Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

I can only speak for my own province, but we are transferring lots of people around to even out the load and always have. Indeed often to places hundreds of miles away, much to the chagrin of families. During the third wave we had doubled our system-wide ICU capacity, and still had to airlift ICU patients to other provinces because we just could not add any more capacity. This is not to mention all the procedures that have been cancelled (and are now being cancelled yet again) so all the health care personnel possible can care for COVID patients. We now have a backlog of 150,000 procedures, including about 50,000 surgeries, that is going to take a very long time to catch up on.

https://doctorsmanitoba.ca/about-us/advocacy-policy/backlog

 

I have no problem with vaccine mandates for health care workers. Nothing says you don't care about your patients like not being vaccinated. Even if they are not perfect, it is all about reducing the risk. If you work in health care and don't believe in basic science like vaccines, who knows if you also don't believe in wearing your PPE properly or washing your hands.

 

A couple months ago Regina was airlifting ICU patients to Ontario because they could not cope. Yes, part of it is certainly a result of living in a sparsely populated country, and part of it is the fact there are still more than enough unvaccinated people to fill our hospitals with ease.

 

Manitoba's hospitalisations, ICU cases and deaths are proportionally dominated by unvaccinated people. I linked some summary epidemiology data for bilboda earlier.

Of note, we have a hugely disproportionate number of people in hospital/ICU from the 'Southern' health region, which - surprise surprise - also has the lowest vaccination rate. This health region is a heady mix of rural, evangelical, Mennonite, and anti-establishment attitudes, and also has a poor adherence to masking and capacity requirements.

Vaccinations have produced enormous benefits to reduce COVIDs impact, but highly concentrated pockets of unvaccinated people who don't try to mitigate spread still manage to screw it up for everyone.

 

Curious if an MZM chart shows the same trends (I suspect it would). Probably not accessible, but it would also be interesting to see similar charts for economies that historically fell off a cliff (eg., Brazil, Greece, etc). I've told my kids for awhile that the people driving this country are intent taking us over the edge and onto the rocks... but I've always said it with a hopeful tongue in cheek that their generation might see the light and bring us back from the edge.

But everyone is drunk on "free" money

 

I think we can all take solace in the fact that there's been a ramp-up with every new administration regardless of party affiliation. They're all doing the same thing regardless of party dogma/propaganda. Yay lol?

 

Interesting, I have thought that money supply and 0% fed borrowing rates are the two handles on the low inflation/relative-lack-of-recession lever of the past two decades, but this graph might indicate the M3 was more important...or that they can't be separated...don't know, I'm out of my element here.

How can the fed put the inflation genie back in the bottle now? Perhaps they can with their current tools, but I suspect wider government policy decisions and conditions are breaking through.

 

My rabies booster is due next month...

 

Pffffft, the vaccine is nowhere near as good as natural immunity.

 

Well, it's M1 that drove the jump in M3, as far as what took place over the last 18 months. This is literally a natural experiment in modern monetary theory, especially if we start paying our debts out of thin air. So what happens when the helicopters stop dropping money bags on Main Street, and the Fed decides they've had enough time at the zero lower bound to see that what the textbooks said was right? No more levers to pull, and there's no bad assets to buy out and unwind for a profit? This isn't a problem with bad money chasing bad money, it's a problem with materials, the labor force, and means of production. And the Fed can't buy its way out of a global supply chain problem. Well, maybe it could, but fiscal conservatives would like it much less than the current state of affairs. Also, there has to be some foreign U.S. securities holders that could really shock the system if they decide to get out of a long position on U.S. debt because they don't like the tone of the Fed's forward signaling.

 

Thinking on the three problems you list:

• Materials: I don't know about the rest, but energy is a "problem" mostly because of policy. True middle east/Putin have short term shock influence, but long term its up to us.
• Labor force: True demographically there are some fundamental worries, but again policy is the driving force behind this shortage.
• Means of production: Surely by now we see that 'globalist' policy and its corollary, a de facto anti-national industrial policy (even if its often a non policy), not only guts the middle class as well as the means of production

So I think we are on the same page, the Fed is not going to be able to produce the results of the last 20 years with the same levers. Also, the usual wisdom is that foreign (and domestic) holders of U.S. debt have no real options, no where else to go. Is that not true?

 

I think that ship has sailed. Sure we can tax the shit out of imports but so can others on our exports. So you create jobs but at the same time you take away jobs from companies which now have a shrinking market and shrinking revenues.

The only way I see to bring manufacturing/production back is to be smarter than we currently are. Jason and Schiit know wtf is up.

 

By "problem", are you referring to recent energy cost increases? If so, what policies do you interpret to be the cause? (Serious question - not really inclined to talk politics but still vaguely interested in energy and tired of vaccination arguments).

 

This.

Every business is reporting record profits. You don't get to record profits by just "raising prices to cover rising costs".

 

Oil in North America is actually not cheap, nor is it - relatively - that plentiful. The reason onshore production from fracking hasn't come back much since ~2015 is because even at current prices, it's marginally economic, and because individual wells decline so fast it's a real treadmill just to maintain, let alone increase, production. In contrast, production from conventional reservoirs eg in the middle east is cheaper and can be ramped up much more quickly, so OPEC+ can provide excess supply as they did in response to the North American shale boom of the early-middle part of the last decade, and wait until the shale producers' shareholders start squealing about the negative cash flows.

This time around the majority of investors seem to be remembering that the price was unsustainable for years before the pandemic and are demanding more discipline from the E&P companies - many of the biggest of whom are getting out of shale and going back to conventional production. Even in the deep offshore (eg Exxon off Guyana), which although expensive to get started, has the promise of huge reserves and long production life.

As a proud resident, I'd like to remind people that clean green Vancouver up here on the left coast is North America's biggest coal export port. The locals don't seem to like to talk about that though...

 

Yay!