted life years) to aggregate the burden of COVID-19. Then, in assessing public policy interventions, such as closing schools and limiting travel, we could at least informally perform some sort of cost-benefit analysis, assessing the economic cost of an intervention and comparing it with the benefit in reduced deaths and illness.

Yet the QALY does not seem to enter into discussions of COVID-19. We see a great deal of discussion of mortality rates among those infected by the novel coronavirus, including reports of how those rates vary by age band. The question, though, is not just the age of those who have died, but how much longer they would have lived. I have not seen any systematic attempt to convert these mortality rates into a QALY number, let alone any formal cost-benefit analyses assessing how different interventions might save QALYs. Perhaps the government or some private citizens have created such analyses, but if so, they don’t seem to show up on Google or Twitter.

Why? Some possible explanations:

(1) Too many unknowns. Cost-benefit analysis, the argument goes, is a process that we can undertake only when we have sufficient time to accomplish it with care. There are many unknowns concerning COVID-19, including how many people carry the virus with mild symptoms or asymptomatically. It is difficult to construct a baseline case of how many people might become infected and die absent government intervention, so any cost-benefit analysis would largely be guesswork.

(2) Real option theory. A more sophisticated version of the previous hypothesis is that a cost-benefit analysis might be too simplistic and in particular might understate the value of extraordinary efforts to contain the virus while we develop better information about its dangers. For example, a cost-benefit analysis based on current assumptions of mortality might suggest that many interventions to reduce the spread of the virus are with high probability not cost-benefit justified, but that with low probability the pandemic will be so bad that such interventions are critical. In theory, we might assume some distribution of how deadly the virus is and simulate the effects of interventions now, taking into account that our information will improve in the future and thus allow better decisions then. But this means that the cost-benefit analysis must account for many more unknowns, plus it is difficult to aggregate the results into a single punchy conclusion.

(3) Lost QALYs. Discussion of QALYs almost always focuses on QALYs saved by interventions. The first step in a COVID-19 analysis would focus on the QALYs that would be lost in baseline. We frequently see reports of how many people die from cancer, but few reports of how many QALYs are lost to cancer. There are exceptions, such as this one measuring the global burden of disease with the related measure of DALYs (disability-adjusted life years). An explanation for the general lack of discussion is that the baseline burden of disease doesn’t matter for policy as much as lives saved from particular interventions. Because we are not used to thinking about disease burdens in QALYs or DALYs, we don’t seek to measure the burden of some new disease in those terms, even though we need to do that before we can assess interventions.

(4) Not medical treatments. Typically, QALYs are used to measure life-years saved by new medical treatments. Here, the question is the expected QALY savings from quarantines, canceling sporting events, and the like. We have standard methodologies for conducting randomized trials of medical treatments, and these methodologies can be used to generate QALY numbers. We may not have standard methodologies for measuring QALYs for government actions that are not medical treatments. In principle, however, we could use epidemiological models to estimate morbidity and mortality and translate that to QALYs.

(5) Prospect theory. The value of a QALY may differ based on whether we focus on a QALY saved or a QALY lost. Because our baseline is the pre-COVID-19 world, whether we are focusing on the burden of disease or the effectiveness of interventions, we frame the new suffering as losses rather than gains. Thus, arguably we should assign a higher value to a QALY with COVID-19 than when focusing on treatments of more familiar diseases. But questions of what a QALY is worth are second-order questions, worth asking when we want to compare QALYs to economic costs of particular interventions. It would be nice to have estimates of QALYs saved by interventions even if we might reasonably disagree about the trade-off between QALYs and economic costs.

I have no idea which steps to slow the spread of COVID-19 are cost-justified and which steps are not. My own ignorance doesn’t matter, but I worry that health organizations and governments may not even be trying to compare costs and benefits in any systematic fashion. Overreaction in the form of an availability cascade is especially likely at the beginning of a crisis, yet there is also a danger of complacency. There may be some good reasons not to base policy decisions solely on comparisons of QALYs and costs, but production of at least back-of-the-envelope estimates could be useful in anchoring serious policy discussion, even in or maybe especially in times of crisis.

