Zero Hedge: Equity futures are in the red Wednesday morning as Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warnings about the supposedly “dire threat” posed by the Delta variant continue to be dramatically amplified by the American media.

“The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit: he hath left off to be wise, and to do good.’ Psalm 36:3 KJV

On Wednesday, Bloomberg published the latest in a series of stories effectively re-stating the same facts: the vaccination rate in a handful of deep-red states has substantially lagged the rate in the rest of the country. The lead-in for Wednesday’s story was the fact that the gap between the most- and least-vaccinated states has continued to widen. Though even Bloomberg concedes that “on a national level, the news appears good…the country’s vaccination campaign is among the most successful in the world…”

Source: Bloomberg

One academic quoted in the Bloomberg story, Timothy Callaghan, who studies rural health at Texas A&M, warned that “we’re going to have counties where vaccination is rare and nowhere close to herd immunity, and others where it’s high. We could be headed toward a divided country of haves and have nots.”

They also warned that an analysis last week of COVID cases in 700 counties found that the new delta variant first identified in India (which, according to Bloomberg, is “far more contagious”) has been found more often in less-vaccinated US counties.

But is the Delta variant really “far more contagious” than earlier iterations of SARS-CoV-2?

In a recent piece published by the Blaze, writer Daniel Horowitz explains that the existing data suggests Delta isn’t any deadlier or more infectious than other strains. Horowitz described the warnings from epidemiologists and public health bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci as “panic porn dressed up as science.”  Read More

Wolf Street: House prices soared by 14.6% from a year ago, according to the National Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the biggest increase in the data going back to 1987. But it pales compared to the raging mania that has taken hold of individual metros.

Today’s release, called “April,” is based on a three-month average of sales recorded in public records in February, March, and April, of deals made a month or two earlier. So that’s the time frame. The metros here – the most splendid housing bubbles – are in order of the biggest house price increases since the year 2000:

Los Angeles metro:

Prices of single-family houses in the Los Angeles metro jumped by 1.8% in April from March and by 14.7% year-over-year. All Case-Shiller Indices were set at 100 for January 2000. The index value for Los Angeles of 339 indicates that house prices soared by 239% since January 2000, despite the collapse during the Housing Bust, which makes Los Angeles the most splendid housing bubble on this list.

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Wolf Street: Consumer price inflation in Russia is red-hot, having jumped 6.0% in May compared to a year ago, 2 percentage points above the Bank of Russia’s target of 4.0%. Polls in Russia show that food inflation is a top concern, currently running at 7.4%.

“… So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand …” Rev. 6:5

But inflation in the US isn’t lagging far behind: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumped 5.0% in May. Yet the central banks are on opposite tracks in their approach to inflation.

Federal Reserve governors keep jabbering about this red-hot inflation being “temporary” or “transitory,” and likely to disappear on its own despite huge government stimulus and the Fed’s huge and ongoing monetary stimulus, though some doubts are creeping in among a couple of them. So they’ll keep interest rates at near-zero until at least next year, and they’re still buying $120 billion a month in securities to push down long-term interest rates.

Russia has been on the opposite trajectory, “surprising” economists at every step along the way. Read More