Virus thread, the political one.

[Walter Sobchak]

Trump is just riffin' man, i don't see why everyone is so obsessed with everything the guy says.
He's just here to fill in the time between the commercials, so what's the problem with a
little self-aggrandizing, some entertainment, demonstration, and getting noticed for being the boss.

Grant gets it.

I remember back in ‘68 when President Nixon would get in front of the press and the whole nation and just riff with ideas on winning the war in Nam and bringing it to a quick close. Just brainstorm, you know throw stuff against the wall and see what stuck. It really helped and motivated the brass, heck it perked up the troops and all the people. He was just spitballing, maybe even sarcastic at times. But we knew that and it worked.

“I asked Bill [Gen. Westmoreland] a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you're totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we attacked the Viet Cong while naked—whether it's just a few or maybe even all of our troops—and I think you said that that hasn't been tried, but you're going to try it. And then I said, supposing you were not only naked, but you also did that thing with the tongue and the eyes that they do in New Zealand. That would scare the hell out of them, and I think you said you're going to try that too. It sounds interesting.

And then I see that if you mix napalm with Palmolive liquid, where it makes it tremendously effective. Like nobody’s ever seen before. Or since. It will knock them out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, like a burning and a cleaning. So it would be interesting to check on that. So that you're going to have to use scientists with. But it sounds—it sounds interesting to me.” — President Richard M. Nixon

And then Vice President Agnew would take the mic and refer to him as “Mr, President” once every 15 seconds. And say “at the President’s direction” about 20 times and repeat how “decisive” he’s been about 30 times. And say how many of the Generals have been so congratulatory, and appreciative for the amazing guidance from the Commander-in-Chief. And then mention a whole bunch of really large numbers without any meaningful context about how many bombs were to be dropped, rounds of ammo shot, sorties flown, and meals Would be served in country.

Good times.

[Mabouya]

Trump is just riffin' man, i don't see why everyone is so obsessed with everything the guy says.
He's just here to fill in the time between the commercials, so what's the problem with a
little self-aggrandizing, some entertainment, demonstration, and getting noticed for being the boss.

If that is the case, why did he not take questions on Friday, then not show up at all on Saturday? They realized that he's doing more damage to himself than the free TV time was worth, so they pulled him to prevent even further harm.

If it truly was all just for grins he would have been back at it again, perhaps suggesting this time that if injecting bleach didn't work, then maybe some Liquid Plumr might.

[j44ke]

Trump thinks that he can wreck Amazon (and Jeff Bezos) by increasing shipping prices. What he doesn't seem to understand - or care about - is that Amazon effectively is USPS shipping domestically and internationally USPS is giving away money by subsidizing shipments from China and Hong Kong.

It is an old story.

Raise domestic shipping prices too high, and Amazon will dump USPS take over domestic shipping of its own goods. But if he instead dumped the agreement on postal rates with China and Hong Kong and raised those costs to market rates, efforts against counterfeiting and to help protect domestic production would both be helped and USPS might be financially stronger.

He hates the UN right? Why hasn't he gotten rid of this thing already?

No no - I get it now. This is all about vote-by-mail. The virus will still be here. Wisconsin. He has until November to break USPS.

[theflashunc]

No no - I get it now. This is all about vote-by-mail. The virus will still be here. Wisconsin. He has until November to break USPS.

Bingo.

[GrantM]

If that is the case, why did he not take questions on Friday, then not show up at all on Saturday? They realized that he's doing more damage to himself than the free TV time was worth, so they pulled him to prevent even further harm.

If it truly was all just for grins he would have been back at it again, perhaps suggesting this time that if injecting bleach didn't work, then maybe some Liquid Plumr might.

it's hard to know how many levels of sarcasm we're posting now. But it feels like you took that literally, when it was satire.

-g

[Mark Kelly]

Something about this conspiracy theory doesn't add up.

