Spekulatius

Bought a bit of CB (insurer)

I think one issue with BATRA is that in addition to owning a sports team, it is also a real estate developer.

I love the confidence! Even though you are so consistently proven wrong, you still post with gusto! What is the Infection Fatality Rate of the flu? Nobody actually believes it is 0.67%, do they? This comprehensive review shows ~10 deaths per 100,000 H1N1infections: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/ So comparing your bogus numbers for CV to these bogus numbers for H1N1, CV is 67 times more deadly than the flu! I love the stupidity! the 21% positive antibody test results on NYCers (3000 person sample) is the best DATUM we have on creating the correct denominator of the mortality per infection rate. what is your problem, Larkin? https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/ I agree that this is a meaningful study. It’s large enough and reasonably random. There might be a bias in just choosing people outside vs at home but it is likely not a strong one. 0.67% morbidity is ~7x deadlier than the flu though. The flu kills between 10-50k annually and infects ~30M (roughly ) so thats in the 0.1% ballpark. In addition, it’s much more infective.

Maybe you should open a business selling coastal cities to horny tech guys based on the f&&kability potential. ::) He underestimates hillbilly towns in that regard.

A retroactive change to the contracts would be unconstitutional, full stop. Of course, that doesn't prevent the market from imposing a discount until it's resolved. Poor drafting is a larger risk, and there will be judges that make stupid decisions, but insurance companies will win most of these suits or settle on favorable terms eventually. Plaintiffs' lawyers are selling their clients hard on a hope and a prayer. Clients getting played. I have heard the wording is pretty standardized and precludes pandemics. The wording was drafted by national insurers organization after the 2003 SARS episode. I willing to bet that this is just noise.

Yes, that’s a real problem . My wife runs the dialysis machines in ICU‘s and they’re super busy , because many patient need dialysis (often the result of organ failures from oxygen deficiencies most likely) and the machines clogging up from blood clots. Nobody expected anyone this going into this. Now we are short dialysis equipment, staff to operate them and consumables. Doctors trying treat this with blood thinners and clot busters. On a related note, an investigation offend in Switzerland and Germany found blood knots in lung and heart of the deceased, likely contributing or even causing the death. This may have implications for treating severe cases going forward.

Re Antibody Tests from Roche CEO. He could be talking his own book of course, but I don’t think so: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/disaster-roche-ceos-verdict-covid-055050902.html

If a million people die (regardless of age) the economy would be trash anyways. Probably worse than it is right now (if that’s possible). Can you expand on this? If a million people die... would the economy necessarily be trashed? I'm interested in thoughts on this. -- I suppose if we got to point of 1million dead, we would have completely overwhelmed the health care system, and a lot more doctors and nurses would sicken and die from COVID. And many people would die from untreated heart attacks (et al) due to lack of medical care. If 1 million people die over 6 months or 1 year that is 30 bps of the US population. But the US population was growing around 70 bps per year so still some slight population growth. I don't know how much the economy would go down in a no stay at home situation (probably less though). The economy would go to trash with 1M excess death in let‘s say 6 month due to widespread panic. It is irrelevant that the population would still keep growing or if the government would claim we are open for business. The multiplicative nature of epidemic vs randomness of natural causes makes a huge psychological difference. If human psychology wouldn’t play a role, 9/11 (~3000 dead) would have been a non- event economically for example.

That's par for the course of what you get out of doctor Trump. How many doctors prescribed hydroxychloroquine just cause they were afraid they would get sued by trumpers if they didn't because the dude shot his mouth? Without control for who was prescribed which drug, the study is meaningless. I wonder if the bright bulbs who were arguing against controlled studies because it was unethical to withhold hydroxychloroquine will suddenly agree that this study is meaningless because there it is no random control? Or the MAGA crowd who fell in love with a small, uncontrolled French study? Also, should be noted that the remdisivir study that caused the market to spike was not controlled. Maybe we should just listen to Fauci? Too many conclusions are drawn right now based on quick and dirty study results. Some feel like Hail Mary‘s and get egos attached to them. Not much good comes out of those situations, especially when lives are at stake.

