Sanskrit Finance

We have a few investments, and a great investment advisor, but I don't really understand anything in the vicinity of the finance universe.  But I was intrigued with the headline in a recent e-mail from the corporation that manages my money:

"After the storm: Preparing for an altered investing landscape."

'Altered landscape' is what The New World is all about.  I read on:

As we’ve worked through different scenarios, I was interested to see that several trends began to emerge...  Driving these trends is a drop in supply as weaker companies have gone out of business and cheap debt.  Access to low-cost debt has allowed smaller companies to invest in new technologies, suggesting that they may emerge from the pandemic in a stronger position to compete.

It’s that changed landscape that we think investors need to prepare for now.

In equities, we anticipated a shift away from investor interest in the growth and high-quality stocks that historically have characterized the end of an economic cycle. Instead, as the global economy begins to recover from the pandemic in the U. S. we likely will see a shift into small-cap stocks that typically perform better as economic growth begins to accelerate. As I’ve already mentioned, we already are seeing signs that small cap companies are well-positioned for the recovery.

We also anticipate the global economy, and specifically emerging markets, will grow faster than the US. Global diversification may be increasingly important to capture global equity gains as emerging markets potentially offer more attractive opportunities than developed markets.

As I referenced previously, commodities also are beginning to look attractive. Oil-price drops devastated weaker suppliers last year and supply levels likely will stay constrained in the near-term. The suppliers that remain may be slow to respond to the increased demand from a recovering travel industry and consumers resuming their daily routines. The lag effect should support higher prices. Agricultural commodities’ prices also may continue to climb on rising demand.

Unlike equities and commodities, fixed income investors may face increased headwinds. Today’s low-yield environment may continue for a while, so what should investors do if they need income? As the economy begins to recover, higher-yielding investments such as emerging market bonds and preferred securities may be worth considering: however, both of these types of investment come with increased risk so should be approached with caution.

This, of course, might have been written in Sanskrit, for all the sense it made to me.  But it purports to speculate on the landscape of the new world, so if you speak the language, it's all yours.  Enjoy.

Thoughts on Vaccine Passports

We've talked about vaccine passports before.  There are quite a few event organizers, and people who attend the events, who'd like to be assured that everyone in the room has been vaccinated.  Already, large numbers of colleges and universities will require all students to show proof of vaccination or recent negative test in order to enroll in the fall.  Major League Baseball will leave it up to teams.  Some sportsball teams - for instance, baseball's SF Giants and NY Yankees, and football's Buffalo Bills - will require proof of vaccination or negative test for entrance; many more will set aside sections - often, the best seats - for vaccinated fans.

Remember the IATA?  This international air travel oversight organization was developing a travel pass, an app which would provide your testing and vaccination status.  It was up to individual airlines to decide how to use this data, but at least the plan was to be consistent across all air travel.  It was supposed to launch in mid-April, but I cannot find anything confirming that this was the case; in fact, I can't find anything in the news about the IATA travel pass dated after early April.  What happened?

More to come on that, we hope.  In other news, the European Union - which pretty much shut down non-essential travel over a year ago - has announced that it will welcome American travelers who are vaccinated or have had a recent negative test, starting this summer.  Travelers will probably be required to show a travel certificate - in the EU, called a Digital Green Certificate - to prove their COVID status. The last time we checked in on the EU, they couldn't agree on a protocol, so this is good news.  Maybe Abbey and I will get to Paris after all!

Today I installed the New York State Excelsior Pass on my cell phone, as Abbey and I are now officially fully vaccinated, but I'm not sure what good it will do me.  I suppose it would get me in to a Yankees game.  But if anyone wants to know if I've been vaccinated, I've got proof that can't be counterfeited.  

Finally, I think we would do well to just ignore the anti-passport crazies who can't seem to understand that a COVID vaccine passport is exactly the same thing, designed for exactly the same reason, as the vaccination proof they have to show in order to enroll their children in public school.  The hysteria around this topic is the ultimate in ignorant knee-jerk political tribalism.  These are not people who want to engage in a dialogue, and we should probably just let them be.

