AIDS doesn't liquify your internal organs within two weeks of infection.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
S&P500 swoon is really not much to date, despite the volatility
The index at 1886.76 is about 6% off the peak reached on September 18.
Down 10% would qualify as a correction, down 20% as a bear market.
It's still a great time to sell! Your Peter Cundill sell markers are roughly S&P500 1900, 1700 and 1500, depending on how much you want to risk losing.
The dollar closed tonight at 85.19
The 52-week high was 86.746 on October 3. The 52-week low was 78.906 on May 8, just five months ago.
I don't find that big of a move in so short a space very encouraging yet. A stable price at a high level is better. Let's see what it can do.
Gold and oil tonight are fairly valued one to the other
The gold/oil ratio comes in at 14.973, which is effectively par.
Gold is $1239 the ounce, oil $82.75 the barrel.
Bank Failure Friday is back with the fifteenth in 2014 in the state of Maryland
NBRS Financial, Rising Sun, Maryland, failed tonight, costing the FDIC $24.3 million. It is bank failure number fifteen in 2014.
FDIC insured institutions number 6,656 through June.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Amber Vinson was told by CDC she could fly on Monday, on Wednesday CDC tells airline she may have been already symptomatic
Committing malpractice in spades, the Centers for Disease Consumption told the infected Ebola nurse Amber Vinson she could fly on Monday even though she told them she had a fever, reported here:
Vinson told CBS Dallas Fort Worth that she was feeling ill before boarding her flight. She had a low grade fever, but she said that officials told her it was okay to get on the plane. Vinson told CBS that she called the CDC several times with concerns.
Ebola is only contagious when a patient is symptomatic. Vinson's 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit fever wasn't high enough to be considered a symptom.
The CDC confirmed to FOX 4 News that they gave Vinson the green light to fly. "Vinson was not told that she could not fly," a government spokesperson told NBC News.
Vinson's comments contradict remarks made earlier today by CDC Director Tom Freiden, who said that she never should have gotten on the plane.
On Wednesday night, a letter from Frontier Airlines CEO Dave Siegel to airline employees claimed that the CDC had notified the airline that Vinson may have had symptoms while on the flight, The Denver Channel reported. "At 1:55 p.m. MDT (Wednesday) Frontier was notified by the CDC that the passenger may have been symptomatic earlier than initially suspected; including the possibility of possessing symptoms while onboard the flight," the letter said. This would conflict with CDC's earlier statement that she didn't have symptoms of the illness while she was on the flight and didn't start showing symptoms until Tuesday.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Infected Texas Ebola nurse shouldn't have been allowed on a domestic flight, but it's OK for Liberians to travel to the USA
Thomas Frieden, MD, director of the CDC and red diaper doper baby graduate of Oberlin College and Columbia University, quoted here today:
The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that a second Dallas nurse who has been infected with Ebola shouldn’t have traveled halfway across the country on a commercial flight the day before she reported her possible illness. New measures are being put into place to ensure that other health-care workers at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas who had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first victim of Ebola in the U.S., are restricted from travel as long as they are being monitored for symptoms of the disease, said CDC Director Tom Frieden. “She [Amber Joy Vinson] should not have been on that plane,” Dr. Frieden said to reporters of the health-care worker, who he said had a temperature of 99.5 the day she flew.
But here he was on October 3 arguing for an open border with West Africa:
“Even if we tried to close the border, it wouldn’t work,” the top health official added. “People have a right to return. People transiting through could come in. And it would backfire, because by isolating these countries, it’ll make it harder to help them, it will spread more there and we’d be more likely to be exposed here.”
Oh, but closing borders within the US will work? And people here don't have a right to return home, which is what Ms. Vinson was doing?
If Duncan had never come here, we wouldn't have all these problems in Texas and now Ohio today, and two Americans with infections with a disease which is a death sentence wouldn't have them.
Frieden and Obama should be in jail, where we can limit the infection they spread.
America's engine of credit creation, housing, is still flat on its back despite recovery from the bottom
America's engine of credit creation, new housing starts, is still flat on its back despite a recovery from the bottom. The fact of the matter is, we have recovered TO the historic lows, that is all, to 955,000 annualized through the first half of 2014.
The total level of mortgage liability, a key component of total credit market debt outstanding, the growth of which has hit the wall, has been in steady decline over the period as well. Since 2008 it has declined from peak level at $10.7 trillion then to $9.4 trillion today, down over 12%. In the prior 6 year period, by contrast, total mortgage liability level increased 90% during the so-called housing bubble, and for the 6 year period prior to that 60%.
A second Texas hospital worker is confirmed with Ebola, thanks to Obama's failure to restrict travelers from West Africa
Reported here 45 minutes ago by CNBC.
Duncan died on October 8th. His second victim reported fever yesterday, the 14th.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Stupid Frenchman's solution to American capitalism is to make it even less capitalistic than it already is
He wants to prohibit you from selling "too soon", here:
"[I]f you want to hire someone else to manage your money, whether a mutual fund or a private equity fund or a hedge fund, you have to lock up your money for 15 years."
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Not a word in this guy's story about, for example, soaring corporate stock buybacks, suspension of mark-to-market accounting rules, the recently increased long-term capital gains tax rate, the much higher tax penalty for earning a big paycheck than for profiting from a big stock sale, nor the existence of long and short term gains in the first place, all of which are anti-free-market.
