Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, September 28, 2020
Must Watch! “US Workers Destroyed; Economy Brutalized; Homeless Nightmare; Tent City; Economic Reckoning”
Jeremiah Babe,
“US Workers Destroyed; Economy Brutalized;
Homeless Nightmare; Tent City; Economic Reckoning”
View in full screen mode.
Gregory Mannarino, "Central Banks Stand Ready! Expect Much More East Money"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Central Banks Stand Ready! Expect Much More East Money"
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Related:
"Deutsche Bank Warns About A Sudden Economic Collapse & Stock Market CRASH!"
"Deutsche Bank Warns About A Sudden
Economic Collapse & Stock Market CRASH!"
by Epic Economist
"According to economic experts, an economic collapse is looming and the new stock market crash is expected to happen before the elections. Recent studies have indicated the many elements that will likely undermine the financial markets over the next weeks and today we are going to analyze those determinants and discuss how they are going to affect the next chapters of the economic collapse. Keep with us and don't forget to like this video, share it with your friends, and subscribe to our channel if you haven't already.
Deutsche Bank disclosed to clients this week they can already “see an increased risk of financial disruption down the road from the growing overvaluation of assets and mounting debt levels.”
Furthermore, Deutsche Bank gathered a team led by Peter Hooper, global head of economic research, to release the World Outlook Update, which predicted the pace of the recovery - or as we prefer to call, the calm before the storm - to slow as the viral cases will likely soar through the winter months, especially if another fiscal package isn't issued before the US elections. But the team anticipates that when the summer comes, and the vaccinations start to happen, the prospects of a restructuration could resume, and presuming there is a successful vaccine, the team foresees three-quarters of the world’s population could be vaccinated by mid-2023.
However, don't expect the vaccine to fix the economy. Hooper alerts the virus will leave persistent scars in the markets, such as long-term damage to the hospitality industry, and automation is likely to take jobs away for good, meaning that a full recovery of the economy to pre-sanitary-outbreak levels may never happen. Also, the Deutsche Bank strategists, who can also see the looming financial crisis being formed by the growing overvaluation of assets, increasingly high debt levels which were driven by the massive fiscal and monetary policy stimulus granted by the Fed, outlined that “financial crises have often been touched off in the past under such conditions by the inevitable shift from policy ease to policy tightening, which is likely still at least several years away, but could surprise sooner.”
Conversely, the team called attention to the fact that politics may become a bigger threat than some might be considering, affirming they could see "significant risks of not getting a quick and clear resolution to the general elections this time around, with a likely unprecedented share of mail-in ballots and delays in counting holding the potential for a contested election”.
John Dizard explained in a recent article, the large banks "are far more risk-averse and better capitalized than in the past crisis, and the housing industry is prospering from the refinancing boom made possible by Fed easing. Since the Lehman/2008 financial collapse, risk has been moved off bank balance sheets and into securitization markets."
Which means, this time around the economic collapse will be triggered differently, and strategists are signaling that the spark for the coming financial crisis will be the market’s rejection of a few classes of securities, in a similar fashion to the 1929 collapse of pyramided securities holding companies. Thus, to discover what the point of vulnerability in the US financial markets could be, we have to take a look at "the least legally flexible credit securities that can move the fastest from low risk to visibly defaulted," as Dizard stressed.
And those would be the commercial mortgage-backed securities - or CMBS. As we mentioned in a recent video about the Big Short 3.0, the CMBX S9 BBB- tranche has an exposure to the hotel sector, which is the one presenting the highest rates of rental insolvency, paired with malls and restaurants. The tendency points for an acceleration on the deterioration of these securities to happen from now on, except in case a miraculous liquidity injection is issued by next month.
In any case, by then, the market will see more and more triple A-tranches jumping down to BB, one of the same things that happened back in 2007-2008 when the last financial crisis started to speed up. Amongst the easiest targets of the byproducts of this crisis will be the major credit rating agencies, which downfall will severely reverberate in the real economy.
If you're one of those who still have hopes to see an economic upturn for this year, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but all things point to a bigger meltdown."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis. Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000 light-years across, the spiral galaxy also seems to have more than its fair share of giant star forming HII regions, marked by the telltale reddish glow of atomic hydrogen gas. The giant HII regions are energized by clusters of hot, massive stars that explode as bright supernovae at the end of their short and furious lives.
Click image for larger size.
