![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/nasdaq3months.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThis is not difficult to figure out.<\/p>\n
The pandemic is over. Conquered. Smitten.<\/p>\n
We’re on to cranking the economy, the stockmarket and hence, winning the presidential election.<\/p>\n
Asset values are skyrocketing because there’s huge money sloshing around.<\/p>\n
As stocks boom (e.g. today), more money will slosh into them, driving stock prices even higher.<\/p>\n
You could posit a depressing story. And it’s one that has many of us staring at the headlights:<\/p>\n
Millions of people are unemployed, hundreds of thousands are getting sick (2.9 million in total so far), thousands are dying each day (a total of 130,000 so far). These are awful numbers. But they’re not public stocks — which are big, not shuttered, companies, benefiting by advancing technology and exploding demand for their services from the lucky, stay-at-home workers.<\/p>\n
Hence today’s boom. Here’s the last three months of Nasdaq, where most of our “action” is.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Nasdaq looks spectacular until you compare it to stocks like Amazon, Shopify, Zoom which have done even better. The usual suspects.<\/p>\n
Nasdaq, which looked great in the chart above, now looks positively puny in the chart below.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/ixicplus5months..jpg\")
<\/p>\n
My forecasts — until the sh*t hits the fan and I don’t think it will, since we’re about to see buckets of\u00a0 government money printing — our usual suspects will continue to do well. My money is on them. You can find my list of favored stocks in the right hand on the blog. Click here.<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n How the rosy picture is being painted\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n + From yesterday’s Washington Post:<\/p>\n On CBS\u2019s \u201cFace the Nation\u201d on Sunday morning, host Margaret Brennan\u00a0gave viewers<\/a>\u00a0an unusual peek behind the booking curtain. \u201cWe think it\u2019s important for our viewers to hear from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control,\u201d she said to the camera. \u201cBut we have not been able to get our requests for Dr. Fauci approved by the Trump administration in the last three months, and the CDC not at all. We will continue our efforts.\u201d CBS isn\u2019t the only media outlet with this issue: Fauci and other key health-policy figures on the administration\u2019s coronavirus task force have been largely pulled from the airwaves in recent weeks while cases surge nationwide. Their absence makes sense, though, when you realize that even in the midst of this\u00a0deadly pandemic<\/a>, the administration\u2019s top priority is the president\u2019s image.<\/p>\n For the full article, click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n + From The Atlantic magazine, is a huge article by James Fallows (a writer whom I admire) titled<\/p>\n The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything<\/strong> Coping with\u00a0a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools. Scientists must explore the most advanced frontiers of research while citizens attend to the least glamorous tasks of personal hygiene. Physical supplies matter\u2014test kits, protective gear\u2014but so do intangibles, such as \u201cflattening the curve\u201d and public trust in official statements. The response must be global, because the virus can spread anywhere, but an effective response also depends heavily on national policies, plus implementation at the state and community level. Businesses must work with governments, and epidemiologists with economists and educators. Saving lives demands minute-by-minute attention from health-care workers and emergency crews, but it also depends on advance preparation for threats that might not reveal themselves for many years. I have heard military and intelligence officials describe some threats as requiring a \u201cwhole of nation\u201d response, rather than being manageable with any one element of \u201chard\u201d or \u201csoft\u201d power or even a \u201cwhole of government\u201d approach. Saving lives during a pandemic is a challenge of this nature and magnitude….<\/p>\n It is a challenge that the United States did not meet. During the past two months, I have had lengthy conversations with some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials\u2014all of them people with firsthand knowledge of what our response to the coronavirus pandemic should have been, could have been, and actually was. The government officials had served or are still serving in the uniformed military, on the White House staff, or in other executive departments, and in various intelligence agencies. Some spoke on condition of anonymity, given their official roles. As I continued these conversations, the people I talked with had noticeably different moods. First, in March and April, they were astonished and puzzled about what had happened. Eventually, in May and June, they were enraged. \u201cThe president kept a cruise ship from landing in California, because he didn\u2019t want \u2018his numbers\u2019 to go up,\u201d a former senior government official told me. He was referring to Donald Trump\u2019s comment, in early March, that he didn\u2019t want infected passengers on the cruise ship\u00a0Grand Princess<\/em>\u00a0to come ashore, because \u201cI like the numbers being where they are<\/a>.\u201d Trump didn\u2019t try to write this comment off as a \u201cjoke,\u201d his go-to defense when his remarks cause outrage, including his June 20 comment in Tulsa that he\u2019d told medical officials to \u201cslow the testing down, please<\/a>\u201d in order to keep the reported case level low. But the evidence shows that he has been deadly earnest about denying the threat of COVID-19, and delaying action against it.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n \u201cLook at what the numbers are now,\u201d this same official said, in late April, at a moment when the U.S. death toll had just climbed above 60,000, exceeding the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. By late June, the total would surpass 120,000\u2014more than all American military deaths during World War I. \u201cIf he had just been paying attention, he would have asked, \u2018What do I do first?\u2019 We wouldn\u2019t have passed the threshold of casualties in previous wars. It is a catastrophic failure.