February 29, 2020

more than meets the eye

The press is nearly gleeful over the Kung Flu virus. Nothing sells ads like a good threat of death and mayhem. As a bonus, they can blame the Trumpster.

Already the talking heads are blaming the losses in the stock market on the virus. You can almost see the hopefulness in their eyes because they know the economy is great and that bodes well for four more years of the Bad Orange Man.  Anything that hurts the economy is a good thing to the lefties.

What they are not telling you is that even with the latest drop in stock prices, the market is still at near record levels.

More importantly, they aren’t telling you that Wall Street is looking at Bernie’s increasing lead with a jaundiced eye. The more it looks like the avowed socialist might get the nomination, the smart people will start to move their money.

If you want to see the economy slow to a crawl, elect a guy who vows to take a big chunk of wealth from private citizens. Don’t worry, Bernie is at least honest. Your taxes are going up too.

1 comment:

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Face it, we were past due for a correction. You can't run the markets that hot for that long without someone eventually deciding it's time to take profits. And I'm sure people made scads of dough when the market started to drop. "Buy low, sell high" has always been the way people got rich. You and me with our paltry 401(k) and IRA funds don't have the ability to buy and sell like that. We just have to ride things out and wait for the market to come back. (It always has in the past. ALWAYS.)

And for all the pissing and moaning about Pence and how he handled the 2015 HIV "epidemic" down by the river, Pence at least wanted to do something proactive (find a way to heal the addicts) rather than stupid (give the addicts clean needles so they could keep shooting up without worrying about HIV). Pence has already made some good decisions and I expect him to run this like a boss.

The only way I see this turning into a net negative for Trump is if his response somehow goes off the rails and we get a zombie apocalypse or something like that. So far, COVID-19 doesn't seem to be the sort of virus that would lead to that; the recovery rate is high and the new infection rate seems to be leveling off. In China? Lots of deaths to start because their healthcare system lacks the most important part of a response to a major epidemic: The freedom to exchange information in a timely manner. But boy, can they build hospitals! /sarc

And I'm giggling about the Iranians, who apparently brought some home with them from visits to China. When this is all over and the truth comes out, I think it's even money it's going to be something along the line of China and Iran collaborating on weaponizing the SARS coronavirus, and oopsie, the virus got loose and that's all she wrote.

The fun part about this whole thing is the Israeli company that was working on technology to produce general virus vaccines and just happened to be using chicken coronavirus for their testing, which means they think they could have a working vaccine for COVID-19 in only a matter of weeks, if all goes well. I think any country that has pushed BDS divestment in Israel should be told, "Sorry, no vaccine for you!" Well. Nah. Kidding. But only because the more people getting vaccinated, the smaller chance a real pandemic could get started.

Consider everything here that is of original content copyrighted as of March 2005
Powered By Blogger