If a million people die (regardless of age) the economy would be trash anyways. Probably worse than it is right now (if that’s possible).

You better hedge the currency though . Some of the oily currencies like NOK, MXN or the Ruble lost ~20% against the USD and trade with the volatility of equity

Bought back some RHM.DE (German industrial conglomerate with interesting defense and automobile supplier). It’s a bit similar to General Dynamics, but cheaper. I also bought a starter in RE (reinsurance).

Contact tracing only works well when you have a small number of cases. When you exceed about 100 cases, it can‘t be done comprehensively and then the only way to works this is to prioritize the contacts (work, family, vulnerable persons who came in contact etc) and hopefully get them quickly quarantined and tested (with rapid feedback). I know for fact that it’s done in Germany and I think they are trying in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, the snail mail arrived way too late for me to go through the convoluted sign up procedure. Hopefully, someone write up a short summary of the shareholder meeting. It would be very much appreciated.

Seems risky to trade this at all, unless you actually can take delivery, as these contracts are worse than hot potatoes. This will take liquidity from the crude future markets

I wonder if we see the day when they start to flare it.

https://www.boston.com/news/health/2020/04/19/an-overlooked-possibly-fatal-coronavirus-crisis-a-dire-need-for-kidney-dialysis Unforeseen knock on effect from COVID-19.

It’s the prelude for a Coen Brothers movie about the epidemic.

This is an article about the increased Chinese influence on the WHO (in German): https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/coronavirus-who-weltkrankheitsorganisation-a-29c74432-aea1-4f9a-b1ff-fcc4bb43cc4e Seems like some critique here is justified. Ousting some of WHO’s leadership would be a better way than withholding funding right now, imo.

Yes, it could well happen. Note that minimum wages have been rising at a pretty good clip before this thing hit. Then a bunch of companies have created their own minus wage floor (Amazon, the banks and many others) above the federal limit. Typically a recession put a lid on wage increased, especially on the lower end, but with all the welfare programs and and unwillingness to take a chance in many occupations to catch a nasty virus, that may well not happen this time around. Likely losers will be small business (service) and agriculture. Higher inflation is also a likely outcome, but may not be they bad it is happens via higher living wages. Some folks I know at high tech companies are very very bullish on automation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/coronavirus-antibody-tests.html Testing for serological tests for antibodies is one of the hardest things to get right, especially with now touted finger prick (think Theranos). These are "analog" tests (as opposed to digital PCR tests for testing viral RNA to determine positive for SAR-Cov2). I have worked in this space for 15 years now and it is pretty clear that most people do not realize how difficult protein measurements are as opposed to DNA/RNA measurements. If not done right, they will have unacceptable false positive and negative rates. The article above clearly points to that risk. Given that at a lot of testing kits and materials in US are coming from China and not being vetted, I can only imagine what kind of misinformation about antibodies is being given out. Quotes - "The Food and Drug Administration has allowed about 90 companies, many based in China, to sell tests that have not gotten government vetting, saying the pandemic warrants an urgent response. But the agency has since warned that some of those businesses are making false claims about their products; health officials, like their counterparts overseas, have found others deeply flawed." "For example, Britain recently said the millions of rapid tests it had ordered from China were not sensitive enough to detect antibodies except in people who were severely ill. In Spain, the testing push turned into a fiasco last month after the initial batch of kits it received had an accuracy of 30 percent, rather than the advertised 80 percent. In Italy, local officials have begun testing even before national authorities have validated the tests." Yea, that’s one issue. Then there is a the issue if presence of antibodies constitutes immunity.

I think this is correct. Even a downgrade of the US credit rating wouldn’t do much, because it is still the best. House in a crummy neighborhood with the exception of Switzerland (too small to matter) and gold. The emerging markets may have a huge problem though.s like Mexico were just about junk and got hit by lower crude prices. They can’t borrow for nothing. The Mexican peso has already lost 20% compared to the USD. I think we will see many defaults.

Debt service after WW2 was serviceable because the US went into a period of heavy growth after WW2, which reduced the debt/GDP metric. This is likely* to repeat after the current epidemic. At some point, all this extra spending will lead to higher taxes imo. Wanted to write *unlikely