[fastupslowdown]

No no - I get it now. This is all about vote-by-mail. The virus will still be here. Wisconsin. He has until November to break USPS.

so I think the post office should be privatized but this whole raise the price on packaging is a canard. Where is the government study suggesting the UPS has mis-priced the contract. Where is the study that discusses the impact on e-commerce and consumers. No this has nothing to do with any of that. Trump has a vendetta against Bezos and is looking to exact a cost on his self-declared enemies. By the way, I believe Trump has backed away from this position as its been explained if the postal service were to fail now it could be the death knell to the economy.

All for privatizing the postal service. We don't need Saturday delivery. Corporations get subsidized prices to spam the public and cause waste and litter and the services provided are way behind what's available in Europe. In any cases mail could be digitized and sent to us electronically. All for that, but I'm not going to enable a crazy President who is pretending to about fiscal discipline. -Mike G

[guido]

26, Words, Full of Self-Praise, From Trump on the Virus - The New York Times

" At his White House news briefing on the coronavirus on March 19, President Trump offered high praise for the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn. “He’s worked, like, probably as hard or harder than anybody,” Mr. Trump said. Then he corrected himself: “Other than maybe Mike Pence — or me.”

On March 27, Mr. Trump boasted about marshaling federal resources to fight the virus, ignoring his early failures and smearing previous administrations. “Nobody has done anything like we’ve been able to do,” he claimed. “And everything I took over was a mess. It was a broken country in so many ways. In so many ways.”

And on April 13, Mr. Trump insisted that governors were so satisfied with his performance they hadn’t asked for anything on a recent conference call. “There wasn’t even a statement of like, ‘We think you should do this or that,’” he said. “I heard it was, like, just a perfect phone call.”

The self-regard, the credit-taking, the audacious rewriting of recent history to cast himself as the hero of the pandemic rather than the president who was slow to respond: Such have been the defining features of Mr. Trump’s use of the bully pulpit during the coronavirus outbreak.

The New York Times analyzed every word Mr. Trump spoke at his White House briefings and other presidential remarks on the virus — more than 260,000 words — from March 9, when the outbreak began leading to widespread disruptions in daily life, through mid-April. The transcripts show striking patterns and repetitions in the messages he has conveyed, revealing a display of presidential hubris and self-pity unlike anything historians say they have seen before. "

[j44ke]

so I think the post office should be privatized but this whole raise the price on packaging is a canard. Where is the government study suggesting the UPS has mis-priced the contract. Where is the study that discusses the impact on e-commerce and consumers. No this has nothing to do with any of that. Trump has a vendetta against Bezos and is looking to exact a cost on his self-declared enemies. By the way, I believe Trump has backed away from this position as its been explained if the postal service were to fail now it could be the death knell to the economy.

All for privatizing the postal service. We don't need Saturday delivery. Corporations get subsidized prices to spam the public and cause waste and litter and the services provided are way behind what's available in Europe. In any cases mail could be digitized and sent to us electronically. All for that, but I'm not going to enable a crazy President who is pretending to about fiscal discipline. -Mike G

Privatization is for rich people.

[caleb]

I'll leave the reserve currency alone, but for inflation it depends on how you want to define it.

Thanks, this is a good explanation.

So, let me summarize why we'll see inflation in asset prices (mostly equities) without inflation in many consumer goods, and hopefully folks can let me know where I'm mucking it up.

Let's assume the stimulus was/is $15,000 per capita. If we had simply written everyone a $15,000 check, we probably would see inflation in consumer goods as that money moved quickly through multiple levels of the economy.

But we didn't write everyone a $15k check. Instead, the average person will individually receive something like $1-2k, while the rest will go to business. Some of that will return to the consumer economy through wages, but much of it will end up quickly settling in asset prices and only slowly circulating among assets.

Is that an accurate description of how we can see asset inflation without consumer price inflation?

[vertical_doug]

Short term, the total Asset side of Fed's balance sheet.
You see they have been busy busy buying 2 trillion of financial assets since 4th week of March.





