As reminders…

Alpha–Variant first identified in the UK

Beta–Variant first identified in South Africa

Gamma–Variant first identified in Brazil

Delta–Variant first identified in India

Omicron–Variant first identified in South Africa

Updating the chart above:

Ancestral: B.1.1.529 Omicron (and cousins)

Transmissibility: All the +

Immune Evasiveness: All the +

Vaccine Effectiveness: Check (for hospitalization)

Also as a reminder:

Polio

–Thanks to a UK reader who sent along an article about an outbreak of vaccine associated polio in London. Wastewater surveillance will occasionally pop for polio virus, but London has seen a bit of spike recently. Genotyping suggests it is one of the reverse mutant polio vaccine viruses that becomes capable, albeit somewhat uncommonly, of causing polio, when one of the attenuated polio vaccine viruses hits the magic mutation back to fully capable virus. Since London does not have complete pediatric primary vaccinations or adolescent boosters (thanks anti-vaxx movement!), there is a population that will be susceptible. So if traveling in London, living there (or maybe in the Jolly Ol’ in general), may be time to check on your antibodies titers or inquire if a booster might be good for you. Granted, your chances of catching polio remain quite remote–London is a huge town. But, authorities there are concerned that wastewater levels suggest there has been some sustained person to person transmission already. Even if you do catch a reverse mutant, no guarantee that you will get the kind of polio you are thinking about, but there will still be a chance.

Grand Canyon Mystery Illness

Over the past month, at least 118 hikers in the Grand Canyon or Colorado River back country have had sudden onset of profound vomiting and diarrhea. While some of the vomiting (at least) could be due to heat-related illness like heat stroke, in some groups pulled out of the Canyon by other campers or park rangers have had unaffected (at the time of evac) members get the same symptoms while in their air conditioned hotel rooms later that night or next day, suggesting an infectious cause. Authorities are suspicious of a norovirus-like GI bug. Norovirus is a family most famous for cruise ship GI disease. I have not read reports of fatalities or anything like that, but if your summer travels will take you to the greater Grand Canyon area, wash your damn hands religiously. Like it’s the early days of COVID, with the whole alphabet song. Best way to reduce exposure to these kind of GI bugs, which are usually spread by touching something contaminated, and then touching your mouth or food. Also, filtered water won’t cut it. Most filtration systems for camping do not have pores small enough to filter out viruses like norovirus. You need to sterilize your water; boiling is the easiest way. If you prefer chemical means, make sure your chemical of choice is known to sterilize viruses too.

Pediatric mystery hepatitis

–No major updates yet; this is more a marker that we are still tracking this. In the US, there are 290 total cases now being reviewed by the CDC since last October, spread across nearly every state in the Union. Other than examining a possible link to adenovirus type 41, there is no real news here yet.

Coronavirus

–Official cases in the US have stabilized, although leading indicators like cold/flu symptom searches on Google and doctor visits for cold/flu symptoms per Carnegie Mellon’s tracker are consistent with the still large number of “unofficial” cases I hear about. The death rate for the omicron cousins waves is predictably low, and that’s in comparison to the official cases. When you back of the envelope account for the large number of at home tests that are popping positive, but not reported, and the omicron cousins are well, well below flu mortality.

That said, they can still be dangerous, particularly in patients with known risk factors. So if you have high risk factors and pop positive, don’t be shy about seeking one of the early treatments!

In Europe, you are seeing some BA.4 and BA.5 driven activity in some countries. Again, I suspect there is more simmering under the radar there too.

In China over the weekend, mass testing in Shanghai discovered only two cases outside of known exposure chains. They will likely still need to watch for another week or two to be outside the incubation period if China is dead set on “lockdowns until zero COVID.” Which it certainly appears that they are.

–Speaking of early treatments, I am sure some of you without high risk symptoms have wondered about access to early treatments if you pop positive for COVID, just to relieve the cold/flu/feels like a bad hangover malaise of it all.

Sadly, Pfizer has abandoned a trial of its COVID pill treatment in standard risk patients after failing to meet its primary endpoint of self reported improvement in symptoms within four days of treatment.

Author’s own editorial comment: That seems, on its face, like a pretty low bar to clear, but could not distinguish itself from placebo effect in the control arm for statistical significance.

They did show a reduction in hospitalization and death within the standard risk group, but that was a difference of 3 hospitalizations/deaths out of 420ish in the Paxlovid treated arm versus 10 out of 420ish in the placebo arm. While the trend is in favor of Paxlovid, those numbers are so low (as even Pfizer conceded) that they could have happened by chance alone, and it’s also not clear if those are COVID specific hospitalizations/deaths or all of them.

