Month: September 2021

Financial State of the States 2021

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-state-of-the-states-2021

Full PDF: https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/FSOS-Booklet-2021.pdf

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Unfunded retirement liabilities
are the largest contributing factor
to the $1.5 trillion in state-level
debt. One of the ways states make
their budgets look balanced is
by shortchanging public pension
and OPEB funds. This practice
has resulted in a $926.3 billion
shortfall in pension funds and a
$638.7 billion shortfall in OPEB
funds

Author(s): Truth in Accounting

Publication Date: September 2021

Publication Site: Truth in Accounting

Revisualizing the Financial State of the States: 2021 edition

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/revisualizing-the-financial-state

Graphic:

Excerpt:

One large benefit of a tile grid map is you can see the geographically small states, which are often more obscured when you a geographically accurate map.

When viewed in this way, with the states colored by their grades, you can see that there’s a Northeastern Rogue’s Gallery, in addition to the expected stinkers of Illinois, Kentucky, and California (also, Hawaii, but many people don’t expect that one.)

But I want to point out that a lot of “red” states, in the political sense, also have crappy finances.

Texas is a particularly bad offender here, with a taxpayer deficit of -$13,100 per taxpayer. It’s not just the “expected” states where pensions are grossly underfunded — mind you, pretty much every single taxpayer sinkhole here has grossly underfunded state-level pensions — but it is a widespread problem.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 29 Sept 2021

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

Yellen Is Wrong. The US Government Doesn’t Always Pay its Debts.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://mises.org/wire/yellen-wrong-us-government-doesnt-always-pay-its-debts

Excerpt:

In 1934, the United States defaulted on the fourth Liberty Bond. The contracts between debtor and creditor on these bonds was clear. The bonds were to be payable in gold. This presented a big problem for the US, which was facing big debts into the 1930s after the First World War.

….

So how did the US government deal with this? Chamberlain notes “Roosevelt decided to default on the whole of the domestically-held debt by refusing to redeem in gold to Americans.”

Moreover, with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, Congress devalued the dollar from $20.67 per ounce to $35 per ounce—a reduction of 40 percent. Or, put another way, the amount of gold represented by a dollar was reduced to 59 percent of its former amount.

The US offered to pay its creditors in paper dollars, but only in new, devalued dollars.1 This constituted default on these Liberty Bonds, since, as the Supreme Court noted in Perry v. United States, Congress had “regulated the value of money so as to invalidate the obligations which the Government had theretofore issued in the exercise of the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States.”

This was clearly not a case of the US making good on its debt obligations, and to claim this is not default requires the sort of hairsplitting that only the most credulous Beltway insider could embrace.

Author(s): Ryan McMaken

Publication Date: 28 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Mises Wire

Weekly COVID-19 age-standardised mortality rates by vaccination status, England: methodology

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/weeklycovid19agestandardisedmortalityratesbyvaccinationstatusenglandmethodology#age-standardised-mortality-rates

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Age-standardised mortality rates are calculated for vaccination status groups using the Public Health Data Asset (PHDA) dataset. The PHDA is a linked dataset combining the 2011 Census, the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) data for pandemic planning and research, and the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). We linked vaccination data from the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS) to the PHDA based on NHS number, and linked data on positive coronavirus (COVID-19) Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests from Test and Trace to the PHDA, also based on NHS number.

The PHDA dataset contains a subset of the population and allows for analyses to be carried out that require a known living population with known characteristics. These characteristics include age-standardised mortality rates (ASMRs) by vaccination status and the use of variables such as health conditions and census characteristics.

Author(s): UK government, ONS

Publication Date: Accessed 27 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Office of National Statistics

September 26-October 2, 1921

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://roaring20s.substack.com/p/september-26-1921

Graphic:

Excerpt:

On Thursday, a great article in the WSJ about a relatively new method called “Dow’s theory of indexing” walks readers through the stock market low from one month ago. The writers discuss how the most recent low on the Dow was 60, set in 1915. Because stocks met resistance last month despite awful sentiment, a bottom formed.

Author(s): Tate

Publication Date: 26 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Roaring 20s on substack

Thousands more people than usual are dying … but it’s not from Covid

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.yahoo.com/news/analysis-thousands-more-usual-dying-170117640.html

:

Excerpt:

While focus remains firmly fixed on Covid-19, a second health crisis is quietly emerging in Britain. Since the beginning of July, there have been thousands of excess deaths that were not caused by coronavirus.

According to health experts, this is highly unusual for the summer. Although excess deaths are expected during the winter months, when cold weather and seasonal infections combine to place pressure on the NHS, summer generally sees a lull.

….

Data from Public Health England (PHE) shows that during that period there were 2,103 extra death registrations with ischemic heart disease, 1,552 with heart failure, as well as an extra 760 deaths with cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and aneurysm and 3,915 with other circulatory diseases.

Acute and chronic respiratory infections were also up with 3,416 more mentions on death certificates than expected since the start of July, while there have been 1,234 extra urinary system disease deaths, 324 with cirrhosis and liver disease and 1,905 with diabetes.

Alarmingly, many of these conditions saw the biggest drops in diagnosis in 2020, as the NHS struggled to cope with the pandemic.

Author(s): Sarah Knapton

Publication Date: 24 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Yahoo News

COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub: Projections

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://covid19scenariomodelinghub.org/viz.html

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Definitions

NPI: NonPharmaceutical Interventions (e.g. masks, social distancing)
Epiweek: Epidemiological Week as defined by MMWR
LOP: Linear Opinion Pool; method used to calculate Ensemble_LOP and Ensemble_LOP_untrimmed by averaging cumulative probabilities of a given value across submissions. See Notes for more details.

