The only problem is it is the only game in town:
"Tech stocks tank and take the rest of the market with them" by Larry Edelman Globe Staff, September 3, 2020
It made perfect sense when the stock market plunged 34 percent in just 23 trading days in February and March. That’s when the coronavirus expanded from a Chinese domestic crisis into a sprawling pandemic, creating economic entropy around the globe, but the furious surge by stocks to new records since prices bottomed out at the tail end of March? Bonkers.
We’ve had a bull market fueled by virtually free money from the Fed, a handful of tech monopolies, and a truckload of wishful thinking about a V-shaped recovery and a vaccine delivered in record time. Forget that the Labor Department said Thursday that another 881,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, adding to the 29.2 million people who were receiving them in mid-August, or that the economy contracted at a 33 percent annual pace in the second quarter, a record reported by the Commerce Department last week.
So it’s really no surprise that after climbing to a new peak on Wednesday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 tumbled 3.5 percent Thursday, its biggest one-day drop since June 11.
At least the “last couple of weeks have felt very exuberant,” and I'm sure fortunes were made.
Stock prices have soared because investors have no where else to go.
Money market funds? Managers have been forced to waive fees to keep interest rates from falling below zero. Government bonds? The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury is 0.6 percent, which isn’t even enough to keep up with inflation, not to mention save enough for college or retirement.
It’s called TINA — there is no alternative. Stocks are the only game in town, and they’ve been a great game since March 23.
That’s when the Federal Reserve said it would do whatever was necessary to stabilize markets and make sure there was enough money available to keep businesses and consumers afloat.
Which businesses and which consumers 'cuz..... !!!!!!!
The last six months have been the greate$t hei$t in world hi$tory, and they are not done yet.
Fed chairman Jerome Powell essentially told investors, “Don’t worry. We got this,” and they took him at his word.
Thursday’s blowout nicked some of the market’s gains, but the scorecard is still impressive.
O, the $corecard is impre$$ive.
There was no one event that precipitated Thursday’s decline. The new jobless claims figures continued a downward trend, but one at levels not seen in generations. The economy has a long way to go before recouping this spring’s losses.
Investors have been growing increasingly concerned, however, that the big tech stocks driving the rally — the so-called FAANG stocks, for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google ― had risen too far, too fast.
Apple soared 134 percent from March 23 through Wednesday. Facebook was up 104 percent. And Amazon had gained 86 percent. On Thursday, Apple shed 8 percent, while Facebook lost 3.7 percent, and Amazon fell 4.6 percent, but that’s nothing compared with Tesla. After a gravity-defying ascent of 590 percent from its March low through Monday, the stock has shed nearly one-fifth its value, including 9 percent on Thursday. Investors started selling on news that the company’s largest shareholder, after chief executive Elon Musk, had reduced its stake, and that Tesla planned to sell $5 billion of new shares.
To get a sense of how narrow the rally has been, consider this: The S&P 500, an index whose members are weighted by their market value, has advanced 6.9 percent this year, driven by gains among high market-cap stocks such as Apple, but when all the companies in the index are weighted equally, it has lost 3.8 percent.
In other words, if all 500 stocks in the index contributed equally to its moves in either direction, the benchmark would be in the red.
Despite the tech-led takedown, the market isn’t headed for a dot-com-like bust, said Dec Mullarkey, managing director at SLC Management in Wellesley.
The FAANGs and other established tech companies have “fortress balance sheets and sustainable cash flow,” Mullarkey said. “They are not as mis-priced as most headlines suggest.”
Still, Mullarkey and other market analysts cited four key factors that may determine the course of the market through the end of the year and beyond.
STILL!
1. Whether Congress and the White House can agree on a new financial rescue package.
Not unless Wall Street wants one.
2. Can the country get the coronavirus under control and roll out a vaccine?
Already has seeing as 90% of the cases are non-infectious false positives and deaths are only 6% of what has been reported, and we don't need one for a mild flu that has a 99.99% survival rate at this point.