Pfizer’s conclusion was that the rate of hospitalization/death was so low in standard risk patients who got COVID that they would not be able to show significance without massively expanding the study, and they are not willing to do that, not when they cannot even hit the self reported symptomatic improvement.

–In other big COVID news, the FDA approved the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for children 6 months to 5 years old. This was not without some controversy, because obviously about all things vaccine related since the messaging on them was botched so badly in the very beginning. Probably the most relevant and justified is that these trials took place during omicron waves, and severe COVID was so rare in this age group that vaccine prevention of severe COVID could not be measured, despite enrolling thousands of patients. Part of the justification for this recommendation though has been a pre-print publication claiming that COVID has been a “top 5” cause of death in this age group; however, that pre-print was pulled for revisions over the weekend after concerns about how COVID caused deaths were determined in its methods.

So instead, in its press release, the FDA emphasized that in a ~230 patient subgroup of 6 month-5 year olds who received the vaccines, the “immune response” was tested and found to be similar to immune responses in adolescents and adults after the primary vaccination series. “Immune response”, if you’re wondering, is how to say “antibody titers” without saying “antibody titers.” Because again, to follow the FDA and CDC on this, antibody titers will get your vaccine or booster approved, but they cannot be relied on to predict protection from severe COVID, and thus cannot be used to determine need for, or timing of, a booster.

At least on the latter part, they have a point, as similar to the age 5-12 set which got approved mostly during an omicron wave, breakthrough was fast and fairly common for kids age 6 months to 5. This is directly from the FDA’s press release on the approval:

“An analysis of cases of COVID-19 occurring at least 14 days after the second dose among approximately 5,400 children in this age group without evidence of prior infection with SARS-CoV-2 was conducted during the time period in which the omicron variant was the predominant circulating strain. In this analysis, among participants 6 through 23 months of age, 64% of whom had blinded follow-up for more than two months after the second dose, the vaccine was 50.6% effective in preventing COVID-19. Among participants 2 through 5 years of age, 72% of whom had blinded follow-up for more than two months after the second dose, the vaccine was 36.8% effective in preventing COVID-19.”

To be clear, that is preventing COVID-19 symptoms, because again, hospitalization was too rare in this age group to measure effectiveness against, despite enrolling 5400 kids. So, for example, among 2 to 5 year olds, the vaccine was only 36.8% effective in preventing breakthrough cold/flu symptoms from COVID.

So to recap all of that, you have a vaccine being tested in very young children (the youngest, in fact, that we can expect to form an antibody response to the vaccine) who are at the lowest risk of severe COVID. At no point, even in the highest transmission periods of the most severe variants of COVID, were hospital beds being overrun and systems near collapse from hospitalization of this age group. It is being tested well after the virus has made its “more contagious, less severe” turn definitively, and most likely, for good. You need to enroll 5400 kids and squint while turning the page just right to see much in the way of protection from cold/flu symptoms, and did not actually enroll enough to meaningfull assess effectiveness for the only metric that matters for this pandemic, prevention of hospitalization (because this age group just doesn’t get enough severe COVID anyways). You tested antibodies in a subset, and found the number went up similar to the older kids, adolescents and adults who got a primary vaccine series (as you would expect for any vaccine)–but you’ve spilt a lot of ink on why that number doesn’t matter, only an arbitrary time after your primary vaccination to get booster shots, and only recently re-stratified by actual patient risk of severe COVID.

Man, hope no one notices that inconvenient incongruity.

But because antibodies… sorry, let me get the language right here, antibodies “immune response” is similar to older patients in whom you could actually measure pandemic related metrics like “severe COVID, hospitalization and death”, it’s close enough for approval.

It is disappointing 2.5 years into a pandemic that major health institutions still struggle to recognize the hospitalization rate from COVID as the key metric that matters, or if they do, are still willing to move goal posts in ways that will seem confusing and feed “misinformation” on the internet.

The Bonfire of the Credibilities remains undefeated.

About the best that can be said is that there was no significant incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis reported in the 6 month-5 year cohort, but ongoing safety evaluation will continue as part of the approval (as it does for all approved medications, for the record).