Publication Date: Accessed 24 Sept 2021

Publication Site: COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub

Banks Share Data to Block Cyberattacks

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-share-data-to-block-cyberattacks-11632389402

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Competing banks are cooperating more than ever before to beat cybercriminals.

As the number and sophistication of cyberattacks jumps, financial firms are sharing more threat intelligence with each other, according to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a nonprofit group that facilitates the exchange of cybersecurity intelligence.

This collaboration has thwarted a number of attacks in the past year, bank executives say.

In September 2020, Santiago, Chile-based Banco Falabella became concerned it would soon come under attack by hackers.

Distributed denial of service attacks, which flood servers with traffic to shut down websites and applications, were rippling across the financial sector as part of a long-running extortion campaign. Meanwhile, certain criminal gangs were besieging Latin American companies in particular with ransomware attacks.

Author(s): James Rundle

Publication Date: 23 Sept 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

British pension funds plough more cash into China

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/british-pension-funds-plough-more-155119851.html

Excerpt:

British pension funds are ramping up their investment in Chinese companies despite growing tensions between the West and the Communist state.

According to a new report by Hong Kong Watch, a pro-democracy advocacy group, the amount of cash invested by Western pension funds and other institutional investors in China has hit a record high in recent months.

It comes amid rising criticism in the West about China’s human rights record, including its brutal treatment of Uighur Muslims and its suppression of democracy campaigners in Hong Kong.

…..

The report cites the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), one of the UK’s largest private pension schemes, and Legal & General, Britain’s biggest pensions manager, as two British firms with “problematic” investments in China.

It found that L&G’s China fund was previously investing UK pensions in Zhejiang Dahua Technology, which is alleged to produce facial recognition software for the Communist Party that detects the race of individuals and alerts the police when it identifies Uighur Muslims.

L&G has since divested from Zhejiang Dahua Technology.

Author(s): Simon Foy

Publication Date: 22 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Yahoo Finance

Taylor Heinicke Was Solving Differential Equations. Then the NFL Called.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.wsj.com/articles/taylor-heinicke-washington-football-team-math-engineering-old-dominion-11632328555

Excerpt:

Last December, a student in professor Fang Hu’s partial differential equations class at Old Dominion University reached out with a problem Hu had never experienced in decades of academia. His pupil said he had just been offered a high-profile job, starting immediately, and might need some special accommodation to finish his course work.

“I got called by an NFL team,” Taylor Heinicke told Hu. “I’m going to be very, very busy.”

“I was like seriously? Really? Professional football?” Hu says. “‘He really takes this course very seriously,’ was my first reaction.”

Heinicke had bounced around the fringes of the NFL for years, but by last year he had bounced out so far that he went back to school to finish his degree. Then, in the span of a month, Heinicke went from taking the highest-level undergraduate mathematics courses at Old Dominion to playing quarterback for the Washington Football Team. He started a playoff game in which he nearly outdueled Tom Brady.

….

When Heinicke was the school’s quarterback from 2011 to 2014, he rewrote record books. He owns the all-time mark for most passing completions in a season in FCS history, and he even broke the record for all of Division I with 730 passing yards in a single game. (That was later surpassed by two quarterbacks. One of them was Patrick Mahomes.)

Heinicke’s success on the field at ODU was boosted by the same traits that led him to take engineering and math classes. His coaches found that their quarterback was both talented and capable of understanding things on a football field that other quarterbacks simply couldn’t.

…..

Just days after Washington’s season ended, Hu heard again from his student. Heinicke finally had time to turn in his final exam.

Author(s): Andrew Beaton

Publication Date: 23 Sept 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

Is The Worst Over? Models Predict A Steady Decline In COVID Cases Through March

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/22/1039272244/is-the-worst-over-modelers-predict-a-steady-decline-in-covid-cases-through-march?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr&utm_medium=social

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The most likely scenario, says Lessler, is that children do get vaccinated and no super-spreading variant emerges. In that case, the combo model forecasts that new infections would slowly, but fairly continuously, drop from about 140,000 today now to about 9,000 a day by March.

Deaths from COVID-19 would fall from about 1,500 a day now to fewer than 100 a day by March 2022.

That’s around the level U.S. cases and deaths were in late March 2020 when the pandemic just started to flare up in the U.S. and better than things looked early this summer when many thought the pandemic was waning.

And this scenario projects that there will be no winter surge, though Lessler cautions that there is uncertainty in the models and a “moderate” surge is still theoretically possible.

There’s wide range of uncertainty in the models, he notes, and it’s plausible, though very unlikely, that cases could continue to rise to as many as 232,000 per day before starting to decline.

Author(s): Rob Stein, Carmel Wroth

Publication Date: 22 Sept 2021

Publication Site: NPR

Covid-19: Life expectancy is down but what does this mean?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58659717

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Despite the name, these life expectancy figures, known as “period life expectancy”, do not predict an actual lifespan.

Instead, they show the average age a newborn would live to if current death rates continued for their whole life.

And as Covid death rates are unlikely to continue long-term, the new estimates do not mean a boy born in 2020 will have a shorter life than one born in 2019.

But they do provide a snapshot of the effect of the pandemic that can be compared over time and between countries and different populations.

Author(s): Christine Jeavans

Publication Date: 23 Sept 2021

Publication Site: BBC