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Growth Over Graves Strategy Stress Tested

Growth Over Graves Strategy Stress Tested

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Asia’s markets have overcome some Monday morning nerves to climb modestly into positive territory this morning. That followed a relatively quiet weekend on the news front, and after Wall Street hit a Covid-19 speed bump on FridayThe announcement that Apple would close again, some of its stores in Southern US states spooked Wall Street, sending equities into a modest retreat. Covid-19 disquiet appears to be tempering expectations across the region today.

 

That is hardly surprising with Southern US states cases racing higher, along with spikes in cases across South Asia and Latin America. One could rightly argue that none of these areas are second wavers, having never successfully emerged from wave one in the first place. The same argument could also be applied to Indonesia, where reopening proceeds apace; although as I sit here writing, large swaths of the country never bought into social distancing in the first place.

 

It is a cold hard fact, that many countries in the world do not have the work from home optionality of many developed nations. Or in the United States’ case, the political will from the government, or the libertarian tendencies of sections of the population, to really put in the hard yards that mass lockdowns bring. Growth over graves is an uncomfortable reality for much of the world, where most economic activity and employment takes place in the informal economy.

 

If much of the world has entered a group-think sense of denial, necessity and hope in reopening their economies, cracks seem to be appearing in those that one could classify as true second wavers. South Korea and China are battling stubborn new outbreaks, and the Australian state of Victoria has extended control protocols for another four weeks. Meanwhile, New Zealand is facing an uptick in cases arriving at its isolation facilities from overseas Kiwi’s returning home.

 

The persistence of Covid-19 seems to have given the FOMO-buy everything crowd pause for thought for now. The underlying driver to the get rich quick, global recovery rally remains; bottomless amounts of free central bank money sloshing around the global financial system. As I have argued before, the only thing that can really run that of the tracks, for now, would be secondary waves of Covid-19 outbreaks forcing key economies to initiate new population lockdowns. 

 

The hopes of the airline industry from “corridors” and “travel bubbles” should be pared. Until a vaccine appears, that idea on a mass scale is dead on arrival. It is as believable an idea as Wirecard, its regulators, its shareholders, and its regulators, all thinking that EUR 1.9 billion of its money and its partners, should be held in trust accounts in Philippines Banks. Ooops. As a wise man once said, “there’s never just one cockroach.”

 

With the week’s data calendar book-ended by the China Loan Prime Rate (LPR) decisions this morning, and the US Durable Goods and GDP results on Thursday, markets look set to spend the early part of the week in self-reflection, rather than rampant buying. Tomorrow sees a flurry of PMI releases across the world, but the street will more than likely concentrate on Covid-19 and with it, a period of consolidation.

 

China left it’s one and five-year LPR’s unchanged this morning at 3.85% and 4.65% respectively. The result was as expected with China forging its own path monetarily through the pandemic slowdown. That appears to be via short-term liquidity injections, reductions in RRR rates, and instructing Chinese Banks to make fewer profits and lend more. The Pandora’s box of unconventional monetary policy in the West, is very easy to open, but appears to be very hard to shut; with the Federal Reserve’s taper-tantrum but one example.

 

Asia-Pacific stock markets edge into the green.

 

After sinking slightly initially, markets across the region have clawed back their early losses and have settled modestly in the green. The Covid-19 nerves shown by Wall Street have disrupted somewhat today, as the weekend passed without any significant surprises. One does detect a certain level of nervousness though, and I have no doubt, that the FOMO day traders will head for the exit door at the first sign of trouble.

 

The Nikkei 225 is up 0.40% with the Kospi unchanged. Mainland China’s Shanghai Composite and CSI 300 have climbed 0.20%. Singapore meanwhile has edged 0.20% higher, with the ASX 200 up 0.40% and the All Ordinaries flat for the session.

 

The Hang Seng has fallen by 0.40% today, weighed down by concerns over the official outline of China’s new security law for Hong Kong over the weekend. Hong Kong will struggle to rally this week as investors digest its full implications, most notably the apparent undermining of the independence of the judiciary. A preliminary draft of the official wording should arrive this week. Soothing words from Beijing are unlikely to mollify those fears.

 

US Dollar slips in Asia.