We mentioned when the FDA’s expert panel recommended approval a few weeks ago that news media coverage closed with expectation that this vaccine would not be… rapidly…. adopted by patients out there, unless their 6 month-5 year old had some sort of known underlying risk factor already. For those kids, you can make an argument. For the rest, the benefits, at least from this data, are awfully hand wavy and make a lot of assumptions for effectiveness for severe COVID based on lab test comparisons to older age groups. Lab tests, which again, are totes valid for approvals like this because they obviously predict likelihood of some degree of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, but at the same time crazy to use for determining who and when boosters should be given, because they totally do -not- predict the likelihood of immunity–according to the same set of authorities.

–I know, I know. Given that kind of clarity in decision making and criteria applied to those decisions, hard to believe poll results like this.

–Speaking of breakthrough and vaccination, new data is out on various combinations of mRNA vaccine +/- booster +/- previous infection with any SARS-CoV-2 variant versus symptomatic BA.2 (the first omicron cousin) infection, and you can find it published here. The TL;DR version is that previous infection alone reduced the chances of breakthrough BA.2 symptoms by a little under 50%. Two doses of vaccine had no effect whatsoever (although most had been vaccinated more than 6 months ago; I am still very curious to see if they draw a cut-off to antibody titers or the new T-cell memory response PCR we discussed last week). Two doses and prior infection and two doses with a booster and NO known previous infection were both a little more than 50% effective at preventing symptomatic BA.2. But the winner was two doses, a booster AND prior infection, with a whopping 77% reduction in the chances of breakthrough BA.2.

The implication is that as more and more of us catch a breakthrough omicron cousin, your chances of getting symptomatic reinfection are going down. This may account for the reduction in severity, along with viral mutation towards more contagious/less severe, as your immune system is getting more comfortable with SARS-CoV-2, avoiding poor clearance choices and Ah-nold freakouts that are the main cause of hospitalization and death, and thus the main pandemic threat. So good news in the long term…

–In other long term COVID news, ask and ye shall receive, apparently. We hypothesized just last week that with the less severe variants of COVID, the lingering symptoms of long COVID (like due to lingering inflammatory response to the virus) may be less frequent. Or in short, the less aggressive the COVID variant, the less likely you are to get long COVID.

And in turns out this may be the case! New research published in The Lancet using self reported long COVID symptoms through the Zoe app show that “long COVID” during the omicron heavy period was reported in 4.5% out of ~50,000 respondees, and this was down from 10.8% of ~50,000 well matched respondees in the delta heavy period in the UK. Now, the caveat here is that long COVID, near as I can tell, in the app is just defined as persistent COVID symptoms (cold/flu-ish symptoms plus some COVID specific ones like smell/taste) more than 4 weeks after diagnosis. So this may be better described as “long clearance period”, and at least some may actually be re-infection with a either a different COVID strain or another cold/flu virus. BUT, that is a pretty big drop and differences due to re-infection/different infection likely don’t account for the all of that difference between 4.5% and 10.8% long COVID in omicron and delta, respectively. This also does not reflect long COVID of the more “exotic” type, like the alopecia (hair loss) or sudden onset type 1 diabetes–but those are fortunately way more rare than 4.5-10.8% of all COVID infections!

Socioeconomic

–We do have a few items worth commenting on this week. First, surprising no one, Reuters found that trust in news media continues to plummet around the world, as the Bonfire rages. Trust in media is especially in the US. While I suspect part of that is each side of the great tribal divide between “R” and “D”, each told and thinking that the preferred media of the other side is “fake news”, I also think it is growing awareness that competitive pressure really has been eroding journalistic integrity. For example, a few weeks back a reader reached out with a Twitter thread that had been making the rounds about coverage of some of the recent US primary elections. In short, the news coverage from a VERY prominent source that the Twitter author generally trusted cherry picked samples to fit a narrative, with the Twitter author wondering aloud if the article had been written before the elections were even over.

(Spoiler alert: Probably! At the very least, there is a good chance that the selection of “lessons” and examples from the election fit either the personal political leanings of the reporter and/or their editor)

This finally caused us to remember what eluded us oh so many updates ago about a particular phenomenon when reading the news– Gell-Mann Amnesia, which was coined by Michael Crichton (yes, “Jurassic Park” guy) in one of his novels. In short, Gell-Mann Amnesia is the peculiar sensation of reading the newspaper on a subject you know well, and spotting obvious errors or over/under interpretations in a story on that subject, and how wrong the reporting was as a result of the reporting not really understanding the subject. But you go on to the next article, or the next day, reading on a subject that you know little about in the news, and assume they got the reporting on that exactly and you are now well informed on it! This forgetting of the possibility, if not tendency, to error in the news is Gell-Mann Amnesia. We described it in a previous update (I am not going to go back and link it), but glad I finally f***ing remembered the name Michael gave it, so I can give some credit there…

