Jim Grant on interest rate management since 2000

The federalization of American finance didn't come of a clear, blue, free-market sky.  The government has met every cyclical disturbance since 2000 with lower interest rates and heavier applications of what is fastidiously called "financial repression."

~ Jim Grant, "A short history of making things worse," Grant's Interest Rate Observer, May 1, 2020

Alexander Salter on the incompetence of government experts

Experts in the supposedly scientific fields of public health and economics have made a mess of things.  Their failures would be comedic, were the consequences not so tragic.  Instead of capable service for the public’s welfare, the American people have been made to suffer incompetence and malfeasance.  Unless we critically examine the failure of experts, we invite similar blunders in the future.

~ Alexander W. Salter, "Incompetent Experts and Bad Government," AIER.org, May 3, 2020

David Stockman on the coronavirus and nursing homes

Had Patient Zero (aka the Donald) not been the victim of malpractice by his doctors led by Fauci and the Scarf Lady, he might have been advised to dial in on day #1 to the heart of the Covid-threat. Namely, the 15,600 nursing homes in America, which domicile some 1.5 million residents, of which one-quarter (425,000) are over the age of 80 years.

In the case of Massachusetts, where the majority of deaths have occurred in nursing homes, the average age of Covid-deaths has been 82 years.

Needless to say, you did not need to be entombed in the infectious disease tunnel at the NIH for 52 years like Dr. Fauci, a pretentious 79-year old windbag who should have himself been put in a retirement home years ago, to realize that nursing homes are dense-packed with the frail, disease-afflicted elderly.

~ David Stockman, "The Three Nations of Covid and a Windbag Named Fauci," LewRockwell.com, May 2, 2020

Andy Grove on crisis and business

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them.

~ Andy Grove

Barron's on corporate bond issuance in response to the coronavirus shutdowns

Covid-19 is blowing a gaping hole in the balance sheets of U.S. corporations.  It's a big problem for stock investors, who, essentially, are seeing billions in value transferred from their portfolios to bondholders...  Overall, S&P 500 companies have added about $210 billion in debt over the past few months.  It's an incredible number.

~ Barron's, May 2, 2020

Greta Thunberg on the value of listening to science experts

It is even more important that we listen to science, to the experts. That goes for all crises, whether it is the corona crisis or the climate crisis.

~ Greta Thunberg, April 29, 2020

(This was a live chat at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm with environmental science professor Johan Rockstrom in Germany.)

Phil Duffy on lessons from the Nazi era applied today

By now I'm one of the few left who lived through most of the Nazi years.  I believe the death toll from WWII from both direct and indirect causes was 100 million, far beyond any threat we face today with Covid-19. I started following WWII when I was 6 in 1941. Because I was reading the newspapers every day it probably expanded both my language and geography skills. At age 10 when the war ended and the news about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Tribunals filled our lives, there were many deeper questions that were raised, but the answers then seem silly in retrospect. You've heard the saying, perhaps wrongly attributed to Edmund Burke, that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing. Americans aimed that accusation at ordinary Germans who had done nothing to prevent the crimes of the Nazi regime, bunkering down instead and pretending that nothing was morally wrong. We Americans rationalized that Germans were morally inferior to Americans. Indeed, those who fought WWII on the allied side, and particularly Americans, who "fought to be free."

By the time I was 21, that whole explanation was beginning to unravel. I had met my wife, and the German side of her family. They had been born in Germany, but had left to come to the United States. If there was something defective in the German DNA, clearly these people were outliers. Then I was stationed in Germany and met many fine Germans. Again, wonderful people.

I recognize that I had been exposed to simplistic propaganda during the Nazi and post-WWII years. More troubling was that I recognized the same attributes in Americans that were responsible for the do-nothing attitude of the German people during the Nazi period. The lesson that should have come out of that period should have been, "There but for the Grace of God go I!"

As a result, I committed to studying why and how people become a nation of sheep, to use the title of Judge Andrew Napolitano's book. That commitment included acting as well as reading and talking.  I still don't have all of the answers, but I have a lot of them. It is not a pretty picture, but the good news is that the current generation is positioned in history to do something about the corruption that inevitably occurs when masses of people bunker down and shut their eyes to what is going on.

That opportunity to learn who we really are is right around the corner, arriving as early as a month out as the Covid-19 Panic passes. If it is business as usual, then shame on us for looking the other way as our freedoms were trampled under the feet of the many petty Hitlers who crawled out of the woodwork during this period. Just as the WWII generation was called "The Greatest Generation", this generation will be the subject of derision and contempt in the future. It will be recognized how easily we traded our liberty for a $1,200 bribe, this generation's 30 pieces of silver.

~ Phil Duffy, note to his grandson, April 30, 2020