Jul 16, 2020
Today's Tweet
Remember this one.
Trump's core political problem is that a very large majority of Americans believe that he is a terrible president whose incompetent leadership is to blame for tens of thousands of preventable deaths and Depression-level unemployment.— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 16, 2020
Today's "No Shit, Sherlock"
Making it stunningly clear she's got a stranglehold on the obvious, the IMF Director says the global economy "isn't out of the woods yet", even though the big debt-ballooning efforts of central banks to put a floor under the markets seem to be working pretty well - for now.
Which, BTW, also makes it stunningly clear just how out of touch these finance pimps are.
Liquidity injections (imho) will prove to be a false bottom, and when people see what these assholes have been doing to make even more money off the further immiseration of the people who've been taking it the shorts for decades to begin with - there could be quite the little backlash.
We can hope anyway.
Global economic activity is picking up after an unprecedented decline this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, but a second major wave of infections could trigger more disruptions, the International Monetary Fund’s top official said.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said the fiscal costs of actions aimed at containing the pandemic and mitigating its economic fallout were driving up already high debt levels, but it was premature to start withdrawing needed safety nets.
“We are not out of the woods yet,” she said in a blog posting ahead of Saturday’s virtual meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 major economies.
The IMF last month further slashed its 2020 global output forecasts, predicting a 4.9% contraction and weaker-than-expected recovery in 2021.
Georgieva said $11 trillion in fiscal measures by G20 members and other countries, as well as massive central bank liquidity injections, have put a floor under the global economy.
Even so, dangers lurked, she said, including a major new wave of infections, stretched asset valuations, volatile commodity prices, rising protectionism and political instability.
Some countries lost more jobs in March and April than had been created since the end of the 2008 global financial crisis, and many of those jobs will never return, Georgieva said.
Job losses, bankruptcies and industry restructuring could pose significant challenges for the financial sector, including credit losses to financial institutions and investors, she said.
To ensure stability, continued coordination across central banks and support from international financial institutions was essential, she said. Regulation should also support the flexible use of capital to keep credit lines open for businesses.
Which, BTW, also makes it stunningly clear just how out of touch these finance pimps are.
Liquidity injections (imho) will prove to be a false bottom, and when people see what these assholes have been doing to make even more money off the further immiseration of the people who've been taking it the shorts for decades to begin with - there could be quite the little backlash.
We can hope anyway.
Global economic activity is picking up after an unprecedented decline this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, but a second major wave of infections could trigger more disruptions, the International Monetary Fund’s top official said.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said the fiscal costs of actions aimed at containing the pandemic and mitigating its economic fallout were driving up already high debt levels, but it was premature to start withdrawing needed safety nets.
“We are not out of the woods yet,” she said in a blog posting ahead of Saturday’s virtual meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 major economies.
The IMF last month further slashed its 2020 global output forecasts, predicting a 4.9% contraction and weaker-than-expected recovery in 2021.
Georgieva said $11 trillion in fiscal measures by G20 members and other countries, as well as massive central bank liquidity injections, have put a floor under the global economy.
Even so, dangers lurked, she said, including a major new wave of infections, stretched asset valuations, volatile commodity prices, rising protectionism and political instability.
Some countries lost more jobs in March and April than had been created since the end of the 2008 global financial crisis, and many of those jobs will never return, Georgieva said.
Job losses, bankruptcies and industry restructuring could pose significant challenges for the financial sector, including credit losses to financial institutions and investors, she said.
And the kicker:
Yeah, no problemo - cuz Trump is so fuckin' good at being the kinda team guy the world needs.
We're fucked.
COVID-19 Update
At this rate, We've got over 300,000 dead Americans by Halloween.
And over 4,000,000 dead worldwide.
Mask mandates catch on as states, businesses try to bypass a toxic debate
They have emerged as an unlikely symbol of partisan divide and a source of bottomless derision for President Trump.
But masks on Wednesday moved ever closer to becoming a new national reality in America’s pandemic-scarred life, with businesses, states and health experts preaching their promise as the country’s last line of defense against a fast-growing viral threat.
Even as the White House continued to resist pushing for a national mask mandate, evidence abounded that face coverings were becoming a de facto requirement — and not only in big cities where they have been in widespread use for months.
