Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 3.19.2020

Thousands attended Miami gay festival; several later tested positive for coronavirus

High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19

Marijuana and COVID-19

Cities Run By Liberals Shut Down Gun Sales Using The Coronavirus Pandemic As An Excuse

Philly schools forbid graded ‘remote instruction’ during shutdown for equity concerns

Clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients with digestive symptoms in Hubei, China: a descriptive, cross-sectional, multicenter study 

South Carolina employee lied about having coronavirus that shut down company

Saints Coach Sean Payton Tests Positive for Coronavirus

99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says

Clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients with digestive symptoms in Hubei, China: a descriptive, cross-sectional, multicenter study

At least 28 priests in northern Italy have died from COVID-19

California releases $150M to build isolation zones in hotels and on beaches for the 60,000 homeless people expected to get coronavirus - as Gov. Newsom requests Navy ship for additional hospital beds and alerts the National Guard to control panic buyers

Experts warn over scale of Wuhan outbreak [From January 2020]

SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: The most important research questions

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 3.11.2020

Acute Myocardial Injury of Patients with Coronavirus Disease 2019

From a well respected friend and intensivist/A&E consultant who is currently in northern Italy

What Do We Do When the Coronavirus Bankrupts the Health Insurance Industry

Almost 200 North Korean Soldiers Have Reportedly Died From the Coronavirus, While Thousands More Are in Quarantine. The Government Won’t Acknowledge They Even Exist.

Russia, Which Closed Its Border in January, Has Coronavirus Under Control

Coronavirus: Iran Reports Leap in Death Toll

Abbas Declares State of Emergency as Coronavirus Spreads to West Bank

Estimate the incubation period of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19)

How Much $$ Will the CDC Profit From a COVID-19 Vaccine?

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 3.10.2020

Coronavirus can travel twice as far as official ‘safe distance’ and stay in air for 30 minutes, Chinese study finds

COVID-19 Epidemic Outside China: 34 Founders and Exponential Growth

Police Quarantine California Neighborhood After Coronavirus Death

Coronavirus Map Live: Third Person Dies in UK — Cases Surge to 273 After Huge Increase

Hungary: 7th Coronavirus Case, Celebrations Cancelled, No Flights to Northern Italy

Five Schools in Pennsylvania Shut Down Due to Coronavirus Exposure

Here’s What’s Coming for America as the Coronavirus Spread: Medical Martial Law

Coronavirus Death Toll in France Mounts to 16 With 949 Confirmed Cases

Novel corona virus disease (COVID‐19) in pregnancy: What clinical recommendations to follow?

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 3.9.2020

Testimony of a surgeon working in Bergamo, in the heart of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak

Scientists may have found a way to prevent coronavirus spread

Coronavirus Update: Cases Skyrocket In Germany, Prompting Economic Concerns

Gates-funded program will soon offer home-testing kits for new coronavirus

Discovery of anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents from commercially available flavor via docking screening

Inhibitors for Novel Coronavirus Protease Identified by Virtual Screening of 687 Million Compounds

Coronavirus: Ten Dead in China Quarantine Hotel Collapse

Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out About Novel Coronavirus

Iran Reports Its Largest Coronavirus Death Toll Within 24-Hour Period

Netherlands: Big Jump in Breda Coronavirus Cases; 34% of Country’s Patients in Noord-Brabant

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 3.7.2020

Virtual Screening of Inhibitors Against Spike Glycoprotein of 2019 Novel Corona Virus: A Drug Repurposing Approach

The best, and the worst, of the Coronavirus dashboards

Identification of COVID-19 Can be Quicker through Artificial Intelligence framework using a Mobile Phone-Based Survey in the Populations when Cities/Towns Are …

As tonnes of used masks pile up, China struggles to cope with medical waste

How Taiwan managed to avoid a coronavirus outbreak 

Clinical trials for a new coronavirus vaccine approved at a Seattle research institute 

N.Y. Cases Surge; Italian, French Lawmakers Ill: Virus Update

As the coronavirus spreads, one study predicts that even the best-case scenario is 15 million dead and a $2.4 trillion hit to global GDP

Adviser to Iran’s Foreign Minister Dies of Coronavirus

Stanford closes arts facilities due to coronavirus threat

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update 2.25.2020

Large parts of China ease coronavirus curbs, many report no new cases

Coronavirus is China’s fastest-spreading public health crisis, President Xi Jinping says

