Well, the Virus Patrol sure has done it. In a fit of reckless overkill they have managed to vaporize six years of economic growth during the last 90 days. And that’s just by the mechanical reckoning of the GDP accounts, where total output in Q2 weighed in at essentially the same level as Q4 2014.

The real damage is far deeper, however, and is reflected in millions of small businesses permanently destroyed, tens of millions of households wiped-out financially and the vicious daisy chain of delinquencies, deferrals and defaults just beginning to rip through the $78 trillion edifice of debt which entombs the US economy.

Real GDP Level

Of course, most of the Wall Street talking heads were nonplussed by this morning’s release because, well, Q2 results are claimed to be ancient history: Reality is purportedly the “V”-shaped recovery on their spreadsheets, which really can’t fail to happen because it’s always two quarters out regardless of conditions at the moment.

So let’s get something straight. What is happening is an economic catastrophe the likes of which we have never seen before, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In fact, the worst annual decline back then was a 14.8 percent drop in 1932, while the entire peak-to-trough real GDP decline between 1929 and the 1933 bottom was 30.5 percent.

So it would be fair to say that measured at an annualized rate, the idiotic Dr. Fauci and his Virus Patrol have now delivered a 32.9 percent GDP plunge, which single-handedly tops the entire contraction of the Great Depression.

Needless to say, the Q2 result also leaves the recessionary drops since 1950 way back in the dust. Even the auto industry induced plunge of Q1 1958 didn’t make the double-digit threshold. It clocked in at a 9.986 percent annualized decline or less than one-third of today’s cliff dive.

What was especially notable, however, was the vaporization of personal consumption spending on services, which ordinarily accounts for upwards of 70 percent of total PCE; and which is also ballyhooed by the paint-by-the-numbers Wall Street economist as the ballast the keeps GDP moving ever higher.

Not this time!

Services spending literally fell through the trapdoor, contracting at a 43.4 percent annualized rate. That compares with the 11 recessions since 1950 where real spending on services never went negative, save for the pinprick decline of -1.6 percent annualized during the Q1 2009 bottom of the Great Recession.

By every account, the economic plunge in the winter of 2008-2009 was the worst since the 1930s, but today the Commerce Department reported a PCE-services drop that was 28X deeper!

Our purpose here is not to marshal scary numbers, even as they surely are. Rather, our point is that what is coursing through the Q2 numbers is not anything that resembles a normal chain-of-reactions macroeconomic cycle. For instance, where job losses cascade through to shrinking incomes, thereby causing consumer confidence and spending wherewithal to diminish and household spending to be curtailed.

To the contrary, what is depicted below is essentially economic martial law. Agencies of the state commanded airports, restaurants, bars, hair salons, gyms, movies, dentist offices, theme parks, sporting events etc. to close or operate at drastically reduced capacity, which meant, in turn, that day-in-and-day out commerce and economic output vanished instantly.

Stated differently, this 43 percent plunge in services spending didn’t happen for the ordinary reason that people were short on cash. As we show below, personal income during the quarter – thanks to the massive flow of free stuff from Washington (aka government transfer payments) – clocked in at a record level!

Consequently, there will be no rebound in the plunging red line below no matter how much fiscal and monetary “stimulus” Washington pumps into the main street economy.

The services sector accounts for nearly 66 percent of total PCE, which, in turn, accounts for 68 percent of measured GDP. So the latter will not recover until the Virus Patrol gets its foot off the neck of what we call the social congregation activities of daily economic life; and also until it and its MSM collaborationist desist from fanning the false claim that the Covid is the equivalent of the Black Plague, thereby causing people to voluntarily quarantine out of misplaced fear.

Of course, you don’t have to listen to Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady for long – yes, they have not yet been locked up in padded cells where they belong – to realize that the Virus Patrol is on a once-in-a lifetime power trip.

In ultra-busy body/Nanny State fashion they are virtually regimenting the comings and goings of a $20 trillion economy – even as they keep the US economy on indefinite idle waiting for the vaccines and antivirals from their allies in Big Pharma and the Gates Complex to ride to the (mandatory) rescue.

Annualized Change In Personal Consumption Expenditures, Services, 1950-2020

We don’t expect the Virus Patrol to be put out of business any time soon because the Donald is too confused and weak to shut them down.