Alabama’s governor, who leads one of the country’s most conservative states, on Wednesday said people would be obligated to wear masks when leaving the house. The announcement, which came as Alabama recorded a new single-day novel coronavirus death record, means nearly half of all states now have a mandate.
The world’s largest retailer and a staple of rural communities nationwide, Walmart Inc., issued the same requirement for shoppers in its stores. A powerful trade group quickly embraced the choice, raising the prospect that other major chains will soon follow.
“Shopping in a store is a privilege, not a right,” said the National Retail Federation. “If a customer refuses to adhere to store policies, they are putting employees and other customers at undue risk.”
The moves came only hours after Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declared that coronavirus outbreaks — now raging across much of the country — could be “under control” within one or two months if the public adopts widespread mask use.
At this point, Dr Redfield isn't any more credible than the hardcore Cult45 devotees, and even though he knows (obviously) a helluva lot more than I do, I'll have to look sideways at his claim that we could have this thing under control in a coupla months if we all just wear the masks. It's possible, but it would take a massive reversal on 45*'s part to motivate the rubes, and I think we're all pretty sure that shit ain't gonna happen.
"Trump always makes thing worse for Trump."
-- Bob Cesca
Jul 15, 2020
Today's Rethink
Marketing works. Propaganda works.
From a piece in The Atlantic 5 years ago:
How an Ad Campaign Invented the Diamond Engagement Ring
In the 1930s, few Americans proposed with the precious stone. Then everything changed.
When I decided to propose to the woman who is now my wife, I gave a lot of thought to how I was going to do it. But I didn't think much about what I was going to do it with. Not only did a diamond ring seem the logical—nay, the inevitable—choice, but I had just the very diamond. My grandfather had scrounged up enough money to buy a diamond ring for my grandmother in the early 1950s, and the stone had passed to me when he passed away. I reset the diamond in a more modern band, got the ring appraised, and slipped it on my fiancée's finger.
It was a beautiful moment—a gesture of love and commitment spanning generations. And it was also exactly what De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. wanted. I was a century-old marketing campaign, actualized. And I'm far from alone; three-quarters of American brides wear a diamond engagement ring, which now costs an average of $4,000.
Every so often, an article comes along that makes you thoroughly rethink a rote practice. Edward Jay Epstein's "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?" was one of them. In his 1982 Atlantic story, the investigative journalist deconstructed what he termed the "diamond invention"—the "creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem."
That invention is surprisingly recent: Epstein traces its origins to the discovery of massive diamond mines in South Africa in the late 19th century, which for the first time flooded world markets with diamonds. The British businessmen operating the South African mines recognized that only by maintaining the fiction that diamonds were scarce and inherently valuable could they protect their investments and buoy diamond prices. They did so by launching a South Africa–based cartel, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. (now De Beers), in 1888, and meticulously extending the company's control over all facets of the diamond trade in the ensuing decades.
Most remarkably, De Beers manipulated not just supply but demand. In 1938, amid the ravages of the Depression and the rumblings of war, Harry Oppenheimer, the De Beers founder's son, recruited the New York–based ad agency N.W. Ayer to burnish the image of diamonds in the United States, where the practice of giving diamond engagement rings had been unevenly gaining traction for years, but where the diamonds sold were increasingly small and low-quality.
Meanwhile, the price of diamonds was falling around the world. The folks at Ayer set out to persuade young men that diamonds (and only diamonds) were synonymous with romance, and that the measure of a man's love (and even his personal and professional success) was directly proportional to the size and quality of the diamond he purchased. Young women, in turn, had to be convinced that courtship concluded, invariably, in a diamond.
Ayer insinuated these messages into the nooks and crannies of popular culture. It marketed an idea, not a diamond or brand:
Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the "trend towards diamonds" that Ayer planned to start. ...
In its 1947 strategy plan, the advertising agency ... outlined a subtle program that included arranging for lecturers to visit high schools across the country. "All of these lectures revolve around the diamond engagement ring, and are reaching thousands of girls in their assemblies, classes and informal meetings in our leading educational institutions," the agency explained in a memorandum to De Beers. The agency had organized, in 1946, a weekly service called "Hollywood Personalities," which provided 125 leading newspapers with descriptions of the diamonds worn by movie stars. ... In 1947, the agency commissioned a series of portraits of "engaged socialites." The idea was to create prestigious "role models" for the poorer middle-class wage-earners. The advertising agency explained, in its 1948 strategy paper, "We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer's wife and the mechanic's sweetheart say 'I wish I had what she has.'"