Anyways, I am sure it has happened to you too. And probably still does. I noticed an egregiously wrong explanation of a medical condition in another article just this week, and immediately thought of Gell Mann Amnesia again…

As that has become more common, or at least more noticeable, especially with all of the correcting and explanation I have had to do of just pandemic (or monkeypox or other “could be pandemic!” infectious disease outbreaks), I am sure that has contributed to erosion of trust in media as well…

–Secondly, got sent this by a reader. It’s behind the paywall, but you can get the key portions in the 3 minute “listen to this article” near the top if click it and throw some head phones on. It’s schismogenesis explained… but I am glad it’s moving more into the collective consciousness, because recognizing it, and the artificial and tribal separation it creates, is a key task for us this decade if we are to make it out closer to the world we hope for.

–Third, you have this article from Reuters, but the real money parts of it are here:

“At a summit of EU leaders later this week, the EU was planning a new initiative that would structurally decrease poorer nations’ reliance on Russian fertilisers by helping them develop their own fertiliser plants.

But at a meeting with EU envoys last week, the EU Commission explicitly opposed the text, warning that supporting fertiliser production in developing nations would be inconsistent with the EU energy and environment policies, officials said.”

Again, it is worth stressing that much of the arable land in many developing nations is only arable at all with fertilizers, or arable enough to meet the caloric needs of its population with fertilizers. The cost of which has skyrocketed, the availability of which has become limited, and whose production is a direct byproduct of oil processing, particularly for ammonia based fertilizers. Natural fertilizers can help, but are not available in the quantity needed and ALSO require extensive diversion of food crops to animal feed (manure don’t make itself, folks).

Thus, the EU Commission is implicitly stating that starvation and the fall of governments in the developing world is a cost it is willing to pay for its own energy and environmental policies.

That is a remarkable concession.

–Even more remarkable as Germany continues plans to shut down nuclear power plants, but is re-starting coal fired plants (one of many articles here) as Russia squeezes the continent’s natural gas supply as part of its broader war fighting strategy.

So in sum, Germany is willing to forgo its energy and environmental policies to meet its own energy needs–but will not sacrifice those same policies to help developing nations secure enough fertilizer to feed themselves.

As I said, simply remarkable.

–Also on the negative ledger is Germany upping its alarm level over supplies of LNG heading towards winter. Ecuador has now seen 11 days of riots all across the country with protestors calling for reduced prices for energy and price caps on food. Yesterday reports indicated a police station had been overrun with one dead in a more rural Ecuadorian town as part of protests there. Pakistan got only a single bid for LNG supplies, and at what would be a record price, increasing concerns about its ongoing energy crisis. And some 40,000 Danish farmers have taken to the streets protesting environmental regulations that they say will bankrupt them given what it takes to actually commercially farm. So at least EU members aren’t discriminating against just emerging market farmers, I guess?

–On the plus side for the world this week, the lockdowns in China have had the unintended benefit of reducing Chinese energy demand, particularly for coal. Coal supplies for India are reportedly now normal for this time of year, same for China. This will keep the price of this important energy source for much of the world relatively constrained.

Further, the cost of rice is actually coming down. South Asian monsoon season is picking up strength, which will help yields of rice in this region as well–along with keeping China’s hydro plants running (meaning less of a bid from China for coal/LNG for electricity–hopefully).

–Wrapping up the section on supply and demand of energy, an extremely important Twitter thread on how to best combat current energy inflation costs and starve the Russian war machine of its energy-based finance.

–Finally, on the “crypto winter” and the predictable finger wagging now taking place…

Without question the crypto space has become rampant with fraud, Ponzi scheme “DeFi” (decentralized finance), and “rug pulls” as unscrupulous hucksters flooded the space to take advantage of poor information, absent regulation, and a hype train that created a massive bubble in all things “crypto”, “NFT” and “Web3.0” in the last several years. The “crypto bro” criminals who perpetrated these schemes deserve all of the scorn, and hopefully criminal charges, coming their way.

As always in frauds and Ponzi schemes though, there is no small share of victim blaming. In fact, it’s why most people are reticent to report that they have been victimized by a scam– no one likes to admit they got fooled, and threw money at unbelievable and unverifiable claims.

But is that where the fault ends?

Why was there such a fertile ground, and so many willing to close their eyes and take massive leaps of faith, particularly on “DeFi Stablecoin” platforms promising 20%, 30%, even 90% APY interest on “deposits” with them?