Of course, we are all waiting with baited breath for BG's Pandemic 11, the deliberate release of a highly infectious and more fatal bioweapon to be blamed on whatever target group is most dangerous right now or whatever group most advances the agenda (my bet is right-wing patriot patsies at this point. OKC redux or something).
3. The direction of US-China trade relations.
As long as there isn't an actual war and conflict between military forces, I'm okay with that. I don't like imitating the CCP when it comes to domestic affairs.
4. The November election. Despite President Trump’s claims to the contrary, investors won’t bail out of the stock market if former vice president Joe Biden defeats him. Rather, their concern is an election marred by foreign meddling and claims of voter fraud.
The last thing is the most important, of course, and it really makes one laugh at this point as the pre$$ screams Russian meddling, Russian meddling, while also assuring us the mail-in ballots (notice the eagle in the background that makes him look like a Roman emperor?) are safe and secure, no fraud. Gotta keep counting those ballots until the right person wins.
Wall Street has survived many crises since traders first gathered under a buttonwood tree in Lower Manhattan to buy and sell stocks in 1792, and it will be tested again this fall.....
UH-OH!
Looks like an EPIC COLLAPSE is coming if that ominous statement has any credence!
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Thus he says from his quiet quarantine, and you kids better find a room quick:
"Boston’s hotel industry has been hit harder than all but two other metro areas; The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the local hospitality market" by Andy Rosen Globe Staff, September 3, 2020
Boston’s hotel industry has cratered this year, with revenue and consumer demand falling even more dramatically than in other big cities, as the region has suffered declines in travel for tourism, business, education, and medical care.
Did you know it would be that bad, Globe, when you threw in on all this?
My $en$e is they did, for they are pushing the agenda full time, full $team.
Of course, given the employment mix in Massachusetts, the state’s economy will be less hard hit than many other states, although a factor in the state’s big loss of jobs is its reliance on industries especially hard-hit by the shutdown, including health care, education, and travel-related business such as restaurants and hotels.
The crisis for Boston has been worse than in all but a few other US markets, according to a report released this week by the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Additional research provided by the hospitality data company STR showed that revenue per available room, a key industry metric, declined in August across the Boston metropolitan area by about 76 percent compared with the same period in 2019.
Only Seattle and Oahu in Hawaii (which includes Honolulu) showed greater declines in that metric. The numbers for Greater Boston continue a trend that has seen hotels lose out on their crucial summer season, with many remaining closed altogether.
There won't be any coming back, either, so it will be rich man's playground and paradise once the parasite rabble is cleared out by inoculation.
No city’s hotels have prospered during the pandemic, but Chip Rogers, chief executive of the lodging and hotel association, said Boston has not reaped even the minor benefits of some other markets. Many hotel guests fly to Boston, rather than drive, he said, and areas with a lot of car visitation have seen some relief.
Who would want to go there when everything is closed and you can't do anything?
Aren't you in quarantine for the first 14 days?
Meanwhile, the metropolitan area has not been able to draw sufficient travelers for outdoor activities, which are more attractive than indoor activities during the pandemic. “The areas that are doing comparatively better — no one’s doing really well — are the beach locations,” Rogers said.
That's where local and state officials seem to focus their concerns this summer, too.
Meanwhile, some of Boston’s most important drivers of summer hotel bookings, which include conventions, colleges, and medicine, have been upended by the pandemic.
One bright spot is that there have been few permanent closures, so you can $pare them the $ympathy.
The crisis has been particularly hard for the workforce of the hotel industry. Carlos Aramayo, president of the union UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents about 5,000 hotel workers around Boston, said the hotel industry needs public assistance to survive the crisis, and that he hopes that support will benefit the workers who are suffering.
The taxpayers have to bail them out as another unemployment program is created!?
“It’s important that if there is that kind of support forthcoming, that it doesn’t just go to the service of debt on these properties, but to the men and women who do the work day in and day out,” he said.
Despite the difficult conditions, many hotels have continued to operate, serving the few travelers who are still coming. Some have shifted their business models, functioning as dormitories for socially distanced college students, and some that have been closed are reopening, hopeful that fall and winter will give way to a better 2021.