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COVID-19 and QALYs

How bad is COVID-19? That is far too complex a question for a blog post, so let’s focus on a much simpler question: What would an answer to the previous question look like? COVID-19 will cause deaths and illness, and attempts to reduce the deaths and illness will themselves impose economic costs. We could use a metric like QALYs (quality-adjusted life years) to aggregate the burden of COVID-19. Then, in assessing public policy interventions, such as closing schools and limiting travel, we could at least informally perform some sort of cost-benefit analysis, assessing the economic cost of an intervention and comparing it with the benefit in reduced deaths and illness.

Yet the QALY does not seem to enter into discussions of COVID-19. We see a great deal of discussion of mortality rates among those infected by the novel coronavirus, including reports of how those rates vary by age band. The question, though, is not just the age of those who have died, but how much longer they would have lived. I have not seen any systematic attempt to convert these mortality rates into a QALY number, let alone any formal cost-benefit analyses assessing how different interventions might save QALYs. Perhaps the government or some private citizens have created such analyses, but if so, they don’t seem to show up on Google or Twitter.

Why? Some possible explanations:

(1) Too many unknowns. Cost-benefit analysis, the argument goes, is a process that we can undertake only when we have sufficient time to accomplish it with care. There are many unknowns concerning COVID-19, including how many people carry the virus with mild symptoms or asymptomatically. It is difficult to construct a baseline case of how many people might become infected and die absent government intervention, so any cost-benefit analysis would largely be guesswork.

(2) Real option theory. A more sophisticated version of the previous hypothesis is that a cost-benefit analysis might be too simplistic and in particular might understate the value of extraordinary efforts to contain the virus while we develop better information about its dangers. For example, a cost-benefit analysis based on current assumptions of mortality might suggest that many interventions to reduce the spread of the virus are with high probability not cost-benefit justified, but that with low probability the pandemic will be so bad that such interventions are critical. In theory, we might assume some distribution of how deadly the virus is and simulate the effects of interventions now, taking into account that our information will improve in the future and thus allow better decisions then. But this means that the cost-benefit analysis must account for many more unknowns, plus it is difficult to aggregate the results into a single punchy conclusion.

(3) Lost QALYs. Discussion of QALYs almost always focuses on QALYs saved by interventions. The first step in a COVID-19 analysis would focus on the QALYs that would be lost in baseline. We frequently see reports of how many people die from cancer, but few reports of how many QALYs are lost to cancer. There are exceptions, such as this one measuring the global burden of disease with the related measure of DALYs (disability-adjusted life years). An explanation for the general lack of discussion is that the baseline burden of disease doesn’t matter for policy as much as lives saved from particular interventions. Because we are not used to thinking about disease burdens in QALYs or DALYs, we don’t seek to measure the burden of some new disease in those terms, even though we need to do that before we can assess interventions.

(4) Not medical treatments. Typically, QALYs are used to measure life-years saved by new medical treatments. Here, the question is the expected QALY savings from quarantines, canceling sporting events, and the like. We have standard methodologies for conducting randomized trials of medical treatments, and these methodologies can be used to generate QALY numbers. We may not have standard methodologies for measuring QALYs for government actions that are not medical treatments. In principle, however, we could use epidemiological models to estimate morbidity and mortality and translate that to QALYs.

(5) Prospect theory. The value of a QALY may differ based on whether we focus on a QALY saved or a QALY lost. Because our baseline is the pre-COVID-19 world, whether we are focusing on the burden of disease or the effectiveness of interventions, we frame the new suffering as losses rather than gains. Thus, arguably we should assign a higher value to a QALY with COVID-19 than when focusing on treatments of more familiar diseases. But questions of what a QALY is worth are second-order questions, worth asking when we want to compare QALYs to economic costs of particular interventions. It would be nice to have estimates of QALYs saved by interventions even if we might reasonably disagree about the trade-off between QALYs and economic costs.

