I've been grubbin' this stuff like crazy lately. Yum!
At Amazon, Old Trapper Beef Jerky 10oz, Naturally Smoked, Old Fashioned Original (Pack of 1).
And the large size, Old Trapper Old Fashioned Double Eagle Beef Jerky - Traditional Style Real Wood Smoked - 1 Jar (80 Pieces).
Monday, May 25, 2020
Jennifer Delacruz's Memorial Day Forecast
It's lovely, mild weather for Memorial Day today, but Ms. Jennifer's still doing her forecasts from home, and a lot of would-be beach-goers will be foregoing a day in the sun today as well.
At ABC 10 News San Diego:
At ABC 10 News San Diego:
Friday, May 22, 2020
Jose Saramago, Blindness
At Amazon, Jose Saramago, Blindness.
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.
'I'm afraid a lot of these stores are going to go out of business. I see that Pier 1 died, but I couldn't understand how it could still be around after all these years. What was all that junk they were selling? Did anyone need anything they had on offer?'
Heat Wave Coming
Well good --- folks need to get out to the beach.
At LAT:
At LAT:
Heat wave to arrive in Southern California just in time for Memorial Day https://t.co/ZPKHr2Ypll
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 22, 2020
'Empty L.A.'
At LAT:
This piece, about AJ Bleyer's empty Los Angeles video, makes me want to drive around the airport loop just to experience no airport traffic. https://t.co/JyWphbG7AA
— Robin Abcarian (@AbcarianLAT) May 22, 2020
Thursday, May 21, 2020
The Day Coronavirus Nearly Broke the Financial Markets
At WSJ, "The March 16 stock crash was part of a broader liquidity crisis that threatened the viability of America’s companies and municipalities":
On March 16, coronavirus brought the financial system to the brink. Few realized how close it came to going over the edge entirely. https://t.co/kGg568pU1D— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 20, 2020
An urgent call reached Ronald O’Hanley, State Street Corp.’s chief executive, as he sat in his office in downtown Boston. It was 8 a.m. on Monday, March 16.Still more.
A senior deputy told him corporate treasurers and pension managers, panicked by the growing economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic, were pulling billions of dollars from certain money-market funds. This was forcing the funds to try to sell some of the bonds they held.
But there were almost no buyers. Everybody was suddenly desperate for cash.
He and the deputy, asset-management executive Cyrus Taraporevala, had spoken the night before, wrestling with how investors would respond to an emergency interest-rate cut from the Federal Reserve.
Now, they had their answer. In his 34 years in finance, Mr. O’Hanley had weathered plenty of meltdowns, but never one like this.
“The market is fearing the worst,” Mr. O’Hanley told him.
March 16 was the day a microscopic virus brought the financial system to the brink. Few realized how close it came to going over the edge entirely.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 13% that day, the second-biggest one-day fall in history. Stock-market volatility spiked to a record high. Investors struggled to unload even safe bonds, like Treasurys. Companies and government officials were losing access to the lending markets on which they rely to make payroll and build schools.
Prime money-market funds that are owned by big institutional investors and buy a lot of short-term corporate debt—normally safe and boring—had outflows of $60 billion in the week ending that Wednesday, financial-data firm Refinitiv said, among the worst ever. Some $56 billion in client money fled bond funds.
Interest rates on short-term corporate debt surged, peaking on March 25 at 2.43 percentage points above the federal-funds rate—the highest it has been since October 2008, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
The financial system has endured numerous credit crunches and market crashes, and memories of the 1987 and 2008 crises set a high bar for market dysfunction. But longtime investors and those who make a living on Wall Street say mid-March of this year was far more severe in a short period. Moreover, the stresses to the financial system were broader than many had seen.
“The 2008 financial crisis was a car crash in slow motion,” said Adam Lollos, head of short-term credit at Citigroup Inc. “This was like, ‘Boom!’ ”
A barrage of government programs has since pulled the system back from collapse. This account of what happened on one of the worst days the financial markets have ever seen, from many of the executives, money managers and Wall Street veterans who lived it, shows why the rescue effort was so urgent.