I'm sure the landlords and business owners are fine with that, until the property is seized entirely.
So much your life's work and dream, but it was always a gamble anyway.
The Royal Sonesta Boston in Cambridge reopened this week in hopes of seeing a decent turnout for Labor Day weekend and building on that momentum.
“The idea is, get open now, survive, provide the level of service, and focus on cleanliness . . . and then ride the wave as, hopefully, travel opens back up,” said Mark Sherwin, executive vice president of operations at the hotel’s parent company.
Well, it is next to Godliness and can you eat hope?
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I find it interesting that the above was an article tucked inside the $ports section on page C8 while this feel-great feature was broadcast above the fold on the front page:
"When your dorm room is at the W, student housing offers a dose of the high life; Colleges are renting out entire floors of hotels to provide socially distanced housing" by Dugan Arnett and Steve Annear Globe Staff, September 3, 2020
When she arrived back at school recently to find her current assignment — an elegantly appointed eighth-floor room at the swanky W Hotel downtown, complete with a king-size bed and a housekeeper who stops in weekly to change the sheets and clean her private bathroom — she experienced something approaching awe.
As the pandemic has forced area colleges to get creative in their efforts to mitigate the on-campus impact of COVID-19, some have turned to an unusual arrangement: renting out entire floors of hotels for the coming school year as a way to supplement on-campus housing and ensure students remain socially distant.
The arrangement is mutually beneficial. Schools, in many cases, are able to limit rooms to one student apiece, while hotels — reeling from a lack of summer travel — receive guaranteed occupancy through at least November, but the biggest beneficiaries, without question, have been the students, who suddenly find themselves enjoying the kind of luxurious existence previously unthinkable in undergraduate living.
For students, certainly, the unexpected luxury has helped quell the disappointing prospect of a socially distant semester.
Look at how hard the Globe is working to $hine this turd of tyranny!
“I haven’t heard any complaints saying the beds are uncomfortable,” joked Shigeo Iwamiya, director of residence life and housing services at Suffolk University, which is housing around 280 students at the Wyndham in Beacon Hill, the DoubleTree near Tufts Medical Center, and The Boxer in the West End.
It is; however, there is nothing funny about it at all.
Indeed, outside the W Hotel’s luxurious entrance on Thursday afternoon, one backpacked guest after another gushed about their current living situation. Not unexpectedly, the rooms have been a hit on social media in a series of widely viewed videos on TikTok.
Good thing they are not going to school in the South!
That's your first lesson, kids. Authority (and its media mouthpieces) lie. They lie right to your face.
There are some downfalls, of course, to permanent hotel living.
Why spoil the good time and fun, Globe?
At the W, laundry can get a little dicey, with nearly 200 students forced to share just a few washers and dryers, and unlike dorm rooms, students are prohibited from hanging their own decorations, meaning they’re left to endure the personal stylings of a hotel decorator.
“There’s Edgar Allan Poe paintings on the walls,” said Jenna Triest, 19, a sophomore journalism student “and the glass table is a Ouija board,” but it was a small price to pay, Triest said, for her current setup.
What evil and twisted sick f**ks put that $hit in there?
As Triest put it, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to go back to normal housing.”
Don't worry, you won't be.
--more--"
I would have kept the kid home:
"With the first day of school approaching, parents and students share dueling anxieties" by Naomi Martin Globe Staff, September 3, 2020
As the first day of school approaches, anxieties are mounting among parents and children about education in the COVID-19 era.
That paragraph makes me sick.
“I honestly don’t think we should go back to school until all this is really over,” said Jay’dha Rackard, an incoming seventh grader at Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy in Boston who fears she or her family could get sick, but going to school with coronavirus restrictions in place, she added, could be awful.
“It is cruel and mean to think that students should be in a room at their seats, not moving for hours,” she said. “Social time with friends in our grade and outside our grade is very important.”
What if it is never over, because that is the plan.
Rackard was among the speakers at a virtual news conference Thursday held by the Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance, including parents, students, and educators, who largely spoke about wanting to improve remote learning.