I have no idea which steps to slow the spread of COVID-19 are cost-justified and which steps are not. My own ignorance doesn’t matter, but I worry that health organizations and governments may not even be trying to compare costs and benefits in any systematic fashion. Overreaction in the form of an availability cascade is especially likely at the beginning of a crisis, yet there is also a danger of complacency. There may be some good reasons not to base policy decisions solely on comparisons of QALYs and costs, but production of at least back-of-the-envelope estimates could be useful in anchoring serious policy discussion, even in or maybe especially in times of crisis.

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Indian Government Nationalizes 4th Largest Bank As Shadow Banking Crisis Looms

Indian Government Nationalizes 4th Largest Bank As Shadow Banking Crisis Looms

Two years ago we first noted the building crisis in the Indian banking system, and now, as Bloomberg reports, the Indian government has stepped in to organize a rescue plan for the nation’s fourth largest private bank as a long-running crisis among shadow lenders threatened to spill over into the banking system.

“After 18 months of shadow banking crisis, the government did not want another major turmoil to hit the financial sector,” said Ravikant Anand Bhat, a senior analyst at Indianivesh Securities Ltd.

The government’s plan – to create a State Bank of India-led consortium to inject new capital into Yes Bank Ltd – would throw a lifeline to the embattled lender, which has been struggling to raise capital to offset a surge in bad loans.

Moody’s Investors Service cut the bank’s credit ratings in December and in January said its “standalone viability is getting increasingly challenged by its slowness in raising new capital.”

“Yes Bank is currently in the intensive care unit, and a State Bank capital injection will provide much needed oxygen,” said Kranthi Bathini, a director at WealthMills Securities Ltd.

Additionally, the finance ministry imposes a limit of 50,000 rupees on withdrawals (around US$650) from accounts held in Yes Bank, according to a gazette notification.

But the market does not seem reassured as India’s sovereign credit risk has recently spiked as virus fears and this banking system crisis comes to a head…

The RBI has superseded the board of Yes Bank for a period of 30 days “owing to serious deterioration in the financial position of the Bank,” the central bank says in a statement.

Yes Bank is not the first – The government took over IL&FS in 2018 in an effort to reassure creditors after the defaults. And last year, the Reserve Bank of India seized control of another struggling shadow lender, Dewan Housing Finance Corp., and said it will initiate bankruptcy proceedings – and we suspect it will not be the last.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 11:40

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Blain: Cutting Rates Is Now “About As Relevant As Painting A Sinking Ship”

Blain: Cutting Rates Is Now “About As Relevant As Painting A Sinking Ship”

Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,

Lots of interesting moments yesterday…

The bear market rally probably didn’t persuade anyone the coronavirus crisis is over – but a few will wonder if we’ve passed “the end of the beginning” stage..! Time to stop the panic, and focus on timing for the upside? For instance, there are a surprising number of articles saying manufacturing production is recovering rapidly in China – although the same weather satellites I mentioned yesterday do show rising NoX levels, but they are still massively lower than they should be, inferring Chinese industry is about 50% of where it was this time last year! 

A number of market talking-heads are saying there is no reason there should not be a swift V shaped recovery from this crisis – but I think they underestimate timing effects on sentiment, confidence in central bankers to keep juicing markets, and on supply chain resilience. Long-term, I reckon the global economy will emerge stronger, but timing is rather in the hands of “what the virus does next,” than the hopes of market sages! (Hopes are never a good strategy.) Perhaps we do get recovery, but I expect the second leg, the upward V, will be jerky and disjointed as more bad, and good, news emerges and is digested. 

Its never as simple as we hope…

Markets also took some reassurance on the Chinese pledging $16 bln to fight the virus, and the American’s nearly $ 8bln – its clear East and West are taking the disease seriously. Read some of the articles about how bad it’s been in Wuhan, and it’s quite distressing. 

However, the real issue is what are governments and central banks going to do about addressing the economic issues and damage?

Tuesday’s 50 bp emergency Fed cut conclusively demonstrated monetary policy is not going to address a global supply shock. 

Solving the Coronovirus shock effects is going to be about practical politics and fiscal policy. Investors want to see what Governments are going to do in terms of hard dosh and real support being put on the table. Interest rates at zero are as relevant as painting a sinking ship. 

