Month: April 2021

PSERS Signs Verus in ‘Emergency’ Hiring to Handle CIO Duties

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.fundfire.com/c/3145634/397343/psers_signs_verus_emergency_hiring_handle_duties

Excerpt:

The $64 billion Pennsylvania Public Schools’ Retirement System made the “emergency” hiring of an outside manager yesterday to take on the duties of chief investment officer James Grossman, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Seattle-based Verus Investments will now handle “monitoring and oversight of investment” as the embattled pension system deals with “internal and external investigations,” including an FBI probe into its investing, PSERS says.

The fund’s investment of millions of dollars in real estate deals in Harrisburg is under federal investigation, while outside lawyers are looking into an “error” that inflated PSERS’ investment returns.

Author(s): Kathleen Laverty

Publication Date: 21 April 2021

Publication Site: FundFire

Public Finance: Full Accrual Accounting and Governmental Accounting Standards Board Testimony

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/public-finance-full-accrual-accounting

Video:

Excerpt:

I will give a very simple example: suppose Netflix makes a deal where instead of you paying for a year’s subscription at a time, you can get a big discount if you pay for 2 years’ subscription.

Subscribers love the deal and pay for it….

….and then Netflix says their sales doubled in their financial reports. That’s IF they followed cash-based accounting, which records cash flows.

But they don’t, because accounting standards boards (outside the government sphere) know that this is just a trick to boost how financials look under cash accounting. And there are loads of these tricks. I just gave one simple example. The trick of getting people to pre-pay for sales to boost the numbers is a well-known ploy on the revenue side. A well-known ploy on the expenses side is to put off paying bills.

This is obviously distorting recognizing the true economic arrangement underlying these transactions, and some of the tricks make for a more fragile economic position for specific businesses. It was always the marginal businesses, which were barely hanging on, where cash-basis accounting tempts into trickery, which usually ends in financial failure. So accounting standards have developed to prevent this stuff.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 22 April 2021

Publication Site: STUMP at Substack

Datawrapper Dataviz Book Club

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://notes.datawrapper.de/p/bookclub-tufte

Excerpt:

1. What was the most surprising thing you’ve learned? Choose a text passage, and explain how it challenged something you assumed. (Type up the text passage / phrase, and tell us on which page we can find it!) 

2. Select one of your favorite data visualizations. Is it working well becauseof a principle that Tufte explained? Or do you appreciate something about it although it goes against Tufte’s principles? – give us a link to the data vis! If you need to upload something, but it on https://imgur.com/ or Twitter. 

3. Having read the book, what will you do differently the next time you design a chart?

Date Published: August 2018

Date Accessed: 21 April 2021

Publication Site:

Ambac files motion to compel documents from actuary – Puerto Rico pensions

Mary Pat Campbell

Document Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-lIsmyzEIiDvYXnYJtWw5kaCI25euLFk/view

Snippet:

Date Accessed: 21 April 2021

Shared by: Cate Long

Publication Site: Twitter and Google Drive

First Dose of Chinese Covid-19 Vaccine Offers Little Protection, Chile Learns

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-dose-of-chinese-covid-19-vaccine-offers-little-protection-chile-learns-11618775502

Excerpt:

Across Chile — which has mounted one of the world’s most rapid vaccination campaigns using the vaccine made by Chinese drugmaker Sinovac Biotech Ltd. — health authorities are scrambling to deal with a surge in new infections and deaths.

More than 7.6 million people, half of Chile’s adult population, have received at least one vaccine dose, most made by the Chinese drugmaker, making the country a testing ground for a vaccine Beijing is supplying to countries across the developing world.

The problem, public-health officials say, was that people in general overestimated the effectiveness of the vaccine after only one of the two recommended doses and moved to ease up on pandemic-control restrictions too soon.

“With one dose, we know the protection is very weak,” said Claudia Cortes, an infectious-disease expert at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, where about 10% of the Covid-19 patients at her hospital have received one shot. “It was not clearly explained that you need two doses — that you need to wait.”

Author(s): Ryan Dube

Publication Date: 18 April 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Worldwide COVID-19 death toll tops a staggering 3 million

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-brazil-caracas-portugal-india-ccad03475cfd5c846f11189a8bfd99c7?mc_cid=6daa5b724a&mc_eid=983bcf5922

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The global death toll from the coronavirus topped a staggering 3 million people Saturday amid repeated setbacks in the worldwide vaccination campaign and a deepening crisis in places such as Brazil, India and France.

The number of lives lost, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Kyiv, Ukraine; Caracas, Venezuela; or metropolitan Lisbon, Portugal. It is bigger than Chicago (2.7 million) and equivalent to Philadelphia and Dallas combined.

And the true number is believed to be significantly higher because of possible government concealment and the many cases overlooked in the early stages of the outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019.

Author(s): DAVID BILLER, MARIA CHENG, JOSHUA GOODMAN

Publication Date: 17 April 2021

Publication Site: Associated Press

India’s Covid-19 crisis has gone from bad to catastrophic in just a fortnight

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://qz.com/india/1998394/how-indias-covid-19-second-wave-worsened-in-just-a-fortnight/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

In just two weeks, India’s second wave of Covid-19 has become disastrous.