A member of the M81 group of galaxies, NGC 2403 closely resembles another galaxy with an abundance of star forming regions that lies within our own local galaxy group, M33 the Triangulum Galaxy. Spiky in appearance, bright stars in this colorful galaxy portrait of NGC 2403 lie in the foreground, within our own Milky Way.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150327.html
Chet Raymo, “At Home In An Infinite Universe”
“At Home In An Infinite Universe”
by Chet Raymo
“They are questions that bedeviled thinkers for thousands of years: Is the universe infinite or finite, eternal or of a finite age? It is certainly hard to imagine a universe that extends without limit in every direction, or a universe without a beginning or end. It is equally difficult to imagine a finite universe; what is beyond the edge? Or a beginning or end in time; how can something come from nothing? how can what is cease to be?
The problems are so intractable philosophically that their resolution has generally been left to the theologians, which from a philosophical (or scientific) perspective offers no solution at all. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for proposing a philosophical resolution (an infinite universe) that offended theology.
An escape from befuddlement is provided by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which- for example- can describe a finite universe without a boundary, as the "two-dimensional" surface of a sphere is finite and without an edge. Unfortunately, multi-dimensional curved space-time is so counterintuitive that it is difficult to get one's head around it without mastery of the mathematics. Given a choice between the ancient myths of your local preacher and the obtuse mathematics of the physics professor, it's not hard to guess what most folks will opt for.
Meanwhile, I'm reading a meditation on infinity by physics professor Anthony Aguirre, in a collection of essays called Future Science. He discusses contemporary cosmological theories based on general relativity, and in particular the rehabilitation of the idea of an infinite and eternal universe, or, more precisely, that our universe might be just one of an infinity of infinite universes. He writes in conclusion: “What seems clear, however, is that infinity can no longer be safely ignored; beautifully constructed, empirically supported, self-consistent theories have brought infinity from idle curiosity to central player in contemporary cosmology. And if correct, the worldview these theories represent constitutes a perspective shift unlike any other: in comparison to the universe, we would be not just small but strictly zero. Well, I can't imagine many folks racing to embrace that conclusion.
Oh, but wait. Aguirre adds one final sentence: "Yet here we are, contemplating- if not quite understanding- it all.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
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Vangelis, “Cosmos: A Tour of the Universe”
Full screen mode suggested.
"Perhaps..."
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are
only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence,
something helpless that wants our love.”
Read online “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke here:
- https://kbachuntitled.files.wordpress.com/
- http://www.carrothers.com/rilke8.htm
The Poet: Mary Oliver, “I Worried”
“I Worried”
“ I worried a lot. Will the garden grow,
will the rivers flow in the right direction,
will the earth turn as it was taught,
and if not how shall I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well, hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning, and sang.”
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well, hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning, and sang.”
- Mary Oliver
"Fast Time and the Aging Mind"
"Fast Time and the Aging Mind"
By Richard A. Friedman
"Ah, the languorous days of endless summer! Who among us doesn’t remember those days and wonder wistfully where they’ve gone? Why does time seem to speed up as we age? Even the summer solstice — the longest, sunniest day of the year — seems to have passed in a flash. No less than the great William James opined on the matter, thinking that the apparent speed of time’s passage was a result of adults’ experiencing fewer memorable events: “Each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
Don’t despair. I am happy to tell you that the apparent velocity of time is a big fat cognitive illusion and happy to say there may be a way to slow the velocity of our later lives.
Although the sense that we perceive time as accelerating as we age is very common, it is hard to prove experimentally. In one of the largest studies to date, Dr. Marc Wittmann of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health, in Germany, interviewed 499 German and Austrian subjects ranging in age from 14 to 94 years; he asked each subject how quickly time seemed to pass during the previous week, month, year and decade. Surprisingly, there were few differences related to age. With one exception: when researchers asked the subjects about the 10-year interval, older subjects were far more likely than the younger subjects to report that the last decade had passed quickly.
Other, non-age-related factors influence our perception of time. Recent research shows that emotions affect our perception of time. For example, Dr. Sylvie Droit-Volet, a psychology professor at Blaise Pascal University, in France, manipulated subjects’ emotional state by showing them movies that excited fear or sadness and then asked them to estimate the duration of the visual stimulus. She found that time appears to pass more slowly when we are afraid.
Attention and memory play a part in our perception of time. To accurately gauge the passage of time required to accomplish a given task, you have to be able to focus and remember a sequence of information. That’s partly why someone with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has trouble judging time intervals and grows impatient with what seems like the slow passage of time. The neurotransmitter dopamine is critically important to our ability to process time. Stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, which increase dopamine function in the brain, have the effect of speeding up time perception; antipsychotic drugs, which block dopamine receptors, have the opposite effect.
On the whole, most of us perceive short intervals of time similarly, regardless of age. Why, then, do older people look back at long stretches of their lives and feel it’s a race to the finish? Here’s a possible answer: think about what it’s like when you learn something for the first time — for example how, when you are young, you learn to ride a bike or navigate your way home from school. It takes time to learn new tasks and to encode them in your memory. And when you are learning about the world for the first time, you are forming a fairly steady stream of new memories of events, places and people.
When, as an adult, you look back at your childhood experiences, they appear to unfold in slow motion probably because the sheer number of them gives you the impression that they must have taken forever to acquire. So when you recall the summer vacation when you first learned to swim or row a boat, it feels endless. But this is merely an illusion, the way adults understand the past when they look through the telescope of lost time. This, though, is not an illusion: almost all of us faced far steeper learning curves when we were young. Most adults do not explore and learn about the world the way they did when they were young; adult life lacks the constant discovery and endless novelty of childhood.
Studies have shown that the greater the cognitive demands of a task, the longer its duration is perceived to be. Dr. David Eagleman at Baylor College of Medicine found that repeated stimuli appear briefer in duration than novel stimuli of equal duration. Is it possible that learning new things might slow down our internal sense of time?
The question and the possibility it presents put me in mind of my father, who died a few years ago at age 86. An engineer by training, he read constantly after he retired. His range was enormous; he read about everything from astronomy to natural history, travel and gardening. I remember once discovering dozens of magazines and journals in the house and was convinced that my parents had become the victims of a mail-order scam. Thinking I’d help with the clutter, I began to bundle up the magazines for recycling when my father angrily confronted me, demanding to know what the hell I was doing. “I read all of these,” he said.
And then it dawned on me. I cannot recall his ever having remarked on how fast or slow his life seemed to be going. He was constantly learning, always alive to new ideas and experience. Maybe that’s why he never seemed to notice that time was passing.
So what, you might say, if we have an illusion about time speeding up? But it matters, I think, because the distortion signals that we might squeeze more out of life.
It’s simple: if you want time to slow down, become a student again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do something novel. Put down the thriller when you’re sitting on the beach and break out a book on evolutionary theory or Spanish for beginners or a how-to book on something you’ve always wanted to do. Take a new route to work; vacation at an unknown spot. And take your sweet time about it."
- http://www.nytimes.com/
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Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psycho-pharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College.
“One Last Smile For My Old Friend”
Full screen mode suggested.
“One Last Smile For My Old Friend”
by Iain Burns
“This is the magical moment a dying chimpanzee recognizes her old friend and gives him an emotional farewell. Mama, the 59-year-old former matriarch at Royal Burgers Zoo in the Netherlands, was curled up in a ball and refusing food until the arrival of Professor Jan van Hooff, who she had known since 1972. At first she did not realize that her old friend had come to see her and remained on the floor as he stroked her. But her bond with Professor van Hooff – who co-founded her chimp colony at the Arnhem zoo – was deep enough to shake her from her gloom. The terminally ill chimp, who was fast approaching the end of her life, can be seen reacting with pure joy when she realizes who has come to see her. Mama screeched with delight and beamed with a smile while greeting the professor. Screeching with pleasure and smiling in delight, Mama can be seen stretching out her hand and stroking Professor van Hooff’s head in greeting. The video was filmed in April 2016. Mama died just a week after giving her old friend a heartfelt farewell.”
"We Were Wrong About Everything"
"We Were Wrong About Everything"
by Mark Manson
"Each week, I send you three potentially life-changing ideas to help you be a slightly less awful human being. This week, we’re talking about: 1) logical fallacies and how they’re the reason we can’t have nice things, 2) The Backfire Effect, or why more information makes us more polarized, and 3) things I’ve changed my mind about. Let’s get into it.
1. Logical fallacies - Readers often ask me where I get the ideas to write what I write. I think sometimes they expect some elaborate system with trunks full of notecards and some indexing software with an algorithm that cross-references everything I’ve ever read with a collection of cocktail napkins I’ve scribbled on.
It’s actually far simpler than that. I get hundreds of emails from readers per day. At some point, I start noticing patterns in those emails - people with similar problems, or people who make similar mistakes. These emails pile up and eventually I get sick of writing the same response over and over and say, "F**k it, let’s do an article."
One article I’ve wanted to do for months now is about logical fallacies - errors in reasoning and assumptions we make when we’re arguing about something. Given it’s 2020 and sh*t is hitting the fan and more people are emailing me crazy arguments than ever before, I figured an article on logic was long overdue. Check it out: "8 Logical Fallacies that Mess Us All Up" (or read it in the iOS app)
Logic doesn't usually cause people to need to change their underwear, but I hope you brought a spare pair anyway. It's an incredibly important but hugely under-read topic, so I sprinkled on some Manson flavoring for you. After all, tightening our reasoning skills prevents us from believing stupid things that are then pushed onto other people. Similarly, understanding logic helps defend us from other people’s bad ideas which, if you’ve ever used the internet, you might have noticed there are a few of them floating around out there.