Since 2008/2009, the Federal Reserve (and much of the world) embarked on what you saw called “quantitative easing.” A big part of this was reducing the Federal Reserve interest rate, which is now in the news for hikes (at least in the US) to combat inflation. There is some arcana involved here that is beyond our scope, but the key thing to remember is that the interest rate your savings account at the bank pays you is a function of that interest rate. As the Federal Reserve lowers the interest rate, so too does the bank lower the interest rate it pays you for your savings deposit.

This rate has been kept insulting low since the global financial crisis, and even though the Federal Reserve is now raising rates, has not appreciably risen at the banks yet. Any savings account you look it at a FDIC insured bank or credit union is going to pay you around 1% APY on your deposit (if that). As a measure of how far that is from more typical interest rates for savings accounts, I have some series EE savings bonds my grandfather bought forever ago that are earning between 4.5-8% depending on when he bought them. If you bought a series EE bond today, it would pay 0.1% interest.

The Federal Reserve has famously sought an ~2% inflation rate per year, and as you are well aware, inflation in the things you need is running much, much higher than 2%.

So if you have money in a savings account or saving bond earning 0.1-1% APY, you automatically losing money, at least measured in the amount of stuff your savings account could buy at the beginning of the year versus what it can buy at the end of the year. Despite being a “savings” account and earning interest!

And that interest will then be taxed every year, adding insult to injury.

This is financial repression of savings, making savings rates less than inflation, and –discourages– savings.  You only lose money slowly in a savings account these days, and really, the only excuse to have one is just to not be stuffing excess cash under a mattress, but in an insured and stable place with at least a pretend return.

And this was by design. They wanted to encourage spending to keep the economy moving during the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Except they have kept the rates deliberately low, and the spigot on, for decades, because as the market reaction to rises in the interest rate shows, you cannot turn that spigot off without crashing the economy.

The downside of this financial repression of savings is what you’ll see called “TINA” on financial sites and twitter feeds, which stands for “There Is No Alternative.” If you cannot get a risk free return, like in a savings account or savings bond, but instead only get an interest rate that guarantees a loss versus inflation, then TINA–there is no (safe) alternative. You are implicitly encouraged to either spend the money on crap you otherwise don’t need (pulling demand forward, and throwing off future supply/demand dynamics) or you have to make riskier and riskier investments. The latter is the context where TINA shows up among the finance guys, because that is where average people are being pushed by this policy. After all, the expected return in investments is a function of the risk. Stocks generally return higher than a savings account, but only because (as this year has shown) stocks can also lose money too. If TINA, and the money has to go somewhere, it will start to find homes in increasingly high risk places, and be particularly susceptible to anyone offering a significant return. Especially a guaranteed significant return.

Thus, you get this:

Celsius is one of an increasing number of crypto DeFi platforms offering suspiciously high APY. Explicitly, Celsius called itself a crypto bank, luring everyone whose savings account was getting slaughtered versus inflation in actual banks with at least a marketing veneer of similar safety, but a “savings account” that actually beat the inflation they were feeling.

Of course, there is an obvious question around Celsius (and full disclosure–I was not at any point invested in any DeFi project, let alone Celsius and only heard about it as it started to blow up).

If a real, traditional bank can’t do better than 1%, how is a crypto start up that makes no real world loans for real world cash flow good for an 18.63% APY?

Turns out, they’re not good for it after all. They pay that with new money coming in, until new money stops coming in, at which point it dies. This is also known as a “Ponzi Scheme”, and Celsius is a big one that blew up just recently.

But TINA, right? If your traditional, secure savings accounts are losing money to inflation for over 10 years at this point, you can see why people are seeing that 18.63%, choosing to believe, closing their eyes, and rolling the dice on it. Especially as inflation took off towards the end of last year.

Even more amazing, despite savings accounts getting slowly bled out by manipulated low interest rates and inflation, you still get lecturing headlines and articles like these, which was merely the first hit on a Google search for “americans are not saving enough”. You’ll find plenty telling you that you are not saving enough for retirement or for emergency expenses, going back for years.

People aren’t saving? Wonder why not?  

Are they all reckless, spending freely without any thought for tomorrow? Pinched by inflation and high and rising cost of living everywhere for everything? Or is that, plus rationally responding to the interest paid on “savings” accounts, meant to safely build wealth, for well over a decade now, and parking money elsewhere–at higher risk?  

