1. Jeremy Samuel Faust writes,
there are little data to support the CDC’s assumption that the number of people who die of flu each year is on average six times greater than the number of flu deaths that are actually confirmed. In fact, in the fine print, the CDC’s flu numbers also include pneumonia deaths.
His point is that deaths from the flu in past years are greatly overstated. This reinforces the intuition that the novel coronavirus is worse than the flu.
2. Culture of looting watch, from the WSJ
housing activists in at least 15 cities, including New York and Chicago, are organizing rent strikes. They are calling on tenants to withhold May payments in hopes of provoking federal and state lawmakers to provide more financial support for renters.
3. Ricardo Reis looks to the period right after World War II as a precedent for how fiscal and monetary policy were entangled and then unentangled.
There comes a time when the central bank says that it should be focused on controlling inflation and no longer just on trying to keep rates low just to finance the debt. The finance ministry, of course, does not like that because now its job is going to be much, much harder. Potentially it’s going to have to deal with high interest rates, especially if it does not behave responsibly with respect to its deficits. As a result, this conflict arises. The Accord was, if you like, the peace treaty.
Pointer from Greg Mankiw. The interview with Reis is broad, recommended.
The accord to which he refers is a 1951 agreement that allowed the Fed to set a more independent course, raising interest rates. That was easier to do then, because the government had stopped deficit spending when the war ended.
4. A commenter pointed to a post by editors of The New Atlantis about the extreme differences across states in death rates. I’m not necessarily with them on the analysis, but I pass along the link because the map charts are eye candy.
1. Every day there seems to be new aspersions cast upon the accuracy of cause of death coding. Today this is one of them: https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-funeral-directors-in-covid-19-epicenter-doubt-legitimacy-of-deaths/ Presumably this could be cleared up by checking the actual reporting to see if there are reasonable numbers of non-covid deaths being reported. But flu- and flu-like illness is necessarily a broad category so it would be helpful to know if all flu-like illness deaths are now being coded as vivid.
At some point, someone is going to compare records to make sure there isn’t double counting going on- you take a death by heart attack and then count it as COVID, too, not instead of, too. If, the COVID label is being misapplied to many deaths, it would show up in deep declines in mortality from other causes, as you note. This would be a big tell, and one way to finesse it will be to report the same death as being from two different causes- that way you don’t have to lie to the family.
I found this passage in Faust’s article maddening:
“The CDC should immediately change how it reports flu deaths. While in the past it was justifiable to err on the side of substantially overestimating flu deaths, in order to encourage vaccination and good hygiene, at this point the CDC’s reporting about flu deaths is dangerously misleading the public and even public officials about the comparison between these two viruses.”
The first statement is great. Truth matters. But the next sentence is Noble Lie bullshit. When truth only matters if it gets people to do what you want them to do, you are no longer a “true scientist” and people will justifiably not believe you.
And those skeptical people may over-generalize, which has real world consequences. Many people think that climate change scientists are just pushing an agenda and so climate change can’t be real. Unfortunately, climate change IS real AND some climate change scientists are pushing an agenda and not being trustworthy about what the research shows.
This, after all, is the moral of “The boy who cried wolf”.
Culture of looting watch
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Arbitrage opportunity. The evictions cannot get done before the next stimulus bill.
Cal teachers are playing the same game. They want to move local bailouts.
It is all merging into a single pot.
The last time the U.S. personal savings rate was as high as it is now was in the recession of 1981. The U.S. personal savings rate in March 2020 was 13.1% and this is up from 8.0% in February. Perhaps some of those savings will go to corporate bonds to finance the building of real productive assets but in the short term we are in a risk averse economy so I am not expecting materials inflation to be a cause of general inflation. (I think the housing sector is more likely a destination for savings after herd immunity is established.)
I bought toilet paper recently for $3.21 (sales tax included) for 6 rolls of very good quality. This does not seem to be a high price though I am not certain because I am very inconsistent in choice of store and choice of brand.
Thus far the TIPS spread is right in “predicting” low inflation.
Home owners have been looting through generations with tax breaks – what’s wrong with renters trying to get in on the action?