The conference came a day after another group of parents, Bring Kids Back, wrote an open letter to state and education leaders urging them to offer children in-person learning “now and for as long as community‐level data shows it can be done safely.”
“Our children’s academic, social and emotional well‐being hinges on the immediate adoption of a data‐driven approach designed to safely get children back in the classroom,” the letter said.
What, the silly color-coded map not good enough?
Parents with that group accused leaders of letting fear, not data, drive the decision-making. They said remote learning causes worse physical and mental health issues caused by too much screen time, disrupted routines, and a lack of in-person interaction with peers and teachers.
They are, of course, 100% right regarding our criminal leaders and the damage that has been done to kids, but our elite $cum don't care and why would they? Most are pedos.
About 70 percent of school districts in Massachusetts have chosen either to bring students back to buildings or a hybrid plan that mixes remote and in-person instruction. Governor Charlie Baker has urged districts to safely return as many students to in-person classes as possible.
The group advocating against returning to school buildings acknowledged remote learning was still far from perfect, but they said the focus should be on improving the experience until the pandemic ends or is under far better control.
Well, it should be over because 90% of the cases were reported by the New York Times to be false positives and only 6% of the cited deaths are COVID specific, so....
"Danish toymaker Lego A/S said it saw solid sales growth in the first half after demand for its iconic colored building blocks soared. Sales rose 7% from a year earlier to 15.7 billion kroner ($2.5 billion), feeding an 11% gain in operating profit, the company said on Wednesday. Lego also said its share of its biggest markets grew faster than the industry overall. Chief Executive Officer Niels B. Christiansen said the company was able to deliver “an extraordinary” performance during the pandemic. He said that Lego was able to reap the benefits of previous investments in areas such as online sales....."
.... as for the kids, homeschool them until this madness ends and defend them with your lives.
“In the spring, I felt like we didn’t learn anything,” said Araceli Flores, 16, a student at Everett High School, and for the fall also, she said, “my fear is I won’t be able to learn.” She has no confidence, she said, that her school could keep her and her classmates safe with masks and cleaning supplies, because before the pandemic the school couldn’t afford general materials.
Victoria Stutto, 17, a rising senior at Chelsea High School, said her father died shortly after remote learning started, and she struggled to cope, especially without her friends. She found schoolwork, especially on a screen, impossible to focus on. Some teachers were helpful, but others told her there were “no exceptions,” she said.
“Remote learning probably came at the worst possible time in my life and it didn’t help that it wasn’t very organized and my teachers weren’t very understanding,” she said.
I find that impossible to believe.
She and her classmate, Katy Ochoa, recommended that each school have a designated person students could contact about personal situations to help form solutions on a case-by-case basis.
Amid rising rents and an economic crisis, Ochoa said, many “students feel they have to choose between their education and supporting their families.” She said she found herself in that position, having to balance her own studies and helping her sister pass her coursework.
There really is no choice.
Stutto said she would not feel safe returning to Chelsea High until the number of COVID-19 cases fell significantly in Chelsea, one of the hardest-hit cities in Massachusetts, and the school or government provided masks, hand sanitizer, and other protective supplies for free, so everyone would have them.
Only 1 in 10 are actually infectious, and it's with a mild flu or cold they don't even know they have according to the narrative. The pre$$ acts like the reports I cited don't exist.
Luz Adriana Gamba, a Colombian immigrant with three children in Lowell, said she hoped the schools would better communicate this semester. Her 16-year-old son, who is learning English, didn’t understand his assignments last spring and ended up failing some classes, she said.
Suleika Soto, a mother of two Boston students, said she chose the hybrid plan for her children, but felt conflicted about it. She had COVID-19 last spring and didn’t work, but now her unemployment benefits are ending and she needs to return to work.
“There is really no child care out there, so school’s my next best option,” Soto said. “I know this is high-risk, but I’m kind of stuck.”
She also hopes her kids’ time with other students and teachers helps their mental well-being, but not at the expense of their physical health. She’d feel a lot better if everyone entering their schools had to show a negative COVID-19 test first.
Pushing the COVI-passport tyranny on the kids, I see!
