Swallowing the bait hook line and sinker is – let’s face it – how fish get caught
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but one $3 trillion Congressional stimulus package does cause the Dow Jones index to rise 18% in three days.
Either bourse traders are mathematically dyslexic, or this is just one more, last, farewell tour, final, closing epilogue to the most currency-fed bull run of all time…..in which Our heroes pretend not to have noticed that $22 trillion of Fed bailout monies still haven’t fixed the NY Repo sector.
Give it the weekend, and come (say) Tuesday, there’ll be a sell-off – in which that Supergroup The Algorithmics will get out faster than a transexual sprinter. And you know what their excuse will be then? There’s been another surge in Covid19 deaths. The specialist site Barron’s is already there in fact:
Are they kidding? They’re not betting, for Heaven’s sake – they’re directionalising.
Heads we win, tails you lose.
The Times this morning devoted a long and lachrymose article about young(er) people succumbing to C19, knowing perfectly well that each example was grossly atypical. In each case, some grieving relative was there to hammer home the government message: “My Jane had no complications, 21 she was, don’t think it won’t get you….stay home, like the Prime Minister says.”. Thirteen examples taken from a population of 78 million…to prove what, exactly? That just because there’s no correlation at all between the fearmongering and the facts, we should still obey?
Yesterday, The Guardian view was that Trump would deliberately kill 2.2 million citizens to keep the US growing and get reelected. It was an offensive, hate-filled column because (1) it ignored the need for herd immunity in the longer term (2) the number of additional deaths would be nowhere near that number (3) at 60% in the latest Gallup poll, Trump is way ahead of any Democrat and (4) if the challenger is going to be an old guy with a tit-touching habit and scrambled brains, then Trump will be reelected by a landslide whatever happens.
Big G wants to accuse the US President of killing people to stay in power, but it’s main OpEd was arguing that the UK’s transition period with the EU should be extended….as of course is Brussels and Paris. Bad guy gets accused of mass-murderous opportunism, good guys get the applause by being brazenly displaying, um, opportunism.
At the top by the masthead, old C P Snow is still saying that Facts are Sacred. But for decades now, the wreckers and fluffies at The Guardian have taken the Berthold Brecht view on facts: the Truth is what we can make of it. Without the Scott Trust, this abomination of a paper would’ve crumbled to dust years ago.
Not a single MSM title has taken an aggressive stance on why Boris (under the jackboot of the Unelected State) says C19 will be a catastrophe if people don’t stay at home, but the GovUK site for health professionals says the virus is no longer viewed as a serious incident. A young lady at the Times accused the PM of bottling out of herd immunity for political advantage, but she was miles behind the music of this Phantom Virus of the Opera.
Over the last 36 hours, President Trump has broken free – as much as he dare – from the surreal narrative being pumped out by a motley crew of media, the Pentagon, State Department, Wall Street, NATO and EU Establishments. But as always, the Leftlib press is so dedicated to Trump the Chump, they’ve completely missed the significance of this development.
Top US medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci was caught on camera shaking his head while putting his hand over his face during one of the President’s attacks on the Deep State. Trump is not best pleased. Trump angrily berated acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire the week before last, after learning that one of Maguire’s aides had briefed a bipartisan group of lawmakers that Russia was meddling in this year’s presidential election in a bid to secure Trump’s victory. He’s since been fired. Further, recently the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, echoed the president’s “deep state” beliefs, telling students at Oxford University “the deep state is 100% true.”
Standing next to Secretary of State Pompeo as the lattter seemed to imply that COVID19 was “a live exercise”, Trump muttered “it’d have been good if you’d told us”. He then slammed State Department employees in front of Pompeo, and during the question-and-answer session of the press conference, interrupted a reporter to admonish the State Department, sarcastically observing, “One thing, Secretary of State Pompeo is extremely busy, so if you have any question for him right now, could you do that?” said Trump. “I’d like him to go back to the State Department or as they call it, ‘the deep state department.”
It is no secret that the vast majority of Trump supporters share his view of a “liberal” neo-fascist element doing Trump down, and for that reason alone The Donald is proving once again that he is a much smarter political operator than his enemies think. If returned in November with a thumping win, he might just yet achieve what John F Kennedy was stopped from doing by Dallas.
We’re a long way from proving that COVID19 involved some kind of plot, but the evidence that it has given a lot of opportunities to those with dictatorial tendencies (or ways out of incompetence charges) seems to me overwhelming: Wall Street, Emmanuel Macron, Mike Pompeo, Brussels and Beijing have all used the crisis to advantage.
The French President is a particularly obvious example. For those of us living under his martial law, curfewed and permission-to-go-for-a-wee-wee State now, he us fulfilling all the worst expectations of contol-freakery and media manipulation. He was the first to call COVID19 “a war”, and has gone further than any other Western leader apart from Putin in his suspension of rights.
For the time being, he is basking in the media praise for his “decisive actions” but I doubt if this will last. He’s pledging massive investment in the Health System, yesterday saying “Once this crisis is over, a massive investment plan and an upgrade of the career paths will be put in place for our hospital system”.
I see that as a classic Freudian slip: the Boy King introduced these draconian measures because he knows full well how open to critique his neoliberal monetarism would have been had C19 overwhelmed public health provision at its peak.
On verra. If he reverses the Emergency Powers quickly and keeps his investment promise, fair enough.
I have my doubts. Overall right now, in fact, I’d like to see a lot more people displaying a bit more certainty in their doubts….if you follow.
The Slog 