From Prospect Magazine, June 6:
Michael Lewis has spent decades chronicling the life of US institutions.
He tells Jay Elwes why the US’s shocking failures on Covid-19 could
have been avoided
In the teeth of the US pandemic, a biochemist named Joe DeRisi set up a Covid testing unit called Biohub. The aim was to provide testing kits to local health officers. Biohub would process the completed tests and inform the health officers of the results. But there was a hitch. Most local health authorities could not receive Covid test results electronically. The information needed to be sent by fax. And some of the local authorities had fax machines so old that they couldn’t handle more than six pages at a time. Some didn’t work at all. That meant that in the year 2020, Biohub—as well as providing Covid testing kits—also started buying and delivering fax machines.
This is just one of many startling anecdotes in Michael Lewis’s new book The Premonition. Lewis has been chronicling the life of US institutions for decades. His 1989 debut, Liar’s Poker, was an excoriating—and bestselling—account of his time on Wall Street. Since then, he has written a stack of blockbusters on everything from baseball to behavioural psychology and high-frequency trading. Several have become Hollywood films. Ever since the banking crisis, he has reaped handsome returns from his writing on different aspects of financial disaster (The Big Short, 2010; Boomerang, 2012) and the frailties of American governance in the age of Donald Trump (The Fifth Risk, 2018).
But The Premonition is the most disturbing of all Lewis’s books. When the pandemic struck, the US public healthcare system, first ignored and then cynically used as a political lever by Trump, failed to work. In the crucial early weeks, as the virus spread, there was no unified response, even though health experts could see what was happening. Stifled by bureaucracy and internal politics, the systems created to protect the public became a threat to their lives.
Faced by the collapse of America’s public health services, one of Lewis’s subjects delivers the line that haunts the book: “these,” he says, “are the symptoms of a failed state.”
Lewis has made a career out of taking apparently unpromising subjects and turning them into narrative gold. And yet he never meant to become a writer. He studied art history at Princeton, but his thesis adviser warned him “there aren’t going to be any jobs” in that field. After a chance meeting with the wife of a senior executive at Salomon Brothers, he landed an interview with the Wall Street investment bank and then a job.
At Salomon Brothers he witnessed the birth of the mortgage-backed securities market, which he wrote about in Liar’s Poker. Mortgages and what banks do with them are not, on the face of it, subjects to wow the crowd. But Lewis revealed a world of preposterous excess, of “big swinging dicks,” of phonies and geniuses, all driven by a crazed desire for money. What made the story alluring was that Lewis had identified a small group who had seen what others had missed—that the US home loan market contained billions of dollars in untapped value.
Seeing what everyone else has missed is a recurring theme. In Moneyball it was the canny baseball coach who figured out that most people were studying the wrong statistics. In Flashboys, banker Brad Katsuyama uncovered what he regarded as an attempt to rig the stock market using high-frequency trading. In The Big Short, the focus was on hedge fund managers who saw the crash coming, and in The Premonition, he follows the health experts who anticipated the gathering Covid storm.
Not all his characters are especially heroic, but their superior nous makes them irresistible. In the case of Liar’s Poker, this led to some unintended consequences. Lewis thought he was writing a warning letter about a finance sector running out of control. (The complex financial products invented at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s were the same ones that blew up in 2008.) Years later, Lewis went out for lunch with the former CEO of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund. “Your fucking book destroyed my career,” Gutfreund told him, “and it made yours.” He was right on both counts. But the public loved Lewis’s chutzpah. Instead of being warned off Wall Street, readers began asking how they could get into finance.
But now America, and the world, faces a catastrophe more serious than any financial collapse. “It seems to me the stakes are highest now,” Lewis said when I spoke to him via Zoom. “It may not matter all that much if the New York Yankees are stupidly run. But it matters a whole lot if the Centers for Disease Control is not well run.”....
....MUCH MORE
Spoiler alert
The CDC and the other three (and four) letter agencies waited their entire bureaucratic lives for this pandemic moment and failed. Utterly and completely failed. I mean the name of the place is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." I don't recall when they added the "...and Prevention" bit, they sure didn't rise to the "control" part, much less adding to their responsibility.
And now there is mounting evidence that not only didn't the government scientists have a plan, they obsfucated, prevaricated, and outright lied about what they did and did not know. Time for a house-cleaning.
As Harley Bassman, the Convexity Maven put it back on May 5, 2020:
Most people will remember the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men”, for the crescendo court scene where Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) shouts at J.A.G. Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise): “You can’t handle the truth”Depending upon your politics, you were either inspired or offended as Jessup continued: “You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”
I was occasioned to think of this scene as I considered our rather haphazard response to this pandemic. It is a primary responsibility of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and likely a few more embedded in the “deep state” to game out any possible national security risk, from Martians to meteors.
So why does it seem there was not a secret folder in the file cabinet labeled: Pandemic response?
There have been over a dozen movies on this topic, so it’s not like the idea of a global pandemic was totally alien (irony intended). And while some will surely blame this entirely on the President, too many people would have known this folder existed for it not to be leaked.
At a bare minimum, the Congressional and Senate intelligence committees would have had this folder delivered to their desks sometime in late December when (our spies at) the World Health Organization(WHO) first received reports from the Chinese about a cluster of 41 deaths from a mysterious pneumonia.
Surely the gears would have been grinding at a dozen Govt Agencies as early as late January when the President closed the airports to flights from China.
I suppose the alternative, of which I am incredulous, is that there was no folder.
Forced to consider the latter, let us not make the same mistake with our investments; perhaps it is time to take the long view and build our own folder.Courtesy of the latest quarterly review from Hoisington Investment Management, the -oriole line-is the quickly expanding Monetary Base, which is projected to reach the -heron dot-of $5.0Tn at month’s end....
