Posts Made By: Rod Kaufman

Originally Posted by Maurice Clark

Hi Rod,

I am sorry but I have to agree with Jim on this one. Small dips are always bound to happen for a variety of reasons, profit-taking, international factors, etc. i think it would take a much bigger and more sustained drop before you could really blame it on some particular factor.

That said, my own $0.02 worth, (not that it is really worth that much ) is that sooner or later the market will drop quite a bit. I base this on the market being overheated because of a lot of money chasing a decent return in an ultra-low interest rate economy. A some point the economy will be back to more normal and interest rates will begin to climb. At that point I expect money to flow out of the stock market.

One thing I don't see discussed much is the exchange rate. The US$ has been dropping steadily over the past year. For example, a year ago, US$1 would buy A$1.68. Today it would only purchase A$1.28. While part of that change is due to commodities such as iron ore being near record highs, it also indicates that the US$ is becoming less wanted.

Cheers,

Maurice

Originally Posted by James Brown

And what reasons are your market pundits citing for todays carnage Rod?  (It's not Covid )

 I know you know, but since it is all anti-R politics with you all the time, I doubt you'll mention it - at least not unless I goad you into an acknowledgement....

Jim

 

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

It's definitely political: Biden, according to Bloomberg, wants a massive tax increase on the wealthy and corporate America. What he will propose, of course, will be different from what he gets but that doesn't matter to the market at the moment...

Originally Posted by James Brown

Rod likes to point out that the red states have been hammered by corvid this summer more severely than the blue states.  Obviously Rod is not very gracious in his approach, but I think his underlying point is indisputable.  Rod focuses on only one cause, when there are probably many factors affecting vaccination and infection rates.  

Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so I manipulated the Worldometer graphs below in two ways.  First I squished the Texas graph down so that the native y axis units (total infections or deaths/day) matched the California y axis units exactly.  Then I stretched to Texas y axes back up by a factor of 1.36 x, since California has a population 1.36 times that of Texas.  Easy to do with PowerPoint, and I think quite accurate.  Now the graphs show the Covid infection and death rates, matched to account for population.  Apples to Apples.  The difference in the summer Delta wave between CA and TX is pretty dramatic.  

On the other hand, the differences in the pre-vaccination fall and winter of 2020 wave is not that noticeable.   This gives some ammunition to the anti-mask crowd, I suppose, since I imagine (don't really know) that mask discipline in CA was/is greater than that in Texas.  Jim

Originally Posted by Greg Shaffer

I continue to chuckle at all the railing over Hydrooxychloroquine not working...... Keep trying Rod, perhaps you will finally convince us that it is worse than dying LOL

Originally Posted by James Lacey

It's not about opinion. It's not about belief. It's not about who you survey. Where is the objective, peer-reviewed randomized clinical study that shows that it helps? There is no good evidence for HCQ use in treating the COVID-19 period. Anecdotal evidence is not evidence.

The latest peer-reviewed article accepted for publication states unequivocally that they saw no evidence of clinical benefit with HCQ. It's not a clinical study. There is no control or comparison group, but 11 hospitalized COVID patients were treated with HCQ and antibiotics per the guidelines in the by now famous Gautert et al. paper, and the results were as follows. One patient died. Two patients ended up in ICU. One patient had heart arrhythmia, forcing treatment discontinuation. The ten surviving patients had swabs done to check for COVID 5-6 days after treatment began, and 8 out of the ten still showed positive. The conclusion by the authors is that this study did not show any positive effect, and it stands in stark contrast to the Gautert et al. paper that is so widely touted as being definitive proof that HCQ works. Of course, the absence of evidence of efficacy is not conclusive, but neither is the presence of it in the Gautert et al. paper. The bottom line is we need randomized clinical studies to prove either way definitively. I remain skeptical given the available evidence.