Long term view since 2008. Look at how much more aggressive the buying is this time.... an addict always needs a bigger hit..

The US Fed balance sheet is 6.5t while GDP is about 22t. So still less than one-third. Japan BOJ began buying in 2012, and their balance sheet is essentially equal to current GDP in size. Japan has had no real price inflation. Their problem has been disinflation/deflation. The one caveat is the Yen has depreciated from 80/dollar to 107/dollar over that time period. So you may see USD weaken versus other currencies (Yuan, Ruble)
If no dollar weakness, no inflation. If dollar weakness, you have a chance of inflation but again probably not.

If you see the little dip in the asset line from 2018/2019, that is when the FED was trying to run off it's balance sheet. If you remember, financial markets started saying the world was ending and we needed more monetary stimulus. This is the Hotel California trade. You can check-in anytime you like, but you can never leave.

To infinity and beyond...…

[caleb]

Short term, the total Asset side of Fed's balance sheet.
You see they have been busy busy buying 2 trillion of financial assets since 4th week of March.
Long term view since 2008. Look at how much more aggressive the buying is this time.... an addict always needs a bigger hit..
If you see the little dip in the asset line from 2018/2019, that is when the FED was trying to run off it's balance sheet. If you remember, financial markets started saying the world was ending and we needed more monetary stimulus. This is the Hotel California trade. You can check-in anytime you like, but you can never leave.

To infinity and beyond...…

Ah, gotcha. It's not as indirect as I was imagining. The Fed is just buying stuff.

[vertical_doug]

Yes, a Tsunami of money for financial assets. An alphabet soup of programs. TALF, TARP, PPP , SBAL....

There is no nuance here, just brute force.

[htwoopup]

so I think the post office should be privatized but this whole raise the price on packaging is a canard.

All for privatizing the postal service. We don't need Saturday delivery. Corporations get subsidized prices to spam the public and cause waste and litter and the services provided are way behind what's available in Europe. In any cases mail could be digitized and sent to us electronically. All for that, but I'm not going to enable a crazy President who is pretending to about fiscal discipline. -Mike G

Couple of things....

Folks often assume that privatization will work because “business is more efficient than government”. That is not necessarily true because

1) Government is not a separate entity it is the populace. So the “inefficiency” is actually valued by the populace but would not be by a corporation. Thus the cuts made in the drive to “efficiency” would be a false efficiency.

A) an example is where you use, (and I agree with you), Saturday delivery. I will also throw in that the USPS has tried to cut that and also cut delivery to some smaller routes. It has also tried to cut their offices/ staff / other costs in smaller towns and go to more effficient regional or multi-town offices which is what is done with some school districts.

But, the elected representatives of the people have prevented the post office from making these moves to efficiency.

The post office, if privatized, would be able to do that but (perhaps wrongly) the populace values the service and thus would view it as a cost to them if it was cut. So, would a privatization also include a prohibition on cutting that? If so, where would privatization help?

Another real example of this from the days when the USPS was a client of mine...they started their own air delivery next day service. Planes, distribution hubs etc. It was beating the pants off of FedEx and UPS. FedEx appealed to their congressman who then said that the government should not compete with “private industry” and made USPS sell all of the planes and so on and do contracts with “private industry” to supply the USPS with overnight, second day, third day services. Guess what. The rates went up and FedEx/ UPS turned a competitor into a captive customer. That is why so many post offices have a FedEx box. Letting the fox into the hen coop.

2) A government (or in this case a quasi governmental) entity serves the need of the people while a company serves the need of the capital owners.

Thus, a privatization would have to result in approximately a 25% increase in efficiency. That is a number of increased productivity I have never heard of in my experience.

The reason is that operations like the post office are non-profit whereas a corporation is for profit. So, a 20% profit margin plus 5% for a cushion to make it better than even that you would make the switch and you get to an impossible arithmetic to justify doing it.

