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Our fragile mental health is the hidden threat to the economic recovery

If you (re)read The Plague earlier in the pandemic, then you were ready for what we’re going through now.

“Rieux and his friends now discovered how tired they were,” Albert Camus…

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The mental health of the working population is a threat that employers and shareholders must confront.

If you (re)read The Plague earlier in the pandemic, then you were ready for what we’re going through now.

“Rieux and his friends now discovered how tired they were,” Albert Camus said of his protagonist after the quarantine had dragged on longer than anyone had ever imagined. “Dr. Rieux noticed it when he observed the steady growth of a strange indifference in himself and in his friends,” he continued. “Men who up to now had shown such a lively interest in any news about the plague, no longer bothered with it.”

We’re well into what the late psychiatrist Beverley Raphael would have called the “disillusionment” phase of the COVID-19 disaster. The “heroic” stage, when we were all in this together, is a distant memory, while the “honeymoon” phase — that blissfully naive summer of 2020 when a V-shaped recovery briefly looked possible — feels like a fever dream.

The final destination on Raphael’s psychological mapping of the human response to disasters is “reconstruction,” which tends to begin around the first anniversary of the moment when everything changed. And, sure enough, if you squint, as Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem did this week, you can see better days on the horizon.

“We expect a solid rebound in the immediate months ahead,” he said in a speech on Feb. 23. “With vaccinations expected to ramp up, we can be more confident in sustained strong growth through the second half of the year and into next year.”

Still, the governor conceded, the virus and its variants could yet wreck his optimistic forecast. For now, uncertainty reigns, meaning frustration and anxiety do, too. That’s a societal problem, first and foremost, but one that also threatens the economic recovery. Yet our fragile mental health is rarely discussed in economic terms.

“There’s a lot of consensus that we are living through a low-grade trauma,” said Amanda Matejicek, a Mississauga, Ont.-based coach who has a PhD in organizational psychology.

Think about what that means. About 20 per cent of Canadians have been diagnosed with depression, according to a poll that Mental Health Research Canada commissioned in December — the highest level the group has recorded.

The reconstruction phase of disaster recovery is no picnic. It describes the period when the human brain comes to grips with what has happened and begins processing the grief. Things will start to feel better, but there also will be setbacks.

“The impact of trauma doesn’t recede once the traumatic event recedes,” said Tatijana Busic, a Toronto-based psychologist. “In fact, once a traumatic event stops, you see people develop PTSD months, even years, later. We haven’t seen that yet, because we still are in survival mode.”

 A pedestrian walks past a City of Toronto poster advertisement stating “Life on pause sucks. Agreed. Keep fighting and we’ll get through this.”

Many of us who avoid depression will continue to grind, like Camus’ heroes. To be sure, there is something romantic about the thought of the 5.4 million Canadians working from home in January pushing through the final stage of the pandemic together. But it won’t be especially productive if we’re all doing it in a fog. We’ll be an unhappier society. We’ll also be a poorer one.

Some 500,000 Canadians were already unable to work on any given day in 2019, according to Bryan Benjamin and Charles Boyer at the Conference Board of Canada . The cost of treating depression and anxiety had risen to about $50 billion a year, while the opportunity cost of lost productivity was about $30 billion annually.

The situation now is, no doubt, worse.

“We’re seeing the exhaustion,” Matejicek said. “We’re seeing the burnout. We’re seeing people trying to keep going even though they are starting to experience the impacts of the stress, the pressure.”

It’s broadly understood that there’s a problem. The issue is whether we’re sufficiently equipped to deal with it.

The men and women who have their hands on the levers of power are accustomed to responding to more concrete threats.

If all the stimulus in the system ends up stoking too much inflation, the Bank of Canada knows what to do: raise interest rates, which will cool things down. It would be painful, but it would be a solution.

If the central bank’s money creation and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s deficits spark runaway inflation, then Macklem will simply jack up interest rates until order is restored. It would be painful, but it would work.