Happy Birthday

This blog is one year old today.  Happy birthday!  One full year of speculating about the new world, after the end of COVID.  

If I had speculated, early on, about how long I would have to be writing about the new world, my range of guesses would not have included one full year.  One year would have been out beyond the edge of probability.

The only wisdom I have to distribute on this august occasion is that reading from the beginning is instructive.  It is reading history, and it provides a sobering account of how naïve we all were.  That's what history does.

As far as I can tell, we're no wiser about the new world today than we were one year ago today.  This, as you might imagine, is pretty discouraging.  

Onward.   

COVID Apartheid

That's what President Hage Geingob of Namibia calls the global process of distributing COVID vaccination doses:  "COVID apartheid."

Namibia has given fewer than 3,000 COVID-19 jabs so far. This is a fraction of what a mass vaccination site in the United States, such as the Javits Center in New York City, administers each day.

In the United States, nearly 40% of the population has now gotten at least one dose of a vaccine. In Namibia, less than 0.1% of the population has gotten a shot.

The population of Namibia is about 2.5 million. 

It's nice to know that the US and other developed countries are forging ahead toward national herd immunity.  It's nice to know that COVAX is getting shots in arms.  

But just a glance at any vaccination data accumulator makes it clear that the new world is still a long way off.  No one has herd immunity until everyone has herd immunity.  Until then, we continue sailing west.

What Will Happen to the Flu?

It turns out that no one seems to know what will happen to the flu.

Well, we do know one thing.  

“We do not know when it will come back in the United States, but we know it will come back,” said Sonja Olsen, an epidemiologist at the C.D.C.

The question - actually, two questions - seems to be:  what is it that will come back, and will our immune systems be ready for it?

Flu shots are designed in the middle of one flu season, for use in the next year's flu season.  Predicting which flu strains (think "variants") will be active the following winter is a complicated and imperfect process, and is probably the reason that flu vaccines exhibit effectiveness of only 40% - 60%.  In a world where our COVID jabs are well over 90% effective, those numbers don't inspire confidence.  Yet they are the best we have been able to do.  All this occurs in an environment where the population, having been exposed to many flu strains over the years, has developed (individually, very different levels of) immunity to many of the previous years' strains.  Nevertheless, somewhere between 12,000 and 61,000 Americans have died of influenza, each year since 2010, according to the CDC.  You'd think they'd be able to narrow that down - statistics with that range are not particularly useful - but that's where we are now.

And where will we be in the new world?  The interesting thing about the 2020-2021 flu season is that there wasn't one.  Flu cases have been essentially at zero for about a year now.  It's not known whether extensive public health measures (masks, distancing, hand-washing) had a major effect, or whether the coronavirus just muscled the flu out of the environment:

The mere presence of the coronavirus may have also played a role in suppressing flu cases, said Dr. Webby, because there is often just one dominant respiratory virus in a population at a given time. “One tends to keep the other out,” he said.

The two question that will have a great impact on the new world are these:  will the flu's year-plus hiatus reduce its ability to produce the new strains that have the greatest impact, thus making for a very benign flu season or two?  Or will we lose our immunity - and/or lose the ability to develop immunity by being exposed to this year's strains?

“Every year, anywhere between 20 to 30 percent of the population gets its immunity sort of boosted and stimulated by being exposed to the flu virus,” Dr. Webby said. “We are not going to have that this year.”

“Decreases in natural immunity are a concern,” Dr. Olsen said, “and lower immunity could lead to more infections and more severe disease.”

Or both?

It is possible for the new world to be a place where sick people wear masks and keep their distance and wash their hands a lot.  This would have a significant impact on the severity of flu season, and save thousands of lives.  What are the chances?

The last time Americans had a chance to make those behaviors part of the culture, Dr. Baker pointed out, they did not.

