The Stock Market

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Much is made of the market drop last spring pursuant to the government’s decision to close down our economy in response to the apparent (apparent because we were operating on vastly incomplete data, much of which was being deliberately falsified by the People’s Republic of China). Much is made, too, of the market recovery later in the spring as our economy was permitted by government to begin reopening.

Readers of this blog know that I view the market as economically strongly tied to the underlying economy, but only loosely tied to it temporarily.

This graph, via MarketWatch, puts last spring’s market drop and recovery, illustrated by the S&P 500 Index, into some context.

The axes are somewhat hard to read (right click on the image and select View Image from the pulldown to get a larger image), but the X-axis labels run from Jan 80 through Jan 20. The data themselves actually run from 1 Jan 78 through 1 Nov 2020.

Last spring’s government-caused Wuhan Virus drop and recovery (the grey-blue region at the right end) compares in two ways with previous drops. This government-caused drop is no deeper than the two economically-driven drops of the last 32 years: the dot-com bust of Jun 00 to Dec 02 and the Panic of 2008 of Jun 08 to Mar 09. The Wuhan Virus drop and recovery also was much steeper and the recovery must faster than those prior drops: 6 months vs 18 months and 10 months just for the drops, and an additional 4 years to recover from dot-com and from the Panic.

Beyond that, the current Wuhan Virus data suggest that the government-mandated shutdown had very little impact on the virus’ progression. Especially given that key government officials like Anthony Fauci, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director, openly lied about the severity of the virus and what we should do about it.

Miami as Financial Center

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Financial firms are starting to figure it out: in addition to a better climate and (much) friendlier tax regime, Miami is the place to be for them. I have a thought on one bit of that maybe-migration, the opening statement:

This city has long pitched itself as an attractive location for finance and tech firms, with its tax advantages, flight connections to New York and cosmopolitan flair. Its efforts appear to be paying off.

I’m not sure that Miami needs to tout New York as being within easy reach. It should begin noting that it’s within easy reach of New York. There’s no need for Wall Street to remain in a city as anti-business, anti-financial success, as badly run generally as New York City, or as badly run and high-tax as is the State of New York.

Miami should encourage all of them to come on down to Brickell. The water’s better than fine.

An Audit Commission

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A group of Senators are planning to join a (large) group of Representatives to object, tomorrow, to a few States’ Electoral College slates being accepted unless they get agreement to an audit commission, modeled on a 19th century audit commission created for the same purpose that consisted of five each of Representatives, Senators, and Supreme Court Justices, that will conduct a 10-day audit of elections in the objected-to States.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats in both houses of Congress together with the NLMSM are up in arms, to the point of hysteria about the move.

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN)…said in a statement Saturday that Mr Biden will be inaugurated January 20, “and no publicity stunt will change that.”
For a group of my Republican colleagues to claim that they want an additional federal ‘commission’ to supersede state certifications when the votes have already been counted, recounted, litigated, and state-certified, amounts to nothing more than an attempt to subvert the will of the voters.
It is undemocratic. It is un-American[.]

Progressive-Democrats should leap at the chance of an objective commission doing a serious, detailed audit. Three things would result, two of which would redound to their advantage: the commission would find nothing in sufficient amount to change the claimed outcome, but serious error and outright wrongs would be identified so miscreants could be brought to justice and weaknesses corrected in Congress—restoring faith in our election systems while confirming Biden’s election. Or nothing wrong would be identified, also restoring faith and confirming Biden.

Or, the third item: enough being found to reject enough Electoral College slates to put the election into the House of Representatives for President and the Senate for Vice President.

That Progressive-Democrats are so terrified of a commission audit is instructive.

It Only Took 50 Years

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Maybe. While it took us ignorant colonials only a decade, or so, to figure it out.

The eurozone has always had a fundamental weakness compared with the US when dealing with financial and economic crises: while its 19 countries share a currency and interest-rate policy, they have no common tax-raising or spending power.
In 2020, the European Union took a big step toward correcting that deficiency by starting to issue bonds on behalf of all member countries, known as common bonds. Beginning in 2021, some common bonds will be repaid through taxes raised by the EU itself.

That’s a one-off, but maybe it’s a first step and not a last one.

The lack of central taxing and spending power—and authority—was a Critical Item in the failure of the diplomatic concord that was our 13 States operating under their Articles of Confederation, and it took our Constitution to rectify the failure.

Of course, the EU still lacks the homogeneity of understanding of the role of government and of the purpose of money so necessary to the success of a polity that our original States, even under the Articles, had.

But, hey, baby steps. Maybe in another 50 years….

Vaccination Shortfall

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The Trump administration promised 20 million doses of the Wuhan Virus vaccine would be delivered to the States by the end of 2020. In fact, only 12-14 million doses were delivered. That’s a significant shortfall—or it would be were it not for a far more significant shortfall that renders the lacking 6-8 million doses wholly irrelevant.

…far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.
…
Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

Never mind that the States had been told for months that vaccines would be available and that vaccine doses would be available in those millions by the end of the year.

The States chose not to act; their administrations chose to disbelieve the Federal administration, and so they sat on their hands. Claire Hannan, Association of Immunization Managers Executive Director, offered this excuse:

There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.

Indeed. And yet, knowing these folks had the hard part—getting the syringes needed, getting folks trained to give the shots in order to fill staffing shortfalls that these folks had to have known would exist—they chose to do nothing. Because they chose to not believe the ability of American business and a Trump administration to work together to deliver vaccines—multiple vaccines—within the promised time frame.

And another typical excuse:

State and local jurisdictions have been asking the federal government for more funding to support vaccine distribution than the $340 million disbursed so far.

Never mind that the State and local distributions already have plenty of money—it’s just currently misallocated.

The list of State failures goes on, yet they’re all laid off to the Federal government—in particular the Trump administration—without any regard for the federal republic nature of our governance structure.  All the Feds can do, and the Trump administration down through the CDC did every bit of it, is jawbone the States on domestic matters. The CDC issued guidelines regarding the vaccines—it cannot issue rules—yet the States in many cases chose to do something entirely different.  The Federal government cannot dictate to the States’ their internal policies, particularly including how they prepare for reception of and deliver vaccination shots to their individual citizens.

2.8 million vaccinations injected out of 12 million doses delivered is unacceptable—and the States, Republican and Progressive-Democrat alike have no one to blame but their own disbelieving and inactive selves.

It would have been a no-lose situation, too. Say the States had scrambled to be ready to handle the promised 20 million doses and the vaccines would not have been produced and deliverable until the end of 2021 as so many so-called experts insisted was the earliest possible time frame. The States would have been ready in time to receive and inject, instead of being the failures they are presently.