Daily Covid and Markets - Thursday July 23
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Data this week has been quite a mixed bag with some of the encouraging data being more encouraging than I expected, and some of the negative data being more negative than expected. “Sustained outright declines in new cases are not that far off” [Ian Shepherdson, Pantheon Macroeconomics], but right now we are just watching the new case curve peak, and disparate results in different states makes it all tough to analyze.
The chart and information I provide at the top of our FACT section below is, I think, the most important part of today’s missive. Fundamentally, these three realities have all held up incredibly true: (1) Case growth has been mostly amongst the young and healthier, and (2) Treatments have substantially improved since March/April.
I was fascinated to see that Sweden had 132 new cases countrywide yesterday, while Australia had 468. It is just an interesting contrast between a vigorous lock-down and shut-out of visitors (Australia), versus the encouragement of a herd immunity build-up. Sweden’s new cases and mortalities are now so low that all eyes are really on whether or not they get a sort of “second wave.”
The chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Epidemiology in India stated yesterday that Dehli, India is fast approaching herd immunity, another massive world city showing huge positivity in seroprevalence tests and therefore a large part of the population already infected.
Major League Baseball season officially kicks off tonight, and while fans are not allowed for now even with masks and distancing (no comment), it is symbolically and substantively delightful that the Yankees will be teeing off on the Washington Nationals tonight. I expect big ratings. Really big.
Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:12.5 | Hello and welcome to today's COVID and markets podcast, brought to you by Dividing Cafe of the Bonson Group. |
| 0:19.7 | We had a down day in the market. We haven't had a whole |
| 0:22.4 | lot of those here in the last few weeks. And so today, the market, the Dow was down 350 points, |
| 0:30.5 | which is 1.3%, but the NASDAQ was down 2.3%, which is something like the six of the last eight days, I believe, that the |
| 0:40.1 | NASDAQ's been down, particularly some of the really well-known, highly regarded big tech |
| 0:48.7 | companies were all down between three and five percent. |
| 0:52.4 | So for the Dow, it will only be down a little over 1%, with that kind of downward |
| 0:55.7 | pressure on Big Tech is really actually quite interesting. The weekly jobless claims came in |
| 1:00.7 | this morning at 1.4 million, which was, you know, close to 100,000 higher than expected, but then |
| 1:06.9 | continuing claims dropped way more than expected. |
| 1:11.3 | So the numbers don't add up this way. |
| 1:13.8 | There's a reason why it isn't quite this simple. |
| 1:16.9 | But in theory, you had 1.2 million people get off unemployment |
| 1:21.3 | and you had 1.4 million people get added to unemployment. |
| 1:24.4 | And like I said, there's some tracking error reasons why it doesn't exactly |
| 1:28.0 | line up that way. But that's kind of the general state of affairs. Still just way too high weekly |
| 1:34.0 | jobless claims and more than likely going to be driving ongoing fiscal thought as Congress walks |
| 1:41.1 | through stimulus 4.0 and then even potentially federal reserve action, as we'll go through |
| 1:45.5 | in a moment. When it gets to the COVID health information, I really, as always, encourage you to go to |
| 1:52.0 | COVID-Omarkets.com. I'm very pleased with some of the information that's there today. There's one |
| 1:57.8 | chart in particular that I have been searching for far and wide that I just believe |
... |
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