The Angry Bear

Coronavirus dashboard for April 4: with lockdowns in place, testing still far behind, no action on necessary “test, track, quarantine” plan  – by New Deal democrat Here is the update through yesterday (April 3) I’ve changed the format, moving the “just the facts, ma’am” data to the top, and comments at the end. The four most important metrics are starred (***) below. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins...

The Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal The Covid-19 pandemic won’t last forever, and at some point we will have to return to figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis.  (What a depressing opening line.  No, I have no desire to live in a world of permanent crisis.)  Is the answer a Green New Deal?  Challenge has just published my analysis of this; you can find the link here. Abstract: The Green New Deal, an attractive agenda of increased...

Remdesivir and Transfer Pricing Part II Now that I sketched out the transfer pricing for Gilead Sciences with respect to their successful HIV and Hep C products (as much as I can say based on publicly available information), it is time to speculate a bit on how Remdesivir may play out. There is a lot we do not know including whether this treatment receives regulatory approval and how it will be priced if it does. Note for example this story: More than...

Credit Spreads: Comparing COVID-19 to the Collapse of Lehman Brothers On March 18, Reuters noted something I have been following of late: Concerns about the impact of the coronavirus on corporate America’s balance sheets has tripled the premium investors are demanding to hold even the highest-rated corporate bonds. The difference between the average yield of investment-grade U.S. bonds over virtually risk-free Treasuries widened to 303 basis points (bps)...

This is the complete letter Trump sent to Senator Schumer on April 2nd.   It is beyond embarrassing. Senator Charles E. Schumer United States Senator Washington, D.C.  20515 Dear Senator Schumer: Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way. As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job. The Defense Production Act...

Coronovirus politics from the Boston Globe: There are indeed two ways in which Trump’s handling of this crisis are being viewed. Where most Democrats see lying and stupidity, most Republicans see optimism and hope. As the virus races around the world, mainstream Democrats see proof that we live in a global connected world — while Trump Republicans see proof that we need tighter borders. Where Democrats see presidential messages shifting daily as unclear...

The D Word Yes, depression, and not the psychological type, although the economic type leads to the psychological type, whether ot not it is the other  way around (see Keynes’ “animal spirits). I often make fun of Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post, but in Washington Post today he raised the possibility that we are going into a depression, not just a bad recession.  On TV this evening I heard Austen Goolsby throw it out as well.  I suspect we...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 2: nationwide lockdown nearly complete, but the surge in testing has completely stalled  – by New Deal democrat Here is the update through yesterday (April 1) Close to 90% of the US population is now under lockdown, and it appears to be lowering the rate of exponential growth of new infections. But testing in the past 6 days has plateaued at about 100,000/day and is not keeping pace at all with the growth in new...

Why the States must surge medical supplies, explained in two easy points by New Deal democrat Point 1: The most recent “plan” of the Trump Administration is to extend the lockdown through the end of April. It is based on the below graph from a foundation endowed by Bill and Melinda Gates: The graph anticipates roughly 100,000 deaths during April and May, peaking in mid-April at about 2500 deaths per day. But it also presumes that the lockdown remains...

In 2020 A March Of Madness, Econospeak Just before the end of February, President Trump declared that there were only 15 Covid-19 cases in the US, and that “they will soon go to zero.”  Deaths from COVID 19 now passed 3,000 (March 30th) and yesterday Trump declared that because we might have had over 2 million dead if nothing had been done, it would show “we did a good job” if deaths kept to “only” 100,000 to 200,000.  To do this “good job” he has...