Monthly Archives: March 2020

Municipal Bonds – Underlying Weakness

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I want to call attention to the shakiness in municipal bond markets. Cities are having trouble meeting budgets due to unanticipated revenue losses while having to expand essential services – overtime pay for police, fire, and medical workers. Higher costs and less revenue mean wider budget gaps. Even with laying off other workers – which itself puts a burden on state unemployment systems, more on those later – city governments have to borrow money to stay operational.

Enter the current financial crash. Cities have to spike up their yields in order to meet investor demands for return on risk. Interest rates are moving into “expected default” territory for municipalities, where investors hope to recoup their invested capital and a small return through high interest rates before the borrower defaults.

Mutual funds have already dropped over $10 billion in muni bond investments, and that continues to increase.

The Fed can intervene to buy short-term muni bonds, but cannot buy long-term bonds. It would need legislation passed in Congress and signed by the President to get that ability.

But the Fed may have to also move soon to aid the states. Recall my reference to unemployment. States are looking to lay off employees in order to have enough money to pay unemployment claims… and there is also the issue with unemployment insurance funds’ solvency. 22 states are below Department of Labor recommended funding levels – and big states like New York, California, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania are all below that recommended minimum. TX, NY, and CA are the three lowest in their ratios.

With 3.3 million unemployed last week and another big number expected this week, even properly solvent funds will be strained. The Fed will have to step in to provide liquidity for states to meet those unemployment insurance demands, as those are not discretionary spending items.

As I mentioned before, getting out of a financial crisis requires increasing national debt by a very large amount. The $2 trillion package is only the start – expect about $15-21 trillion more. And then the question to follow on to that is this – will the Fed get enough solvency itself to cover the state budgets? If not, I’d expect high inflation as a means of balancing the books. Would that be fair? Of course not. Would it be necessary to prevent a national bankruptcy? That’s very much a possibility.

Save Lives, Not Costs: A Christian Philosophy

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I am heartened by leaders who talk about saving lives, regardless of cost.

I am dismayed by leaders who talk about saving costs, regardless of lives.

Christ taught that one cannot serve both God and mammon. Serving God means loving my neighbor as myself, healing the sick, and caring for the poor and needy. Serving mammon means putting matters of money and finance ahead of other concerns.

This is why I am dismayed by the leadership from President Trump and leading Republicans. Yes, they want to save lives. But they want to save hedge funds, stock dividends, and corporate earnings first. I will pass over their too-comfortable association with white supremacists and major polluters. I will pass over profiteering from tragedy. I will pass over separating children from parents in cruel applications of the law. When leaders speak of sacrificing the people to prop up the economy – and it is the poor people, the needy people who are sacrificed, not the rich, make no mistake there – they show that though they may draw near to God with their lips, they are far from Him in heart. They do not serve God. Their master is mammon, and their judgment awaits. They will have the world with all its power and fortune, but they lose their eternal lives in the transaction.

Know that there are a few Democrats who shame themselves with service to mammon and a few Republicans doing God’s work in saving lives without concern for the costs. But when considered as a whole, it is the Republican Party whose leadership on local, state, and national levels that has been brutal in its willingness to sacrifice the poor to save the rich. Shame on them for such practices and shame on any American who supports them.

So ends my Jeremiad. And, like Jeremiah, I expect that the targets of my criticism will denounce me and say that it is sinful to criticize the leaders of this proud nation, that they are doing nothing wrong, or not much wrong. Jeremiah had the destruction of Jerusalem as his justification and I fully expect the United States to have one of the highest per capita mortality rates from this pandemic as my justification. These are not happy things – would that men would change so that these things need not be the future.

I wish all good health and that your sorrows be swallowed up in joy. May we all ask of our leaders to remember that lives are more important than monies.

Life As I Know It

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Life as I know it involves a number of complex bodily systems working together to provide a homeostasis. It involves joy and anguish, good times and bad. It involves the greedy affecting me and my family and friends with the consequences of their greed, and it involves the blessings of encounters with the kind, considerate, and compassionate.

Life as I know it continues as before. The furniture or schedule may be rearranged, but my complex bodily systems continue to provide homeostasis, allowing me to continue to experience the full range of life experiences. If I go to a war zone, I will keep my head down so that the snipers don’t shoot me. If I live where there is a pandemic, I keep my distance, so that the virus doesn’t infect me.

Let us be realistic: a cure will be found, a vaccine will be developed. A distribution method will be employed, people will get the vaccine – and people will refuse to be vaccinated, such is our world. That is at some point in the future. Until then, if we keep our physical distance, we do not become a link of disease transmission between the infected and the currently uninfected. We do not become the infected ourselves. The overall fatality rate is around 2-3%, but we know it is much higher for people whose complex biological systems have been weakened by cancers, diabetes, rheumatism, or other diseases and disorders… or the wear of age.

