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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (160126)	7/14/2020 12:39:45 AM
From: TobagoJack	2 Recommendations Recommended By dsv Secret_Agent_Man Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218065

Negative news of the sort I do not like Something about the CoVid state-of-is might be forever zerohedge.com Scientists Discover That One Big Assumption That Everyone Has Been Making About COVID-19 May Be Dead Wrong Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com, Over the past several months, there has been a tremendous amount of debate about almost every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have been eager to debate about the severity of the virus, they have been eager to debate about the wisdom of the lockdowns, and they have been eager to debate about the effectiveness of wearing masks. But the one thing that everyone could pretty much agree on is that eventually this pandemic would end. Virtually all of us assumed that one way or another eventually most of the population would develop COVID-19 antibodies and that once we got to that point the pandemic would fizzle out. Unfortunately, it appears that was not a safe assumption to make. Yes, those that have had COVID-19 do develop antibodies. But two new scientific studies have discovered that *those antibodies start to fade very, very quickly.* For example, a study that was recently conducted in China found that more than 90 percent of COVID-19 patients experience steep declines in COVID-19 antibodies “within 2 to 3 months”… A new study from China showed that antibodies faded quickly in both asymptomatic and symptomatic COVID-19 patients during convalescence, raising questions about whether the illness leads to any lasting immunity to the virus afterward. The study, which focused on 37 asymptomatic and 37 symptomatic patients, showed that more than 90% of both groups showed steep declines in levels of SARS-COV-2–specific immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies within 2 to 3 months after onset of infection, according to a report published yesterday in Nature Medicine. Further, 40% of the asymptomatic group tested negative for IgG antibodies 8 weeks after they were released from isolation. And a very large study that was just conducted in Spain found that some patients that had initially successfully developed antibodies “no longer had antibodies weeks later”… A large study from Spain showed that antibodies can disappear weeks after people have tested positive, causing some to question how possible it will be to attain herd immunity. A study published in medical journal Lancet showed 14% of people who tested positive for antibodies no longer had antibodies weeks later. Needless to say, this is absolutely devastating news, and it has very serious implications for vaccine development… Such findings have implications for vaccine development, since the efficacy of a vaccine hinges on the idea that a dose of weakened or dead virus can prompt your body to generate antibodies that protect you from future infection. If those antibodies are fleeting, a vaccine’s protection would be fleeting too. Short-lived antibodies also diminish hopes of achieving widespread or permanent herd immunity. If antibodies can fade in some patients within weeks, and if just about everyone loses them after a few months, that would render any vaccine almost completely useless. And if these findings are confirmed, we can pretty much forget about ever achieving “herd immunity”. Instead, we are potentially facing a future in which COVID-19 will be with us permanently, and people will need to understand that there is a possibility that they will be able to get infected repeatedly. Sadly, there is evidence that this is already starting to happen for some patients. In a recent article for Vox, a doctor in Washington D.C. named D. Clay Ackerly shared that one of his patients got infected with COVID-19 again three months after being infected the first time… “Wait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection. And in that same article, Dr. Ackerly explained that other doctors are starting to see similar cases…. Recent reports and conversations with physician colleagues suggest my patient is not alone. Two patients in New Jersey, for instance, appear to have contracted Covid-19 a second time almost two months after fully recovering from their first infection. Daniel Griffin, a physician and researcher at Columbia in New York, recently described a case of presumed reinfection on the This Week in Virology podcast. If you stop and really think about what all of this means, it will chill you to the core. It means that COVID-19 is never going away. And every time you get it, the more severe it is likely to be. Each time it will do even more permanent damage to your system until it finally finishes you off. I seriously wish that what I was telling you was not true. I do not want to have to worry about a potentially deadly virus every time I leave my house. But sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be okay somehow is not going to do us any good. In fact, denial can kill you. A 37-year-old Ohio man named Richard Rose originally thought that all of the fuss about COVID-19 was just “hype”, and he angrily insisted that he would never buy a mask. The following is what he posted on Facebook on April 28th… ‘Let make this clear,’ he wrote, in a post that was shared 10,000 times. ‘I’m not buying a ***** mask. I’ve made it this far by not buying into that damn hype.’ Sadly, he eventually got infected, and COVID-19 killed him on July 3rd… Richard Rose, a 37-year-old man from Port Clinton, Ohio, recently died from coronavirus after slamming “hype” about the pandemic on Facebook. Rose’s family told Cleveland CBS affiliate 19 News the US Army veteran died at home on July 3, just three days after testing positive for COVID-19. He was a healthy 37-year-old man. If the virus can take him down, it could potentially take just about anyone down. So please take this pandemic seriously. Over the past week, we have seen daily numbers soar to levels that we have never seen before, and some experts believe that the numbers will continue to go higher as we approach the end of the year. And as I just discussed above, if those that have had the virus quickly lose immunity, there will be nothing to stop this virus from sweeping across the globe year after year. Needless to say, a lot more scientific studies need to be conducted, and hopefully those additional studies will show that the studies that were done in China and Spain were completely wrong. But at this point the outlook for fighting this virus is exceedingly bleak, and scientists assure us that it is just a matter of time before a pandemic that is even worse comes along.** Sent from my iPad