But if a critical mass of the country’s workforce is coping with low-grade post-traumatic stress disorder, there aren’t any simple levers that policy-makers can pull.

“It’s an important concern, and in some ways, one that might get lost in everything else that is going on around COVID-19,” Gordon McKenzie, chief executive of Saskatoon-based potash exporter Canpotex Ltd., said in an interview.

“We’re getting COVID fatigue from a long year of working remotely or working from home. A lot of people suspected COVID would be over within 2020. It’s not over. The mental-health side of that is even more important now than it was a few months ago.”

 A pedestrian in Toronto in February.

The House of Commons Finance Committee earlier this month made 145 recommendations to add to the next budget. The first was to “develop and implement a long-term mental health COVID-19 recovery plan to ensure all Canadians — especially the most vulnerable — can access the care they need, no matter where they live.”

The federal government last year said it would spend $10.2 million on research related to how COVID-19 might be affecting mental health and substance abuse.

I’m not anti-government, but we’re in trouble if Canada’s business leaders leave this issue to the politicians, as many of them are wont to do when faced with sensitive matters.

The public sector is having a hard enough time getting us vaccinated. The mental health of the working population is a threat that employers and shareholders must confront.

There is reason to worry that Corporate Canada may not be up for it. Only about third of Canadian companies have mental-health strategies, according to a study by Deloitte. There’s also plenty of anecdotal evidence that the business elite just don’t get it.

For example,  dozens of big companies took money from the federal government’s emergency wage subsidy while they continued to pay dividends and, in some cases, repurchased shares. Those companies said they were entitled to do so, and that they had a responsibility to take care of their shareholders.

But that was never the point. People are angry because wealthy executives and shareholders refused to sacrifice along with everyone else. Studies show that feelings of inequity are among those that erode our mental well-being.

Such callousness on the part of management might be unconscious. Many corporate boards are made up of semi-retired, rich and powerful people who may not have learned much about the intricacies of mental health on their way to the top.

“We don’t teach agile emotion regulation and we don’t teach agile relationship dynamics,” Matejicek said on a Zoom call from her garage, where she and Busic had decided to meet so they could make plans for their counselling and coaching startup, People in Business Inc., at a safe distance.

They think business schools have left today’s leaders ill-prepared to deal with the mental well-being of their organizations, if only because psychology has advanced so much since Boomers and Generation Xers got their MBAs.

“Our business leaders don’t have the tools they need to effectively engage the humans they have,” Matejicek said. “They know the processes. They know the reward systems. The bonus systems. The ways of creating engagement. They don’t know how to manage the human dynamics.”

The situation isn’t hopeless.

Sonja Volpe, who leads Paris-based BNP Paribas SA’s Canadian unit, started adding new programs related to mental health in May. She expanded the benefits program to include a tele-health service that provides access to therapists, makes a point of holding weekly meetings with smaller staffing groups where the point is simply to talk, and hands out extra vacation days.

One overarching goal is to make sure BNP employees learn to create space. “You have to have lunch,” Volpe said.

McKenzie did similar things at Canpotex. Like Volpe, McKenzie said he’s made a point of hosting regular virtual townhalls to keep staff in Asia, Brazil and Canada connected. He also put an emphasis on results, as opposed to time served at their desk, in hopes of encouraging people to power off their computers, and he tripled the amount of money that employees can claim on psychologists.

These are small things, but if enough leaders do likewise, it could make a difference.

“You don’t have to be Shakespeare,” Busic said. “Just stop and say hello to people. The value of that is tremendous.”

Financial Post

• Email: kcarmichael@postmedia.com | Twitter:

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Analyst reviews Apple stock price target amid challenges

Here’s what could happen to Apple shares next.

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They said it was bound to happen.

It was Jan. 11, 2024 when software giant Microsoft  (MSFT)  briefly passed Apple  (AAPL)  as the most valuable company in the world.

Microsoft's stock closed 0.5% higher, giving it a market valuation of $2.859 trillion. 