Headlines are shocked that people in their millions fall for internet scams, DeFi ponzis, dubious cryptos pumped by paid (and often in on it) “influencers” and NFTs promising suspiciously high returns. One wonders how much of it is driven by perceived need to get a return over the inflation they see and feel in the things they need to buy

Traditional, safe investments are not getting that job done. Again, by central design.

So yes, while I do think financial illiteracy plays a part in the “success” (for awhile) of ponzi schemes like Celsius–gullibility is only part of it. Despite how often gullibility gets emphasized to show that only fools “invested” in things like Dogecoin (which deliberately begin as a -joke- to show how easy it was to create a new crypto coin that did nothing).

But in a world of TINA, I suspect no small part fits these Leonard Cohen lyrics:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Is it that much of a stretch to believe that people whose savings accounts cannot get them ahead of their bills and inflation saw an APY that promised them hope, wanted to believe, and then rolled the dice hoping they wouldn’t get burned? (and do the crypto shysters preying on that hope deserve all that is coming their way for that, and more?)

Is it truly all their own fault?

Central bank policy has been to encourage gambling, just frank gambling, to find a yield that actually provides “savings”, preservation of wealth to spent later on retirement or rainy days, by making sure TINA in safe, actual savings accounts and bonds.

Hell, even outright gambling, in both traditional and legal online casinos, is now north of $230 billion dollars a year. Does that surprise anyone?  That is more than the gross earnings of the top 3 pharma companies (by gross earnings) combined.  But when even savings accounts and CDs are guaranteed losers, for a decade, versus your rising costs, are you not encouraging this “why not” behavior? Doesn’t a shot at a literal craps table start looking like a reasonable alternative? After all, the numbers are stacked against you, the house is going to win its edge–at the craps table and in a savings account.

At least with craps, there’s a chance of a hot streak that sees you walk with more purchasing power than you started with. You can’t even say that about savings products right now. You literally can’t.

Yet the news media, the financial media, politicians and the Fed are shocked, -shocked- to find gambling going on in this casino.  Including the literal casino gambling.  

Never, though, is the finger pointed at the policy failures and fraud that led to economic calamities that low interest policies (QE and other acronyms) were supposed to fix.  Even now, they blame everything else but what they have done for the inflation you see, and economic calamities unfurling. Even as savings rates are still 0.1-1%, far below inflation, and chasing money that might have been saved and stored to raise all boats into ever riskier places trying to keep ahead of inflation.

The same experts at the Fed and other institutions, charged with financial stability and preventing/prosecuting fraud, who somehow missed the mortgage backed securities derivatives bubble in 2006-2008, believed it was “contained” to subprime, and believed inflation was transitory for most of last year, have created intended consequences with their policy here.

Just to show you how dismal the science of economics can be, here is an article from April of last year describing how Americans have “$5.4 trillion (with a “t”) in ‘excess savings'” ready to be unleashed in a spending orgy that would power strong economic growth to end 2021. As well as discussing how those Americans had used stimmies and slow times during COVID to rebuild their savings and pay down debt. Possibly too prudently, the article implies, as the economy was not strong yet, waiting to be powered by that multi-trillion dollar tsunami of “excess savings.”

By the beginning of this month, here is another article with headline alarm bells are ringing that Americans are dipping deeply into savings to maintain their standard of living in the face of runaway inflation, and could be tapped out “within a few months”–with lower income families’ savings already wiped out. And now they have been dangerously, some might say foolishly, gambling on reckless investments in meme stocks, NFTs and crypto DeFi ponzis promising 90% APY, in a “Golden Era of Fraud” according to some.

Life comes at you fast, apparently.

And you can easily find more examples of this policy schizophrenia and logical incongruity over and over again, nearly everywhere you look. It’s not just the Fed–I highlight them only because they are going to skate, yet again, from the predictable consequences of behavior they incentivized.

If not a Dark Age, then it is truly a Golden Age of Willful Ignorance and Fraud, and a Golden Age for Leadership that does not actually lead, let alone demonstrate the character that -should- lead.  The Bonfire grows, but it is not, and should not, be done yet.  The powers in heaven -should- be driven from their courses, if for nothing else than their recent track record.  And we should cheer that.  Raise our heads and be glad when the proverbial Day of the Lord finally comes, as we hope and pray it shall, and that which clearly is not working is made anew into something that does.

–Your chances of catching coronavirus this week are equivalent to the chances that, having mentioned it, we must end with a link to it.

–Your chances of catching monkeypox are equivalent to the chances that we will end on a down musical note on a summer Friday though…

<Paladin>