Coronavirus credit crunch hits millions of Chinese firms

Coronavirus: China’s car sales collapse, as officials warn of sharp trade decline to come

A novel coronavirus outbreak of global health concern

Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus–The species and its viruses, a statement of the Coronavirus Study Group

The Fall of Wuhan

You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus: Most cases are not life-threatening

Airline stocks tumble as the coronavirus spreads outside of China

Coronavirus: China likely overestimating economic recovery by leaving out hard-hit small businesses

Emerging coronavirus 2019-nCoV pneumonia

Coronavirus LIVE: Italy added to quarantine list as panic buying leaves shop shelves empty

Incubation period of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infections among travellers from Wuhan, China, 20–28 January 2020

Coronavirus: South Korea to test 200,000 sect members as pandemic fears hit markets

Harvard Professor Says 40-70 Per Cent of People Worldwide Will Be Infected With Coronavirus

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Video: Italian city in flames following clashes between cops & Antifa protesters

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Laurel & Hardy? No Larry & Paul

As I frequently say, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer.  In fact I reckon I take prided in how little I actually know.  But every now and then I am able to string together a couple a few thoughts and sentences in such a manner to express what I honestly and truly believe and this is one of those rare times. When it comes to economics, I am no economist but when I read what is proposed and written by many of the “so-called’ experts in this field regarding the present economic standing of the United States, in particular Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, I always think of what Milton Friedman once said: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.”

I would not be surprised if a lot of cats consider Paul Krugman and Larry Sumner’s as overly smart and learned men. I would agree and note there are several reason for this, inclusive of their Ivy league educations and their incessant habit of speaking in technical terms employed to make them seem smarter than they are and/or to confuse the listener when they are proven wrong and/or are just guessing about what they think versus what they actually know. I suggest this because both believe economic theory is ALWAYS right which herein my problem with them is. Let us start with Krugman, who clearly has no clue or understanding of middle and lower class Americans.

If you have ever heard Paul Krugman talk or read anything he has penned to paper, one halcyon observation that can be made is that in his astigmatic perspective, he is always right and never wrong. No matter the topic, especially when the subject is rooted in macroeconomics, if you disagree or refute his propositions, you are often accused of having bad data, reconstructing history or just being plane ole illogical. This unceasing proclivity of Krugman’s to be correct in theory but incorrect based on real world standards would be amusing if it were not so dangerous. For example Krugman frequently invents or pretends to have been the economist who predicted the housing bubble. What he forgets to add is that in 2002 he wrote that the Federal Reserve and Alan Greenspan needed to “create a housing bubble to replace the NASDAQ bubble” in order to combat the recession at the time. When this was pointed out, you guessed it, he explained away the unexplainawayable.

He also has a habit of taking credit for stuff that has nothing to do with him or his words like the fact that the U.S. has yet to experience any real increase in price inflation. This although he had stated and predicted that from 2010 on, the U.S. would experience an extended period of unending “process of disinflation.” One could go on and on: the zillion times he has said the Euro would collapse or how negative interest would never ever happen. Regarding the Euro, he even went as far as to put in writing that many of the peripheral countries of Europe would be unable to remain in the Eurozone, even predicting that Greece would be out along with Spain and Italy four years ago.

I won’t just focus on Krugman, for every slap-stick comedy duo has a sidekick and partner and there is no better person I can slot for this role (casting couch aside) than the one and only Larry Summers. Summers, former Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration and former Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama has blessed the world with the already disjointed and discredited concept of "secular stagnation." Now to provide a little background, when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, he mounted Summers as head of the National Economic Council. This even after he made remarks suggesting that women were biologically and genetically inferiorto men and more so, had not done such a great job while in the Clinton administration with respect to the dotcom bubble and his advocacy for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. The CFMA gave us financial derivatives, credit-default swaps and other complex papers which were basically unregulated and brought about the 2008 financial collapse. Although prior to this he regarded these new changes regarding securitization on Wall Street as being positive.

But I digress, back to secular stagnation. Summers believes that the U.S. economy is engaged in a new long-time trend or new normal that he has termed "secular stagnation." In simple terms, he suggests that without the existence of bubbles in any part of the U.S. economy, it is mathematically impossible for the economy to generate enough spending to get to full employment. For him, this is because since interest rates can't go below zero (Krugmanesque) and because the "natural interest rate “has been permanently lowered into negative territory such that real rates can't go low enough to keep the economy out of a protracted slump.