The Federal Reserve set the stage for the downturn on Sunday, March 15. Most investors were expecting the central bank to announce its latest response to the crisis the following Wednesday. Instead, it announced at 5 p.m. that evening that it was slashing interest rates and planning to buy $700 billion in bonds to help unclog the markets.
Rather than take comfort in the Fed’s actions, many companies, governments, bankers and investors viewed the decision as reason to prepare for the worst possible outcome from the coronavirus pandemic.
A downdraft in bonds was now a rout.
Mr. O’Hanley was in a good position to see the crisis unfold. His bank provides vital, if unheralded, administrative and bookkeeping services for most of the world’s biggest investors, and runs its own trillion-dollar money manager.
Companies and pension managers have long relied on money-market funds that invest in short-term corporate and municipal-debt holdings considered safe and liquid enough to be classified as “cash equivalents.” They function almost like checking accounts—helping firms manage payroll, pay office leases and move cash around to finance their daily operations.
But that Monday, investors no longer believed certain money funds were cash-like at all. As they pulled their money out, managers struggled to sell bonds to meet redemptions.
In theory, there should have been some give in the system. U.S. regulators had rewritten the rules on money funds in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, replacing their fixed, $1 price with a floating one that moved with the value of their holdings. The changes headed off the panic that could ensue when a fund’s price “breaks the buck,” as one prominent fund had in 2008.
But the rules couldn’t stop a panicked assault like this one. Rumors circulated that some of State Street’s rivals would be forced to prop up their funds. Within days, both Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. stepped in to buy assets from their money funds. Both firms declined to comment.
This was bad news for not only those funds and their investors, but also for the thousands of companies and communities dependent on short-term loan markets to pay their employees. “If junk bonds back up, people can rationalize that away,” Mr. O’Hanley said. “There’s very little ability to rationalize trouble in cash.”
A debt-investing unit of Prudential Financial Inc., one of the largest insurance companies in the world, was also struggling with normally safe securities.
When traders at PGIM Fixed Income tried that Monday to sell a batch of short-term bonds issued by highly rated companies, they found few takers. And banks were reluctant to step in as intermediaries.
“The broker-dealer community was frozen,” said Michael Collins, a senior fixed-income manager at PGIM. “It was as bad as at any point during the great financial crisis.”
Across the country in Southern California, the head of the debt-trading desk at investment firm Capital Group Cos., Vikram Rao, tried to make sense of the dysfunction.
Mr. Rao, who was working remotely that Monday, walked down the 20 steps to his home office at 4:30 a.m. to discover the debt markets were already in disarray. He started calling the senior Wall Street executives he knew at many of the big banks.
Executives told him that Sunday’s emergency Fed rate cut had swung a swath of interest-rate swap contracts in banks’ favor. Companies had locked in superlow interest rates on future debt sales over the past year. But when rates fell even further, the companies suddenly owed additional collateral.
On that Monday, banks had to account for all that new collateral as assets on their books.
So when Mr. Rao called senior executives for an explanation on why they wouldn’t trade, they had the same refrain: There was no room to buy bonds and other assets and still remain in compliance with tougher guidelines imposed by regulators after the previous financial crisis. In other words, capital rules intended to make the financial system safer were, at least in this instance, draining liquidity from the markets.
One senior bank executive leveled with him: “We can’t bid on anything that adds to the balance sheet right now.”
At the same time, the surge in stock-market volatility, along with falling prices on mortgage bonds, had forced margin calls on many investment funds. The additional collateral they owed banks was also booked as assets, adding billions more.
The slump in mortgage bonds was so vast it crushed a group of investors that had borrowed from banks to juice their returns: real-estate investment funds.
The Fed’s bond-buying program, unveiled that Sunday, had earmarked some $200 billion for mortgage-bond purchases. But by Monday bond managers discovered the Fed purchases, while well-intentioned, weren’t nearly enough.
“On that first day, the Fed got completely run over by the market,” said Dan Ivascyn, who manages one of the world’s biggest bond funds and serves as investment chief at Pacific Investment Management Co. “That’s where REITs and other leveraged-mortgage products started getting into serious trouble.”
