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Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition
Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition
“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in? I didn’t even know sleep. It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.” – Deadpool
One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup. I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman®”
“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost. Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target. I call that a win-win. Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.
See? You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.
I started working from home yesterday, which was nice. When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch. Good times. I do have a concern – The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR. I want to be treated as more than a sexual object. I mean, not much more, but more.
As much as you might be interested in my derrière, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months. While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do. Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.
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Complacency and the Environmental Catastrophe
Complacency and the Environmental Catastrophe
Ask any reasonably well-informed person what the cause of climate change is and the chances are they will say greenhouse gas emissions (GGE’s), but they would only be partially correct. While it is true that man-made GGE’s are clogging Earth’s lower atmosphere, trapping heat and resulting in widespread climate change, the underlying 21st century cause, in contrast to the 19th and early 20th century when information was scarce, is something much more personal and lethal: complacency. Widespread complacency among politicians, big business and to a lesser degree, the general public, is the reason why, despite the various cries for restraint, global GGE’s continue to increase.
Complacency is why air pollution is getting worse in cities and towns across the world, leading to a range of health problems and premature deaths; complacency has caused the destruction of the planet’s rain forests, 85% of which have been lost through human activity, and it’s why the oceans have been poisoned and robbed of fish. Complacency is fueling the greatest extinction of animal and plant species in our history, it’s setting forests alight, filling the oceans and rivers with plastics and other pollutants, and is the reason why the ice mass in the North Pole is melting at unprecedented rates, leading to rising sea levels, flooding and the erosion of land, destroying homes and natural habitats, taking lives, displacing people – potentially millions.
It is complacency, which a wise man once described as the root of all evil, that is causing all of this and more – the ‘I’m all right Jack’ mentality’. And no matter how many reports are published and forecasts made, or how often someone speaks or writes about what is the greatest crisis in human history, few listen, even fewer act and nothing substantive changes, certainly nothing that matches the scale of the catastrophe. Do people even know there is a crisis, really?
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There Is No Excuse For Janet Yellen’s Complacency
There Is No Excuse For Janet Yellen’s Complacency
Janet Yellen has been reported by Reuters as saying in London yesterday that “she does not believe that there will be a run on the banking system at least as long as she lives”:
“Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be,” Yellen said at an event in London. “Fed’s Yellen: Not another financial crisis in ‘our lifetimes’”
The only word I can use to describe this belief is “delusional.”
The only way in which her belief could be justified would be in financial crises were truly random events, caused by something outside the economy—or just by a very bad throw of the economic dice.
This is indeed the perspective of mainstream “Neoclassical” economic theory, in which Yellen was trained, and because of which she was deemed eligible—and indeed eminently suitable—to Chair the Federal Reserve.
This is the theory that led the OECD to proclaim, two months before the crisis began in August 2007, that “the current economic situation is in many ways better than what we have experienced in years”, and that they expected that “sustained growth in OECD economies would be underpinned by strong job creation and falling unemployment.” (OECD, June 2007, “Achieving Further Re-balancing”).
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A Murderous Complacency
murder: a flock of crows
~ Miriam-Webster dictionary
Many view the appearance of crows as an omen of death because ravens and crows are scavengers and are generally associated with dead bodies, battlefields, and cemeteries, and they’re thought to circle in large numbers above sites where animals or people are expected to soon die.
~ “Nature”, PBS.org
Running PeakProsperity.com requires me to read and process a lot of data on a daily basis. As it’s hard to digest it all in real-time, I keep a running list of charts, tables and articles that catch my attention, to return to when I have the time to give them my full focus.
Lately, that list has been getting quite long. And it’s largely full of indicators that concern me; signals that the long era of “extend and pretend” in today’s markets may finally be at its terminus.
Like crows circling overhead, every day brings with it new worrisome statistics that portend an ill change ahead. Indeed, these omens are increasing so quickly now that it’s hard not to feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s suspense classic The Birds:
So what are the data that make me think these crows will soon be feasting on the carcass of the great bull market that has powered stock, bonds, real estate and most other asset classes to record highs since 2009?
Rogue’s Gallery
Complacent Investors
Investors have enjoyed remarkably gentle treatment by the stock markets over the past half-decade. Retracements have occurred much less frequently than historical norms, and have been shallow and short-lived when they happened.
Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat and often referred to as “Wall Street’s biggest bull” notes that 2016 was the mildest year on record for the S&P 500, with only 7 days in which the index traded at less than 3% of its 52-week high.
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The climate emergency: time to switch to panic mode?
The climate emergency: time to switch to panic mode?
James Schlesinger once uttered one of those profound truths that explain a lot of what we see around us: it was: “people have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic.”
So far, we have been in the “complacency” mode of operation in regard to climate change: it doesn’t exist, if exist it is not a problem, if it is a problem, it is not our fault, and anyway doing something about it would be too expensive to be worth doing. But the latest temperature data are nothing but spine-chilling. What are we seeing? Is this just a sort of a rebound from the so-called “pause”? Or something much more worrisome? We may be seeing something that portends a major switch in the climate system; an unexpected acceleration of the rate of change. There are reasons to be worried, very worried: the CO2 emissions seem to have peaked, but that didn’t generate a slowdown of the rate of increase of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If nothing else, it is growing faster than ever. And then there is the ongoing methane spike and, as you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
What’s happening? Nobody can say for sure, but these are not good symptoms; not at all. And that may be a good reason to switch to panic mode.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Volatility and Sleep-Walking Markets
Volatility and Sleep-Walking Markets
A recent Business Insider chart of the day feature was particularly interesting. Called The stock market is asleep, it observed that the US market has been in a period of very low volatility:
Market technician Ryan Detrick noted that it’s been 8 weeks since we’ve seen a weekly move of at least 1% up or down in the S&P 500. That’s the longest such streak we’ve seen in 21 years.
Markets enter such periods of complacency when there has been a long uptrend, with periods of very low volatility reflecting where the market has come from, not where it is going. Such periods are far more likely to be a sign of an impending trend reversal than of a continued uptrend.
Under normal circumstances, markets can be expected to show more variation, with regular inhalation and exhalation indicative of healthy risk perception. The loss of that pattern, indicating extreme complacency, is a leading indicator of a rude awakening. The VIX index, or volatility/fear index, is at extreme lows, indicating a historic level of complacency. It is no surprise that this coincides with a market extreme.
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