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So how come there is no spread amongst students in Europe?
Some parents are still in the dark as Trump rolls out the rapid tests:
"Spotty broadband challenges Western Mass. schools" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, September 2, 2020
With its forests and fields, farmhouses and cabins, Sandisfield in far western Massachusetts looks like a Norman Rockwell image of old New England, and it might as well be, as far as Internet access is concerned, but in a time of pandemic, the lack of reliable high-speed broadband access in Sandisfield and other small western Massachusetts towns has become a serious challenge, especially for families with school-age children forced to fall back on remote learning.
Yeah, to the Great Global Re$et and the total global surveillance grid being constructed by BG and the like.
After Monument Valley Regional Middle School shut its classrooms last spring, Sandisfield resident Vanessa Tarasuk’s three sons were often absent from their virtual classrooms, because the family’s sluggish DSL Internet connection kept collapsing under the load. It got so bad that the school asked local police to check on the family.
“We were truants, I guess,” Tarasuk said. “We couldn’t get on Zoom. We couldn’t get on Google Classroom . . . it was just so overwhelming that I gave up.”
Get your call from DCF yet?
Parents around here need to wake up before they never see their kid again.
Six years after the state completed a $90 million data network to serve the region, thousands of Western Massachusetts families and small businesses still do not have access to reliable high-speed Internet service. While hundreds of municipal buildings have hooked up to the broadband backbone, including public schools that are now resuming online-only instruction, some 32,000 residents in 32 western towns cannot get that connection into their homes, according to the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI)
On goes the 5G, down go the kids on the playground.
Ben Doren, principal of the school in Great Barrington that the Tarasuks attend, declined to comment on the family specifically, but he did acknowledge the school asked police or the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families to check on students who weren’t attending remote classes, and Dillon said the school district may continue to request wellness checks on children who don’t log into remote classes, and may even make its own visits to families. The district will try to arrange alternative broadband access, and if that’s not possible, students may be forced to rely entirely on printed handouts.
Who knew fascist jackboots existed in Western Mass., huh?
“It’s a last resort because they would be less interactive and engaging,” said Peter Dillon, superintendent of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District, which serves the Tarasuk family.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The broadband network to bring high-speed service to the region was finished in 2014, but the “last mile” connections that bring fast Internet into homes and businesses remain incomplete. The state-funded MBI has provided $55 million in grants to 53 underserved towns as of 2016, but so far, fewer than half — 21 — have been fully wired.
Better off without it.
By contrast, virtually every home in Boston has access to high-speed broadband, through Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications, or RCN Corp. Paying for the service is a problem for many low-income households, but the service is there.
Another reason to avoid that city.
They flip the switch, you can't breathe.
In an emergency response to the school shutdowns forced by COVID-19, the MBI has deployed high-capacity wireless Internet hot spots in over two dozen public buildings throughout Western Massachusetts, but it’s hardly an ideal way for students to attend classes or complete homework, as it requires users to position themselves in or near buildings where the devices are installed.
Did that while we were under lockdown and restriction, huh?
So we couldn't see them doing it, huh?
The Berkshire school district has also provided families with mobile hot spots that connect to cellular data networks, but that, too, has a major shortcoming. “Lots of our communities have terrible cell service,” said Dillon.....
“There’s no one to blame,” and for some households, the last resort is a satellite dish.
Vanessa Tarasuk is still trying to figure out what to do as school resumes. Her sons received “incomplete” grades for last year, but were still promoted, and even before the pandemic, Tarasuk said, the lack of Internet access had put her children at a disadvantage.
“We’re already behind, because schools rely on the fact that everyone has access to the Internet,” she said. “So we’ve always been behind. We’re always going to be behind. So we’ll just roll with it, I guess.”
In this upside down world in which we now live, it's best to be last.
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The total $urveillance $y$tem is $old to you as one of inclusion even as they paint us into a corner.
Now play ball!