To: carranza2 who wrote (160126)	7/14/2020 8:30:12 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218065

we know what the antidote answer is ... bloomberg.com Social Security’s Funding Crisis Has Arrived Net inflows were forecast to turn negative next year even without the pandemic, and the U.S. Treasury may have to step in. A. Gary Shilling 14 July 2020, 12:30 GMT+2 Social Security is back on the brink of a crisis. Photographer: William Thomas Cain/Getty Images A. Gary Shilling is president of A. Gary Shilling & Co., a New Jersey consultancy, and author of “The Age of Deleveraging: Investment Strategies for a Decade of Slow Growth and Deflation.” Some portfolios he manages invest in currencies and commodities. The Social Security Trust Fund has done quite well in recent years, due to the postwar babies’ surge into the labor force in the last decades of the 20th century while retirees from the low-birth rate Great Depression years were drawing relatively few benefits. The combination of these two forces pushed the Social Security Trust Fund balance from about zero in 1980 to $2.9 trillion today. But now, the coronavirus pandemic threatens to undo all those gains, and without swift action by the government a new crisis may be at hand. The fund’s Trustees noted in an April report that net inflows into the Trust Fund will turn negative next year, commencing a demise that will see the Trust Fund go broke in 2035. Then, payroll taxes will cover only 79% of promised retiree benefits. Here’s the troubling part: “The projections and analyses in this year’s report do not reflect the potential effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Social Security program,” the Trustees stated in the annual report. Clearly, benefits will increase as more workers retire early or claim disability while payroll taxes swoon with the drop in employment. Social Security is not like a cash-value life insurance policy in which an individual’s premiums and interest earned on them are eventually paid out to the insured or in death benefits. Instead, Social Security transfers the payroll taxes of employees and employers to retirees, plus interest. The huge net inflows of recent years masked the vast expansion of Social Security payouts since World War II that were not actuarially matched by offsetting payroll taxes. That removed any semblance of a savings plan and shifted Social Security to a family welfare scheme. Payments are made to many who aren’t paying payroll taxes, including non-working spouses, widows and children. Also, originally, annual retiree benefits were 17.5% of earnings in the last five years of work but have reached 33% of retiree incomes, on average. Now, 10,000 postwar babies are reaching 65 every day and retiring to draw Social Security benefits. This year, 65 million Americans, or 20% of the population, are receiving over $1 trillion in benefits, including 90% of those over 65. And many currently employed are in the relative sparse baby bust generation that followed the postwar babies, the last of whom were born in 1964. Social Security’s plight has been obvious for decades and the longer Washington procrastinates, the more difficult the solutions. The Trust Fund Trustees state that ensuring solvency over the next 75 years would require a 3.1- percentage point rise in the 12.4% current payroll tax that is split between employees and employers. Even less politically attractive would be an immediate 19% across-the-board cut in benefits. Waiting for the Trust Fund money to run out in 2035 would require a 4.1-percentage-point rise in the combined payroll tax or a 25% cut in benefits, the Trustees calculate. The increased woes from the pandemic may finally force Washington to act, as costs will probably balloon to the point that the fiction of a self-funding Trust Fund is abandoned and Social Security benefits are paid directly by the Treasury. That would eliminate any protections Social Security has from politics, but concerns about the resulting jump in the federal budget deficit would mount. Payroll taxes on higher incomes and perhaps capital gains as well would be used to redistribute income downward. If self-funded Social Security benefits are an entitlement that is no longer affordable, so too are state pension fund benefits. Decades of lush retiree benefits, overly-optimistic investment return assumptions, insufficiency pension fund contributions and lengthening retiree life spans have resulted in the liabilities of public pension funds exceeding assets by $1.2 trillion in 2018, according to the latest data and Pew Charitable Trusts. The pandemic will surely worsen the mismatch. As with Social Security, options to restore to health these pension plans, which are only 79% funded on average, are unattractive. State governments are already strained by falling revenue from declining sales and income taxes, and are unlikely to help. Cutting benefits is politically difficult. To boost investment returns, pension funds can continue to shift to hedge funds, private equity, commodities and other volatile investments, but risk-adjusted returns may not improve, as was seen in the first quarter. Some states have introduced cost-sharing policies that distribute unexpected gains and losses among employers, employees and retirees. Others are shifting from more expensive and burdensome defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans for new employees or introducing hybrid plans that contain elements of both. As with Social Security, the coronavirus crisis may force action on these entitlements. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. To contact the author of this story: Gary Shilling at agshilling@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Robert Burgess at bburgess@bloomberg.net Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE