As TV doctor, Oz provided platform for questionable products and views...
Monday, October 3, 2022
US COVID-19 Big Picture Through 9/30/22
Deaths per day through September 2022 are down from 896 through August to 846 through September.
Cases per day through September 2022 are down from 163,178 through August to 151,878 through September.
Drilling down, there were 441 deaths per day in September vs. 511 deaths per day in August. May, June, and July figures were all in the 300s.
Cases really fell off. There were 3.222 million new cases in August vs. 1.810 million in September, portending fewer deaths going forward.
The CDC ranked COVID-19 the 3rd leading cause of death in 2020:
~1,909 people per day died of heart disease in 2020;
~1,650 died of cancer everyday in 2020;
~1,146 died of COVID-19 everyday in 2020 measured from Feb 29 when the first death was announced.
The New York Times data I use shows about 4,742 fewer total deaths in 2020 than the CDC does.
But any which way you measure it, even over 365 days in 2020, 2021 deaths per day were much higher than in 2020 and deaths per day now in 2022 at 846 to date are much lower than in either of the previous two years.
Sunday, October 2, 2022
The traditional 60/40 portfolio is down 20.77% ytd
VTSAX is down 24.89% through 9/30.
VBTLX is down 14.59% through 9/30.
And don't forget to subtract all-items inflation of 6.14% from Nov 2021 through Aug 2022!
Headlines are popping up advocating safe havens in cash and short-duration US Treasury securities, but you'll still lose in those relative to inflation, just not as much.
What a great job the Democrats have done this year! Destroying the bond market wasn't on my bingo card for 2022, even though the high and rising prices for bonds has been a deal-breaker for me for a long time.
The Democrats' green war on energy has consequences.
Is real war next?
Saturday, October 1, 2022
Friday, September 30, 2022
Spiking interest payments on the national debt through 2Q2022 threaten to crowd out other current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and National Defense
Wait until the second half is done.
This is going to be ugly.
The long-term gains from a higher savings rate will trounce the gains from earning higher returns
Charlie Bilello, here.
But I have problems:
If a household saved 1% of their disposable income per year and earned a 10% rate of return, they would have a balance of $99,272 after 30 years.
Alternatively, if they saved 10% of their disposable per year and earned only a 1% rate of return, they would have a balance of $209,927 after 30 years.
That’s a 111% higher ending balance for the 10% savers as compared to the 1% savers even though their annualized investment returns were 9% lower.
He doesn't mean the "returns were 9% lower" since he's already stated the returns were 111% higher. He means the return RATES were 9% lower. But that's not true. The difference between a 1% return rate and a 10% return rate is not 9%.
It's 90%.
He does it again here, twice:
For instance, if a household only saved 1% per year and earned a 5% return, after 30 years they would have $40,096. Earning a 6% return would bump that up to $47,712, a 19% increase.
By comparison, if their returns stayed at 5% but they were able to save 1% more per year (2% savings rate), they would be left with $80,192 after 30 years. That’s a 100% increase in the ending balance through saving 1% more versus a 19% increase from earning a 1% higher return.
But the difference between saving at 1% vs. 2% is not "to save 1% more" nor "saving 1% more".
It's saving 100% more.
Aka double.
Furthermore, the difference between returns paying 6% and 5% is not "earning a 1% higher return".
6% is a 20% higher rate of return than 5%.
He means 1 point of return.
This sort of confusion runs rampant in America, even with a guy who clearly knows how to do percentages and has a very consequential story to tell, and it has to do with imprecision of language. Increasing by one percentage point from 1 to 2 is an increase of 100%. Increasing a percentage by 9 points from 1 to 10 is an increase of 90%.
It shouldn't be surprising that increasing savings RATES by 90% and 100% produces returns in the end which are also of the same magnitude higher, but for some reason it is.
The precision of the math he presents is extremely important, but the language isn't precise at all.
@charliebillelo has 475k followers on Twitter, lol.
A society which loses such precision is a confused society, and it's showing up in everything, everywhere.
Thursday, September 29, 2022
First it was the US Army actually recruiting a Chinese spy, now its first trans officer is a spy for the Russians but the CNBC story won't mention the trans part or show the picture
You can't make this shit up.
CNBC has updated the story:
Henry in 2015 was reported to be the first known active-duty Army officer to come out as transgender.
Thanks Obama!