That Tuesday, UBS Group AG closed two exchange-traded notes tied to mortgage real-estate investment trusts. By Friday, a mortgage trust run by hedge-fund firm Angelo Gordon & Co. had warned its lenders it wouldn’t be able to meet its obligations on future margin calls...
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
Benjamin J. Cohen, Currency Statecraft
Following-up, "China and the Future of the Dollar."
From my former professor and mentor at UCSB, Dr. Benjamin J. Cohen, Currency Statecraft: Monetary Rivalry and Geopolitical Ambition.
From my former professor and mentor at UCSB, Dr. Benjamin J. Cohen, Currency Statecraft: Monetary Rivalry and Geopolitical Ambition.
China and the Future of the Dollar
From Henry Paulson, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, at Foreign Affairs, "The Future of the Dollar: U.S. Financial Power Depends on Washington, Not Beijing":
Keep reading.
NEW: The enduring dominance of the US dollar is remarkable, but its status will be tested by Washington’s ability to weather the COVID-19 storm and emerge with prudent economic policies, writes Hank Paulson in @ForeignAffairs. https://t.co/kVNFM2kxA4
— Paulson Institute (@PaulsonInst) May 19, 2020
In late March, global financial markets were collapsing amid the chaos of the novel coronavirus pandemic. International investors immediately sought refuge in the U.S. dollar, just as they had done during the 2008 financial crisis, and the U.S. Federal Reserve had to make huge sums of dollars available to its global counterparts. Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the primacy of the dollar has not waned.Fuck China. The more the U.S. can do to weaken that communist kleptocracy the better.
The enduring dominance of the dollar is remarkable—especially given the rise of emerging markets and the relative decline of the U.S. economy, from nearly 40 percent of world GDP in 1960 to just 25 percent today. But the dollar’s status will be tested by Washington’s ability to weather the COVID-19 storm and emerge with economic policies that allow the country, over time, to manage its national debt and curb its structural fiscal deficit.
The stature of the dollar matters. The dollar’s role as the primary global reserve currency makes it possible for the United States to pay lower rates on dollar assets than it otherwise would. Equally significant, it enables the country to run larger trade deficits, reduces exchange-rate risk, and makes American financial markets more liquid. Finally, it favors U.S. banks because of their enhanced access to dollar funding.
That the dollar has maintained this stature for so long is a historic anomaly, particularly in the context of a rising China. The Chinese renminbi (RMB) has by far the greatest potential to assume a role rivaling that of the dollar. China’s economic size, prospects for future growth, integration into the global economy, and accelerated efforts to internationalize the RMB all favor an expanded role for the Chinese currency. But by themselves, these conditions are insufficient. And China’s much-touted successes in the realm of fintech—including its rapid deployment of mobile payment systems and the recent pilot project by the People’s Bank of China to test a digital RMB—will not change that. A central bank–backed digital currency does not alter the fundamental nature of the RMB.
Beijing still has major hurdles to overcome before the RMB can truly emerge as a primary global reserve currency. Among other transformative measures, it needs to make more progress in moving to a market-driven economy, improve corporate governance, and develop efficient, well-regulated financial markets that earn the respect of international investors so that Beijing can eliminate capital controls and turn the RMB into a market-determined currency.
Washington should be clear-eyed about what is actually at stake in the competition with China. The United States should maintain its lead in financial and tech innovation, but there is no need to exaggerate the impact of a Chinese digital reserve currency on the U.S. dollar. Above all, the United States must preserve the conditions that created the dollar’s primacy in the first place: a vibrant economy rooted in sound macroeconomic and fiscal policies; a transparent, open political system; and economic, political, and security leadership abroad. In short, sustaining the dollar’s status will not be determined by what happens in China. Rather, it will depend almost entirely on the United States’ ability to adapt its post-COVID-19 economy so that it remains a model of success...
Keep reading.
Jessica Chastain
We watched ""IT Chapter Two" last night. I love Jessica Chastain, and there's a to-die-for "wet t-shirt" scene at start of the film, man.