Moreover, if he keeps shooting himself in the kneecaps via tweets like today’s “lets-postpone-the-election” numbskullery, he will guarantee an even worse scenario: Namely, that while Sleepy Joe is being oxygenated and propped-up behind the Resolute Desk for daily Oval Office photo ops, the left-wing health Nazis who surround him will really go to town on Lockdown Nation.

Nor is that any kind of unhinged trashing of the camarilla of out-and-out statists who will form the core of the Biden Administration. The fact is, the Donald’s malpacticing doctors, the MSM and the Blue State mayors and governors have now unleashed a full-on public hysteria that is self-fueling.

It is now transforming ordinary sheeples into obedient and unquestioning brown-shirts. Even in the purportedly enlightened, socialist republic of Aspen, where we are sheltering for the duration, we see them “mask-up” even with no one in sight, while pumping strenuously up the mountain side on a fat-tired bike.

One manifestation of the Covid-Hysteria is the soaring level of “testing” going on as people either try to get a hall pass in order to return to work or just plain run to the nearest testing station every time the media sends off new alarm bells.

During April, for instance, which was the very worst month of the contagion in terms of serious illnesses and deaths, 5.2 million new tests were reported or 175,000 per day.

By contrast, in July to date (thru the 29th), there have been 21.5 million new tests reported or an average of 745,000 per day.

In a population that has been thoroughly exposed to the virus after five months, it is a given that with the number of tests soaring, the number of positive cases will rise proportionately. But that’s a misdirection because the real issue is the true medical severity of the new cases, and that has dropped precipitously.

The death rate has dropped from 1,800 per day in April to 780 in July; and whereas 15-20 percent of new cases were being hospitalized in most states during April, that figure has now fallen to 2-4 percent.

That is, after the Grim Reaper’s original romp through the most vulnerable populations – especially the nursing homes and long-term care facilities in March/April – the preponderant share of the remaining populations being infected and testing positive appear to have stronger immune defenses, and are mainly either asymptomatic or treating and recovering at home in the normal flu-season manner.

So on the facts, the Hysteria should be dying out, but, alas, the facts are of small moment in the context of a runaway public hysteria that is being turbocharged by a severely aggravated anti-Trump partisanship that has no modern precedent, or any at all.

We are constantly reminded that there are less than 100 days until the election, but probably of even more salience is that the next flu season will be arriving even sooner in October. And it won’t matter whether the obvious herd immunities building up against the SARS-Cov-2 cause the next flu season to be unusually mild or not.

That’s because the Virus Patrol will be at shrill alert for the “second wave” in the run-up to October, keeping the suffocated economy evident in today’s GDP report on its back foot for the balance of the year, at least. That means the ballyhooed V is now surely dead-as-a-door nail.

In this context, it needs be recalled that the services sector of the US economy is bearing the brunt of the Lockdown orders, but that it now counts for fully $8.7 trillion or 45 percent of GDP. That compares to a mere 26 percent back in the days of America’s industrial might in the mid-1950s.

In the big picture context, therefore, national policy – especially at the Eccles Building – caused the off-shoring and hollowing-out of the US industrial economy over the last three decades. In turn, that has left main street especially vulnerable to a state-orchestrated attack on its new services sector center of gravity such as outpatient surgery clinics, Pilates studios and tapas bars.

Again, an economic martial law attack on the new epicenter of the US economy means that the issue is not traditional stimulus, but clearing the decks and clearing the air of the Virus Patrol orders and Covid-Hysteria, which was the real culprit behind the Q2 GDP disaster.

Nominal GDP (light brown) Versus Service Sector PCE (dark brown), 1955-2020

Perhaps nowhere is the impact of economic martial law more evident, ironically, than in the health care sub-sector of the services economy.

The former, of course, has been the workhorse of US GDP growth for decades. However, after peaking at $2.50 trillion in Q4 2019, it weighed in at just $1.89 trillion in Q2 2020. That’s a $608 billion decline, reflecting an astounding -24 percent contraction.

And this is supposed to be the worst medical crisis to hit America since the Spanish Flu of 1918!

But, actually, the government’s data mill is telling an absolutely opposite, nay crazy, story. Namely, that the single largest sector of the US economy plunged at a 61.6 percent annualized rate in Q2 – meaning that the figure gives the notion of being “off the charts” of history an altogether new definition.

Needless to say, health care spending is not now and never has been amenable to Washington’s vaunted stimulus machines. The overwhelming share of spending is government funded directly through Medicare/Medicaid et al or through the $300 billion per year tax shelter for employer health plans; and whether public or private, consumer health payments are overwhelming made by third-parties, thereby further limiting the efficacy of the cheap money from the Fed and free money from Uncle Sam.

The plunging red line below, therefore, is the doing of the Virus Patrol and its orders to shutdown most so-called discretionary healthy care services, such as cancer screenings. So until it is put out of business and the public Covid-Hysteria is substantially abated, the rebound of the health services sector is likely to the contained and protracted.

In short, what we have is a government-ordered depression, not a macroeconomic recession that is purportedly remediable by a huge dose of monetary and fiscal stimulus. So the truth is, the Virus Patrol, not the Fed and Washington’s everything bailout brigade, is in charge of the recovery from the Q2 disaster, and they are not much interested in letting it happen.

To take another salient example, the go-to strategy of the Virus Patrol has been to shutdown large scale public gatherings entirely, but that’s obviously the venue of the recreation sector.

So it is not surprising that the PCE spending rate for this sector has given “cliff-diving” a run for its money. Compared to the $590 billion annualized rate of spending in Q4 2019, the current quarter clocked in at just $272 trillion.

The amounted to a 53.4 percent decline from Q4 and an out-of-this-world contraction of 61 percent annualized in the current quarter. Or alternatively, recreation spending in Lockdown Nation during Q2 reverted to the level first crossed in Q2 2002.

That’s 18 year’s worth of growth gone in a virtual economic heartbeat.

Of course, there was one thing that was way up in Q2 – transfer payments and personal income. And every dime of the massive increase in transfer payments shown below was borrowed by Uncle Sam and monetized by the Fed.

Yet the only thing it accomplished was to further balloon the public debt because the current depression does not flow from the want of means or desire to spend: It’s the product of economic martial law ordered up by the Virus Patrol.

Still, it is worth noting that wage and salary income (brown line) was down by $680 billion at an annual rate in Q2, while the Washington spending machine boosted transfer payments at a $2.4 trillion annual rate, or by nearly four times more!

Once upon a time, that would have been considered insane overkill, and at least caused Republicans to screech at the top of their lungs about fiscal profligacy.

Alas, as they put up their $1.2 trillion Everything Bailout 5.0 against the House Dems’ $3.3 trillion alternative in the days just ahead, the chart below will be nowhere seen in the porkers’ lounges of Capitol Hill.

Change From Prior Quarter In Billions: Transfer Payments (purple line) Versus Wages and Salaries (brown line)

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

Dr. Fauci is back in the limelight where he likes to be. In a recent ABC interview he informs Americans that if they “really want 100 percent protection” they should not only wear masks, but also goggles on their eyes. Will he be recommending space suits next week? Also in today’s Liberty Report: With the latest Depression-level drop in US GDP, the real costs of the lockdown are becoming evident. Poverty, hunger, and more death will continue the foolish policy of shutting down the US economy instead of protecting the vulnerable. Plus, Are The Netherlands, Sweden, Mumbai, and Afghanistan all on the right track? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

While much of the world imposed strict population lockdowns in response to the outbreak of the coronavirus, the pressure on countries (and even US states) to conform to the lockdown demands was intense. But a few counties broke from the pack and now the results are in: not only did they not experience a cataclysm, they fared better in both cases and deaths than the lockdown countries. And they have economies to return to once the virus runs its course, which it is doing according to the history of viruses. Also today: Fauci’s “not concerned” by potential dangers of the Covid vaccine. Should the rest of us be? Watch today’s Liberty Report:

The director of the World Health Organization has warned that we can never go back to normal after the coronavirus outbreak that has killed approximately 650,000 worldwide. But every year the normal flu kills about that many…so why the lockdowns and forced masks and destruction of the economy for this one? What is the real agenda behind this mass hysteria? Also today – as the Sun Belt “spike” continues to fade, what will be the next tyrant move to terrify – and terrorize – the population? Cuomo’s attack on chicken wings. Watch today’s Liberty Report:

Remember Libya? The country “liberated” by Obama and Hillary? Nine years later the country remains destroyed, with the remains being picked apart by warlords and slave traders. Turkey, an enthusiastic supporter of the 2011 invasion, is making its move to snatch Libyan oil. Neighboring Egypt says, “not so fast.” The world is distracted by disappearing coronavirus while a major war is brewing. Also in today’s Report, Texas Covid updates, W.H.O. hires corrupt PR firm, and more. Watch today’s Liberty Report:

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

It should be evident by now that the Donald’s one and only north star is his own glorification and self-aggrandizement. That’s why he’s totally flat-footed at this crucial moment in the pandemic saga.

What he needs to be doing is taking off the gloves for a bare-knuckled counter-attack against the Virus Patrol, which is ruining America’s economic and fiscal future.

Instead, yesterday he put on the Mask and the tweeted a juvenile boast that he’s the most patriotic muzzle-wearer in the land. Apparently, there is no place the Donald won’t go to reverse his sagging poll results:

We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!

But no, Donald, you ain’t no favorite among lovers of liberty, capitalist prosperity, free market opportunity and the constitutional fettering of state power.

After all, you said you came to Washington to drain the Swamp, yet there is no more odious set of Swamp Creatures than the camarilla of NIH/CDC/FDA doctors and apparatchiks, along with their Big Pharma and Gates Vaccine lobby allies, who bamboozled you into the folly of Lockdown Nation last March.

But now—when its way past time to reverse course and repudiate your malpracticing doctors— you actually genuflect to their Mask Totem, when you should be declaring loudly and unequivocally the opposite: Namely, that the the coronavirus has meet it match in the immune systems of the overwhelming share of Americans, and that it’s beating a fast retreat into the archives of still another infectious winter virus that passed through the population and moved on.

On the one hand, the Grim Reaper of Covid has long since vacated the epicenter of its brief rampage in New York, where the foolish actions of Gauleiter Cuomo caused a surge in nursing home infections, sickness and death, which accounts almost entirely for the four week surge in the state’s WITH-Covid death count during April.

By contrast, during the current month thru July 20, New York has tested like crazy, but has come up with no cigar with respect to new Covid cases. Compared to a total of 1,250,000 tests during that 20-day period, only 13,872 have tested positive, and many of those are surely the same people taking and re-taking their PCP swab in order to gain license to go back to work.

In any event, the gross positive rate is just 1.1 percent and would probably well less than that if the data were de-duped.

Likewise, there have been an average of just 10 WITH-Covid deaths reported during the first three weeks of July, which self-evidently is a tiny fraction of 500-800 deaths per day—heavily in the nursing homes—reported during April. Moreover, there is no real mystery as to why the curve is (thankfully) plunging to the lower right of the chart and heading right off the page. This virus like other virulent influenza’s strikes the weakest and most vulnerable population first, and thereafter tends to meet its match as the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population join the battle.

What that natural progression of the contagion means, of course, is that Governor Cuomo’s economically destructive lockdown orders had virtually nothing to do with the coronavirus’ welcome retreat.

That’s evident by comparison with Sweden, which had virtually no lockdowns at all. As of yesterday, however, the WITH-Covid death rate was 130 per 100,000 persons for New York state overall, and 235, 223 and 200 per 100,000, respectively, in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

By contrast, the mortality rate in Sweden has been about 55 per 100,000, and the preponderant share of those have been people over 70 years, heavily institutionalized in care facilities. In any event, the chart below says it all. Governor Cuomo’s boot heels did not “flatten the curve” relative to the open social and economic regime in Sweden, and also resulted in a 2.5X higher mortality rate on a cumulative basis.

By the same token, there is no “second wave” crisis in the so-called hot spot areas of the Sunbelt, either. Like in the case of New York, the virus is simply moving through the population in a time frame that is a month or two lagged relative to the original contagion’s spread in the Northeast; and, again, it is meeting its match in the immune systems of the healthier parts of the population.

The proof for that is straight-forward and is measured by the hospitalization rate per new case. The latter has plunged from 15-20 percent in the early days of the contagion in these new so-called hot spot states, but is now in the low single digits. The data for new cases, hospitalizations and the hospitalization ratio for the first 20 days of July includes the following:

· Florida: 207,960 new cases, 6,726 additional hospitalizations=3.2 percent;

· Arizona: 65,968 new cases, 1,962 additional hospitalizations=3.0 percent;

· Tennessee: 36,245 new cases, 1,047 additional hospitalizations=2.9 percent;

· Georgia: 64,284 new cases, 3,996 additional hospitalizations=6.2 percent;

· Arkansas: 13,150 new cases, 883 additional hospitalizations=6.0 percent;

· South Carolina: 35,046 new cases, 1,328 additional hospitalizations=3.8 percent;

· Mississippi: 21,642 new cases, 610 additional hospitalizations=2.8 percent

In a word, hospitalization rates of 3-6 percent are not indicative of a public health crisis or a dread disease laying waste to the population. In fact, they are only slightly above the hospitalization rates for normal winter influenza.

The chart below is the CDC’s assessment for the 2010-2018 seasons, and shows that the hospitalization rate per infected case has averaged 1.5 percent-2.0 percent over that eight year period; and that’s against a generous guesstimate of total influenza illnesses, not lab confirmed cases as with the current Covid stats.

Still, the point hardly needs saying. We do not close the bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, movies, malls etc. every winter owing to the flu. Yet that’s exactly what the Donald’ camarilla of malpracticing doctors are now urging for the states listed above in the face of a virus that is only slightly more severe than normal.

Stated differently, even now 94-97 percent of the ballyhooed “new cases” in the so-called Red Zone states are either asymptomatic or result in mild illness and recovery at home. The fact that what the Donald mistakenly thought was the Greatest Economy Ever is now swamped in unemployment, business failures, payment delinquencies and a fearful, muzzle-ridden public is ultimately the doing of the Masked Man above.

Harry Truman was right. The buck stops in the Oval Office.

At the end of the day, it was the Donald who empowered Dr. Fauci, who, in turn, paved the way for the governors, public health departments, mayors and lesser officials to attack the livelihoods and well-being of their own constituents in their tens of millions.

To add insult to injury, however, you can leave it to Dr. Fauci. The man had the gall to offer New York state as a shinning example to the rest of the nation when, in fact, it’s governor is damn near criminally negligent on the state’s nursing home death tsunami alone.

The fact is, New York’s mortality rate per 100,000 is well more than 2X greater than the European basket cases of Italy, Spain and the UK, and is actually more than 4.5X higher than Florida’s and 9.5X higher than that of Texas.

In the face of such abysmal judgement, the Donald’s trademark “you’re fired” would be the least that might be expected. But what we got was not just the ostentatious tweet of POTUS in a muzzle, but a renewed signal for the power-grabbing, Trump-hating local Dem officialdom to intensify their attacks on the main street economy.

The Dem rulers of Broward County, Florida, for example, have just now issued an order requiring homeowners to enforce the mask rule against visitors in their own homes-–upon penalty of fine or jail and subject to county inspector surveillance.

Likewise, County mayor Dale Holness’ announced a curfew and criminal penalties for having more than 10 people in your own home, or being part of a gathering of more than 10 people inside a PRIVATE RESIDENCE.

Of course, Broward County is just a microcosm of the economy-crushing mayhem that has been unleashed by the Donald’s own presumptive subordinates. This is no longer just a few aggressive governors like those of New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the early days of the pandemic: What you have now is a veritable army of petty officialdom, enforcers and self-appointed snitches literally tearing apart the fabric of economic and social life in much of America.

Of course, the Donald is clueless about this because the retainers and sycophants who surround him insure he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the economic collapse that has been triggered, and which shows no sign of some kind of miraculous “V”-shaped rebound.

Nor does he realize that the pre-Covid economy was a fragile tinder-box of debt, speculation and malinvestment that was stumbling forward on cyclical fumes and the residual growth momentum of capitalism—even in the face of the giant obstacles to sustainable prosperity stood up by the state and especially its central banking branch.

