US Politics: Time to Stock Up

[Maithanet]

25 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

With all this, Trump approval rating is still ~42-43.

In a totally unrelated historical tangent, I imagine the Nazis were fairly popular in Germany until the siege of Stalingrad, after which it was the beginning of the end for Hitler. And even towards the end they were stockpiling food and eating well while the average German was starving (unrelated to the Administration trying to obtain a vaccine for themselves)

But polls still have a lag and the vast majority of people who pay attention to non-propaganda news already disapproved of him.  I mean, that speech on Wednesday was a disaster and the stock market agreed, so that could maybe hurt him a tiny bit, but nothing big.  I imagine that the 42% still sticking with Trump either think this is a hoax or that Corona is just a huge problem and everybody is struggling with it.  Point #2 even has the benefit of being half true, although Japan, South Korea and Canada are all doing vastly better than we are, even as their own responses have had flaws.  

I agree that as this drags on, it will be the ultimate test of Trump's durability.  But it's too early to really expect his polling to change yet.  I expect we will see a painfully slow, but undeniable erosion of that support over the coming weeks and months.  

[OldGimletEye]

9 hours ago, Ran said:

I saw a proposal that did include things like talking into account socioeconomic class, but that seems to go far.

It's been a little over 20 years since I played my last NCAA football game. But frankly, the guys that I saw who true phenoms, the sort of guys who show up to college at 18 and are 6'6" 265 and do about a 4.6 forty or are 300 lbs and can reverse slam a basketball tend not, in my opinion, to be from the upper classes.

[Fragile Bird]

3 minutes ago, Triskele said:

I had missed this, but it's being reported that the White House said no thank you to WHO offers to share their testing methods and then also said no to domestic labs because Trump didn't like the "optics."  

The thing is, the US is usually a world leader. It’s the US that often creates test kits for a flu outbreak and sends them out around the world, so you sort of understand the refusal.

But what you don’t understand how the test kits got so royally fucked up and why they were so late. I keep wondering if the CDC has serious Trump supporters in the upper ranks who got a head’s up to drag their feet, or if there are no Trump supporters and they were trying to keep their heads down because they knew Trump didn’t want tests done. 
 

A German supplier told CNN their first test kits went out at the end of January and at this point this one supplier is making a million a week.

[Guest]

So, to get back to the horse race, because of the debate tonight, I've noticed that Biden has been attempting outreach to Sanders supporters. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how effective the things he's done so far will be to the kind of Sanders supporters that he needs to (I'm in the acceptance stage of the cycle already, and I suspect most of them are still stuck in anger).

Here's what I think needs to happen tonight and going forward in order to try and heal the rift in the party right now: Sanders (who himself sounds resigned that his defeat is inevitable) needs to hold Biden's feet to the fire over the progressive platform - and Biden needs to let him, needs to own up to past mistakes and needs to commit to real changes going forward, even at the cost of prolonging the primary longer than anyone would like.

I think that COVID-19 is the inflection point that will cause Trump's luck to run out, so I am no longer so concerned about if a Democrat will win in November. What I'm concerned about now is the lessons that will be learned going forward. If the lesson is to maintain the status quo to get suburban moderates on board, then I think we will see a Tea Party-style split in the Democratic party over the coming years, as the moderate wing of the party attempts to run farther to the right to keep those moderates on board, even though those voters are more naturally Republican, and most likely will return to the Republican party when a "regular" Republican candidate is put forward.

The noises I've seen coming from both candidates is that they're working to heal that divide, but the attacks made during this primary cycle were much more on a personal level than I can remember in the past, so I think it's going to take longer to heal. The disruptions caused by COVID-19 will most likely postpone that process as well.

I think that prolonging the primary, while allowing Biden to rack up wins to prove himself as the prohibitive favorite, as all the stakeholders (both candidates, Clinton, Obama, and Warren) work together between now and the (remotely held?) convention to soothe the anger and bridge the divides.

I'm hoping that's what happens. My cynical side says that Bernie will push too hard, Biden will fall back on his newfound pugnacity because of his inevitability, and it'll all fall to shit at the worst possible time for our country. I hope I'm wrong.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Anyone going to watch the debate?

[Guest]

FED cuts rate by a full point.

[Guest]

Announcing QE. $500 billion. This is fucking insane! This is all to prop up.the fucking market! We need fucking demand side stimulus!