2. When More Information Makes Things Worse - Last week, I wrote about how I believe social media gets blamed for what is actually just the sh*ttier aspects of human nature scaled across fast information networks known as the "internet." Actually, that’s what I tried to argue but I don’t think it came out that well. Some readers pushed back saying that even though social media may not be responsible for the litany of mental health and social problems that it gets blamed for, it’s still responsible for public discourse devolving into a cesspool of trolls, flame wars, and Twitter mobs.
In fact, Tristan Harris, the main focal point of the new Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma," came out this week and said: "The only source of information for most people now is a machine that is designed to partially inform people, misinform people, spread conspiracy theories, and lies faster than facts."
And this is where I want to try my argument again because I think what Harris says is inaccurate. Social media algorithms do not manipulate and push users into believing awful things. People already believe the awful things and social media simply spreads them more easily. Critics like Harris imply that tech companies are sitting in Silicon Valley scheming for ways to extract more ad dollars from people’s anxiety and misinformation.
That’s a caricature of what really happens. Social media does not make us worse people. We already were terrible people. Rather, social media is the mirror that made that terribleness more widespread and apparent for everyone to see.
This is what I tried to say last week: we are not victims of some evil algorithms that cause us to think and feel in flawed ways. We think and feel in flawed ways already, the algorithms simply amplify those flaws like never before. This is why I wrote in "Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope" that eventually, we will need algorithms that can compensate for our inherent psychological flaws, rather than simply reflect them back at us.
There are flaws in the idea that if Twitter and Facebook just showed better information, everything would be fine. How do I know this? Researchers have already tested it. A couple of years ago, researchers at the University of North Carolina ran an experiment. They took people with left-wing beliefs and right-wing beliefs and exposed them to opposing viewpoints on Twitter for a month. In all, they were exposed to over 700 messages and articles of viewpoints that differed from their own. At the end of the month, the researchers went back and surveyed the people again to see if their political views had become more moderate. They had not. In fact, they had become even more polarized than they were before.
This phenomenon has become known as "the backfire effect" - when people are exposed to information that challenges their current beliefs, they do not surrender their current beliefs. Instead, people become more convinced that they are right and others are wrong. In this way, it is possible that giving people more information and access to a wider diversity of ideas does not moderate beliefs or bring people together, but rather it fragments them and drives them apart further.
That’s not social media’s fault. That’s just human nature. Sure, Big Tech has profited off of it. But they also recognize the problem and have been quietly working towards addressing it. After all, destabilizing modern society and generating political crises is not good for any business.
3. What I’ve changed my mind about - In the spirit of challenging the natural tendency to double-down on false beliefs and remove the social stigma from changing one’s mind, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I wanted to periodically admit things that I have been wrong about and/or changed my mind about. I want to do this because I believe developing a culture where this is admired or at least respected is incredibly important if we’re going to survive in this day and age. So I encourage you to do it yourself periodically, as well.
Here’s what I’ve been wrong about:
• In crises, leadership matters. For a number of years, I’ve written that people focus too much on leaders they don’t like and instead ignore the larger social trends that are often dictating leaders’ unsavory behavior. I wrote this originally about Trump but it could have been written about many leaders around the world. I argued that leaders have less influence than people perceive. Well, what I didn’t realize when I wrote that was that this is probably only true in good times. When a crisis hits, leadership matters far more. Basic decisions of prioritization have widespread consequences. People look to someone to guide them morally and emotionally. And if your leader sucks, then shit is going to get bad. This is doubly painful because it’s often in crises that the biggest leaps in progress are made. Yet if you have incompetent leadership, that progress never comes, and you inevitably fall behind.
• Lockdowns are probably not effective. The data is in and a country’s ability to cope with the pandemic seems to have very little to do with how strict their quarantine was and far more to do with social norms (mask-wearing, distancing, etc.), population density, geography, and other, far more important policies around testing and tracing. In fact, widespread cheap testing and contact tracing seem to be the most effective policies and yet, in many countries, they are emphasized the least.
• I have not changed my mind about vaccines, but after enough emails from vaccine-skeptical readers, I have learned about various risks and policy errors associated with vaccines that I was not aware of before. I now understand some of the criticisms that are made and why some people are skeptical of using them for their families. That said, full-blown anti-vaxxers are still morons. It’s like refusing to ever wear a seatbelt because occasionally they’re installed incorrectly by car manufacturers and hurt people. The understanding of risk/reward is nonsensical. I still believe that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives. And barring exceptional circumstances, you and your loved ones should still get them.