See:
"A letter from state officials to the Maine Principals’ Association is dimming hopes for a quick resolution to fall high school sports. Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew and Education Commissioner Pender Makin urged the organization to delay the season until safety guidelines can be reviewed further. In the letter, they said their concerns go beyond the students participating in sports to the communities. “If the schools had the resources like professional and some collegiate sports leagues to conduct frequent team testing and house teams separately to protect other students, school staff, and their families, it might be possible to return to interscholastic competition safely. Without that, such a return poses a risk of spreading COVID-19 across the state, within schools, and to vulnerable people within communities,” the letter stated. The letter criticized the association for hastily voting to advance all fall sports Aug. 27 before the state could review the guidelines. Concerns were also raised with volleyball and football, leaving those sports in jeopardy, the Morning Sentinel reported. Soccer, meanwhile, was moved from high to medium risk, leaving open the possibility it can be played in some capacity this fall."
No goals this year as the tyrant Mills extended the civil emergency order for the 6th time.
"A total of 13 people associated with a youth hockey camp in New Hampshire have tested positive for COVID-19. As of Tuesday, players plus four adults associated with the camp, which took place in Nashua, had contracted the virus, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Shibinette confirmed the news in a press conference on Tuesday. “We were able to identify all of the close contacts for the people that participated in that camp, so a combination of kids or youth that participated, and the staff,” she said. Shibinette noted that participants included people from outside of New Hampshire. The state was able to use contact tracing to identify everyone exposed. “We haven’t done any public notification,” she said, “but we can confirm that there is a cluster of illness associated with it.” When asked about the camp and all youth sports camps over the summer, Gov. Chris Sununu said that the state wants to make sure people understand the guidelines, and if they are “intentionally ignored,” enforcement may come; however, he said there are no changes to the guidelines for sports right now, and state authorities are monitoring them. “We always want to work collaboratively with folks,” he said."
That puts youth sports on ice for now, but at least you can still go swimming:
"A 16-year-old from New Hampshire successfully swam across the English Channel, completing a 33-mile swim by reaching a sandy beach in France after darkness fell. Vera Rivard, of Springfield, left Dover in the United Kingdom around 9:30 a.m. and arrived on a beach near Calais, France, just before midnight on Tuesday. The swim took her more than 14 hours, and she is the second American to cross the channel this year, the Valley News reported. “As she leaves the beach in England for her English Channel attempt, I will be the proudest parent ever! Not if she finishes, not how fast she swims, but that she was brave enough to start,” Rivard’s mother, Darcie DeBlois-Rivard, wrote beforehand on Facebook. Rivard’s swim cost her family around $15,000, about a third of which was covered by donations and sponsorships, the Valley News reported. Rivard and her family quarantined for two weeks before her swim in Dover. She completed a long-distance swim around Manhattan island in July and hopes to swim a third major open water course to Santa Catalina Island off California — the third in a “triple crown” of long distance swims — at some point in the future....."
Your vaccination will be waiting for you when you get home:
"Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said Thursday it’s unrealistic to believe a coronavirus vaccine will be available by Nov. 1 — but that New Hampshire will be prepared to distribute it if it is. Federal health officials last week instructed states to be ready to begin distribution by Nov. 1, two days before the presidential election. The timing raised suspicion among public health experts about whether the Trump administration intends to rush approval for political gain. Sununu disagreed. “I don’t see it being politicized at all. They’re just trying to make sure we’re prepared,” he said. The letter sent to governors from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked them to expedite licensing and permitting for vaccine distribution. New Hampshire likely won’t need to do that, Sununu said, because it would use its existing public health network. “If it comes in early November, we will be ready,” he said. “My sense is, good management would dictate that if they say it’s going to come in the December-January time frame, you’d make sure everyone’s ready on Nov. 1 in case we get lucky,” he said....."
Are all these guys on the same damn script?
".... Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Shibinette said planning began in June for all the various options without yet knowing whether the vaccine would come directly from manufacturers or from the national strategic stockpile. “We created a system for every option,” she said. “We’re in a good place when it comes to system development for mass vaccination.” That doesn’t mean all residents would be able to get vaccinated at once, she cautioned. “It is not vaccinating 1.3 million people in 30 days. This is going to take multiple months,” she said....."