It rose as much as 2% during the session and the company was briefly worth $2.903 trillion. Apple closed 0.3% lower, giving the company a market capitalization of $2.886 trillion. 

"It was inevitable that Microsoft would overtake Apple since Microsoft is growing faster and has more to benefit from the generative AI revolution," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said at the time, according to Reuters.

The two tech titans have jostled for top spot over the years and Microsoft was ahead at last check, with a market cap of $3.085 trillion, compared with Apple's value of $2.684 trillion.

Analysts noted that Apple had been dealing with weakening demand, including for the iPhone, the company’s main source of revenue. 

Demand in China, a major market, has slumped as the country's economy makes a slow recovery from the pandemic and competition from Huawei.

Sales in China of Apple's iPhone fell by 24% in the first six weeks of 2024 compared with a year earlier, according to research firm Counterpoint, as the company contended with stiff competition from a resurgent Huawei "while getting squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi," said senior Analyst Mengmeng Zhang.

“Although the iPhone 15 is a great device, it has no significant upgrades from the previous version, so consumers feel fine holding on to the older-generation iPhones for now," he said.

A man scrolling through Netflix on an Apple iPad Pro. Photo by Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images.

Future Publishing/Getty Images

Big plans for China

Counterpoint said that the first six weeks of 2023 saw abnormally high numbers with significant unit sales being deferred from December 2022 due to production issues.

Apple is planning to open its eighth store in Shanghai – and its 47th across China – on March 21.

Related: Tech News Now: OpenAI says Musk contract 'never existed', Xiaomi's EV, and more

The company also plans to expand its research centre in Shanghai to support all of its product lines and open a new lab in southern tech hub Shenzhen later this year, according to the South China Morning Post.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, Apple announced changes to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into effect last week, Reuters reported on March 12.

Beginning this spring, software developers operating in Europe will be able to distribute apps to EU customers directly from their own websites instead of through the App Store.

"To reflect the DMA’s changes, users in the EU can install apps from alternative app marketplaces in iOS 17.4 and later," Apple said on its website, referring to the software platform that runs iPhones and iPads. 

"Users will be able to download an alternative marketplace app from the marketplace developer’s website," the company said.

Apple has also said it will appeal a $2 billion EU antitrust fine for thwarting competition from Spotify  (SPOT)  and other music streaming rivals via restrictions on the App Store.

The company's shares have suffered amid all this upheaval, but some analysts still see good things in Apple's future.

Bank of America Securities confirmed its positive stance on Apple, maintaining a buy rating with a steady price target of $225, according to Investing.com

The firm's analysis highlighted Apple's pricing strategy evolution since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, with initial prices set at $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model.

BofA said that Apple has consistently launched new iPhone models, including the Pro/Pro Max versions, to target the premium market. 

Analyst says Apple selloff 'overdone'

Concurrently, prices for previous models are typically reduced by about $100 with each new release. 

This strategy, coupled with installment plans from Apple and carriers, has contributed to the iPhone's installed base reaching a record 1.2 billion in 2023, the firm said.

More Tech Stocks:

Apple has effectively shifted its sales mix toward higher-value units despite experiencing slower unit sales, BofA said.

This trend is expected to persist and could help mitigate potential unit sales weaknesses, particularly in China. 

BofA also noted Apple's dominance in the high-end market, maintaining a market share of over 90% in the $1,000 and above price band for the past three years.

The firm also cited the anticipation of a multi-year iPhone cycle propelled by next-generation AI technology, robust services growth, and the potential for margin expansion.

On Monday, Evercore ISI analysts said they believed that the sell-off in the iPhone maker’s shares may be “overdone.”

The firm said that investors' growing preference for AI-focused stocks like Nvidia  (NVDA)  has led to a reallocation of funds away from Apple. 

In addition, Evercore said concerns over weakening demand in China, where Apple may be losing market share in the smartphone segment, have affected investor sentiment.

And then ongoing regulatory issues continue to have an impact on investor confidence in the world's second-biggest company.