\u201d…<\/p>\n During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called\u00a0Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city\u2019s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market where wild animals, live or already killed, were on sale along with fish and domesticated animals. It was at this market that the first animal-to-human transfer of the virus is generally thought to have occurred, probably from a bat. But by that time, as Marisa Taylor of Reuters\u00a0first reported, the Trump administration had removed dozens of CDC representatives in China.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, information came in. By the final days of December, and no later than January 1, a warning would have appeared in the President\u2019s Daily Brief\u2014the classified summary of international developments distilled from all intelligence agencies and passed to the president and a handful of advisers. \u201cIt was in the briefings by the beginning of January,\u201d a person involved in preparing the president\u2019s briefing book told me. \u201cOn that there is no dispute.\u201d This person went on: \u201cBut knowing it is in the briefing book is different from knowing whether the president saw it.\u201d He didn\u2019t need to spell out his point, which was: Of course this president did not. …<\/p>\n In addition to America\u2019s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration\u2019s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years. Through Trump\u2019s time in office, official American attitudes toward China have been a mixture of servility and truculence. Trump himself has been almost as personally flattering and subservient to Xi Jinping as he has been to Vladimir Putin. In his speeches and tweets he has emphasized that Xi is a \u201cgreat leader\u201d and his personal friend. (And if former National Security Adviser John Bolton\u2019s\u00a0account\u00a0is to be believed, Trump told Xi that he liked the idea that Xi was holding Muslim Uighurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang.) But at the official level, Trump\u2019s administration has been as hostile to China as Trump sounds in his rally speeches, when he utters \u201cChy-nah\u201d as if the word itself were profane. Visa allowances have been tightened; long-standing cooperative arrangements have been cut; \u201cthought leaders\u201d of the administration, from Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo onward (but not including Trump, who is a \u201ctone leader\u201d), have suggested that it\u2019s time for a new Cold War, with China as the existential foe. …<\/p>\n Anything that Barack Obama had recommended, Donald Trump was predisposed to ignore. Of the many lies Trump and his defenders have spun, none is more flatly false than the claim, as stated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in May, that the Obama administration \u201cdid not leave \u2026 any kind of game plan for something like this<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In response to McConnell\u2019s claim, Ron Klain tweeted about the official pandemic playbook left for Obama\u2019s successors.\u00a0McConnell, surprisingly, retracted his statement<\/a>\u2014but the White House spokesperson,\u00a0Kayleigh McEnany<\/a>,\u00a0then claimed<\/a>\u00a0that whatever \u201cthin packet of paper\u201d Obama had left was inferior to a replacement that the Trump administration had supposedly cooked up, but which has never been made public. The 69-page, single-spaced Obama-administration document is officially called \u201cPlaybook for Early Response to High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents\u201d and is freely\u00a0available online<\/a>. It describes exactly what the Trump team was determined not to do.<\/p>\n What I found remarkable was how closely the Obama administration\u2019s recommendations tracked with those set out 10 years earlier by the George W. Bush administration, in response to its chastening experience with bird flu. The Bush-era work, called \u201cNational Strategy for Pandemic Influenza\u201d and publicly\u00a0available here<\/a>,\u00a0differs from the Obama-era playbook mainly in the simpler forms of technology on which it could draw. But the premises, recommendations, and warnings are fundamentally similar in each\u2014and at complete odds with the \u201clet\u2019s just ignore it\u201d nature of the Trump administration\u2019s response.<\/p>\n The Bush report explained clearly why new diseases would inevitably emerge, and why they would constitute a severe threat to national security in the broadest terms. Its central premise was the importance of working seamlessly with other governments so as to contain outbreaks before they spread worldwide. \u201cGiven the rapid speed of transmission and the universal susceptibility of human populations, an outbreak of pandemic influenza anywhere poses a risk to populations everywhere,\u201d the report explained. \u201cOur international effort to contain and mitigate the effects of an outbreak of pandemic influenza beyond our borders is a central component of our strategy to stop, slow, or limit the spread of infection to the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m tempted to devote the next 20 pages of this article to quoting whole passages from the Bush report. But here is a sample\u2014and remember, this was an official assessment by the U.S. government more than a dozen years before the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed:<\/p>\n The animal population serves as a reservoir for new influenza viruses \u2026 It is impossible to predict whether the H5N1 virus [in 2005] will lead to a pandemic, but history suggests that if it does not, another novel influenza virus will emerge at some point in the future and threaten an unprotected human population.<\/p>\n The economic and societal disruption of an influenza pandemic could\u00a0be significant. Absenteeism across multiple sectors related to personal illness, illness in family members, fear of contagion, or public health measures to limit contact with others could threaten the functioning of critical infrastructure, the movement of goods and services, and operation of institutions such as schools and universities. A pandemic would thus have significant implications for the economy, national\u00a0security, and the basic functioning of society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/section>\n
\nImagine if the National Transportation Safety Board investigated America\u2019s response to the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/zoesipad-750x524.png\")
<\/p>\n