Also, some previous beliefs of mine that have been strengthened this year, in no particular order:
• Science and data should lead to policy decisions as much as possible.
• Culture is quietly one of the most influential variables in determining the outcomes for populations, even though it is more taboo than ever to talk about it.
• A healthy and conscious attention diet is more important than ever before.
• The institutions in the US are more intractable and inefficient than even I had previously thought and it appears that things will likely have to get much worse here before they get better.
There are others, but let’s stop there before I start depressing everybody. This hasn't been a mind-changer per se, but the more time that goes on, the more convinced I become that many of the social ills that we associate with technology today are actually borne out of a deep, fundamental loneliness that has been generations in the making. I know that's not a very concrete observation, but it's where my intellectual nose is at. Until next week..."
"We Were Made For These Times "
"We Were Made For These Times "
by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.
You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.
I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.
Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these, to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it. I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for."
Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes is an American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst, and the author of "Women Who Run With the Wolves. "
"Galloping Ghosts"
"Galloping Ghosts"
by Ken Grant
"Yup, Gotta say a few words about Gale. Galloping Gale. Who galloped off and left us this past week. But first a point of clarification. Gale Sayers was not the Galloping Ghost. That moniker belongs to a Chicago Bear of an even earlier vintage (back when they wore leather helmets, embraced, rather than avoided, concussions, and when the term “going both ways” referred exclusively to a footballer who played both offense and defense): Red Grange. Running Back and Defensive Back. The Original Galloping Ghost. Maybe the only one. That is, until Galloping Gale shed his mortal coil. Perhaps now there are two Galloping Ghosts; maybe not. I don’t decide these things you know.
Never saw Red play but was a huge fan of Gale’s. The way I would describe him would be as follows: he was the Jimi Hendrix of the NFL – running with riffs that nobody could imagine, much less replicate – before or since. For me (and in retrospect), when he blew out his knee in ’69, it marked the beginning of the end of the Sixties. The Beatles announced their breakup that month. Sayers returned, a shell of himself, in 1970, which of course was the year Hendrix died.
Now he’s galloped away (this time for good), and America, Chicago in particular, shed many tears. It’s been a tough month in Chicago, kicked off by the shuttering of the iconic Palmer House Hotel, which had been hosting the hoity toity, dating back to a time when the hoity toity’s main residences were caves.
Didn’t think it could be toe-tagged, but, these days, the unthinkable is exactly what goes down. And it’s been a tough month all around. As is widely known, September is, historically, the worst lunar cycle for equity valuations. And this year (even if with respect to nothing else) has followed script. The Gallant 500 is down a decidedly ungallant 5.7% at the point of this correspondence, and this after Friday’s 160 basis point rally. Captain Naz, up >2% on Friday, was knocking on the door of a double digit, month-to-date drop the night before.
Still and all, Friday’s rally was heartening to observe – particularly as it transpired during the penultimate trading session to Yom Kippur – 5781 – which should feature a respectable amount of fasting, (hopefully) a passel of repentance, and (presumably) not much trading activity. It should also be noted that the sands of Q3/2020 (Julian Calendar) are running low, and, as such, ‘tis the season for some enthusiastic tape painting. If so, protocol suggests a bid through at least Tuesday 9/29 (decorum demands that one refrain from this unholy exercise on the final day of the period).
But because we’re talking football here, I’d say Friday surge, perhaps set to bleed into early next week, was an exercise of running up the score. And, on the whole, I think, absent a further ignominious retreat over the remaining three sessions, the quarterly performance is one that should please us. The G500 gained ~6.4% of third quarter yardage, through some occasionally fierce pressure from the other side. The tape may feel heavy at the moment, but perhaps we should bear in mind the conditions that prevailed coming into the sequence on July 1.
Covid was breaking out aggressively in geographic regions, where, based on climate alone, the defense was thought to have been the strongest. The country was, in near-full-scale lockdown, including in such improbable jurisdictions as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and all of the Great State of Maine.
Social unrest was in full crescendo, barely five weeks after that cockroach cop cut off George Floyd’s coratid artery. The smart money was proclaiming – heaven help us -- that the NFL season itself would never transpire. So, from that perspective, and looking forward from July 1st, would any investor not have rushed in to lock down a 6.4% index gain? I think not.
So why, in heaven’s name, does everything feel worse right now? Like our offensive line is failing to create even the miniscule amount of daylight required for Grange or Sayers to bust off a big one? It requires little imagination or cognitive effort to understand the fear and gloom. All of our most dreaded risk factors are fully in play. No clarity on the trajectory of the Public Health crisis. Domestic politics are a complete sh!t show and likely to get worse. But let’s throw the Big Dog a bone here (Big Dog’s gotta eat, right?), and focus, for an instant, on credit.
The recent statistics are beyond terrifying – give off a feeling that must be akin to what the Citadel Bulldogs must have felt like coming out of the tunnel to face #1 Clemson. The final was 49-0 – a whupping that can only be characterized as merciful, considering that the latter pulled most of its starters in the beginning of the second quarter.
And, in terms of credit markets, the following two graphs tell the tale. First, last week, the Bank for International Settlements released its Q1 Debt to GDP estimates:
Click image for larger size.
So, the world, as measured in GDP terms, is 30% more into The Man than it was heading into the ’08 crash. And here, it’s important to bear in mind that the series ends on March 31, 2020; we won’t know the tallies for Q2 for many weeks. Anyone want to take The Under on another surge? Didn’t think so.
Now we move to issues of solvency, and here, though it shames me to do so, I am forced to revert to a graphic I lifted from – of all places – this week’s Barron’s (via Bloomberg):
Click image for larger size.
I know this ratio is a bit obtuse, even to me. To the best of my understanding, an interest rate coverage level of < 1 implies that the enterprise’s entire year’s earnings is less than its annual vig. Let us hope that the lenders are more understanding here than, say, what is thought to be the attitude of the hard guys in Jersey City. And again, bear in mind that these statistics only take us through 3/31 – when lockdowns were said to be a fortnight’s operation; before we reached the definitive conclusion that the American economy was formed and continues to operate, principally, as a means to perpetuate race- based economic inequality. Neither metric, at any rate, is likely to improve over the near term.
But don’t you despair, my lovelies. Daddy’s indeed gonna buy you that diamond ring. The credit situation is so dire that the Central Banks will be forced to put their magic printing machines into overdrive. They’ve bailed us out thus far in 2020 (I don’t even want to think about where we’d be if they hadn’t) and must continue on, This here debt monetization thus ain’t over; in fact, it’s just beginning.
But we’re gonna have to be patient before these goodies come our way, and some of us may take a pounding in the interim. Hopefully, we won’t blow out a knee like Sayers, because we’re gonna need that knee to lean on during The National Anthem. Don’t ask me why; don’t know. But kneel we will. Kneeling won’t save us – not in this world or the next – but when did that ever stop us?
And now I fear it’s time for me to gallop away myself. Not like my hero Sayers, or even like the Old Gangster Sayre. But in my own way. At my own pace. You may not recognize it as a gallop, but it’s the closest I can come. And I think we should be generous with one another as to what, in the first instance, constitutes a gallop, which I believe differs for each and every one of us. For some, it is more of a lumber; for others, it generates six touchdowns on twelve touches, playing for a team that finished the season 1-13.
So, gallop with me, won’t you? Even if you have to stifle your gait to do so. And whatever else you do, please, please, please, don’t give up the ghost."
"Hope..."
“Hope is always about the future. And it isn’t always good news. Sometimes, hope can imprison us with belief or expectation that something will happen in the future to change our lives. Similarly hopelessness isn’t always about despair. Hopelessness can bring us right into this very moment and answer all of life’s most difficult questions. Who am I? Where am I? What does this mean? And what now?”
- Daniel Gottlieb
"Dumb Enough to Be President"
"Dumb Enough to Be President"
By Bill Bonner
SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "One of the most galling features of capitalism, generally… and America’s degenerate version, especially… is that there is often little connection between brains, work, and wealth. Luck plays a huge role. Mark Cuban, for example, must be one of the luckiest people on the planet. He started a dot-com-ish business in the 1990s. By 1999, it had revenues edging towards $100 million. That should have entitled him to a modest payday. Instead, at the height of the dot-com bubble, he sold out to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. Then, with the Big Score under his belt… Cuban became a famous person. And now, he’s aiming for another Big Score, this time in politics.
Something Stupid: Hardly a day goes by that someone famous doesn’t say something remarkably stupid – and the media reports it with a straight face. Last week, it was Mr. Cuban’s turn. Of course, he makes the news almost every week. He’s a serial newsmaker – an entrepreneur… an inventor… a rich guy… a big mouth… a TV personality… a celebrity… and a sometimes-even-mentioned-as-a-presidential-candidate. But we’re suspicious of anyone who is that accomplished. In our experience, it takes a lifetime to learn any trade. And even then, you come to the end, and you realize that you don’t know the half of it.