This all sounds good on paper but there are more than a few things wrong with this vision of Summers. The foremost is how one calculates real rates. How do we measure real interest rates or are we measuring real interest rates? When cats like Summers say that inflation-adjusted rates have been falling, most are just subtracting expected inflation from the nominal interest rate. The concern is that the way I see it, real interest rate is entirely different from the natural interest rate, which mean a more tenable explanation other than secular stagnation and the new normal of sub two percentgrowth, could be due to an unusual prolonged business cycle.

My question is how can cats like Krugman and Summers keep getting away with being so wrong so frequently yet venerated as economic Gods by the elite east and west coast press outlets and even many of our current politicians? Until we figure this out, it will be nearly impossible to have intelligent reasoned and fact based discussions or even arguments with such individuals on the topic of economics. I understand completely what Robert Skidelsky meant when he wrote: “Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.” 

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War of Taxes

Around 600 years ago in England there was a war.  It was between the House of Lancaster and the House of York and was called ex post facto the Wars of the Roses. It was a petty and bloody war and ended when Richard III, the last Yorkist king, was defeated by Henry Tudor founder of the house of Tudor at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. We may be in for a similar metaphorical history making period of time if the tea leaves read from Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and with Italian voters rejecting Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s referendum on constitutional reforms and the established world order with a “no” vote this past Sunday. If so, an ample title for this allegory could be the “War of Taxes.”

Here in America, liberals have been so caught up on raising taxes on the wealthy that they missed the picture worldwide in terms on how these policies impact not only the world transnational economics but also the common citizen. This means that tax policy has to consider global and national economic interest equally.

As it stands, Ireland with a 12.5% corporate tax rate, has one of the lowest in the world. The federal corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 35 percent. Thus using basic math, if a company constructs a factory in Ireland that produces $1 million in profit, it will pay $125,000 in Irish tax compared to $350,000 that it would pay if it built the same factory in the U.S. This is a large difference seeing that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) notes that the U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate among its 35 industrialized member nations.  What does this mean? Well knowing that Ireland is in the midst of a deep recession, the last thing there economic policy needs is to run-off foreign investment.

The U.K. has a similar economic problem. But after their June 23 Brexit vote to leave the European Union, under the leadership of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May,they are going out of their way to comfort international companies to show that the U.K. will become an even better place to do business. Although what the U.K. corporate tax policy will be (whether she would be willing to embrace a suggested cut to 15% or to cut the rate by 2020 to 17%), the British government commitment to lower corporation tax is being well received and it is certain that in the future, it will be significantly lower than current levels and would give the nation the lowest corporate-tax rate among G20 nations. Presently the U.K. corporate tax rate is 20%, which is one of the lowest in the G-20 and the same as Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

President elect Donald Trump has also expressed the importance of addressing the U.S.corporate tax rate. If we look beyond the G20 to the top 188 economic nations, the U.S.’s corporate tax rate is the third highest in the world, lower only than the United Arab Emirates’ rate of 55 percent and Puerto Rico’s rate of 39 percent, with the worldwide average corporate tax rate being 22.5 percent. Trump has proposed reducing the US federal tax from 35% to 15%. If this happens, in particular with a GOP dominated House and Senate, we may see the possibility of additional cuts in other nations. Steven Mnuchin, Trumps U.S.Treasury Secretary-nominee is already on record saying he wants to make tax reforms to increase job growth his main priority.

Before you say that Trump economic policy is impractical, be reminded that the U.S. is not the only country pushing for lower corporate tax rates. In 2015 Italy moved to lower its national corporate tax rate 24% starting in 2017 and Canada and Japan are just two of other countries currently in the process of lowering their corporate tax rates to attract new transnational businesses. Canada currently has a corporate income tax rate of 26.7 per cent. Even Japan, in an effort to promote growth just reduced its corporate tax rate to 30%. Germany along with Ireland made big cuts in an effort to attract corporate investment more than a decade ago and it has proffered effective. 

All of the above may be a forewarning of what may be on the horizon – a war of corporate tax rates around the globe.  This should only be expected since after losing regulatory requirements and closing tax loopholes, the only thing left to promote domestic economic growth in pragmatic terms is to reduce ones national corporate tax rate. Moreover, given that the U.S. doesn’t have a value-added tax (VAT or federal sales tax), having higher corporate tax rates will continue to serve as an impediment to economic growth domestically in terms of increased wages and jobs.  It is not a requirement that we turn into a Greece before we learn the lessons of Greece. So although the War of the Roses is history, maybe 600 years from now, history books will be talking about the war of taxes.

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