Sunday, October 12, 2014
It's a lie that Liberians were denied ZMAPP: three got it and two of them survived Ebola
Reported by ABC here on August 26th, but race-baiters in this country never mention it:
MONROVIA, Liberia – Two African health workers who received doses of the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp are set to be discharged from the hospital later this week, a Liberian health official told ABC News today. Three African health workers — two African doctors and one physician’s assistant — received the drug after contracting the virus earlier this month, according to Dr. Moses Massaquoi, who heads Ebola case management at Liberia’s health ministry. Though they were all showing signs of improvement at first, one of the doctors died on Aug. 24. He also had diabetes and hypertension, Massaquoi said. The remaining two patients improved soon after receiving the first of three doses of ZMapp — a cocktail of three antibodies meant to attack the virus. They are expected to be discharged on Friday.
Obama's illegal immigrant children brought in enterovirus 68 this summer, and now American children are dying from it
Reported here:
A 21-month-old girl is the first in the state of Michigan and second in the U.S. to die this year from a strain of the enterovirus that has infected more than 500 people across the nation, health officials said on Saturday.
Madeline Reid, who was stricken with Enterovirus D68(EV-D68), passed away late on Friday while being treated at the Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit, hospital officials said in a statement. ...
More than 500 people, mostly children, in 43 states and the District of Columbia have been infected with EV-D68 since mid-August, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This week, the CDC said that a 4-year-old Eli Waller of New Jersey, who went to bed last month in seemingly good health and died in his sleep, was the first fatality linked directly to the strain of the virus.
Aside from Reid and Waller, at least four others infected with Enterovirus D68 have died this year, although the CDC said it is unclear what role the virus played in their deaths.
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But of course it's a lie that only 500 have been infected. Over 900 patients were seen in Colorado alone during the end of the summer season suddenly presenting with symptoms caused by the virus. And the article elsewhere tries to make it sound like the particular strain is common in the US when it's not.
We are being systematically lied to by the CDC, Obama, the IRS, the State Department . . ..
Outrageous race-baiter Robin Wright for CNN won't tell you Duncan got brincidofovir
People like Robin Wright belong in the dustbin of history along with Obama.
Here she is insinuating Duncan the Dallas Ebola victim didn't get treated like a white person would be:
Louise [Duncan's girlfriend] refused to allow her last name to be used for fear of repercussions. Unfortunately, doctors and the pharmaceutical developer said there was no longer any ZMapp left for Duncan or any other victim. But the imagery that accompanied his plight lingers: Whites can be flown to the United States or Europe at any expense, while Africans are left to die unattended on the streets of Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or now, without ZMapp, in Dallas.
But the Associated Press reports here that doctors did everything they could for Duncan, including giving him experimental drugs from North Carolina, with the FDA's blessing:
Just after midnight Oct. 4, Duncan went into multiple organ failure. By morning, a shipment of brincidofovir arrived and Duncan got the first dose.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
VGPMX at 9.63 hasn't been this cheap since 2003
The 2009 low was 9.73.
The thing is, the historical low water mark for this sector fund, which is a stock fund not a pure metals fund, was in August 1998 at 5.05. You could really lose your shirt in this fund even at this bargain price. I'd look for a broader stock market correction than the current 5% before I even thought about it more seriously.
On January 2, 2002 this fund was at 8.56. Following the Peter Cundill rule, you would have sold your entire initial investment in this fund at that price by late 2003 and recouped it because it would have doubled already at 17.12. (Often the easy money is made quickly off the lows, but it did take until February 2002 for the 5.05 price to double to 10.10, not quite four years.) The all-time high for this fund at 40.02 in May 2008 did not come until almost five years later.
US Federal Reserve continues to fail against deflationary headwinds
The Fed needs a clear strategy for getting the inflation rate higher after falling short of its 2 percent target for 28 consecutive months. ...
Prices fell 1.2 percent for the 12 months ending in July 2009, when the economy had just exited the recession, according to the inflation measure the Fed uses, the personal consumption expenditures price index. Unemployment that month was 9.5 percent. Since Fed officials first published their inflation target in January 2012, the index has averaged 1.5 percent. ...
The 2 percent inflation objective first appeared in a January 2012 statement on longer-run policy goals, and has been restated each January since. The statements say nothing about tactics for returning inflation to 2 percent over the medium term.
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The all-items consumer price index shows the same thing, with the average of the annual average change at just +1.59% for each of the five years 2009-2013. In the most recently completed year, 2013, the change from 2012 was just +1.46%. And year over year on August 1, 2014, the change has been just +1.69%.
Despite a balance sheet for all Federal Reserve banks which appears to have peaked at $4.459 trillion on September 24th as QE prepares to end and excess reserves only slightly off peak at $2.677 trillion, inflation is slim to none in this economy, and slim just left the building.
In point of fact, these numbers are nearly meaningless in the face of the real deflation in the economy, which has nothing to do with prices but with credit. Total credit market debt is hardly expanding at all. Compared to the post-war record, where credit creation has doubled on average about every eight years, we have hit a brick wall since 2007.
At that time total credit market debt outstanding stood at $50 trillion. Seven years later it is barely $57.5 trillion, and there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that next year it will be at $100 trillion or anywhere close to that.
What we are witnessing is the unraveling of the post-war credit based economy, and no one seems to have a clue how to fix that, least of all the US Federal Reserve.
The irony: The Arab street views the Christian West as as anti-capitalist as itself
From Hernando de Soto, here:
For the poor in many Arab states, it can take years to do something as simple as validating a title to real estate. At a recent conference in Tunisia, I told leaders, “You don’t have the legal infrastructure for poor people to come into the system.” “You don’t need to tell us this,” said one businessman. “We’ve always been for entrepreneurs. Your prophet chased the merchants from the temple. Our prophet was a merchant!” ...
All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction.
As countries from China to Peru to Botswana have proved in recent years, poor people can adapt quickly when given a framework of modern rules for property and capital. The trick is to start. We must remember that, throughout history, capitalism has been created by those who were once poor.
Friday, October 10, 2014
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