Maybe we’re just slow. Or maybe Mr. Cuban spreads his talents a little too thin. Here’s CNN’s report on Mark Cuban’s latest brainstorm: "Mark Cuban is once again pushing the idea that every American household should receive $1,000 bi-weekly stimulus checks for the next two months.[…] Cuban suggests a “use or lose it” approach, where Americans would have to spend the funds within 10 days or they would lose the money. The approach is rooted in promoting spending to help stimulate the economy.
“The whole goal is to get that money every two weeks into the economy,” Cuban said. “Once businesses start having demand, even if they’re closed and working online, then there is a reason for them to be able to bring back employees and retain those employees if demand is sustained.”
Forced Spending: Fifty years ago, would anyone – other than an unhinged fantasist – have dared to suggest such a thing? Would the newspapers have bothered to report it? Probably not. But today, we have more billionaires and lower standards. In the boom years, people spent money they didn’t have buying things they didn’t need. And now, Cuban proposes to make it a matter of government policy.
You can’t argue with his logic – as far as it goes. If it makes sense to give people fake money in order to stimulate the economy, why not give them more of it? And then, if people really get richer by buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have… why not force them to do it? But what will happen when the feds stop giving people money? What will happen to the “demand” that Cuban thinks he is stimulating? It will come to a stop, of course… resulting in an even worse calamity.
It is as if Cuban – and millions of others – doesn’t bother to think further ahead than the 24-hour news cycle. Give people $1,000 every two weeks? Require that they spend it? $2,000 a month? Free money? Many people probably heard the proposal and wished Mr. Cuban were president already. But he’ll get his chance.
Most likely, the next four years are going to be full of political chaos, social discord, and economic calamity. Whoever wins the next election will have a rough row to hoe. And come the following election, voters will be looking for a change. Snowflakes, world-improvers, and Mark Cuban will come forward.
Here at the Diary, we do not get involved in politics. But we hope Cuban gets lucky again. He is an idiot, of course. But the U.S. is headed through a dark passage, like an alcoholic’s final binge. Going “Full Cuban” – that is to say, drinking straight from the bottle – might help us hit bottom sooner."
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/28/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/28/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Updated live.
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Daily Update (September 27th to 30th)
"Harken, The Covidean Creed..."
"Harken, The Covidean Creed..."
by Ian Jenkins
"Harken, The Covidean Creed... as agreed at The Unholy Conclave at Davos...
We believe in one Virus, the SARS-COV-2, the Almighty, destroyer of heaven and earth, that is all there is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Malady, Covid-19, the only son of SARS-COV-2, eternally begotten of the Virus, God from God, Darkness from Darkness, true God from true God, begotten, not made (probably) of one Being with the Virus.
For diseases are they none but the One True Virus and Death comes not without Its presence. Thou shalt have no diseases before the One True Virus. They that die outside the Virus shall not have their passing told unto the people on a quotidian basis in hushed tones, but shall be quietly recorded in obscure tables when the time comes.
Through the Virus all things were unmade.
For us men (and women and all points in between) and for our damnationIt came down from heaven (or maybe from China or Maryland):
By the power of the Holy WHO
It became incarnate from the swirling microbes (or maybe bat soup through immaculate Zoonosis), and was made Pandemic.
For Its sake we were crucified under ongoing Lockdown;
It suffered not death, like unto most it afflicteth, and is never buried in the news.
Though by the evidence that appeareth on those who do pass away or wax sick, it hath waned to almost nought.
On the second wave It rose again,
And though few did perish many were tested and lo! Many were deemed infected (probably) and ‘cases’ were they named, though sickness showed they none,
in accordance with the Great Plan;
It ascended into the collective consciousness
and is seated on the right and left hand of all (lest with sanitizer they do anoint themselves five score times hourly)
It will come again in glory, as many times as necessary to convince the living and the dead, and his mask’d kingdom will have no end, it seemeth.
We believe in the Unholy pathogen, the Lord Rona, the taker of life (for they that are vulnerable), though he passeth the children by,who proceeds from the laboratory and the test.
With the quest for a Vaccine, the donning of the Holy Mask and with sequestration of the faithful he is worshipped and glorified and Its name kept alive in the minds of all.
It hath spoken through ‘The Science’ and thereafter through the Media, through Potentates and Rulers and through the scriptures of the WEF and of the foundations and think-tanks that do proclaim Its Gospel.
Woe to they who do speak out against the words of the Powers of Covid or their servants, for they shall be anathema and their names removed from the Book of Face and platform shall they have none. One shall they be made with they that aver the Earth to be flat and Conspiracy Theorists shall they be named.
We believe in one unholy Catastrophic and Technocratic Global Church.We acknowledge one Great Reset for the salvation of all.