Thanks Joe!
The update is still riddled with typos and even an incomplete sentence, but they've made sure to get the major's personal pronouns right.
The major is a real piece of work.
It's all in the eyes.
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Housing in America in 2021 has never been more unaffordable
Median household income in 2021 bought just 17.8% of the median sales price of houses sold.
Every damn time: The Army Times won't show the picture of the US Army reservist found guilty of spying for China, you have to go to the South China Morning Post for that
Ex-Army reservist convicted of acting as Beijing agent...
The most important thing to the Army Times obviously is to hide the man's identity, because you know, racism.
Nevermind the lunacy of recruiting foreigners to serve in the US military.
This country is so screwed it's almost indescribable.
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
The Great Long Term Investment Grade Bond Debacle of 2022
Safe havens aren't supposed to do this.
Long term return for VWESX since inception in 1973 near the end of 2018 reached north of 8%.
In 2022 ytd return is -27.28%.
The whole spectrum of bonds as represented by VBTLX is down ytd 14.79%.
Traditional investors with a 60/40 portfolio are down over 20% through yesterday because stocks and bonds both are falling.
Cash is king again.
LOL, Democrat Larry Summers is EXTREMELY ALARMED by the reappearance of Reagan-like TAX CUTS in the UK
Larry knows danger when he sees it.
Larry is all Trussed up and ready for action!
Monday, September 26, 2022
Fetterman's giant self-own: I have nine dates tattooed on my right forearm, each one a day on which someone died violently while I was mayor
Didn't do a very good job as mayor then, did ya fella?
Phony boom narrative under Trump continues under Biden, only the lie is much bigger
Factory Jobs Booming Like It's 1970s...
Well, it's the lying New York Times, of course, and drive-by repeater, Drudge.
The summer peak in 2019 was 12.905 million.
The summer peak in 2022 was 12.916 million, up . . . eleven thousand! Woo hoo!
Meanwhile in the 1970s, many MILLIONS more worked in manufacturing in the United States, and many millions more as a share of the population:
11.8% of the population in 1979 on average vs. just 4.9% in August 2022!
From the end of the story, lol:
Eight percent of the surveyed companies reported moving segments of their supply chain out of China to the United States in the past year, while another 16 percent had moved some operations to other countries. But 78 percent of the companies said they had not shifted any business away from China.
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Mike Lee is such a phony, advocating for a clean continuing resolution instead of a last minute omnibus, as if there's much of a difference
Mike hopes you never hear of regular order again.
Here.
Last guy to mention it I think was Paul Ryan in 2015:
"We need to let every member contribute, not once they earn their stripes, but now," he said. "The committees should take the lead in drafting all major legislation: If you know the issue, you should write the bill. Let's open up the process." "In other words," he said, "we need to return to regular order."
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Two conditions need to develop before buying bonds
. . . the trend in the bond market . . . still looks bearish. ...
As yields rise and inflation eases, the relative allure of bond payouts becomes attractive, in absolute and relative terms vs. other assets.
James Picerno, here.
Yields are indeed rising, but prices are still falling, so no, not quite yet. Bond prices ought to stabilize when inflation finally eases, and so far prices haven't stabilized.
VWESX is instructive.
There's just a handful of years back in the 1980s where the average price of this very long term investment grade bond fund had been below $8 like the current price is today.
That's one reason why Jeffrey Gundlach rightly says that bonds are "wickedly cheap".
But VWESX only just got there on September 20th, hitting $7.99. We're down to $7.88 this weekend.
Meanwhile yields across this investment grade spectrum are bunched up in the fours, with only about 55 basis points difference between the shorts and longs, and intermediates effectively paying the same as or more than longs.
Prices on the longs need to fall a lot more before making them more attractive than intermediates if you are going to settle for only similar yield.
After all, the long term average return of investment grade longs is north of 7.5%, not in the fours.
But what the hell do I know?
Invest, or don't, at your own risk.
Friday, September 23, 2022
Adam Tooze: Central bankers' hands were forced in 2010, the poor dears, they aren't the lords of easy money, no, they're its slaves, just like us
Here, for The New York Times:
If
you are worried about wealth inequality in the United States, then the
solution is not to tighten monetary policy but to make structural
changes to the country’s financial system, starting with the undergrowth
of shadow banking. Serious taxation of wealth and capital gains would
also push in the right direction.