If you want to see real world on why privatization is actually a bad idea for public goods and services look at just three of the examples in transportation (which is essentially what the post office is)...the huge highway in Ontario with all of the crashes that it is an endless battle on getting it right, the bridge that fell in Italy killing many, or the North Carolina road system which was supposed to be in lieu of gas taxes to pay for the highways and they have high gas taxes still and are stuck with billions in repairs that the taxpayers will have to pay for.

Don’t forget that the Roman Empire worked because they realized that a sanitation system and a road/transport system would allow an empire to exist so the government provided that and the Empire thrived.

There are many reasons that the US Empire is failing but I would hate to see us hasten it by making choices of changes to commonly needed systems for the false god reasons.

Oh, and digitizing mail....Don’t forget that one of the horrors of the pandemic is the number of school children in NYC (and elsewhere) who don’t have online access so that they can’t participate in schooling from home while schools are closed. And, anyone seeing the mail (a reason not to use gmail) of a private individual especially on a mass basis is frightening from privacy issues basis.

[mzilliox]

exactly! if its not profits you want, but quality services, the private sector is not your huckleberry. Some socialism is good for social creatures in a society. See, same root words there.

[j44ke]

From the Guardian website:

"More US states to end lockdown as US economy crumbles

The US states Colorado, Mississippi, Minnesota, Montana and Tennessee will join other states in the lifting of lockdown restrictions, as economists predict an unemployment rate of 16% or higher for the month of April.

Health experts warn that increased human interaction in the reopened state economies could spark a new wave of infections with the virus that has already killed more than 54,300 Americans, Reuters reports.

The states are preparing to go back to business without the testing and contact-tracing infrastructure health experts say is needed to prevent a resurgence of infections.

Georgia, Oklahoma, Alaska and South Carolina have already taken steps to restart their economies following a month of government-ordered lockdowns.

A record 26.5 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted on Friday that the economy would contract at nearly a 40% annual rate in the second quarter."

I understand the numbers of dead only include those people dying of Covid-19 in hospitals. Is this correct? If so, the actual numbers of dead from the virus will be higher.

Actual numbers of dead may never be known, because they stopped doing autopsies and post-mortem tests. Estimates based on modeling have been accepted in some states, but not (as far as I know) nationally? Please correct me whoever knows I am wrong.

Here's an interesting update on counting fatalities according to a Yale study just out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/inves...d/?arc404=true

[davids]

Something about this conspiracy theory doesn't add up.

This is either the worst, or best, thing I've seen all day. Thanks!

[Doug Fattic]

A few years ago the State of Indiana sold the Indiana Toll Road to a private organization for a few billion dollars. I often use it because it is just a few miles south of me and is very convenient if I am going very far east or west. The 1st thing the new owners did was put in automatic tellers at the toll booths and raise the price to use it significantly. The auto tellers of course didn't work perfectly and way too many times I'd have to wait too long for an attendant to come and help. I was running late to the airport one time and was not interested in taking an extra 5 minutes or more to correct my missing change. So to make a profit for the new stock holders, the new deal put some toll booth workers out of business. And then I paid significantly more to use the road.

To me this is a classic example of how a public service business is not better for me if it is sold to a private business so it can "operate more efficiently". I would prefer the state hire more workers at a decent wage and charge me less to use the road. The state unlike a private business does not need to make a profit.

Of course one of the risks of a capitalistic business is that it can go bankrupt and that is exactly what happened to the Indiana Toll Road. The money from the sale was probably used on whatever so they didn't have to raise taxes. There is another scared cow of the Republican party that needs to be slain. If the income from gasoline/diesel taxes is not adequate to maintain good roads and bridges than raise the tax. That isn't rocket science accounting.

[Matthew Strongin]

This is either the worst, or best, thing I've seen all day. Thanks!

It can't be both?

[Mabouya]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2iUPoHh]Something about this conspiracy theory doesn't add up.

That's just proof that the infections started in the US in 2018, way earlier than we thought.