We look in vain for the resurrection of Reason, Proportionality and Democracy,
and towards the life of the New World to come.
Amen."
"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 9/28/20"
SEP 28, 2020 1:04 AM ET:
Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 33,097,000
people, according to official counts, including 7,139,301 Americans.
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Updated 9/28/20, 2:23 AM ET
Click image for larger size.
"Goodbye To All That: Are Our Rituals of "Prosperity" Increasingly Meaningless?"
"Goodbye To All That:
Are Our Rituals of 'Prosperity' Increasingly Meaningless?"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Of all the economic heresies imaginable, perhaps the most heretical is to recognize what we label "prosperity" as increasingly meaningless rituals more akin with Soviet-era staged parades than actual well-being. This is the most dangerous heresy because it breaks the link between consumption - the core activity of our economy - and human happiness. If conspicuous/surplus consumption is ritualistic rather than fulfilling (i.e. it adds to our well-being), then it becomes meaningless or even corrosive. The focus them shifts to the negative consequences of consumption, i.e. how the rituals of consumption are eroding / disrupting our well-being.
Rituals are satisfying because the performance of the ritual is itself the source of our satisfaction. Belief or enjoyment isn't necessary; completion of the ritual is its own reward. But once we pull away from the rituals, the emptiness of the performance becomes clear and we start asking, what am I getting out of this for the expense and effort? These questions arise because many conventional consumption rituals have become prohibitively expensive and troublesome and others demand major amounts of time with very little payoff.
Consider the ritual of passively consuming sports. The ratings of televised games were falling before the pandemic, and by some measures appear to be in free-fall. It's not hard to discern potential reasons: Millennials never formed the habit/ritual of spending hours watching a game, or attending games; despite the protests from die-hard fans, most of the games are interchangeable, as are the players, as pro and college sports have become homogenized in many ways.
As with many other consumption rituals, those performing the rituals rarely stopped to ask themselves if the ritual was actually improving their well-being, or if it had slowly morphed into a colossal waste of time and money.
Many activities of discretionary consumption are in large part rituals: going on vacations, taking cruises, shopping, dining out, and so on. While many will miss the performance of these rituals, others will realize they don't really miss them. Some will feel immense relief that they no longer have to put up a facade of enjoying the tiresome, meaningless rituals.
The enormous expense of once-affordable rituals such as dining out means many will give up these consumption rituals because they can no longer afford it. Two sandwiches and two drinks, sales tax and a tip is now routinely $50 or more. (Note to wealthy readers: in the real world, it's pretty difficult to earn $50 net of taxes and the cost of doing business.)
Other consumption rituals were embedded in modes of work that are dissolving because they're no longer financially viable. The rituals of business travel and attending conferences paid by employers are dying because the luxury of these consumption rituals is no longer affordable to employers whose revenues and profits are in terminal decline.
Every manager pounding the table for a return of all employees to the central office has yet to discover what happens when the corporation reports a staggering loss and refuses to provide forward guidance. If the manager is fortunate enough to retain their job, their task will be to eliminate all offices and digitize and/or automate every function to cut costs.
The many rituals of a central office - the endless meetings, the petty arguments, the smoking breaks, going out for lunch - goodbye to all that. A couple of quarters of steep losses in revenues will push every company and agency to strip away all the rituals of consumption that are no longer affordable.
Did all that enormous expense of time and money really make us happy, or were we just going through the motions? Even those who were so anxious to resume the performance of these consumption rituals may find that the performance leaves them with a nagging sense of ennui and hollowness, as if something is missing, despite the perfect repetition of the ritual.
Some will blame the pandemic, but this is not the real source of their dissatisfaction. The heretical truth is that many of the consumption rituals that signified "prosperity" for decades are either meaningless, unaffordable or require way more effort than the meager payoff is worth.
So the game is playing on the TV but nobody's watching. The news is playing on another TV, but nobody's watching that, either. A disembodied stock market pundit declares a new Bull market but nobody's listening. The social media feed is scrolling by in a mad fury on a smartphone but nobody's clicking on any of it. It's all pointless, hollow, tiresome, for the completion of the ritual is no longer enough.
The meaningless of the engagement rituals and the consumption rituals is now so obvious that the desperation of the purveyors to get everyone back on board adds an exclamation point to the emptiness of their offerings. Here's why addressing this is heresy: what props up the economy once all the consumption rituals fall out of favor or are no longer affordable? The answer is of course nothing."
Sunday, September 27, 2020
"God Grant Me The Courage..."
“God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right,
even though I think it is hopeless.”
- Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
God grant us all the courage... we're gonna need it
to face what's coming. And we're all in this together...
Stay strong, folks...
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