Photos at the Fappening.
And see, "44 Pictures of Jessica Chastain Will Drive You Frantically Enamored With This Sexy Vixen."
Photos at the Fappening.
And see, "44 Pictures of Jessica Chastain Will Drive You Frantically Enamored With This Sexy Vixen."
Happy Birthday, @jes_chastain! From #ZeroDarkThirty to #Interstellar, which of her 55 acting credits is your favorite? https://t.co/q6YHyaandP pic.twitter.com/2KJpJYZvNs
— IMDb (@IMDb) March 24, 2020
I guess you can say I know how to satisfy. pic.twitter.com/7DhTEtNVU1— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) May 13, 2020
FRIDAY. pic.twitter.com/B1xOjsKQp4— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) May 8, 2020
My ideal day: Margs, Ella Fitzgerald, love poetry, and being in bed before sunset. Happy Birthday Ella <3 pic.twitter.com/r0PjJLlHCD— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) April 25, 2020
Dance party with my sunglasses. Yes it’s come to that. pic.twitter.com/3e4JtL0gUK— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) April 19, 2020
Will Leftists Be Able to Stop Reopening?
At Issues & Insight, "Americans Are Re-Opening. Will Dems Be Able to Stop Them?":
America Is Reopening Itself: Will Politicians Be Able To Stop It? https://t.co/swEeXiOGhi— Issues & Insights (@InsightsIssues) May 19, 2020
Weary of more than two months of lockdowns, lost jobs, vanished income, and emotional distress, Americans are practicing a bit of Irish Democracy, shopping, dining out, gathering, and trying to carry on as before the pandemic arrived without approval from authorities. It was bound to happen.Still more at that top link.
As has been widely noted, we were initially told that we needed to shut down and shelter in place so that we would “flatten the curve” of infection growth to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed by people sick with COVID-19. That benchmark was met a little more than a month into the lockdowns. Time magazine reported in late April that “The U.S. Has Flattened the Curve.” This New York Times chart clearly shows that the flattening began early last month.
Yet many Americans are still under shelter-in-place orders, some of which have been extended. We hate to use a cliche, but politicians have been moving the goalposts. Flattening the curve isn’t good enough. They want to keep people home until there’s a vaccine; or science, which has sadly become a loose term that means whatever the user wants it to, has established an effective treatment; or maybe until there are zero coronavirus cases.
This has rankled more than a few. The masses are fed up with huddling in their homes and are yearning to breathe free.
The center of the “resistance” might be, oddly enough, in California, which has three “Free Counties.” Sutter and Yuba, just north of Sacramento, and Modoc, in the state’s far northeast corner, have reopened without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval. More counties quickly followed, rushing, reports the Sacramento Bee, “to persuade state health officials they are ready to reopen key segments of their local economies on a fast-track basis.”
In Southern California, Orange County engaged Newsom in a bitter battle over reopening beaches there. Newsom closed the shoreline when he saw photos that he didn’t like of people on the sand in Newport Beach. County Supervisor Michelle Steel called it an “act of retribution against Orange County.” But beachgoers eventually won by kicking up such a fuss that Newsom and state authorities were pressured into making a decision they otherwise would not have made.
Meanwhile, Michiganders are chafing under the boot of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has issued arguably the harshest lockdown orders in the country, and has even extended to May 28 her initial closure order for some businesses. The capital in Lansing has been the site of demonstrations by some deeply restless, and in many cases angry, protesters.
“We haven’t had any bloodshed yet,” one member of a Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine recently wrote.
We hope there is none. But tempers are short. One man has already been charged with making death threats against Whitmer and the state attorney general. And we’ve seen members of the Michigan Militia swear they aren’t going to allow law enforcement to arrest an Owosso barber who reopened his business because he had no other income. How long can she hold back demands for freedom — in America?
Monday, May 18, 2020
Fearmonger Fauci
I like Dr. Fauci. Axios had a good comparison between Fauci and Dr. Birx yesterday. See, "Why Deborah Birx is the real power doctor."
But I get why people have a problem with him.