“We think the sell-off is rather overdone, while we suspect there is strong valuation support at current levels to down 10%, there are three distinct drivers that could unlock upside on the stock from here – a) Cap allocation, b) AI inferencing, and c) Risk-off/defensive shift," the firm said in a research note.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

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Major typhoid fever surveillance study in sub-Saharan Africa indicates need for the introduction of typhoid conjugate vaccines in endemic countries

There is a high burden of typhoid fever in sub-Saharan African countries, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. This high…

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There is a high burden of typhoid fever in sub-Saharan African countries, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. This high burden combined with the threat of typhoid strains resistant to antibiotic treatment calls for stronger prevention strategies, including the use and implementation of typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCVs) in endemic settings along with improvements in access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

Credit: IVI

There is a high burden of typhoid fever in sub-Saharan African countries, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. This high burden combined with the threat of typhoid strains resistant to antibiotic treatment calls for stronger prevention strategies, including the use and implementation of typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCVs) in endemic settings along with improvements in access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.

 

The findings from this 4-year study, the Severe Typhoid in Africa (SETA) program, offers new typhoid fever burden estimates from six countries: Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, and Nigeria, with four countries recording more than 100 cases for every 100,000 person-years of observation, which is considered a high burden. The highest incidence of typhoid was found in DRC with 315 cases per 100,000 people while children between 2-14 years of age were shown to be at highest risk across all 25 study sites.

 

There are an estimated 12.5 to 16.3 million cases of typhoid every year with 140,000 deaths. However, with generic symptoms such as fever, fatigue, and abdominal pain, and the need for blood culture sampling to make a definitive diagnosis, it is difficult for governments to capture the true burden of typhoid in their countries.

 

“Our goal through SETA was to address these gaps in typhoid disease burden data,” said lead author Dr. Florian Marks, Deputy Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI). “Our estimates indicate that introduction of TCV in endemic settings would go to lengths in protecting communities, especially school-aged children, against this potentially deadly—but preventable—disease.”

 

In addition to disease incidence, this study also showed that the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Salmonella Typhi, the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, has led to more reliance beyond the traditional first line of antibiotic treatment. If left untreated, severe cases of the disease can lead to intestinal perforation and even death. This suggests that prevention through vaccination may play a critical role in not only protecting against typhoid fever but reducing the spread of drug-resistant strains of the bacteria.

 

There are two TCVs prequalified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and available through Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. In February 2024, IVI and SK bioscience announced that a third TCV, SKYTyphoid™, also achieved WHO PQ, paving the way for public procurement and increasing the global supply.

 

Alongside the SETA disease burden study, IVI has been working with colleagues in three African countries to show the real-world impact of TCV vaccination. These studies include a cluster-randomized trial in Agogo, Ghana and two effectiveness studies following mass vaccination in Kisantu, DRC and Imerintsiatosika, Madagascar.

 

Dr. Birkneh Tilahun Tadesse, Associate Director General at IVI and Head of the Real-World Evidence Department, explains, “Through these vaccine effectiveness studies, we aim to show the full public health value of TCV in settings that are directly impacted by a high burden of typhoid fever.” He adds, “Our final objective of course is to eliminate typhoid or to at least reduce the burden to low incidence levels, and that’s what we are attempting in Fiji with an island-wide vaccination campaign.”

 

As more countries in typhoid endemic countries, namely in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, consider TCV in national immunization programs, these data will help inform evidence-based policy decisions around typhoid prevention and control.

 

###

 

About the International Vaccine Institute (IVI)
The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) is a non-profit international organization established in 1997 at the initiative of the United Nations Development Programme with a mission to discover, develop, and deliver safe, effective, and affordable vaccines for global health.

IVI’s current portfolio includes vaccines at all stages of pre-clinical and clinical development for infectious diseases that disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries, such as cholera, typhoid, chikungunya, shigella, salmonella, schistosomiasis, hepatitis E, HPV, COVID-19, and more. IVI developed the world’s first low-cost oral cholera vaccine, pre-qualified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and developed a new-generation typhoid conjugate vaccine that is recently pre-qualified by WHO.

