We have always maintained that to reopen the economy was a false choice unless the public had confidence the virus had been contained.

The U.S. is losing control of the COVID crisis due to the colossal failure of leadership by the Administration.  Sure, deaths are way down but they lag the new case count by around two to four weeks.  If the market rally is based on the lower death count, then it should be a short lived rally.

The weekly seasonality in the data must have to do with how it is reported.

Look at the date of this Tweet.

If the economy is “reopened” next week, will the stock and bond market bubbles reinflate?   Will the unemployment rate move back to below 4 percent?   

Very unlikely.  False hopes and false choices will result in disastrous consequences. 

If people are afraid that the invisible enemy is still among us,  the economy has zero hope of recovering and the country should prepare itself for a long drawn out recession or even depression.  Forget about productivity, which is the ultimate driver of long-term economic growth.

Only if most of the public has confidence COVID-19 has been dealt a fatal blow can a robust economic recovery even be considered a possibility. – Is America Already Waving The White Flag?, GMM, March 23rd 

The U.S. could have done so much better yet here we are morphing into a failed state and a Third World Country.   We needed a national plan to reopen and strong leadership at the Federal level but only got, at best,  mixed messaging and political polarization.

None, nada, just more Potemkin noise, the hallmark of this administration, coupled with massive gaslighting.  It’s up to the Governors now to get it right and land the plane.

The Trump campaign strategy now seems to be keep whiping up the base and try to even…wait for it…. gaslight death. Don’t think it is gonna work on both counts.  – GMM, April 21st

Baseball Players Not Even Comfortable 

Here’s Mike Trout, who is on his way to becoming the GOAT of baseball. 

Buster Posey of the Giants,

Listen to Sean Doolittle of the Washington Nationals,

Sounds like baseball may not even happen this year.  Sad.

Where will the country be without their circuses?

What Is a Failed State?

People use this expression to indicate a political entity whose government has ceased to perform most or all of its basic functions. Such a condition can result from civil war, untrammeled corruption, natural disaster, or some combination of those and more. The Fund for Peace, which has been working on such issues for more than 70 years, lists four criteria to identify such a country:

• “Loss of control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force therein
• Erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions
• Inability to provide public services
• Inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community”

I’ve always thought of such fallen lands (sometimes given a fatal shove by my own government) as far-away places. Countries like Libya. The Fund for Peace identifies that beleaguered and now fractured nation, where rival armed forces compete for primacy, as the one in which government fragility has increased most over the last decade. The present chaos began when the United States and its NATO allies stepped in militarily, precipitating the overthrow of autocrat Muammar Qaddafi, with no particular plan for the day after.

Then there’s Yemen, where Washington’s support for the intervention of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only exacerbated an ongoing civil war, whose civilian victims have been left to confront famine, cholera, and most recently, with a shattered healthcare system, the coronavirus. And before Libya and Yemen, don’t forget the Bush administration’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, which damaged that country’s physical and political infrastructure in ways it is now, 17 years later, starting to dig out of.

So, yes, I’d known about failed states, but it wasn’t until I read “We Are Living in a Failed State” by George Packer in the June 2020 Atlantic magazine that I began to seriously entertain the idea that my country was bouncing down the same flight of stairs. As that article’s subtitle put it: “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”  – Common Dreams