Notes From All Over -- October 21, 2020

First things first: NFL tracking with BLM. 

"Sunday Night Football" ratings "crash" 17% -- week six -- continues season long decline.

It is interesting. I have tried going back to watching NFL but after about five or six minutes I have to switch to something else, usually picking up around the house.

The games are incredibly boring, and invariably we get some banter about how these guys are giving back to "their" BLM communities. As if. They all live in McMansions in gated communities with 95% Caucasians.

And, of course, the virtue signaling with masks where the masked coaches are surrounded by 120 others who are unmasked. Link at https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2020/10/20/ratings-crash-17-week-6-sunday-night-football-continuing-season-long-decline/.

Record: Trump confirms more federal judges in his first term than any president in 40 years. Remember all those stories about how chaotic the White House was? Seems they got a lot more done than past presidents. The previous previous president recognized for his beer summit. Link at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/20/trump-federal-judges/.

Off again, now on again: apparently that New Jersey tax on stock market trades is back on the table. 

Originally it was a quarter-cent for each trade; now it's down to a thousandth of a cent.
Let's see 0.25 / 0. 001 = 250x. That's a pretty huge change. Goes to show just how much money can be made with creative taxing. Who would ever have thought of taxing trades?

New Mexico will just love Biden's plan to place a moratorium on BLM and federal oil permits. Link here.

Pharmacy desert: Walgreens is shutting down in downtown San Francisco. Shoplifting put them out of business. 

Food inflation: there's a bigger story here, perhaps, but for now, the CNBC blurb on pork prices in China.

• The consumer price index rose 1.7% last month from a year ago, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said Thursday.
• Overall food prices remained elevated, up 7.9% in September from a year ago. Pork prices climbed 25.5%, but at a slower rate than increases of over 100% seen for much of the last 12 months.
• The producer price index fell 2.1% in September from a year ago, greater than the 1.8% decline forecast by a Reuters poll.
  

Banks could enter the lodging business. A third of US hotels could disappear -- report. But Siri will find them. From Yahoo!Finance:

A third of hotels in the U.S. could go under due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study.

Some 33% of hotel owners expect to hand the keys back to their lender or enter a forced sale situation, according to a September 7 survey of 103 hotels by the Hospitality Asset Managers Association (HAMA).

Comment: if that happens, expect to see fees on everything: fees for towels; fees for clean pillowcases; fees for "complimentary" shampoo; fees for that "sanitized band" on toilet seats. One thing banks are good at: fees.