“The 1918 influenza pandemic should have been something that gave us some sort of societal learning,” said Dr. Baker, but behavior did not change. “So what is the journey you are about to go on from the Covid-19 pandemic, along that axis?” she added. “Will you wear your mask, even if no one else is?”

There are wide swaths of America (and other countries) which have actively resisted making those behaviors part of the culture this time, as well, even with a death toll in the millions worldwide.

So what will flu season look like in the new world?  It will depend on factors out of our control - the number and severity of new strains, and our immunities after a year of no flu.  It will also - perhaps most significantly - depend on measures completely in our control.  Are we smarter than we were in the 1920s?

Stay tuned. 

Yep

                                                                                                      - The New Yorker - 4/19/21

The Good Old College Jab

More and more colleges are, as part of an initiative to open up in the fall of 2021 with full in-person classes, requiring proof of vaccination for COVID-19.  This is good news, and a no-brainer.  Even in Florida, where the no-brainer was apparently a real challenge and requiring vaccines for anything was banned for petty political reasons, there are colleges that seem to be going ahead with plans for requiring their students and staff to be vaccinated.

"Of course these types of mandates aren't new, and their legality has been challenged and upheld for nearly a century."  The vast majority of colleges have required proof of vaccination for a long time, just like public elementary and secondary schools.  

So attending college in the new world will require proof of vaccination, updated as often as it turns out it needs to be.  No one's safe until everyone's safe.  

Sleep

An interesting article about how a history of COVID-19 infection disrupts sleep patterns.  So sleep is another victim of long COVID.  

Don't get it.

Once Again, Don't Get It

Hoo boy.  I really didn't want to write another post on this, because I feel my non-existent readers are tired of hearing of it.  But really, while the pandemic is still with us (and, by the way, it is still with us), I think this issue needs to be at the front of the line of things we think of while managing our behavior.

What issue?  This:  "Survivors" of COVID-19 continue to present with symptoms of serious health conditions, mostly organ damage and neurologic conditions, that are serious enough to require hospitalization and occasionally lead to death.

What brought me around to this again was the study in The Lancet which is (appropriately, I think) getting a lot of attention:  after studying literally millions of health records, they found that about one in three COVID survivors presented with "substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection. Risks were greatest in, but not limited to, patients who had severe COVID-19."  The Lancet article is a little difficult for laypeople (or at least this layman) to get through; here's a more accessible summary.  Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine also weighs in with a study that has a lot to say about these subsequent mental health and neurological diagnoses among people who were not hospitalized ("mild" case) or were not formally diagnosed at all, but are sure they had it.  

The BMJ reports the results of a study of more than 47,000 patients, which found:

Over a mean follow-up of 140 days, nearly a third of individuals who were discharged from hospital after acute covid-19 were readmitted (14,060 of 47,780) and more than 1 in 10 (5,875) died after discharge, with these events occurring at rates four and eight times greater, respectively, than in the matched control group.

And even more disturbing, the NY Times reports a CDC study published in JAMA regarding mysterious inflammatory syndrome (MIS), a condition which has affected a small proportion (around 2,000) of children diagnosed with COVID.  This study suggests that children with mild or no symptoms are much more likely to present later with serious organ damage:

The study, led by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that in over 1,000 cases in which information about whether they got sick from their initial Covid-19 illness was available, 75 percent of the patients did not experience such symptoms. But two to five weeks later, they became sick enough to be hospitalized for the condition, called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), which can affect multiple organs, especially the heart... the study said that “most MIS-C illnesses are believed to result from asymptomatic or mild Covid-19” followed by a hyper-inflammatory response that appears to occur when the patients’ bodies have produced their maximum level of antibodies to the virus. Experts do not yet know why some young people, and a smaller number of adults, respond this way.

Enough.  We are all familiar with the blase assertion that "I don't have to worrry, I'm healthy/young/lucky, and I'll get it and be done with it."  We've also heard many of our leaders suggest that everyone should get it and achieve herd immunity that way.  Both approaches are arrogant, foolish and ignorant.

