Perhaps for want of a more suitable object President Donald Trump has vented his anger on the World Health Organization, announcing that the United States is withdrawing its financial support because of the latter’s mishandling of the so called pandemic. The progressive world is enraged. All hell broke loose and the American head of state received his portion of flak. How inhuman, how selfish, how abominable!

The United States contributed in total the whereabouts of 400 million dollars in 2018 or 16% in round numbers for the biennium of 2018-2019.In order to have an idea of how much that is, we need to bear in mind that the WHO is also financed by entities other than states: non-governmental organizations, of which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation according to the same sources contributed within the corresponding periods in round numbers 380 million dollars or almost 10%. GAVI Alliance contributes a little less than the United Kingdom but more than Germany. There are other private benefactors, like Rotary International or the Rockefeller Foundation.

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What is social distancing? A handy political construct. What do you do when you rule over a country, nay, over a number of countries, grouped in political blocs, and you are notified by your services that resistance is growing? that opposition is gaining in popularity? that social order is threatened? that the racial minorities that you and the likes of you have imported rather than assimilating are going to be at the throats of their hosts? What do you do when you are informed that people are boldly taking to the streets and demanding change? that there are players who are ready to topple you and your comrades, to wrench power from your hands and – what’s worst – are going to bring you to book?

You are not going to impose martial law because it somehow does not look civil in a world that has been inebriated on the infinite, never-ending, always expanding range of human rights; in a world where people have been taught to associate such measures with regimes – i.e. those governments run by tyrants in far-off lands – but not with developed democracies that are paragons of civil virtue? Besides, imposing such drastic measures draws a clear line of us against them and as a rule adds fuel to the fire of resistance. Under such circumstances, if obedience can be counted on, then merely negative obedience.

To save the day you need to come up with a solution that is going to be innocuous and that will compel people to identify with it. What do people in affluent societies care most about? About their well-being. What is their well-being conditioned by? By good health, of course, because without it you cannot enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Hence, if an individual’s good health can be put at risk, his whole world is threatened.

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Gefira 43 is accompanying the reader through the erratic behaviour that has seized hold of governments and peoples of the Northern Hemisphere among that is meticulously and almost reverentially referred to by its name plus assigned number, as if the recipients of the news were expert virologists, physicians or biologists.

The event is already advantageous to governments and organizations: unbridled money printing, pacification of political opposition without any resort to law enforcement, the introduction of restrictions of which – as we know from experience – not all will be lifted and a wonderful, legitimate, plausible excuse for all and any measures taken and many other things. Look, the blame for all failures within the next two or three years will be conveniently put on the pandemic and everybody will understand! Isn’t it a godsend!

Gefira 43 invites its readers to dispel fear and make an effort to see through the props and pay attention to those parts of the stage which are not made visible by the spotlights. What is being arranged in the dark now, that’s a fundamental question. From Beijing through Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Paris to Washington we are seeing more or less the same measures imposed by the authorities acting as if in unison. Gone are the old animosities! Does the event spell a thorough reshuffling of world politics? Is globalization going to be strengthened on the pretext of creating a unifying mechanism capable of combating such calamities in the future or are we witnessing the end of the process of rounding all countries and nations up into one shed? The latter can be substantiated by the observation that all national states in Europe have been acting on their own and the European Union was nowhere to be seen.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #43 is available now

• COVID 19 spells the end of the American Empire
• By way of deception thou shalt do war
• Taking advantage of the Corona crisis

Guest author: C. van Rijn

The Corona crisis is one of the biggest problems humanity has had to deal with in a long time. People are dying in great numbers and radical measures are being taken amid this panic and maybe even mass hysteria. It is often said that human life has no price. And yet, human life has a price. This price is determined on a daily basis by health care systems using the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). Usually, countries in Europe are willing to pay in between €20.000-€100.000 to extend a person’s life for a year. On the basis of the concept of quality adjusted life years (QALY) it is calculated whether a person with cancer is still entitled to immunotherapy or whether an older person is still entitled to a heart transplant.
To calculate whether the current measures are worth their money, we are going to estimate the gain in life expectancy resulting from the lockdown and compare it with the costs.

To this end we need to know a few things:
a) total costs of the lockdown;
b) how many years of life are likely to be lost without the lockdown;
c) how many years of life are lost even with a well-executed lockdown;
d) how many years of life are likely to be lost as a negative side effect of the lockdown;
The costs per year of life gained by the lockdown are then: a/ (b- c -d).

These calculations seem easy, but they are quite complicated. As an example we take the Netherlands and operate partly on precise numbers, partly on rough estimates. The findings can be extrapolated and applied to any other country.

First the cost. The economic loss according to CPB estimates stands at 1.2-7.7% and that calculated by the IMF at 7.5%. This means in total about €8 billion to €50 billion.
To calculate how many years of life are lost without the lockdown, we need to know the crude mortality rate (CMR) and the infection fatality rate (IFR). Until now, attention has only been focused on the Case Fatality Rate.
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We are witnessing the greatest transformation in the oil market in history.

What was recently political fiction has become reality: Saudi Arabia, the US and Russia are on the same side. After long negotiations, the largest producers of the black gold agreed to drastically reduce extraction. The limitation of the produced quantities by 20 million barrels per day (according to Trump) means a 20% lower supply (every day a total of 100 million barrels are offered in the world). Although many investors still see no reason for a rapid increase in WTI and Brent (two main types of oil), as world demand has fallen by 25 million barrels due to the so-called pandemic, the determination of the global players should be a warning to the bears on the market. The most likely scenario for most members of the new giant cartel (which also includes Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) is price stabilization between 60 and 70 dollars per barrel. If prices are higher, they are more likely to counteract this, as it would encourage an acceleration of the introduction of massive e-mobility, which would not play into their hands. You can find more about commodities, which will soon be an attractive investment, in our next Bulletin No. 43.

The global financial system with its two powerful pillars – the IMF and the World Bank – continues to play a big role. It needs to cope not only with the pecuniary processes but also with other global occurrences because these have a direct impact on markets, stock exchanges, manufacturing and services. The outbreak of the notorious epidemic that is on everyone’s lips is just such an event. It has economically impacted China, the world’s factory, and now it – or rather the precautions are taken against it – is ravaging Europe and the United States. Businesses are ordered to stop operating or to limit their activities while people need to make their living if only to pay the fixed costs such as rent, credit, leasing, employee remuneration and the like. Yes, governments offer solutions and these include tax exemptions or they provide citizens with unearned money just to allow them to survive. Does it not resemble the quantitative easing of a few years ago? Yet, the divergence between the amount of money available and the amount of goods and services is not going to ameliorate the economic problems.

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