So any old Black Swan could have triggered the deep recession now underway. But owing to the sudden, concentrated blunderbuss attacks of Lockdown Nation, this one will prove to be the blackist avian visitor of all.

For instance, nothing like this chart has ever been seen before in the annals of modern history. Compared to a peak of 6.6 million UI beneficiaries at the bottom of the Great Recession (May 2009), there are now upwards of 32 million workers drawing state and Federal UI benefits. That’s more than 20 percent of the 158 million employed workers as of February.

Ordinarily, the jolt to income and spending from a 32 million person army of the unemployed would have sent the US economy reeling months ago because in the hand-to-mouth world that the Donald inherited, 80 percent of the households have no meaningful financial cushion or rainy day funds.

Of course, that unemployment based income and spending plunge is now being temporarily cushioned by the unprecedented eruption of free stuff from Uncle Sam that was packed into the Everything Bailouts three months ago. That includes upwards of $500 billion of wage support via the PPP program at the SBA, the $1,200 helicopter checks which went out to 160 million citizens and especially the $600 per week Federal “top-up” on UI benefits.

The impact of the latter in disguising the economic pain implicit in the UI chart above cannot be over-emphasized. On a nationwide average basis, the regular state UI program pays about $500 per week or an annualized rate of $26,000 to covered workers.

In the middle of the night during the frenzied legislative sessions of late March, however, Congress upped the ante to $1,100 per week, which annualizes to $57,200.

Them there is different kettles of fish entirely!

But the Federal top-up also costs $75 billion per month and has put nearly two-thirds of unemployed recipients in a higher income bracket than when they were on the job drawing a paycheck; and, also, by the way, producing output of goods and services which are the real building blocks of the macro-economy.

It now comes to pass that at least some of the sleep-walking GOP senators have figured out that you can’t shell out a $75 billion per month dole for unemployment and expect the engines of economic life to restart or the tattered remains of Washington’s fiscal accounts to ever be repaired.

So there is a rather considerable chance that the battle over the impending Everything Bailout 4.0 will be prolonged, and that the giant air-cushion of transfer payments which has disguised the Lockdown Nation disaster will be abruptly deflated in August.

The chart below, in fact, shows how the phantasmagoria of free stuff from Washington since March has tuned upside down the traditional notion of a recession, and especially one where one-fifth of the labor force is unemployed. The chart shows total monthly household personal income—including dividends, interest and proprietors profits which mostly goes to the top 10 percent—-since January.

Incredibly, during April when the bottom literally dropped out of industries ranging from air travel to neighborhood restaurants and bars, total household income was actually 5 percent higher than it was during January—a time when both Wall Street and the Donald claimed the US economy was booming like never before.

Since then, household income has managed to stay right at the pre-Covid January level, notwithstanding a loss of wage and salary disbursements that is still running at a negative $850 billion annual rate.

What portends for August and many months to come, therefore, is the delayed income and spending contraction of a battered economy which has already experienced a double-digit plunge in the actual production of goods and services.

Needless to say, that’s going to shock both Wall Street and the Masked Man alike.

And it will be enough of a blow to voter confidence—even in the Trumpite precincts of Flyover America—so as to insure that the best outcome possible on November 3 will be the Mother-of-All-Hanging Chad battles at the Electoral College and Supreme Court, while the likely outcome is a return of the vengeful coalition of Clintonista poltroons and Progressive-Left ideologues to the seats of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In either contingency, today’s lagging indicators of the underlying economic distress generated by Lockdown nation will be aggravated enormously. These charts on failing rent collections and small business closures are, in fact, just the tip of the iceberg—and will continue to worsen even if some gussied-up Everything Bailout 4.0 is cobbled together on Capitol Hill before the real election season blood-lettings get underway.

Indeed, on any number of high-frequency variables, the data has already plateaued and that’s before the August plunge and the most vicious election battle in modern history have taken their toll.

And now with the new lockdown orders and a renewed MSM campaign of Covid-Hysteria in the Sunbelt, there is indeed a “second wave” coming—that is, more hemorrhaging of jobs, incomes, defaults and business failures across the length and breath of main street America.

As we said, anyone who actually believed the Donald had any semblance of a plan for MAGA should now be asking “Who’s that Masked Man”?

We’re not.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.