"Prediction is very difficult,
especially if it's about the future."
Nils Bohr.
A safer, happy, more
prosperous, 2021 to all.
‘Tis the last day of year
2020, and time to foresee the future. Of course, no one can foresee the future,
least of all our corrupt central banksters who have never yet foreseen a
recession, or for that matter a crisis, or even an inflation, or pandemic. Then
again, neither can your LIR editor.
"In
economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension."
J.
K. Galbraith.
Up first, a
very real vaccine concern.
Vaccinated US nurse contracts
COVID-19, expert says Pfizer shot needed more time to work - ABC
December 30, 20208:22 AM
(Reuters) - A nurse in California tested
positive for COVID-19 more than a week after receiving Pfizer Inc's vaccine, an
ABC News affiliate reported bit.ly/2L8iBel
on Tuesday, but a medical expert said the body needs more time to build up
protection.
Matthew W., 45, a nurse at two different
local hospitals, said in a Facebook post on December 18 that he had received
the Pfizer vaccine, telling the ABC News affiliate that his arm was sore for a
day but that he had suffered no other side-effects.
Six days later on Christmas Eve, he became
sick after working a shift in the COVID-19 unit, the report added. He got the
chills and later came down with muscle aches and fatigue.
He went to a drive-up hospital testing site
and tested positive for COVID-19 the day after Christmas, the report said.
Christian Ramers, an infectious disease
specialist with Family Health Centers of San Diego, told the ABC News affiliate
that this scenario was not unexpected.
“We know from the vaccine clinical trials
that it’s going to take about 10 to 14 days for you to start to develop
protection from the vaccine,” Ramers said.
“That first dose we think gives you
somewhere around 50%, and you need that second dose to get up to 95%,” Ramers
added.
Ten Ways Covid-19 Has Changed the
World Economy Forever
Wed, December 30, 2020, 12:01 AM GMT
(Bloomberg) -- Economic shocks like
the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 only arrive once every few generations, and
they bring about permanent and far-reaching change.
Measured by output, the world
economy is well on the way to recovery from a slump the likes of which barely
any of its 7.7 billion people have seen in their lifetimes. Vaccines should
accelerate the rebound in 2021. But other legacies of Covid-19 will shape
global growth for years to come.
Some are already discernible. The
takeover of factory and service jobs by robots will advance, while white-collar
workers get to stay home more. There’ll be more inequality between and within
countries. Governments will play a larger role in the lives of citizens,
spending—and owing—more money. What follows is an overview of some of the
transformations under way.
Leviathan
Big government staged a comeback as
the social contract between society and the state got rewritten on the fly. It
became commonplace for authorities to track where people went and who they
met—and to pay their wages when employers couldn’t manage it. In countries
where free-market ideas had reigned for decades, safety nets had to be patched
up.
To pay for these interventions, the
world’s governments ran budget deficits that add up to $11 trillion this year,
according to McKinsey & Co. There’s already a debate about how long such
spending can continue, and when taxpayers will have to start footing the bill.
At least in developed economies, ultralow interest rates and unfazed financial
markets don’t point to a near-term crisis.
In the longer run, a big rethink in
economics is changing minds about public debt. The new consensus says
governments have more room to spend in a low-inflation world, and should use
fiscal policy more proactively to drive their economies. Advocates of Modern
Monetary Theory say they pioneered those arguments and the mainstream is only
now catching up.
Even Easier Money
Central banks were plunged back into
printing money. Interest rates hit new record lows. Central bankers stepped up
their quantitative easing, widening it to buy corporate as well as government
debt.
All these monetary interventions
have created some of the easiest financial conditions in history—and unleashed
a frenzy of speculative investment, which has left plenty of analysts worried
about moral hazards ahead. But the central-bank policies will be hard to
reverse, especially if labor markets remain fractured and companies continue
their recent run-up in saving.
In other
news, how secure is GB and Europe’s telecom systems from a Nashville man made
attack or natural disaster?Hopefully, someone,
somewhere, in Her Majesty’s Government, is looking into the lessons of
Nashville.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The vulnerability of the
telecommunications system in Nashville and beyond became clear Christmas Day
when AT&T's central office in downtown became the site of a bombing.
Mayor John Cooper called the blast on Second Avenue an attack on
infrastructure. The effects of that attack are sure to ripple through the
region for weeks, as the telecom giant scrambles to restore services while
maintaining the integrity of an active investigation site teeming with federal
agents.
State and local officials and experts say the fact that a
multistate region could be brought to its knees by a single bombing is a
"wake-up call," exposing vulnerabilities many didn't know existed and
predicting it would lead to intense conversations about the future.
The bombing and the damage to the AT&T office was
a "single-point of failure," said Douglas Schmidt, the
Cornelius Vanderbilt professor of computer science at Vanderbilt
University.
"That's the Achilles' heel. The weak link," he
said. "When one thing goes wrong and everything comes crashing
down."
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the
age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it
was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of
darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair
The Bank of England, with apologies to
Charles Dickens.
While stock mania rules just about everywhere, and all
the world bets on free “money” for all forever, this old dinosaur market
follower, thinks he sees fiat money disaster directly ahead. Get gold (and
silver.)
There is no free lunch on planet earth, yet all politicians
and central banksters everywhere are promising voters exactly that.
US debt stood at about a massive 20 trillion dollars four
years ago, when President Trump took office. In four short years its 28
trillion now, officially, and rising.
Under socialists Biden-Harris, there’s no telling where
US official debt will be four years on from now.
Since the crash of 1987 we have managed to create a
financial crisis about every 5 to 10 years. The Great Nixonian Error of fiat
money, communist money, is coming to its end.
All bubbles eventually burst. This one’s long overdue.
Asian shares hit record high as
investors bet on recovery next year
Following the markets on both sides of the Atlantic since 1968. A dinosaur, who evolved with the financial system as it was perverted from capitalism to banksterism after the great Nixonian error of abandoning the dollar's link to gold instead of simply revaluing gold. Our money is too important to be left to probity challenged central banksters and crooked politicians.