The country, which was reporting less than 15,000 cases a day just last month, has been seeing over 200,000 Covid-19 infections a day since April 15. Yesterday (April 19), India reported 273,810 new Covid-19 infections and 1,619 deaths—both highest single-day spikes. That takes the active Covid-19 caseload tally up to nearly 2 million.

Author(s): Manavi Kapur

Publication Date: 19 April 2021

Publication Site: Quartz

The obscure maths theorem that governs the reliability of Covid testing

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/18/obscure-maths-bayes-theorem-reliability-covid-lateral-flow-tests-probability

Excerpt:

This is important to know when thinking about “lateral flow tests” (LFTs), the rapid Covid tests that the government has made available to everyone in England, free, up to twice a week. The idea is that in time they could be used to give people permission to go into crowded social spaces – pubs, theatres – and be more confident that they do not have, and so will not spread, the disease. They’ve been used in secondary schools for some time now.

There are concerns over LFTs. One is whether they’ll miss a large number of cases, because they’re less sensitive than the slower but more precise polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. Those concerns are understandable, although defenders of the test say that PCR testing is too sensitive, able to detect viral material in people who had the disease weeks ago, while LFTs should, in theory, only detect people who are infectious.

But another concern is that they will tell people that they do have the disease when in fact they don’t – that they will return false positives.

Author(s): Tom Chivers

Publication Date: 18 April 2021

Publication Site: The Guardian

In clinical and real world trials, China’s Sinovac underperforms

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/04/15/in-clinical-and-real-world-trials-chinas-sinovac-underperforms

Graphic:

Excerpt:

THE LATEST results for China’s CoronaVac vaccine, developed by Sinovac Biotech, a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company, were disappointing for the aspiring scientific and technological powerhouse. Phase-three trials, which were conducted on health-care workers in Brazil, yielded an efficacy rate of just 50.7% (with a 95% confidence interval of 35.7% to 62.2%), just barely above the 50% threshold set by the World Health Organisation for covid-19 vaccines (see chart). The results of a real-world trial released a week earlier were even worse: the vaccine was estimated to be just 49.6% effective (11.3% to 71.4%) against symptomatic covid-19 cases; when asymptomatic infections were included, this figure dropped to a dismal 35.1%.

The Chinese authorities’ reaction did little to boost confidence. After news broke of the discouraging results, Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, admitted at a conference on April 10th that current vaccines “don’t have very high rates of protection”, and suggested that vaccines could be mixed to improve efficacy. Mr Gao later backtracked from the comments, claiming that it was “a complete misunderstanding”.

Publication Date: 15 April 2021

Publication Site: The Economist

An Alternative to the Correlation Coefficient That Works For Numeric and Categorical Variables

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://rviews.rstudio.com/2021/04/15/an-alternative-to-the-correlation-coefficient-that-works-for-numeric-and-categorical-variables/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Using an insight from Information Theory, we devised a new metric – the x2y metric – that quantifies the strength of the association between pairs of variables.

The x2y metric has several advantages:

It works for all types of variable pairs (continuous-continuous, continuous-categorical, categorical-continuous and categorical-categorical)

It captures linear and non-linear relationships

Perhaps best of all, it is easy to understand and use.

I hope you give it a try in your work.

Author(s): Rama Ramakrishnan

Publication Date: 15 April 2021

Publication Site: R Views

Behind the Mysterious Demise of a $1.7 Billion Mutual Fund

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-mysterious-demise-of-a-1-7-billion-mutual-fund-11618911000

Excerpt:

A U.S. mutual fund that suffered nearly $500 million of losses appears to have misvalued its large derivatives portfolio, according to an analysis of the fund’s disclosures by The Wall Street Journal, academics and traders.

The Infinity Q Diversified Alpha Fund disclosed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission valuations of investments that in at least three instances were incorrect or inconsistent with market conditions, said traders and academics. One valuation was mathematically impossible, said a former Morgan Stanley managing director who reviewed the disclosures.

In one instance, the disclosures show, Infinity entered two nearly identical swaps contracts referencing the same index over the same period, yet booked a gain on one that was more than three times as large as the other—an outcome analysts said defied logic. Swaps are bilateral contracts, brokered by banks, that traders use to bet on asset prices, interest rates or other financial trends.

Author(s): Gunjan Banerji

Publication Date: 20 April 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Covid-19 Cases Rise in Parts of U.S. Even as Vaccinations Pick Up

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-faces-critical-weeks-as-covid-19-cases-rise-again-in-some-places-11618845433

Excerpt:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday that the seven-day average of new Covid-19 cases is at more than 67,443, up 1% from the prior seven-day average of 66,702. Four weeks ago, the seven-day average was 53,000 cases a day, said Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, during a press briefing Monday.

The U.S. is in a “complicated stage” of the pandemic, Dr. Walensky said.

“The more people get vaccinated, the fewer infections there will be, which means fewer variants will emerge and fewer breakthrough infections will occur and the quicker we can get back to doing the things we love,” said Dr. Walensky.

More than a quarter of the U.S. population has now been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to CDC data. The country administered an average of 3.2 million doses a day over the past week, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of CDC data.

As of Monday, all American adults are eligible to receive a Covid-19 vaccine, with every state meeting the April 19 deadline set by President Biden.

Author(s): Melanie Grayce West

Publication Date: 19 April 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal