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

To: bull_dozer who wrote (172399)	5/27/2021 3:48:46 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

I am figuring that George is wrong and right. ... I wonder how many days, weeks and months the opinionated George Mullen has in mind, and given that the years, months, and weeks still leaving the world in a fuddle w/r to the flu / its politics / and economic imprint, that George reckons is 25T worth, wonder what to make of his earlier figuring, that the team(s) in charge seriously mishandled economic management, because just as the MSM does FUD, the authority(ies) were be-FUD-ded townhall.com "And then the Coronavirus hit us. In short order, fear and panic have consumed our politicians, media, and public. Within the past few weeks alone, the Dow has cratered to under 19,000 and America's $22 trillion economic engine has effectively been forced to shut down by our own government. This economic shutdown is a new government experiment, and a dangerous one at that." George apparently does not read his own opinion townhall.com "When China was hit by the coronavirus, it locked down the hotspot Hubei region (Wuhan included) of 58 million people. This shutdown encompassed only 4.1% of China's 1.4 billion population. When America was hit a few months later by the coronavirus, our nation's 50 state governors chose not to thoughtfully lockdown our hotspots, but instead panicked and effectively shut down 100% of America's 330 million people."

To: bull_dozer who wrote (172399)	5/27/2021 5:13:57 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

Re <<25T>> According to suspect MSM, the issue of ‘origin’ has been refreshed, in time for coming elections. Am going to guess that the issues shall remain until 2032. Another flu went pandemic and many regimes weaponised the episode, or not. Time shall tell. The Biden administration is now facing calls to show it took the possibility of Chinese culpability sufficiently seriously especially since prominent Trump team officials and Republicans are launching a victory lap after last year promoting claims about the Wuhan lab -- mostly without any clear evidence. But Trump supporters also appear to be making another attempt to whitewash history of his disastrous handling of a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands on his watch. edition.cnn.com The Covid-19 origin story has massive political consequences (CNN) — A growing storm over the origins in China of Covid-19 has explosive political implications for the United States at home and abroad, as well as the dueling legacies of two presidents that will be defined by the pandemic. President Joe Biden on Wednesday told Americans he had ordered US intelligence agencies to report in 90 days on whether the virus originated not in animals and spread to humans but might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory. The move deepened a mystery encompassing the pernicious spread of a deadly pathogen, an intricate epidemiological puzzle, the opacity of a totalitarian system and the bitter overtones of a superpower rivalry. It will fan doubts about the World Health Organization's capacity to tease out lessons from the current crisis in order to prevent future pandemics. In the US, it leaves both the former Trump administration and the Biden White House facing calls for transparency about their efforts to establish how the virus started and whether politics tainted their investigative efforts. If it turns out the virus did escape from a laboratory, former President Donald Trump may be able to claim some vindication. But it would also highlight how his repeated habit of trashing the truth and bending intelligence to suit his own political ends shattered his credibility on this and other issues. The focus on the laboratory theory in recent days multiplied calls in Washington for the US to make China pay a price for the pandemic, even before the full extent of its origins are known, adding more toxicity to a geopolitical joust that may spark a new Cold War. But finding answers will be hard. China has every reason to cover up a virus that stained its prestige as a rising and sophisticated power with nearly 3.5 million people dead worldwide. Its nationalist leader Xi Jinping and the Communist Party have no time for shame of culpability that would mar their core case to the world -- that their one party rule is a better fit for the 21st century than democracy -- a narrative Biden has publicly vowed to combat. Facing his own political pressure, Biden laid out two theories seen as "likely" by US intelligence on the origin of the virus in a statement on Wednesday. The first has long been regarded as the most credible possibility by public health experts -- that there was zoonotic spread, possibly from live animals in a "wet" market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, to humans. But while cautioning there was no definitive conclusion yet, the President said that "one element" of the US intelligence community "leans" toward the possibility that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Biden's notable public statement came as he felt rising political heat after the Wall Street Journal revealed that several Chinese virologists sought hospital treatment late last year for an unidentified ailment. CNN then reported that the Biden administration had shut down a probe launched in the waning days of the Trump State Department to prove Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab. While the State Department later said the inquiry had simply been completed, several sources involved who spoke to CNN said it was their impression there was more work to be done. The Biden administration is now facing calls to show it took the possibility of Chinese culpability sufficiently seriously especially since prominent Trump team officials and Republicans are launching a victory lap after last year promoting claims about the Wuhan lab -- mostly without any clear evidence. But Trump supporters also appear to be making another attempt to whitewash history of his disastrous handling of a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands on his watch. 'No cherry picking' The medical and political priority now is a credible, in-depth, investigation. Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and former Baltimore Health Commissioner, said on CNN "Newsroom" that such a probe needed to be based on a scientific method, "which means you don't go into this with a preferred conclusion and then cherry pick your data to fit that conclusion." Such concerns are why the Biden administration closed down the probe opened by ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, two sources told CNN's Kylie Atwood. The Trump administration, facing election-year blame for its botched handling of a pandemic the ex-President long downplayed, had a strong incentive to find Chinese negligence, whatever the real story was. It also had a record of shaping science and intelligence for political ends and rejecting inconvenient expertise. It now falls to the Biden administration to prove that it has the clout and willingness to track down the origin of the virus. There will be questions whether intelligence agencies, given the notorious difficulty of penetrating the Chinese security state, represent the best way of finding the truth. It is not yet clear whether China fully understands the origin of the virus. And the starting points of pandemics can be difficult to pinpoint. "Many of us feel that it is more likely that this is a natural occurrence ... where it goes from an animal reservoir to a human. But we don't know 100% the answer to that," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious diseases expert, said at a White House Covid-19 briefing Tuesday. But the Biden White House does have some political exposure on the issue. Last year, Democrats rebuked Trump for pulling out of the WHO on the grounds that it was dominated by China. The US rejoined the global body soon after the new President took office. If it turns out Beijing hoodwinked the WHO, which downplayed the laboratory theory, senior Trump officials can claim some vindication. White House hardens line In recent days, there has been a noticeable hardening of the US line toward the WHO and Beijing, and the White House has been covering its tracks. "We have been saying that for a very long time that China needed to provide more access to the lab, cooperate more fully with the scientific investigators, and we don't think that they have met that standard," White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday. Andy Slavitt, the White House's Covid-19 coordinator, said on Tuesday that the US needed a "completely transparent process from China. We need the WHO to assist in that matter. We don't feel like we have that now." His comments raised the question of whether the WHO, in its current configuration, has the diplomatic weight and capacity to conduct an investigation that China is likely to obstruct. "The World Health Organization is not capable of undertaking this investigation because, frankly, the Chinese won't allow it," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio argued on Fox News on Wednesday. The Florida senator is one of a number of Republicans who may run for President in 2024, and taking a hard line on China will be part of the price for entry into the primary race. A victory lap Trump administration veterans and supporters responded to the latest events by claiming they were right to fling accusations at China despite not yet having offered public evidence. "We need to know what happened here. The Chinese Communist Party knows what happened here. They know who patient zero was. They know precisely where this began," Pompeo said on Fox News on Monday. Pompeo is asking reasonable questions, even if he has political motives. The Chinese government was tardy in warning the rest of the world of the tragedy that was unfolding in Wuhan.\| And the WHO appears to have struggled to secure timely and detailed answers about what was going on in late 2019 and early 2020 as the virus erupted. Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young told CNN's Jake Tapper on Wednesday that the global health body needed to act fast to reestablish its reputation by persuading China to come up with more data about the origins of the virus. "I don't see any other way for the World Health Organization to restore its credibility in the eyes of Americans and many across the world, who have seen them, frankly, place more trust in the Chinese Communist Party leadership and more deference to them than they have to the Western world," Young said. The former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield told CNN's Sanjay Gupta in documentary released in March that the most likely "aetiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory." Like other Trump officials, he could not prove it. Trump himself gave the impression back in May 2020 that he had some information about the origin of the virus, saying, "Something happened." "It came came from China. It should have been stopped. It could have been stopped on the spot," Trump said. The ex-President, however, frequently touted conspiracy theories, hunches and manipulated intelligence and facts to serve his own political argument. He also politicized the virus for his own ends. So, he was not seen as a particularly credible source. And the question remains -- if the Trump team had evidence of the lab theory, why did they not tell the world when they had every incentive to do so? Claims that Trump was "right" about Covid-19 also distract from his own culpability in mismanaging a virus that he repeatedly said was not a problem. Whatever Covid-19's origin, history will condemn Trump for his neglect and denial once it reached US soil. He actually hampered US preparedness early in the crisis because he failed to pressure Beijing for answers. As he sought a China trade deal to burnish his reelection campaign, he fawned over China's President. Trump said in early 2020 that the Chinese were "working very hard" and doing "very well." Of Xi, Trump tweeted, "He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus." It was only when the impact of the virus became clear on his own election prospects that he changed his tune, bolstering the idea he has a political motivation in blaming China for pandemic. Sent from my iPhone

To: bull_dozer who wrote (172399)	5/27/2021 6:24:37 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

