Absolutely Not The Daily Troll-o-Graph

EU plans for a trillion-euro economic recovery fund risk becoming snarled in the political wrangling over its forthcoming seven-year budget, underscoring the bloc’s challenges in seeking a route out of the coronavirus-induced slump.  Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission presidents is planning to tell leaders this week that they should re-engineer the bloc’s multiannual financial framework (MFF), which runs from 2021 to 2027, to turn it into a vehicle to fuel the post-coronavirus recovery.  But Pierre Gramegna, Luxembourg’s finance minister, told the Financial Times that linking the recovery fund too closely to a deal on the MFF would be risky because of leaders’ recent inability to make progress advancing the broader budget talks. He echoed a proposal by France to instead create the fund via a new vehicle outside the MFF that he claimed could be up and running within months.  “If we were to embark on a discussion that says ‘let’s link this recovery fund...

The European Union (EU) was created with the “ideal” of unifying the European people after two world wars. But mass migration, youth unemployment, job precariousness, and a rise in extreme poverty have shown the project is failing. Why, exactly, has it failed? Here’s a breakdown. After the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of populist governments voicing increasing opposition to EU policies in Hungary, Poland, and Italy, as well as growing nationalist movements in Germany, France, and now Spain, it’s clear there is mass discontent with the European Union today. But why, exactly, has it failed? Here’s a breakdown. MONETARY UNION The monetary union was created to coordinate the money supply and interest rates through a central bank in Europe. It was first sanctioned by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and later established through the creation of the euro currency adopted by 19 member-state countries. The European Central Bank (ECB) was in turn created...

The WHO and the Media says testing is the answer but is it? Country                      Tests/1M Pop                          Deaths/1M Pop USA                                  10,815                                      112 Spain                                 19,896                                      428 Italy                                   20,557                ...

The Care Home crisis rumbles on and probably won't be helped by giving care home workers a shiny new badge. However, practicality trumps all the noise being generated. The simple fact is, that almost no care home residents go out into the community in normal times, so they really shouldn't get infected. However, its well known from my experience that Norovirus makes regular visits to care homes in normal times. The simple fact is, that its not the residents getting infected by themselves its people taking the virus in to them. We know that most care homes banned visitors and non essential medical visits before the lock-down actually occurred so that 99.9% of external contact with the community was second hand via the carers themselves. Therefore the outbreaks are being caused by carers catching the virus when they are outside the homes and then taking it in and passing it to residents when they go in. So what can be done about that? You could of course test al...

I 've been struck by the harridan calls of the muppet left that we need a "new kind of economy" after the corona virus is over. This is "code" for a return to 70's. Labour are playing this as "we can now see who our critical workers are and they must be rewarded" and this then covers for massive pay rises for Nurses and Doctor's, binmen and cleaners and so forth. In short they want to massively expand the public payroll right at the time when the country's debt is spiraling, which is rather unfair as a political narrative. Firstly, they don't bother to mention all the private sector key workers like those in the electricity, water and gas industries without whom you'd have no services for a hospital to run on, they would have to shut. They should also be calling for massive pay increases for the internet company workers who provide the systems which currently allow the government to function to manage this. So the whole ...

Italian bond yields rose on Tuesday to their highest in almost a month, reflecting some disappointment in markets over a half-trillion-euro coronavirus rescue plan agreed by euro zone finance ministers late last week. The agreement includes almost unconditional use of the euro zone’s European Stability Mechanism (ESM) bailout fund for loans to governments, to allow them to subsidise wages so that companies can cut working hours rather than jobs, and a plan for the European Investment Bank to step up lending to companies. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Friday said that providing cheap loans from the euro zone bailout fund was a “totally inadequate tool” and Italy had no intention of applying for help from the ESM. Analysts said the measures had helped peripheral bond spreads, but without meaningful steps towards fiscal union in the longer term, upward pressure on the borrowing costs of weaker states would return. “Italian spreads reflect disappointment that Italy m...

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in covid-19 Use of these drugs is premature and potentially harmful. The BMJ in 1925 cautiously endorsed Moellgaard’s gold treatment for tuberculosis, although it found his pharmacological reasoning “both interesting and instructive.” We should be similarly cautious about proposed treatments for people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. Many proposals are based on in vitro investigations, studies in experimental animals, or experience with interventions in infections with other viruses, whether similar to SARS-CoV-2 (eg, SARS-CoV-1) or not (HIV). This is all true of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, both 4-aminoquinolines, which have been suggested as potential treatments for covid-19. Currently, at least 80 trials of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine, or both, sometimes in combination with other drugs, are registered worldwide. The possible activity of 4-aminoquinolines in infectious mononucleosis was first propose...