Despite happy talk here and there, Las Vegas, with its dependence on frequent fliers and conventioneers, is in a bad way. During an earnings call for Las Vegas Sands, owners of The Venetian and Palazzo on the Las Vegas Strip, Sands President Rob Goldstein said, “We’re in a world of hurt here in terms of Vegas.”
So while Trump’s true believers require no convincing as to the President’s assertion that Covid-19 will magically go away, his administration is taking control of the information. “The Trump administration ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington,” reports USA Today.
The Fed is not going to hit the brakes, but could the social mood be changing. The nightly news looks like 1968, could markets follow? In ‘68 it was the Hong Kong flu that killed 70,000 while the stock market peaked. The Vietnam War accelerated, the National Guard killed students at Kent State, the Weather Underground formed, and the Beatles broke up. The stock market then headed down to a 1970 bottom.
In other words, forget the mask, stay home. Isolation is the only solution. But, after a couple of months of being cooped up at home, many Americans can’t handle it. One wonders why? The answer lies in Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s groundbreaking “Democracy The God That Failed.”
The constant argument about Covid shutdowns, social distancing and other inconveniences is the government's ham-handed response is killing “the economy.” This brings to mind Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip, “There is no such thing as society,” which, although long since underground, she is still criticized for. “There are only the individuals, families, groups, associations and organizations that make it up,” writes economist William Watson to finish her thought. Likewise, he explains, “there is no such thing as ‘the economy’. There are only the people, groups, associations, etc. that make it up.”
Who knew a person can now buy partial shares of Amazon, Tesla, and other modern unicorns. If nothing else, Wall Street thinks outside the box. If you thought Robin Hood wore a pointy hat adorned with a feather, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, turn your calendar. The new Robin Hood allows the rich to steal from the poor.
If one were looking for clues as to why the stock market has rebounded while daily economic news grows worse, besides the Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell “flooding of the market” with liquidity, another reason could be the flood of new punters betting on stocks, from high-flying tech shares to dead-in-the-water leisure stocks.
In the newest case, the company is struggling before a game has been played. Last August Allegiant Airlines inked a deal with the NFL’s used-to-be-Oakland, used-to-be Los Angeles, used-to-be-Oakland (again) and now, Las Vegas Raiders for the naming rights to the new 65,000 seat and partially taxpayer funded stadium which sits along I-15 in Clark County, Nevada.
Eglet’s filing claims, “Shortly after November 17, 2019, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the other Defendants knew, or should have known, that COVID-19 was a ‘new’ dangerous, contagious, and deadly virus because many Chinese citizens who contracted the virus were getting very sick, and some were dying. Moreover, DNA samples taken from these very sick and dying people confirmed that this was a ‘new’ virus for which there was no vaccine or cure.”
Toilet paper may be in short supply, but the Federal Reserve is determined to make sure dollars are not.
I will always remember Whitman as Monsieur Paul Regret--or "Mon-sooor," as Texas Ranger Jake Cutter (John Wayne) insisted on calling him.
To understand the president, Rucker and Leonnig, provide the essential roadmap to the method of Trump’s madness.
“We’re out of money,” a call to the Detroit home office revealed. “Everyone wants to refi and we don’t have the funds.” Always the salesman, the Quicken rep said, ``I don’t know why anyone is waiting, rates will never go below 3 percent,” inspiring a hearty laugh from this writer.
Pal does not blame the president. He’s in the finance and investments business. For him, this is all about coming out on the other side, healthy and financially solvent. He has no political axe to grind.
Product margins are skinny and technology has taken away the asymmetric knowledge advantage dealerships once had. So, once a customer falls in love with their new pride and joy, the hapless customer is sent to The Box.
All this weakness has something to do with coronavirus, in the eyes of socionomists. In the March issue of The Socionomist, with the cover devoted to the virus, Matt Lambert and Mark Galasiewski quote Robert Prechter, “disease sometimes plays a prominent role in major corrective periods.”
A few folks are aware of the repo tantrum which occurred last September. Overnite rates for money secured by US debt popped to ten percent, signaling at least a financial plumbing problem or a collateral crisis, due to the financial mandarins trying to sneak away from the party with $100 billion that was in the Fed’s bottomless punch bowl.
So where the state has failed, private enterprise has stepped into the breach. Profits will make that happen. High cost makes customers more careful with how much they use. Nobody is wasting water in Kathmandu. “Before, I didn’t think about how often I could shower or when I can clean the house,” said Laxmi Magar, a housewife and mother of six. “But now that water is so expensive I watch every drop.”
To refresh our memories, Jurow says, “2006 was just insane. 320 billion dollars taken out in cash just in that year, and boy, the debt helped the economy continue, even though things were showing signs of real problems.”
And while CO2 concentrations have increased, causing Ms. Thornberg to lose sleep, “one cannot help but notice that a large part of the warming trend over the last 120 years took place prior to 1950, a period where CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere remained relatively low,” wrote the natural resource investing pair.