I understand the flu in Britain was the same one in USA until the virus did hard-fork, and it spread in both domains about the same way, the way warned against by elsewhere through demonstration of resolve according to George. George Mullen was correct, that political weaponization enabled GDP going negative. Going on w/ weaponization shall likely make it far worse longer even as the flu went back to the drawing board. Politicians devoid of solutions must blame so it seems, according to George. bloomberg.com Dominic Cummings Tells a Chilling Story of British Failure The U.K. cannot fully move past the pandemic until it understands the policy fiascoes that led to so many lost lives. Therese Raphael 27 May 2021, 14:45 GMT+8 What impact will Dominic Cummings’s extraordinary seven-plus hours of testimony Wednesday have on Boris Johnson’s government and Britain’s examination of its pandemic performance? Not much, is the cynical view. After all, Johnson’s mistakes in the first waves of Covid-19 have been well covered. And Cummings, the prime minister’s former top adviser who was dismissed in November, is hardly a neutral observer. And yet, like him or loathe him, what made Cummings’s parliamentary account so explosive wasn’t that it revealed much that people didn’t know already. Rather it provided chilling confirmation of what hasn’t been properly acknowledged by those in power: that the death toll of the past year wasn’t just a result of the new coronavirus, but also of the terrible shortcomings in planning, decision making and leadership. The U.K.’s official pandemic inquiry — which Johnson has kicked down the road to 2022 — will have many uncomfortable questions to ask. Why was Britain’s death toll so high? Why did so many people die in care homes? Why did it take so long to put lockdown measures in place? And why was more than 20 billion pounds ($28 billion) spent on a test-and-trace system that largely didn’t work? According to Cummings, the distressing reason for all of these failures is a combination of institutional chaos and personal weakness at the top of Johnson’s administration. The man who was once a combination of Svengali and chief consigliere to the prime minister — the second-most powerful person in government (possibly even one notch higher than that) — described a government of “lions led by donkeys.” He declared Johnson “unfit for the job” and claimed that Health Secretary Matt Hancock lied repeatedly to cabinet colleagues and the public, including over shortages of personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses, and that he pleaded with Johnson to fire him. The upshot of all these failings, according to Cummings: “Tens of thousands of people who died didn’t need to die.” For a flavor of the bedlam in Downing Street, Cummings described the moment in March 2020 when Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen MacNamara got wind of the inadequacy of existing pandemic plans and rushed into the prime minister’s office to tell him and Cummings that the country was “absolutely f----d.” As Britain teetered on the edge of catastrophe, Johnson and others thought the real risk wasn’t the health danger but people’s overreaction to it and the impact on the economy, Cummings said. The ex-adviser confirms that the government had pretty much resigned itself to the Swedish strategy of “herd immunity” — whereby resistance happens naturally once enough people have had the virus — until they realized that it would cause the collapse of the National Health Service and hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was this “single peak” strategy that meant testing, vaccine development and other imperatives weren’t taken seriously at first, Cummings said. If only they’d been more transparent about what the infection data were showing and the assumptions that the government was making, then the initial disastrous strategy (and the subsequent death toll) might have been very different. “It was literally a classic historical example of groupthink in action,” Cummings said. The same groupthink meant that policies that proved so effective in Singapore, Taiwan and elsewhere — from test-and-trace to border controls — were dismissed as unworkable or unsuitable to Britain. Johnson himself comes across as shallow, poorly served by his blame-deflecting advisers (Cummings included), divided in his own instincts and generally the wrong man at the wrong time. Cummings went so far as to accuse Hancock of criminal negligence. Those are charges so serious that they’ll need backing up with evidence. Hancock will have his chance to rebut them in his own committee appearance but it’s hard to see his reputation quite recovering. Cummings takes aim at so many policies and officials, indeed the entire culture of British politics, that a reform-minded person would struggle to know where to start. That may make it easier for Johnson to simply say that elected officials don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch and creating Cummings’s model of Platonic order. And “Dom” was at the heart of power when this was all taking place. He’s culpable, too, as he admitted. The public certainly have no love for Cummings, a pivotal figure in the toxic Brexit wars, and no particular appetite to rehash the sufferings of the past year right now. Though he was an architect of Britain’s split from the European Union, Johnson’s defenders see him as someone who hates on his great country rather than appreciating its many virtues. Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email. Longer term, however, the Confessions of Dominic will form part of the historical record and provide fodder for countless opposition questions in Parliament. It will feed into the eventual public inquiry, and it may eat away at public confidence should another crisis arise. The accounts of government bungling are acutely painful for those who lost family and friends and those scientists and others who called for earlier action. Johnson is no doubt counting on a strong economic recovery, continued vaccine success and a short public attention span to push past this chapter. Perhaps, but in his withering critique Cummings has forced a debate about the pandemic record far earlier than Johnson wanted. And he has put Conservative lawmakers and the party on notice that while it may win elections, this leadership team has lost countless lives. Some senior Tories may decide to change that No. 10 team before voters do. 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: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Boxell at jboxell@bloomberg.net Sent from my iPhone