IVI is headquartered in Seoul, Republic of Korea with a Europe Regional Office in Sweden, a Country Office in Austria, and Collaborating Centers in Ghana, Ethiopia, and Madagascar. 39 countries and the WHO are members of IVI, and the governments of the Republic of Korea, Sweden, India, Finland, and Thailand provide state funding. For more information, please visit https://www.ivi.int.

 

CONTACT

Aerie Em, Global Communications & Advocacy Manager
+82 2 881 1386 | aerie.em@ivi.int


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US Spent More Than Double What It Collected In February, As 2024 Deficit Is Second Highest Ever… And Debt Explodes

US Spent More Than Double What It Collected In February, As 2024 Deficit Is Second Highest Ever… And Debt Explodes

Earlier today, CNBC’s…

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US Spent More Than Double What It Collected In February, As 2024 Deficit Is Second Highest Ever... And Debt Explodes

Earlier today, CNBC's Brian Sullivan took a horse dose of Red Pills when, about six months after our readers, he learned that the US is issuing $1 trillion in debt every 100 days, which prompted him to rage tweet, (or rageX, not sure what the proper term is here) the following:

We’ve added 60% to national debt since 2018. Germany - a country with major economic woes - added ‘just’ 32%.   

Maybe it will never matter.   Maybe MMT is real.   Maybe we just cancel or inflate it out. Maybe career real estate borrowers or career politicians aren’t the answer.

I have no idea.  Only time will tell.   But it’s going to be fascinating to watch it play out.

He is right: it will be fascinating, and the latest budget deficit data simply confirmed that the day of reckoning will come very soon, certainly sooner than the two years that One River's Eric Peters predicted this weekend for the coming "US debt sustainability crisis."

According to the US Treasury, in February, the US collected $271 billion in various tax receipts, and spent $567 billion, more than double what it collected.

The two charts below show the divergence in US tax receipts which have flatlined (on a trailing 6M basis) since the covid pandemic in 2020 (with occasional stimmy-driven surges)...

... and spending which is about 50% higher compared to where it was in 2020.

The end result is that in February, the budget deficit rose to $296.3 billion, up 12.9% from a year prior, and the second highest February deficit on record.

And the punchline: on a cumulative basis, the budget deficit in fiscal 2024 which began on October 1, 2023 is now $828 billion, the second largest cumulative deficit through February on record, surpassed only by the peak covid year of 2021.

But wait there's more: because in a world where the US is spending more than twice what it is collecting, the endgame is clear: debt collapse, and while it won't be tomorrow, or the week after, it is coming... and it's also why the US is now selling $1 trillion in debt every 100 days just to keep operating (and absorbing all those millions of illegal immigrants who will keep voting democrat to preserve the socialist system of the US, so beloved by the Soros clan).

And it gets even worse, because we are now in the ponzi finance stage of the Minsky cycle, with total interest on the debt annualizing well above $1 trillion, and rising every day

... having already surpassed total US defense spending and soon to surpass total health spending and, finally all social security spending, the largest spending category of all, which means that US debt will now rise exponentially higher until the inevitable moment when the US dollar loses its reserve status and it all comes crashing down.

We conclude with another observation by CNBC's Brian Sullivan, who quotes an email by a DC strategist...

.. which lays out the proposed Biden budget as follows:

The budget deficit will growth another $16 TRILLION over next 10 years. Thats *with* the proposed massive tax hikes.

Without them the deficit will grow $19 trillion.

That's why you will hear the "deficit is being reduced by $3 trillion" over the decade.

No family budget or business could exist with this kind of math.

Of course, in the long run, neither can the US... and since neither party will ever cut the spending which everyone by now is so addicted to, the best anyone can do is start planning for the endgame.

Tyler Durden Tue, 03/12/2024 - 18:40

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