Nice day for ducks

Weird stuff going on at home, though not altogether surprising. Quite often I play my guitar and attempt to sing one-man-and-his-guitar songs in a fairly good approximation of a tortured cat, the pain on our actual moggy’s face notwithstanding. In stealth mode in the corner lurks my Google Home automated spy, covertly listening over the last few weeks. Today I wander into the kitchen, say ‘hey Google, play discover weekly’ and it sets up Spotify, which plays me all the same songs by one man and his guitar – only this time perfectly, and even throws in a few Jeff Buckley classics to complement my destruction of Hallelujah. Although, as we all know, there’s no way Google is listening and gathering intelligence until you say ‘Hey Google’ …. is it.

Anyway, here’s a couple of ducks, stuck indoors during last week’s rain.

Washing your mouth out with soap

More fake news, this time invented by our most trusted news organisations as they wilfully distort and mis-report a scene played out in the White House briefing room by President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Acting Under Secretary Bill Bryan, leader of the Science and Technology Directorate at the US Department of Homeland Security. The reporting today is a reconstruction of reality which is clearly designed to cast President Trump as a dangerous imbecile who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a national crisis, and given prominence in the news to the extent that the actual facts were obliterated.

Of course, in all matters coronavirus we should listen to the scientists and definitely not drink disinfectant. In fact it doesn’t really need a scientist to tell us that, does it? Surely that’s a given, and quite clearly the President dropped a massive bollock when he stepped into this territory. So in this rant I’m not referring to the pensioner who should be self-isolating for many reasons at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Rather, I’m making a comment on our press.

‘Trump’s wild coronavirus claims prompt disbelief’ screams the Guardian, in a headline no-one can possibly mistake for one of its characteristic slepping errors. Now I’m entitled to think, especially as a paying supporter of this reasonably sophisticated compendium of millennial bias, that there would be a fact behind this headline. Not so. Trump made no claim.

So let me do my tiny bit to put matters straight with some counter-facts* to the inevitable anti-Trump reporting that will dominate the headlines for the next week and thereby divert our attention from real stories – for example the crashing of the economy, which is getting nowhere near the attention it deserves because the media simply can’t make it up.

Bill Bryan runs a group of highly qualified scientists with the facilities of some of the best laboratories in the world at the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center. He presented to the President the findings of research in which the effects of UV light on airborne and surface borne viruses were demonstrated. Lots of science, but Bill managed to put it across in a fairly easily understood way, describing a few basic trends which the Center believes are important. He described how simply being exposed to sunlight appears to have a destructive effect on the virus.

Bill pointed out that the Center was also testing effects on the virus of readily available disinfectants, for example bleach and isopropyl alcohol, and crucially referred to work to integrate the findings into practical applications to mitigate exposure and transmission.

At which point, in thanking the Acting Under Secretary for his briefing, the President related some previous thinking that he gone through with Bill about whether or not it made sense to hit people with UV light, or just very powerful lights. (We used to call this ‘lateral thinking’, and whole libraries of books were written about it by management consultants.) And then clearly stating that this needed some medical input, he surmised with a question whether the disinfectant knowledge being gained by the Center might have some application through an injection or ‘almost a cleaning’. He simply did not make any wild coronavirus claims, and no amount of being screamed at by the Grauniad will make it so, even though it makes a good story and even though there are many good reasons to disagree with the Donald.

This is actually what the President did: he invited an expert to his briefing, allowed the expert to present some facts and then did some lateral thinking whilst acknowledging he wasn’t the expert. I have no doubt that the vast majority of UK news consumers have no idea what that expert said, whilst plenty of reporters had the opportunity to take him up on this at his briefing, but clearly didn’t.

*Source: actual transcript of the actual briefing at the actual White House.

Praying for a Dead Cat Bounce

An old phrase has taken on new life lately as the millions of us who rely on the flows of capital and stock markets around the world for our basic well-being study what’s going on in bewildered despair. None of us who has money in a pension fund – which is more or less everyone that ever had a job – or is reliant on the conversion of capital into profits – which is definitely all of us, no exceptions – can have failed to notice that stock markets around the world have crashed over the last few weeks.

While this was happening, some investors will have made millions through short selling, which basically means they profit through the falling stock prices of our companies. They bet that some companies will be on a downward trajectory, and when they’re right they can make millions and convert these profits into a new yacht. There’s a downside for short sellers, of course, which is that potential losses are unlimited if suddenly a company lifts off like a Changzheng rocket, but on the whole, when China sneezed and the world caught a cold, the short sellers were out looking for victims. So vicious can be the hunt for victims that stock exchanges sometimes step in and ban the short selling of certain stocks, usually temporarily, to protect the prey from being eaten alive by the pack. It seems such a shame though, that these investors aren’t able to have their fun while the rest of us watch our pension funds fall through the floor.

Which brings me back to dead cats. If you’re one of the many small investors that sold your investments just as the market was reaching its apparent nadir driven by an obvious collapse in the world economy due to a little spikey thing from the East , you’ll be a little irritated to discover that the markets have taken off and are now rewarding the ‘dip buyers’. These people are exactly the opposite of the short sellers – buying cheap and hoping to sell later as the market reaches a new peak, at which point the profits will be converted to a new yacht. Simples, yes?

So now we’re back on an apparently upward trajectory. It seems perverse, but many investors are hoping this won’t last. There’s a principal at stake, which is that if you drop a dead cat from high enough it will bounce, and start dropping again to new lows. When it does, the short sellers will rake in more profits, the dip buyers will be buying new Ferraris, and millions of pensioners will close their eyes and hope!