To: bull_dozer who wrote (172399)	5/27/2021 7:19:32 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

Testing time is nigh, and as there shall not be any <<reparations>> paid to us by fiat-paper virus originators around the planet (okay, you get $1,200 in USA and I get HK$ 10K in HK which is ~$1,285, we must decide on allocation % between gold / platinum : crypto I figure 20 : 1, or more bloomberg.com Crypto Versus Gold Debate Rages on Wall Street as Flows Reverse Lynn Thomasson 27 May 2021, 21:21 GMT+8 Follow us @crypto for our full coverage. Gold is back with a vengeance this month just as the crypto rally falls apart, refueling the Wall Street debate over the link between the two putative hedging assets. Bullion funds have seen the biggest two weeks of inflows since October and prices are edging closer to $1,900 an ounce. In contrast, Bitcoin has plunged by almost 40% from a $63,000 peak and funds are recording outflows. Yes, the weaker dollar and falling inflation-adjusted yields are big reasons for the gold revival. Elon Musk-spurred volatility, meanwhile, has snuffed out some of the speculative euphoria in Bitcoin, while undermining its ambition to attract the institutional crowd. Yet, all this fascinates a market cohort that point out the parallels between digital gold and the real deal. They’re both viewed as inflation hedges, commodities in scarce supply and capture the cultural divide between young, tech-obsessed traders and boomer traditionalists. Meanwhile, the likes of JPMorgan & Chase & Co. and ByteTree Asset Management say gold’s recent ascent appears to have come at least partly expense of Bitcoin as investors rotate between the two. “There is still so much confusion between Bitcoin and gold,” wrote Charlie Morris, founder of ByteTree in a note. “They coexist, and they both thrive in an inflationary environment.” In a report on shifting gold and Bitcoin trends, Morris suggested that fund flows are having an unusually large impact in boosting the gold price, and vice versa Bitcoin’s outgoing flows are depressing prices. Past may be prologue: Earlier this year, Bitcoin funds pulled in institutional cash as money managers extolled a case for digital currencies to creep into gold’s spot in a portfolio. With the economic growth in full swing, more than $20 billion then left bullion-backed ETFs in the six months to April. For some strategists, the bullion market is a starting place to divine their price forecast for Bitcoin. In a world where investors allocate gold and Bitcoin evenly to their portfolios and the two assets converge in volatility, it would imply a valuation of Bitcoin at $140,000, JPMorgan has previously estimated. “Needless to say such convergence or equalization of volatilities or allocations is unlikely in the near future,” strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote. Since the Covid-19 vaccine breakthrough triggered an economic rebound in November, exchange-traded funds tracking gold sold almost 12 million troy ounces through to the start of May, worth about $22.5 billion at today’s price. Investors pulled almost $14 billion from the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (ticker GLD) in the period, helping cut total assets in the world’s largest gold ETF by 29%. Some $1.6 billion has flowed back into the fund to put May on course for the best month since July. In day-to-day action, the direct link between gold and Bitcoin is hard to pin down, suggesting the connection is more about market psychology than real-money flows. The threat of price pressures and weakening dollar are good reasons for the metal’s current rally. And while predictions for Bitcoin prices have been chastened by the selloff, the enthusiasm hasn’t gone away. Bloomberg Intelligence strategist Mike McGlone, who has a price target of $100,000 for Bitcoin, says there’s still a chance crypto can become a digital reserve asset and that makes it worth the risk. “Gold may be losing its significance, so it may be simply prudent to diversify,” wrote McGlone. “The human nature of acknowledging a new asset class is what we see as a primary Bitcoin support.” — With assistance by Sam Potter Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE

To: bull_dozer who wrote (172399)	6/4/2021 10:15:55 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

Re <<America Should Demand $25 Trillion in Reparations from China>> America shall likely print it up in any case, collateral-free, against China's supposed capacity to do same but in amount of 250T One cannot get enthusiastic for money war where money is the munition and not the prize. Re 250T, as reckoned 2017 Message 30991373 and updated. 2020 Message 32949520 per that which I had been watching since 2011 Message 27675006 and briefing along the way Message 29283719 Message 29423379 etc etc So, as a precaution, I ordered two of 500 coins, hopefully to arrive before end Summer, China Eagle coins, that might be one-off, or turn into annual mintage ala China Panda coin series. They throw in a two oz silver eagle for each gold coin, because whilst gold is dirt, silver is less than dirt. FYI, the first mintage of Panda (1982) is now quoted at $3,900 rarepandacoins.com I regularly buy Panda coins as bullion / savings token, at spot + 3.5% and watch its numismatic value growth cushion its gold-content-value occasional dip, and always fiat-money lag. Am not a bug. Just a saver.