See Michelle Malkin, "Protect Your Family from Fearmonger Fauci":
But I get why people have a problem with him.
See Michelle Malkin, "Protect Your Family from Fearmonger Fauci":
As a responsible parent & citizen, I will NOT let terror rule my children’s lives. We cannot hide from germs, people or adversity. https://t.co/SYwNj4Ce9R#FireFauci #NoGatesVaccine #ReopenAmerica #ReopenSchools #FreeTheChildren
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 14, 2020
This Mother’s Day weekend, my family defied government pandemania. We drove out east from Colorado Springs to the tiny town of Calhan for a lovely little hike in the purple-and-gold-hued Paint Mines archeological district. Unmasked, we basked in the sunshine, fresh air and freedom. The park was teeming with moms like me who put family bonding over “social distancing.”Still more.
We were not alone — and that was a glorious thing.
There is nothing public health fossil Dr. Anthony Fauci can do or say to stop me from making the best choices for my children’s health, sanity and resilience. He appeared before the Senate on Tuesday to heckle states like Colorado not to get back to business — back to life — too soon and too quickly. “Needless suffering and death” will occur, he told The New York Times. “I think we better be careful (that) we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune from the deleterious effects,” he testified.
Irked by Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s very necessary reminder that no federal infectious disease bureaucrat is the “end-all” decider of our fate, Fauci warned against reopening schools because children in New York are “presenting with COVID-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome.”
How dare you accuse us parents of being “cavalier” with our children’s health, Fauci, when you are scaring them with dubious, unverified claims connecting a few cases of an alleged mystery pediatric disease to the coronavirus?
How dare you toss around so cavalierly the uncorroborated specter of “Kawasaki syndrome” (a rare but treatable disease) while untold numbers among the 57 million K-12 students suffer from the effects of panic-induced anxiety, depression, phobias and isolation?
Here are some actual facts about Fauci’s Kawasaki hype: Peer-reviewed studies over the last several years have identified multiple theories of the inflammatory disease’s etiology, including genetic factors, environmental triggers, superantigens, bacterial infections and viruses. A blinded, case-control retrospective study on kids at Children’s Hospital in Denver investigating whether one strain of human coronavirus infection was a factor among Kawasaki syndrome patients “failed to demonstrate an association.” The Mayo Clinic diseases and conditions information website states that “scientists don’t believe the disease is contagious from person to person.” Moreover, the Mayo Clinic states: “Kawasaki disease is usually treatable, and most children recover from Kawasaki disease without serious problems.”
The truth is that Fauci is misleading American families and educators through arrogant acts of both omission and commission. The Kawasaki lie is not his first or last lie. Before he embraced masks for all, he smugly dismissed the measure in March during a “60 Minutes” interview because it would “make people ‘feel’ a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection people think that it is.”
Now, he says, face coverings “should be a very regular part” of our daily lives.
Dutiful reporters ignore the flip-flop, slavishly acting as stenographers for Fauci and the rest of the dishonest “deep state.” “Masks are here to stay,” The Washington Post Lifestyle section chirped last week. To which I say:
Hell, no.
As a responsible parent and citizen, I will not let terror rule my children’s lives. I speak from heart-wrenching personal experience over the past five years as my teenage daughter, already battling chronic pain and joint hypermobility requiring multiple surgeries, also suffered from severe clinical OCD that left her unable to do mundane things — like use a public bathroom, eat out at a restaurant or ride in a crowded vehicle. She lost friends. She fell into depression. Her physical and emotional health deteriorated. She was homebound, helplessly trapped in the worst kind of self-imposed lockdown...
Anthony Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem
Ed Driscoll posts the New York Times book review here, "BOTCH ON THE RHINE."
And at Amazon, Anthony Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II.
And at Amazon, Anthony Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II.
Perfect Country Girls
Seen on Twitter:
Perfect 🙏 pic.twitter.com/DFUqEXFneV— Country Girls (@DownHomeGirls) May 15, 2020
— Country Girls (@DownHomeGirls) May 18, 2020
— Country Girls (@DownHomeGirls) February 5, 2020
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