[Fragile Bird]

Holy shit, Google with 1700 engineers working on a nationwide web site of where to go to get a test was not fake news, YOU GUYS REPORTED FAKE NEWS!

[Fragile Bird]

If the market goes up tomorrow I am selling, baby.

[OldGimletEye]

2 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Announcing QE. $500 billion. This is fucking insane! This is all to prop up.the fucking market! We need fucking demand side stimulus!

The FED is right to be skeptical that congress can get its act together in time. And since short term interest rates are low, it seems appropriate to try to push down long term interest rates.

[Fragile Bird]

“Relax, we’re doing great”

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Anyone going to watch the debate?

I don't have anything else to do!

[Fragile Bird]

Just now, OldGimletEye said:

The FED is right to be skeptical that congress can get its act together. And since short term interest rates are low, it seems appropriate to try to push down long term interest rates.

Nope, Powell wants to keep his job.

The markets, if not tomorrow, the next day will start screaming, ‘where’s the stimulus!’

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Holy shit, Google with 1700 engineers working on a nationwide web site of where to go to get a test was not fake news, YOU GUYS REPORTED FAKE NEWS!

???

[OldGimletEye]

Just now, Fragile Bird said:

Nope, Powell wants to keep his job.

The markets, if not tomorrow, the next day will start screaming, ‘where’s the stimulus!’

Huh? If congress doesn't act aggressively with this, that pretty much leaves the FED as the only game in town.

[Ran]

37 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

It's been a little over 20 years since I played my last NCAA football game. But frankly, the guys that I saw who true phenoms, the sort of guys who show up to college at 18 and are 6'6" 265 and do about 4.6 forty or are 300 lbs and can reverse slam a basketball tend not, in my opinion, to be from the upper classes.

Yeah, it seemed odd. I imagine there are sports where socioeconomic class does matter -- equestrian sports like showjumping, eventing, and dressage in some countries (for example, Saudi Arabia) tends to favor upper class people who had privately acquired high-end horses from a young age that allowed them to more quickly develop elite skill, and either own such horses now or have sponsors who own them, while if you're lower middle or poor, the cost of traveling for competitions (both in time and money) could be prohibitive (this is the case even in Sweden, which is much more egalitarian due to robust and affordable non-profit riding schools) -- but I think it'd be really hard to genuinely quantify that.

Going back to politics:

Debate is too late for me to watch, but will be interesting to see the takes tomorrow. I hope Sanders and Biden remember -- or even make a point -- of not shaking hands afterwards but showing comity in some other fashion. 

[Fragile Bird]

1 minute ago, larrytheimp said:

???

On Friday Trump said Google had ‘a team of 1,765 engineers building a web site where you can go and find out where to be tested’.

Google said, pardon? We have a subsidiary building a web site for San Francisco.

Trump just said the president of Google, a ‘fine fellow’, sent a letter confirming what he had said on Friday.

God only knows what the lies are here.

[Fragile Bird]

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Huh? If congress doesn't act aggressively with this, that pretty much leaves the FED as the only game in town.

 Congress isn’t going to do everything in one bite, there will be half a dozen bills before the dust settles.

But don’t look at Congress, look at the Senate. If McConnell keeps saying ‘this is a wish list’, you know it’s Trump who does not want stimulus to happen. 

All he wants is negative interest rates, so he can be paid to borrow money.

[OldGimletEye]

4 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

 Congress isn’t going to do everything in one bite, there will be half a dozen bills before the dust settles.

But don’t look at Congress, look at the Senate. If McConnell keeps saying ‘this is a wish list’, you know it’s Trump who does not want stimulus to happen. 

All he wants is negative interest rates, so he can be paid to borrow money.

The quicker the Fiscal and Monetary authorities act to stabilize expectations the better, particularly since the situation with coronavirus is developing rapidly. The last thing you want is asset prices to go into a free fall, which will impair balance sheets, affect the monetary transmission process and at worst lead us into some kind of Fisherian debt deflation.

Congress is simply not likely to act fast enough. 

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Fragile Bird said:

On Friday Trump said Google had ‘a team of 1,765 engineers building a web site where you can go and find out where to be tested’.

Google said, pardon? We have a subsidiary building a web site for San Francisco.

Trump just said the president of Google, a ‘fine fellow’, sent a letter confirming what he had said on Friday.

God only knows what the lies are here.

I'm with larry in that this is just confusing the hell out of me.  Why do you need 1700 engineers to launch or "build" a website?  Or is it an actual physical site?