In the late 1940s, just before my grandfather started hunting for his diamond ring, an Ayer copywriter conceived of the slogan that De Beers has used ever since: "A Diamond Is Forever." "Even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash, the concept of eternity perfectly captured the magical qualities that the advertising agency wanted to attribute to diamonds," Epstein writes
. A diamond that's forever promises endless romance and companionship. But a forever diamond is also one that's not resold. Resold diamonds (and it's maddeningly hard to resell them, as Epstein's article details) cause fluctuations in diamond prices, which undermine public confidence in the intrinsic value of diamonds. Diamonds that are stowed away in safe-deposit boxes, or bequeathed to grandchildren, don't.
Between 1939 and 1979, De Beers's wholesale diamond sales in the United States increased from $23 million to $2.1 billion. Over those four decades, the company's ad budget soared from $200,000 to $10 million a year.
De Beers and its marketers proved extraordinarily adaptable at molding public perceptions. When the U.S. engagement market seemed tapped out, a new campaign promoted the gift of a second diamond as a way to reaffirm romance later in marriage. When small Soviet diamonds entered the market, people were told that the size of diamonds (as opposed to their quality, color, and cut, or the mere gesture of buying a diamond in the first place) didn't matter much after all. (Some gambits backfired, like the diamond-ring-for-men misadventure of the 1980s.)
And when De Beers sought to expand internationally in the mid-1960s, it didn't flinch at entering markets like Japan's, where a deeply rooted tradition of arranged marriages left little space for premarital romance, let alone diamond engagement rings. De Beers, Epstein writes, aggressively marketed diamond rings in Japan as tokens of "modern Western values." In 1967, when the campaign began, less than 5 percent of betrothed Japanese women had a diamond engagement ring. By 1981, that figure had risen to 60 percent, and Japan had become the second-largest market, after the United States, for diamond engagement rings. De Beers conjured up "a billion-dollar-a-year diamond market in Japan, where matrimonial custom had survived feudal revolutions, world wars, industrialization, and even the American occupation," Epstein marvels.
 |
| 1956 |
Today's Tweet
Variation on a meme.
if people today were on the titanic pic.twitter.com/7Lu3zKDgQ9— Matt Buechele (@mattbooshell) July 8, 2020
COVID-19 Update
Top 20 Countries
Top 20 States
There's that nasty little uptick again.
If we stay with what we're doing, and the thing goes in a straight line, we could see:
Cases
60 Days:
10,878,568
90Days:
19,059,919
Dead
60 Days:
200,806
90 Days:
246,648
It’s not just Florida, Arizona and Texas anymore. States including Oklahoma and Nevada are reporting record numbers of new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. More than 62,000 new infections were reported nationwide on Tuesday, pushing the total count since the pandemic began past 3.41 million.
Outside of the United States, that kind of explosive growth can be found only in the developing world, in countries that lack the United States’ wealth and resources. The number of new cases reported in Florida alone over the past week outstrips the total count in most European nations.
At least 133,000 Americans have died of covid-19 to date, with Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Nevada and Utah reporting record numbers of fatalities Tuesday.
Here are some significant developments:
- An experimental coronavirus vaccine prompted immune responses in the first 45 people to take part in human trials, and it appeared to be safe, according to early findings published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- CDC Director Robert Redfield said Tuesday that the coronavirus could be “under control” in the United States within a month or two if everyone wore masks.
- The Trump administration abruptly dropped plans to make international students leave the country if they aren’t taking any face-to-face classes this fall.
- Some communities in Arizona and Texas are preparing for a surge in covid-19 deaths by requesting “mobile morgues” — refrigerated trucks that can serve as backups when they reach capacity for body storage.
- Nearly every resident of a Montana assisted-living facility has tested positive for covid-19. Before the outbreak, Canyon Creek Memory Care had turned down free testing offered by the state.
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