It
would no doubt help if onetime central bankers, rather than cycling in
and out of private finance, spoke out seriously in favor of reform. They
would be doing the public a service if they spelled out the way that
their hands were forced by the current incestuous intertwining of public
debt markets with hedge funds and the like. Ultimately, however, it is
politics that must grasp the nettle of change.
In
the current dispensation, it may be flattering for central bankers to
be cast as maestros, but in practice they are less the lords of easy
money than its functionaries.
Central bankers cycle in and out of private finance raking in millions, Adam.
If anyone were serious about restructuring the country's financial system, the place to start would be by restoring the key missing feature of capitalism without which it doesn't really exist. It's called bankruptcy.
Thursday, September 22, 2022
Bond yields should fall as stocks sell off, lol
Yield on the US 1-year is beating everything with a club in 2022, up 920% year to date.
Hide your baby seals.
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
LOL Al Gore flunked out of divinity school but still preaches a secular apocalypse which will never happen and isn't happening now
A country teeming with sectarian believers in eschatology of one kind or another groomed us for these idiots.
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
LOL The UK Mirror calls the Queen Prince Harry's great-grandmother
Old Blighty ain't what she used to be.
Everything in the story is about as reliable, too.
Monday, September 19, 2022
You can always tell when there's a live idiot writing the headlines at Drudge instead of a bot combing WaPo, The New Republic, and CNN to shred the right
The reptile Drudge shed his conservative skin long ago.
Biden repeats May statement committing US forces to the defense of Taiwan
Asked in a CBS 60 Minutes interview broadcast on Sunday whether U.S. forces would defend the democratically governed island claimed by China, he replied: “Yes, if in fact, there was an unprecedented attack.”
More.
Sunday, September 18, 2022
Once again, it was the idiot liberal Republican George H. W. Bush who advanced the anti-capitalist Democrat global warming agenda
. . . the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro.
Here.
George also spawned the redundant hate crime legislation, huge increases to LEGAL immigration, wheel-chair access at every intersection's crosswalk among other expensive accommodations for the ambulatory handicapped, who in 2016 are fewer than 7% of the population, an unchastened Saddam Hussein, and READ MY LIPS . . . NEW TAXES.
Oh yeah. He also literally spawned the guy who didn't keep America safe on 911 and gave us the expensive nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the insidious Patriot Act, but don't get me started.
Everything BUSH has been terrible for America, which is saying a lot when everything Democrat always is anyway.
Saturday, September 17, 2022
This is how America ends
One place at a time.
America and its free market capitalism depends on rules, a shared commitment to them and to their enforcement:
Sound money, not fiat money;
truth, not "my truth";
law and order, not one law for me and another for thee.
When you can't trust anybody anymore, it is over. People vote with their feet, as do corporations.
Crime, Homelessness, Taxes: Hollywood Big Shots Fleeing LA...
As Violent Crime in LA Rises, Demand for Private Security Among Wealthy Soars...
UPDATE: In Atlanta's Buckhead Neighborhood, Rising Crime Fuels Move to Secede...
AMAZON relocating workers from Seattle office due to crime...
DC WAWA closes amid ongoing shoplifting, violence...
WALGREENS closing more stores in San Fran due to organized theft...
Violence rises as employees fight back against shoplifters, thieves...
Chicago's Wealthy Neighborhoods Hire Private Police as Crime Rises...
Friday, September 16, 2022
Thursday, September 15, 2022
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
The Fed was supposed to tighten its balance sheet starting Jun 15th: Nearly three months later it's down a measly $110 billion to . . . $8.822 TRILLION
The Fed is all talk about combating inflation, no action.
Because the top 10% of the country has 89% of the money that way, dummy.
True populism would throw the bums out and end The Fed, but we haven't got any.
Everyone forgets that the Russians-tampering-with-voting-machines lunacy began in the Hillary camp in 2016, not in the Trump camp in 2020
The group ... believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. ... the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.
Here.
Hillary lost because blacks didn't turn out in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia. She underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states.
The Russians didn't put the stink on her campaign.
She did that all by herself.
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Welcome to my uncharted territory of climate destruction, eh?
Average temperature in Grand Rapids, MI, Jan-Aug 2022 = 49.9
Average temperature in Grand Rapids, MI, Jan-Aug since 1892 = 49.6
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