 

The Dollar continued to grind higher on Friday, with the dollar index creeping up by 0.19% to 97.61. With equity markets climbing into the green this morning, the Dollar has slipped across the board in muted trading. EUR/USD is up 0.15% to 1.1190, with AUD/USD up 0.30% to 0.6850, while USD/JPY is unchanged at 108.85. 

 

A similar pattern is happening across the regional space, with the Dollar retreating slightly. The rally in oil prices over the past two days is likely to lend support to the Indonesian Rupiah and Malaysian Ringgit. 

 

Overall, today’s trading session is a quiet one, with Europe likely to continue tentatively selling Dollars this afternoon. That said, a few negative Covid-19 headlines looks to be all it would take to turn that sentiment 180 degrees in quick time.

 

Oil continues to reach for the sky.

 

In an interesting divergence from the equity markets, oil prices continued to probe higher on Friday, although they gave back some of their gains late in the session. Brent crude traded to just shy of $43.00 a barrel, before falling to finish 1.35% higher at $42.00 a barrel. WTI broke through $40.00 a barrel, testing $40.50 a barrel, before retreating. It still though, finished higher by 1.90% at $39.80.

 

Trading is directionless in Asia, with Brent firming slightly to $40.30 a barrel, and WTI easing 20 cents to $39.60 a barrel. Both contracts appear content to adopt a wait and see attitude on a quiet news day in Asia.

 

Brent crude’s next technical target is $43.40 a barrel. Above there, it should attempt to close the chart gap from early March, and rally to $45.00 a barrel. WTI meanwhile, has traced pout a double top at $40.40 a barrel, which will probably provide some tough resistance initially. After that, its technical target is the $44.00 region followed by $45.00 a barrel, its 200-day moving average.

 

For today, although oil continues to impress with its resilience, it to, will be vulnerable to downside corrections if negative Covid-19 headlines hit the wires.

 

Is gold signalling that risk aversion is about to spike?

 

Gold caught the Covid-19 risk aversion wave on Friday, powering 1.25% higher to its daily resistance at $1745.00 an ounce. It has headed straight to go this morning in Asia, jumping to $1760.00 an ounce, before settling 0.50% higher at $1752.00 an ounce.

 

Gold’s price action is hinting that although risk aversion is restrained on equities and energy, tensions could be rising below the surface. Gold has resistance at $1760.00, followed by the May high at $1765.00. It is the later level that is the critical one, forming the top of the multi-month $1660.00 to $1765.00 range. 

 

Gold has been here before, letting bullish traders down severely. The risk of yet another bull market trap is high, and until we see a daily close above $1765.00 an ounce, caution is warranted at these price levels. A daily close above $1765.00 however, should open up a fully-fledged assault on $1800.00 at long last. A fall back below $1745.00 an ounce though, will mean tears of despair once again for gold bugs.

 

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Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…

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After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.

Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.

These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.

Another excerpt:

That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.

Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People who recovered from COVID-19 and received a COVID-19 shot were more likely to suffer adverse reactions, researchers in Europe are reporting.

A medical worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a patient at a vaccination center in Ancenis-Saint-Gereon, France, on Nov. 17, 2021. (Stephane Mahe//Reuters)

Participants in the study were more likely to experience an adverse reaction after vaccination regardless of the type of shot, with one exception, the researchers found.

Across all vaccine brands, people with prior COVID-19 were 2.6 times as likely after dose one to suffer an adverse reaction, according to the new study. Such people are commonly known as having a type of protection known as natural immunity after recovery.

People with previous COVID-19 were also 1.25 times as likely after dose 2 to experience an adverse reaction.

The findings held true across all vaccine types following dose one.

Of the female participants who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for instance, 82 percent who had COVID-19 previously experienced an adverse reaction after their first dose, compared to 59 percent of females who did not have prior COVID-19.

The only exception to the trend was among males who received a second AstraZeneca dose. The percentage of males who suffered an adverse reaction was higher, 33 percent to 24 percent, among those without a COVID-19 history.

Participants who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed with a positive test) experienced at least one adverse reaction more often after the 1st dose compared to participants who did not have prior COVID-19. This pattern was observed in both men and women and across vaccine brands,” Florence van Hunsel, an epidemiologist with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb, and her co-authors wrote.

There were only slightly higher odds of the naturally immune suffering an adverse reaction following receipt of a Pfizer or Moderna booster, the researchers also found.