We also know that, in addition to the fatal cases, there are disease victims who face long-term symptoms as a result of their encounter with the disease. Most frequent is a permanent respiratory system problem. The disease passes, but the symptom does not for another 5-10% of victims.

We have questions about whether or not a person who survives an infection will be immune to a second infection or, if there is immunity, how long it lasts. We have questions if there is already a cure at hand – the answer there is simple, no. There is no vaccine.

Is there a drug already among us that will successfully control the symptoms? That is a dangerous question, as it presumes we would also know the correct dosage and timetable for the administration of that drug. Getting the correct compound to the correct patient at the correct time is the science of pharmacology. Do not second-guess it, especially if you haven’t been trained in that field. Until there is a properly-researched treatment, keep your head down where there are snipers and your distance where there are viruses.

If you are still reading this, your complex biological systems are providing you with homeostasis, and you experience both the storm and the calm: life as you know it continues as it always has thus far.

Getting Good Information About the Recent Pandemic

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Is it safe to use ibuprofen to treat a fever? Is it safe to use marijuana during this outbreak? These are just some of the questions going around and we should all know how to find answers for them. There’s conflicting information from various sources, so we all have to learn how to hit multiple sources to see what’s going on. Right now, studies are going to be limited due to the recent nature of the outbreak. That being said, health professionals globally are going to share ideas with each other and some of that chatter may spill over into the media reports – and not all reporters know how to report science.

What we *do* know is that anything that stresses the lungs will leave a person more susceptible to damage from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. Right there are two good keywords to use in searches. Everyone’s calling it “coronavirus” in the popular media, while scientific communities are using SARS-CoV-2 to identify the virus and COVID-19 to identify the disease. Using those keywords gives a better shot at getting quality results.

Next, when we see the site providing the information, examine the website itself to evaluate its accuracy of information. Local news stations, those are good for reporting things like what’s open and what’s closed and how many people locally are in the hospital, but not much more. National news outlets will have a higher degree of accuracy, but can still get a few things wrong. Websites with a strong political bias may be victim to Russian trolling – yes, the Russians are taking rumors and amplifying them on various websites that are much more political than they are scientific – so disregard those entirely as providers of scientific information. Entirely. Their information may actually prove harmful, which is why I say to disregard them entirely.

Websites affiliated with medical institutions, particularly medical research, will have the best quality information. Learn how to read their information carefully and patiently, as the more technical sites will use specialized terms and expressions to convey meanings. The specialized definitions themselves are not hard to learn – but they must be learned, so part of your reading of specialized articles will involve looking up words you don’t quite understand. Once you get the meanings, though, you’re able to better understand the next article.

As regards ibuprofen, the WHO has walked back an earlier statement cautioning against using that drug as a fever suppressant. That’s another thing to mind – conditions can change, so we need to be ready to change with them.

For marijuana use, the cautions are as regards to impact on the respiratory system and any activity that involves communal sharing of drugs or their delivery apparatus.

What about other questions? I just apply the above methodology to get the answers. In particular, I use those keywords SARS-CoV-19 and COVID-19 to deliver better results in my searches.

Los Héroes Mayores

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In Mexico, there is a monument
Tall and proud
Six columns for six heroes
Who died rather than surrender
Los Niños Héroes

Niños because they were children
Still new to life
But they knew their moment of valiance
When it arrived.

In my neighborhood, in my city
I know people who are young no more
They are my elders,
Kind and gentle in their age
Beset with unseen enemies round about

Here is diabetes advancing
There is the stab of a stroke
Beyond is the cancer
Too close is the loss of balance
And the fall that comes after it

Legion is this army that advances
Veteran soldiers of disease and desuetude
Their allies may be contagious
But these soldiers can strike on their own
Such is their skill over the millennia

How do we choose to face them?
We cast about for our friends, our support
But they fall, too, to the relentless advance
Ultimately, we face them alone
We face the unseen enemies alone

We know not one of us gets out alive
We know not one of us escapes unscathed
There will be scars before we die
There will be nights of agony before we die
There will be all but death, ere we die

But life is no eruption of accidents
We chose to be here
We chose to make choices
We chose to face agonies and despairs
That we would know peace and joys

As long as we are rational,
As long as we can yet choose,
We choose how we face that unseen army alone
We choose how we come to terms with the victory of death
We choose how we endure the sting of the grave

I heard once the tale
Of a man, advanced in age,
Who knew he would die of stomach cancer
His son asked him what was the purpose of it
The elder replied, “The Lord needs valiant men.”

And so he took the final charge in his hospital bed
Without flinching, he did his last duty
He accepted his lot and dug into his soul
Finding the eternal courage to become one of
Los Héroes Mayores

Mayores because they are elders
Experienced in life
But they knew their moment of valiance
When it arrived.