This is the major reason I’m negative on Europe at the moment. The ECB under Lagarde is trying to join the 21stCentury, and realises that tinkering with rates and even QE is not the solution. It requires Fiscal policy to juice decaying economies. But fiscal spending is a government political decision. The ECB does not have any political mandate, and in any sane world will never be given one. Her best hope is for the ECB to support nations calling for the rules to be eased to allow fiscal policy – it won’t help Italy was the fist to the lending window, but even Berlin is making positive noises about combatting the effects of the virus. 

The issue for markets remains recessionary threats, and these are multiple. One of the major ones is the prospect of an escalating cascade of defaults as companies start to go to the wall triggering wider financial contagion on the back of broken supply chains and lost orders.

I wasn’t that surprised UK Regional Zombie Airline Flybe finally went to the wall last night – Coronavirus was but the final nail in its coffin. 

However, what does its collapse say about the UK’s Government intervening across business (and especially SMEs) to stop them going bust over Coronavirus fears? I am heartened to read new BOE Governor Andrew Bailey is greatly in favour of SME support to get them through the crisis. (I’ve decided I like Bailey – anyone who is a target of the self-confabulated Gina Miller is a friend of mine!) 

But letting Flybe go bust raises a host of issues. For a start, I can’t believe the Boris government is using the excuse it can’t bail out Flybe because we are still subject to EU rules. FFS! This means the government could not cut domestic passenger taxes – which would have saved the airline, nor can they make it an emergency loan of £100mm. Both would upset Yoorp. Apparently!

There is a great argument to be made that Flybe is vital to UK infrastructure. If you want to fly from any of the regions to another you really have had no alternative. Driving is an option – if you fancy hours stuck in jams caused by our decaying infrastructure – and don’t even suggest the railways. 

I’m particularly peeved about Southampton. The railway to anywhere is just appalling. The roads are most blocked – they are converting the motorways into “Smart Motorway” death-traps. And now the airport is closed – over 95% of the flights were Flybe. 

Here is a great Business Investment Idea: Buy Southampton Airport

Let me tell you a story. A few years ago we were in Frankfurt on business. It was a Thursday night, and we were having dinner with German clients. I decided to fly directly home to Southampton the following morning, while Jimbo was going to Heathrow. But something came up, and we were both needed back in the office. It was too late to change flights. My flight to Southampton was 20 mins after the Heathrow flight. When I landed at Southampton, I walked across and caught the train to London Waterloo, and then the tube to the office. I arrived 30 mins before Jimbo who’d caught the earlier Heathrow flight. 

There is a message in that story. Southampton airport is empty. It lies at the hear of Southern England in one hours drive of 20 million affluent people. It was a small airport under Flybe. It could be massive. 

(And if you are wondering why there is a blue Spitfire on the Photo this morning, its because the guard plane at Southampton is a model of the original prototype Spit that first flew from the Airport in 1936!)

Back in the USSR USA

Meanwhile, the other big story this morning is the market not taking fright at the likelihood Joe Biden will win the Democrat Nomination, and even could/might win against Trump. That was utterly inconceivable just a week ago… All Trump had to do was wait for the Democrats to lose the election. 

But a week is a long time in politics!  

With the prospect of slower flatline growth or a weaker economy into the 3rd/4th quarter – timing and recessions are the secret of all good comedy – Trump could face a real battle with Biden. You might have expected the market to react badly to the prospect of a Biden win, but even health stocks went higher..

Over the next few days I’m looking for pro and con arguments on what a Democrat Win in November will do the global economy. 


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 11:20

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Trump Says Govt To Withhold Sanctuary City Funding After Court Ruling

Trump Says Govt To Withhold Sanctuary City Funding After Court Ruling

President Trump announced on Thursday that due to a Federal Court decision last week, “the Federal government will be withholding funds from Sanctuary Cities,” adding “They should change their status and go non-Sanctuary. Do not protect criminals!“

Trump was referring to a Feb. 26 ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has the authority to withhold funding from cities and states which have refused to help the federal government crack down on people living in the country illegally.

The three-judge panel found  Congress had delegated authority to the attorney general to set conditions on the federal grant program it had created, called the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program.