The researchers performed what’s known as a cohort event monitoring study, following 29,387 participants as they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The participants live in a European country such as Belgium, France, or Slovakia.

Overall, three-quarters of the participants reported at least one adverse reaction, although some were minor such as injection site pain.

Adverse reactions described as serious were reported by 0.24 percent of people who received a first or second dose and 0.26 percent for people who received a booster. Different examples of serious reactions were not listed in the study.

Participants were only specifically asked to record a range of minor adverse reactions (ADRs). They could provide details of other reactions in free text form.

“The unsolicited events were manually assessed and coded, and the seriousness was classified based on international criteria,” researchers said.

The free text answers were not provided by researchers in the paper.

The authors note, ‘In this manuscript, the focus was not on serious ADRs and adverse events of special interest.’” Yet, in their highlights section they state, “The percentage of serious ADRs in the study is low for 1st and 2nd vaccination and booster.”

Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of the group React19, which advocates for people who were injured by vaccines, told The Epoch Times: “It is intellectually dishonest to set out to study minor adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination then make conclusions about the frequency of serious adverse events. They also fail to provide the free text data.” He added that the paper showed “yet another study that is in my opinion, deficient by design.”

Ms. Hunsel did not respond to a request for comment.

She and other researchers listed limitations in the paper, including how they did not provide data broken down by country.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccine on March 6.

The study was funded by the European Medicines Agency and the Dutch government.

No authors declared conflicts of interest.

Some previous papers have also found that people with prior COVID-19 infection had more adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including a 2021 paper from French researchers. A U.S. study identified prior COVID-19 as a predictor of the severity of side effects.

Some other studies have determined COVID-19 vaccines confer little or no benefit to people with a history of infection, including those who had received a primary series.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends people who recovered from COVID-19 receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although a number of other health authorities have stopped recommending the shot for people who have prior COVID-19.

Another New Study

In another new paper, South Korean researchers outlined how they found people were more likely to report certain adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination than after receipt of another vaccine.

The reporting of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or pericarditis, a related condition, was nearly 20 times as high among children as the reporting odds following receipt of all other vaccines, the researchers found.

The reporting odds were also much higher for multisystem inflammatory syndrome or Kawasaki disease among adolescent COVID-19 recipients.

Researchers analyzed reports made to VigiBase, which is run by the World Health Organization.

Based on our results, close monitoring for these rare but serious inflammatory reactions after COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents until definitive causal relationship can be established,” the researchers wrote.

The study was published by the Journal of Korean Medical Science in its March edition.

Limitations include VigiBase receiving reports of problems, with some reports going unconfirmed.

Funding came from the South Korean government. One author reported receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 05:00

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‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded…

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'Excess Mortality Skyrocketed': Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack 'Criminal' COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded experimental vaccines were hastily developed for a virus which primarily killed the old and fat (and those with other obvious comorbidities), and an aggressive, global campaign to coerce billions into injecting them ensued.

Then there were the lockdowns - with some countries (New Zealand, for example) building internment camps for those who tested positive for Covid-19, and others such as China welding entire apartment buildings shut to trap people inside.

It was an egregious and unnecessary response to a virus that, while highly virulent, was survivable by the vast majority of the general population.

Oh, and the vaccines, which governments are still pushing, didn't work as advertised to the point where health officials changed the definition of "vaccine" multiple times.

Tucker Carlson recently sat down with Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist and vocal critic of vaccines. The two had a wide-ranging discussion, which included vaccine safety and efficacy, excess mortality, demographic impacts of the virus, big pharma, and the professional price Kory has paid for speaking out.

Keep reading below, or if you have roughly 50 minutes, watch it in its entirety for free on X:

"Do we have any real sense of what the cost, the physical cost to the country and world has been of those vaccines?" Carlson asked, kicking off the interview.

"I do think we have some understanding of the cost. I mean, I think, you know, you're aware of the work of of Ed Dowd, who's put together a team and looked, analytically at a lot of the epidemiologic data," Kory replied. "I mean, time with that vaccination rollout is when all of the numbers started going sideways, the excess mortality started to skyrocket."

When asked "what kind of death toll are we looking at?", Kory responded "...in 2023 alone, in the first nine months, we had what's called an excess mortality of 158,000 Americans," adding "But this is in 2023. I mean, we've  had Omicron now for two years, which is a mild variant. Not that many go to the hospital."

'Safe and Effective'

Tucker also asked Kory why the people who claimed the vaccine were "safe and effective" aren't being held criminally liable for abetting the "killing of all these Americans," to which Kory replied: "It’s my kind of belief, looking back, that [safe and effective] was a predetermined conclusion. There was no data to support that, but it was agreed upon that it would be presented as safe and effective."

Carlson and Kory then discussed the different segments of the population that experienced vaccine side effects, with Kory noting an "explosion in dying in the youngest and healthiest sectors of society," adding "And why did the employed fare far worse than those that weren't? And this particularly white collar, white collar, more than gray collar, more than blue collar."

Kory also said that Big Pharma is 'terrified' of Vitamin D because it "threatens the disease model." As journalist The Vigilant Fox notes on X, "Vitamin D showed about a 60% effectiveness against the incidence of COVID-19 in randomized control trials," and "showed about 40-50% effectiveness in reducing the incidence of COVID-19 in observational studies."

Professional costs

Kory - while risking professional suicide by speaking out, has undoubtedly helped save countless lives by advocating for alternate treatments such as Ivermectin.

Kory shared his own experiences of job loss and censorship, highlighting the challenges of advocating for a more nuanced understanding of vaccine safety in an environment often resistant to dissenting voices.

"I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin and the the genesis of that book," he said, adding "Not only is my expertise on Ivermectin and my vast clinical experience, but and I tell the story before, but I got an email, during this journey from a guy named William B Grant, who's a professor out in California, and he wrote to me this email just one day, my life was going totally sideways because our protocols focused on Ivermectin. I was using a lot in my practice, as were tens of thousands of doctors around the world, to really good benefits. And I was getting attacked, hit jobs in the media, and he wrote me this email on and he said, Dear Dr. Kory, what they're doing to Ivermectin, they've been doing to vitamin D for decades..."

"And it's got five tactics. And these are the five tactics that all industries employ when science emerges, that's inconvenient to their interests. And so I'm just going to give you an example. Ivermectin science was extremely inconvenient to the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I mean, it threatened the vaccine campaign. It threatened vaccine hesitancy, which was public enemy number one. We know that, that everything, all the propaganda censorship was literally going after something called vaccine hesitancy."

Money makes the world go 'round

Carlson then hit on perhaps the most devious aspect of the relationship between drug companies and the medical establishment, and how special interests completely taint science to the point where public distrust of institutions has spiked in recent years.

"I think all of it starts at the level the medical journals," said Kory. "Because once you have something established in the medical journals as a, let's say, a proven fact or a generally accepted consensus, consensus comes out of the journals."

"I have dozens of rejection letters from investigators around the world who did good trials on ivermectin, tried to publish it. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you. And then the ones that do get in all purportedly prove that ivermectin didn't work," Kory continued.

"So and then when you look at the ones that actually got in and this is where like probably my biggest estrangement and why I don't recognize science and don't trust it anymore, is the trials that flew to publication in the top journals in the world were so brazenly manipulated and corrupted in the design and conduct in, many of us wrote about it. But they flew to publication, and then every time they were published, you saw these huge PR campaigns in the media. New York Times, Boston Globe, L.A. times, ivermectin doesn't work. Latest high quality, rigorous study says. I'm sitting here in my office watching these lies just ripple throughout the media sphere based on fraudulent studies published in the top journals. And that's that's that has changed. Now that's why I say I'm estranged and I don't know what to trust anymore."

Vaccine Injuries

Carlson asked Kory about his clinical experience with vaccine injuries.

"So how this is how I divide, this is just kind of my perception of vaccine injury is that when I use the term vaccine injury, I'm usually referring to what I call a single organ problem, like pericarditis, myocarditis, stroke, something like that. An autoimmune disease," he replied.

"What I specialize in my practice, is I treat patients with what we call a long Covid long vaxx. It's the same disease, just different triggers, right? One is triggered by Covid, the other one is triggered by the spike protein from the vaccine. Much more common is long vax. The only real differences between the two conditions is that the vaccinated are, on average, sicker and more disabled than the long Covids, with some pretty prominent exceptions to that."

Watch the entire interview above, and you can support Tucker Carlson's endeavors by joining the Tucker Carlson Network here...

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/14/2024 - 16:20

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