Don't get it.  The new world will have enough challenges without having to cope with your completely avoidable organ failure or dementia.  Or both. 

Distance

My wife and I got our second Moderna shot yesterday (we're doing fine, thanks).  That same day, 2.9 million Americans got a shot, for a total of 109 million in total.

In other news:

Africa

• Percentage of world population -  15.8
• Percent of world doses administered in Africa:  2.0

United States

• Percentage of world population -  4.3
• Percent of world doses administered in US: -  24.7

There is no herd immunity without global herd immunity.  We've not reached the new world until everyone's there.

Hobbies Then and Now

How is our pandemic like the Great Depression, you might ask?  It's like the Great Depression because, due to the collapse of the economy, huge numbers of people have lost their jobs, or been downsized, and therefore have a whole lot of free time all of a sudden.

And that, we are told, is why people play bridge.

The COVID-19 pandemic "has led to a surge of hobbies," including "tie-dyeing clothes, attending PowerPoint parties and partaking in TikTok challenges."  During the Great Depression, hobbies that emerged included "stamp collecting, music making, woodworking and birdwatching."  And playing bridge. which had not been a well-known pastime before the 1930s.

There's even a scholarly paper describing the emergence of hobbies - as well as the term "hobby" - during the Depression, including the observation that "the underlying reasons for the emergence of hobbies as a socially sanctioned pastime lay in the similarities between work and hobbies, not in their differences."  Hobbies were a substitute 'job' that engaged the millions who had lost theirs.

Birdwatching, music making, woodworking and stamp collecting are still popular hobbies, with national and international organizations connecting enthusiasts all over the globe.  We still play bridge, too.  What new hobbies will the new world include?

I don't have any clothes that I'd really like to tie-dye, and I'm not sure what TikTok is.  Having experienced my fill of Power Point in my career, I'm not sure a PP-themed party would be attractive.  But I have taken up a hobby - one that I think many of us have enjoyed during this past year:  I write a blog.  This one.  However, "The New World" will not make it into the new world.  As soon as this is "over," and we can stick our heads up and look around the place, I'll probably write a few final posts describing what I see, and sign off.  

Or maybe I'll find some bridge partners and write a bridge blog.  Anything can happen.

Buggy Whips in the Big City

Unless you've been spending a lot of time in New York City recently, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that there have been a lot fewer people spending a lot of time in New York City.  Specifically, a lot fewer people working in those big iconic office buildings in New York City.

A recent overview in the New York Times told us that "about 90 percent of Manhattan office workers are working remotely, a rate that has remained unchanged for months..."  That's a lot of empty buildings.  But reading on, we learn that many of those workers aren't coming back.

Spotify’s headquarters in the United States fills 16 floors of 4 World Trade Center... ts offices will probably never be full again: Spotify has told employees they can work anywhere, even in another state. A few floors down, MediaMath, an advertising tech company, is planning to abandon its space, a decision fueled by its new remote-work arrangements during the pandemic.  In Midtown Manhattan, Salesforce, whose name adorns a 630-foot building overlooking Bryant Park, expects workers to be in the office just one to three days a week. A nearby law firm, Lowenstein Sandler, is weighing whether to renew its lease on its Avenue of the Americas office, where 140 lawyers used to work five days a week.  "I could find few people, including myself, who think we are going to go back to the way it was,” said Joseph J. Palermo, the firm’s chief operating officer... JPMorgan Chase & Co., which has more than 20,000 office employees in the city, has told their work forces that the five-day office workweek is a relic."  

This kind of thing is happening all over the country (and the world), but New York City - specifically, Manhattan - is the five hundred pound gorilla.  

But no city in the United States, and perhaps the world, must reckon with this transformation more than New York, and in particular Manhattan, an island whose economy has been sustained, from the corner hot dog vendor to Broadway theaters, by more than 1.6 million commuters every day.

Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan are "the nation's two largest central business districts," and right now, more office space is for lease here than any time in history - even after the 911 attacks.  Given what major employers are saying about the future of WFH, this will not improve as time goes on.

And that has substantial consequences not only for the thousands of businesses that depend on commuters who pay tolls, eat lunch, buy papers and lattes, have a drink after work, hail cabs, ,maybe stay for dinner and a show, but for municipal finances as well.  The five hundred pound gorilla pays a lot of taxes - "almost half the property tax revenues" that NYC collects.  WFH will be conspicuously absent from NYC municipal workers' options once the pandemic is under control, and Mayor DiBlasio hopes other corporations will follow suit for the good of the city.  Don't hold your breath.

So the new world could - probably will - include a radical change in the rhythms and structure of downtown New York City (and, to a lesser extent, other cities).  There is already talk of transforming empty commercial real estate into affordable housing (it's hard to write that with a straight face, but wow!  Wouldn't that be something?), but many niche service businesses may find themselves in the buggy whip museum.

Actual Post-COVID PTSD

And - just hours after putting up the previous post - we learn that survivors of COVID-19 are actually exhibiting all the symptoms of actual PTSD, the traumatic stress being the battle against the virus.

A study conducted in Italy on 381 recovered COVID patients, reported in JAMA Psychiatry, found a high correlation between documented COVID symptoms and symptoms of PTSD measured in post-COVID mental health assessments.

The strongest predictor [of PTSD] was persistence of three or more Covid-19 symptoms, the same symptoms described by long-Covid patients: fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations, difficulty breathing, headaches, and others... Around 70% of people who reported experiencing three or more persistent medical symptoms were found to have PTSD compared to 31% for people with one or two, the study found.

As it turns out, a similar study of 714 patients in China had been done in early 2020, and reported that 96% had PTSD symptoms.  

I'm tired of doing math.  I'll leave that up to you.  Over one hundred million people have "recovered" from COVID worldwide; over 20 million of them in the US*.  Post-COVID PTSD is an emerging medical term used to describe mental health challenges faced by well over half of them.

"... some experts say the world should be bracing for a mental health crisis."  Do you think?

* - Both these numbers are almost certainly way too low.

COVID PTSD

I'm a little frustrated about the fact that this blogging platform doesn't allow me to tag my posts - in other words, to put each post in one or more categories, which are searchable.  Instead, there's a search function (which works very well, surprisingly, as in-site search engines are notoriously useless) that I use to find posts on a particular subject - if I can remember a word or phrase I used in most or all of them.  This is harder than you might imagine, especially given that we're up over 150 posts by now.

After searching with three phrases that didn't work, I finally thought up one that did - it was "side effects."  This led me to two posts about the long-term effects of COVID-19 - the major medical complaints that survivors come back to the hospital with.  As with many aspects of this novel coronavirus, we don't know how long these medical consequences (or vaccinations, or immunity from infection, etc.) last.    

Apparently, we still don't know much, except that these effects are real and persistent.  And now the Annals of Translational and Clinical Neurology presents a study, summarized at MedicalXpress, that suggests that COVID patients who did not need hospitalization are equally at risk of cognitive dysfunction, which has been the area of primary concern in the "long-haul" research:

The researchers found that approximately 85% of those patients they studied were reported to have had at least four neurological symptoms—the most common were brain fog, headaches and numbness or tingling. Other common symptoms included loss of taste and/or smell, blurred vision, dizziness and ringing in the ears. They noted that many of the patients described such symptoms as coming and going, and most reported their symptoms lasting for several months—some for as long as nine.

The study also suggests that patients diagnosed with depression before contracting the virus were more likely to present with this maddening array of neurological issues.

It is a relatively small study, but large enough to mean something.  It's almost as if COVID leaves many of us with a neurological PTSD.  Which means those of us who survived, don't all survive, and that there will be widespread medical challenges long after we reach the new world.