The decision came after multiple courts had ruled against the Trump administration on the issue, saying it lacked the authority to impose immigration-related conditions on certain funding. –The Hill

The decision comes after seven states and New York City filed a 2017 lawsuit against then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had announced the withholding of funds from local governments which refused to share information regarding illegal immigrants, including jail access to federal authorities looking into the immigration status of immigrants, according to The Hill, which adds that officials which backed the lawsuit have vowed to challenge the ruling by the appeals court.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 11:00

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Elizabeth Warren Dropping Out Of Presidential Race

Elizabeth Warren Dropping Out Of Presidential Race

Time’s Up!

Elizabeth Warren is reportedly planning to drop out of the Democratic primary on Thursday, the New York Times reports.

She plans to inform her staff Thursday morning (though we suspect the NYT news alert on this report will be warning enough, if they haven’t heard already. We suspect many knew days, if not weeks, ago that it was over).

Warren’s candidacy was defined by her battle with Bernie Sanders over their largely overlapping visions of a progressive agenda. Much of the sniping between leftie die-hards on twitter revolved around whose Medicare 4 All plan was superior. But unlike Sanders, Warren had repeatedly said she was a “capitalist to my bones”, something that the hardcore communists and socialists who comprise Sanders’ most loyal supporters rejected.

She was also mocked over her genetic-testing debacle back in late 2018 which proved the she had falsely portrayed herself as a woman of color for much of her professional and academic career.

As a candidate, Warren was largely defined by her “I have a plan for that” mantra – immortalized by the now-famous Time Magazine cover – and her attachment to her dog, Bailey, who had his own campaign twitter account.

Warren is dropping out after her abysmal showing on ‘Super Tuesday’, where she came in third in her home state of Massachusetts.

Her departure follows a mass exodus that has left Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders – two old, white men – as the last two men standing.

She’s fallen a long way from October, when she was briefly the betting favorite.

The news has been confirmed by NBC. Warren only had 50 delegates, and it’s likely many will side with Bernie Sanders, who has long since won the battle to be the progressive standard-bearer.

The big question now is: To whom will Warren give her endorsement? Will she swallow her pride, put the acrimony behind her and side with Bernie Sanders, whom she repeatedly touted as an ideological ally against the party ‘establishment’? Or will Warren side with Biden, a move that would undoubtedly infuriate millions of progressives who will presumably follow Bernie leftward? Most media reports so far claim she will likely back Bernie, including a Washington Post report from yesterday claiming the Warren and Sanders camps were working together to find an “off-ramp” for her campaign, allowing them to “unite and push a common liberal agenda.”

Though WaPo noted that her camp has also taken meetings with Biden about a possible endorsement.


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 10:44

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/38tIcVc Tyler Durden

China Hints At Blackmail Over Pharmaceutical Exports, Would “Plunge US Into Mighty Sea Of Coronavirus”

China Hints At Blackmail Over Pharmaceutical Exports, Would “Plunge US Into Mighty Sea Of Coronavirus”

China’s CCP media mouthpiece, Xinhua News, has published a new article titled “Be bold: the world owes China a thank you.”

Illustration: Dionne Gain

In it, the author suggests that the coronavirus outbreak is much worse in the United States than authorities are letting on – while noting that President Trump praised China’s measures to control the outbreak during a recent press conference. Xinhua also points out that the US stock market “has plummeted continuously, with a drop of more than 12% in just one week.”

The article then suggests the travel ban imposed on China – including the restriction of people who have visited China – was ‘unkind,’ and has had a ‘great economic impact’ on the country.

US government officials, such as Secretary of Commerce Rose, US Secretary of State Pompeo, and US White House Economic Adviser Navarro, have publicly gloated over China’s new crown pneumonia epidemic, saying that the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in China is good for the United States and will help companies return to the United States.

It also called on companies around the world to consider the risks of China’s supply chain. Even the infamous “Wall Street Journal” published an infamous article “China is a real patient in Asia”, and the “New York Times” in the United States also published a document condemning the closure of Wuhan in China as a violation of human rights. The American culture of falling rocks is really shameless. Today, Feng Shui is taking turns, and the United States has become a victim of the new crown pneumonia epidemic. At this time, China has not fallen into rocks and has not condemned the United States. At this time, the United States should recognize its mistakes. Apologize to China for your actions. -Xinhua (translated)

The punchline? If China retaliates against the United States at this time, including a travel ban or a strategic restriction over medical exports,  America would be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

Xinhua notes that “most of the drugs in the United States are imported,” and that “most masks in the United States are made in China and imported from China,” an that if restricted, the US won’t be able to take “the most basic measures to prevent the new coronavirus.”

Indeed (via F. William Engdahl of New Eastern Outlook):

80% of present medicines consumed in the United States are produced in China. This includes Chinese companies and foreign drug companies that have outsourced their drug manufacture in joint ventures with Chinese partners. According to Rosemary Gibson of the Hastings Center bioethics research institute, who authored a book in 2018 on the theme, the dependency is more than alarming.

Gibson cites medical newsletters giving the estimate that today some 80% of all pharmaceutical active ingredients in the USA are made in China.

“It’s not just the ingredients. It’s also the chemical precursors, the chemical building blocks used to make the active ingredients. We are dependent on China for the chemical building blocks to make a whole category of antibiotics… known as cephalosporins. They are used in the United States thousands of times every day for people with very serious infections.”

The made in China drugs today include most antibiotics, birth control pills, blood pressure medicines such as valsartan, blood thinners such as heparin, and various cancer drugs. It includes such common medicines as penicillin, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), and aspirin. The list also includes medications to treat HIV, Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, cancer, depression, epilepsy, among others. A recent Department of Commerce study found that 97 percent of all antibiotics in the United States came from China.

* * *

Still, Xinhua suggests in their ‘blackmail’ article that there is “great love in the world,” and that  they would never do such a thing. As their own coronavirus infections are gradually controlled, “China’s ability to export masks and medicines will be greatly enhanced.”

 


Tyler Durden

Thu, 03/05/2020 – 10:35

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3cAn0QA Tyler Durden

McGinnis: The Empire Strikes Back Against Originalism

John McGinnis wrote an essay for Law & Liberty, titled “The Empire Strikes Back Against Originalism.” I encourage you to read it. John provides a thorough summary of how originalism stands today in our legal order, and how its critics are coming to grips with it. Much of the essay focuses on a recent New York Times Magazine article by Emily Bazelon. (James Phillips and I were quoted by Bazelon.) Here is an excerpt:

Bazelon is often caught in a time warp in her criticisms of originalism, as if we were still in the infancy of its revival without the benefit of mature scholarship responding to opponents’ claims. She says that Brown v. Board is inconsistent with originalism without even addressing the scholarship, like Michael McConnell’s, that argues that it is not. She suggests that originalism will necessarily require a wholesale repudiation of precedents that undergird the modern state without taking account of work like my own and Mike Rappaport’s that identifies a role for precedent within originalist theory.

But the strongest evidence of the strength of originalism is that much of her criticism of the current Court comes from originalists or originalist methods. She quotes my colleague, the originalist Steven Calabresi criticizing an opinion of Justice Scalia’s as getting history wrong. Similarly, she objects to Gorsuch’s Gundy v. United States dissent, which cast doubt on the breadth of Congress’ authority to delegate legislative power to the executive, by quoting work from two scholars at Michigan Law School who argue that the original Constitution did indeed permit such delegations. She also argues that a study of the linguistic record of “keep and bear arms” at the time of the Second Amendment shows that the phrase was used in a military context. Unfortunately, she does not assess the correctness of these contending positions (she would have more space if she left out Gorsuch’s car, home, and work as a private litigator). But all these criticisms are actually disputes about original meaning, not rejections of it.

Disagreement about meaning does not mean that the Constitution is indeterminate. Indeed, because original meaning depends on facts, it is, in principle, ascertainable, unlike the personal values that other judicial decision-making approaches require judges to use when deciding which of many inconsistent precedents to apply.

I whole-heartedly agree with John. The debates we have today are originalist debates. The Constitution may mean one thing or the other, but it has a meaning, which we can ascertain. Read the entire piece.

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