The case for American optimism

Follow Us Get the newsletter This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a bright side of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Today's Agenda America is on the upswing. A better stimulus plan may be possible. The retail revolution has changed hedge funds. Electrifying cars would save gobs of energy. Always Look on the Bright Side: America Edition Humans may be naturally pessimistic because blithely skipping about the prehistoric savannah was a good way to get eaten by a lion. It pays, evolutionarily, to always be thinking of how things could go wrong. But! Pessimism can be bad for you, too, giving you ulcers and making you risk-averse and ungrateful for the things that go right. So let's have a little optimism today about America. It seems to be in pretty bad shape, what with the pandemic and recession and global warming and racism and inequality and all. But! Things may finally be turning around here in the depths of an ugly winter, writes Noah Smith. Take vaccinations: Despite its worst efforts, America is actually doing pretty well at getting Covid shots in people's arms, at least relative to the rest of the world. That will help reverse 2020's grim economic downturn, as will the various stimulus efforts the government is still trying to make happen. And new leadership is also trying to make headway on solving the other problems, too. America's colleges, meanwhile, are still the envy of the world. Even kids in the U.K., who can go to really good schools for much less money, still want to come here, writes Therese Raphael. Sure, it's not such a great deal right now to pay the value of one (1) human soul for an online education. But the pandemic may be all but over by the fall, when America's colleges will once again offer experiences not found anywhere else in the world, such as streaking through the quad, an optimistic activity if ever there was one.  Further America Reading: What I learned on a pandemic, election-year road trip across America. — Frank Barry The Real Bipartisanship Was the Friends We Made Along the Way By golly, Americans may even be about to taste some of that rare elixir known as "bipartisanship." Some of the Republicans who rejected President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus plan have come out with a $600 billion proposal that already seems to be a dead letter. Still, Biden ran on unifying the country, so he should at least take a stab at meeting the GOP somewhere in the middle, writes Jonathan Bernstein. What he should not do, however, is sacrifice necessary policy on the altar of unity. Bloomberg's editorial board thinks there are ways compromise could improve Biden's plan. It doesn't like big stimulus checks, for example, or doubling the minimum wage. Biden's team may ultimately agree. The questions then will be whether the remainder meets Jonathan's do-no-harm standard and if there will actually be any Republican votes for it. One big trap for Biden is that bipartisan wins would fulfill promises, which would make him a successful Democratic president, which would make Republicans sad, notes Matthew Yglesias. You can see the dilemma here. One lesson of the Obama and Trump years is that bipartisanship happens most often when nobody knows it's happening, like when you hide dog medicine in a piece of ham. Bipartisanship may seem impossible if you think America is irreconcilably split into camps of donkeys and elephants, especially when brain science makes some of those elephants think the donkeys are really pedophilic lizard people in disguise, as Faye Flam writes. But the truth, Stephen Mihm writes, is that independents are the largest and fastest-growing bloc in American politics. No wonder Biden keeps tacking toward the middle: It's where the votes are. Bonus Editorial: Biden should push Iran to make nice with its neighbors before reviving the nuclear deal.  GameStop Continues to Not Stop Despite Reddit chatter this weekend about riding GameStop to the moon, its stock price bounced around in the lower atmosphere today. Still, said bouncing occurred at about $250 a share, or roughly 100 times the 52-week low. The most obvious fate for dedicated longs — "diamond hands" in Reddit-speak — in a shopping-mall retail chain with too many stores and too few customers would seem to be pain. But Matt Levine raises the possibility the stock could end up like that other Reddit darling, Tesla — it could just stay ludicrously high forever because reasons. Whatever happens to GameStop, Mohamed El-Erian writes, hedge funds, retail investors, regulators and brokers are still in a tense standoff, pointing guns at each other like in the climax of a Quentin Tarantino movie. It's still not clear who will get shot first, though plunging short interest in the stock could be a catalyst. But the GameStop episode has already inflicted real harm on the hedge-fund business model, writes Nir Kaissar. Everybody's afraid to short now, but if you can't short, you can't hedge, and then why are we paying you all those fees?  Further Redditvestment Reading: The retail gang won't be able to push around silver the way it did GameStop. — David Fickling  Bonus Markets Reading: Short-term interest rates keep grinding toward zero, possibly forcing the Fed to raise them soon. — Brian Chappatta  Telltale Charts Electrifying America's entire auto fleet would save as much energy as we burn on power in a year, write Liam Denning and Elaine He in a piece adorned with striking charts. It looks like Saudi Arabia was right to worry about oil demand last month, writes Julian Lee. It seems to be falling again, starting with travel in China. Further Reading Women leaders have gotten better results in the pandemic, but men can borrow their leadership style. — Stephanie K. Johnson   Biden must seek a global agreement on nuclear weapons; renewing New START isn't nearly enough. — Andreas Kluth  America's top universities shouldn't be so squeamish about studying war. — Max Hastings  Brexit and the mishandling of the virus have driven Scotland toward independence. — Martin Ivens  A database of criminals' DNA can discourage crime. — Jennifer Doleac  ICYMI Covid deaths are starting to drop across America. An Elon Musk company wired a monkey's brain to play video games. The McPlant Burger is here, sort of. Kickers Scientists solve the mystery of why wombats poop cubes. Yet another chatbot ingests Internet content, spews hate.  This political hip-hop video took 10 years to film.  The Monty Python stage show turns 50. (All kickers h/t Scott Kominers) Pandas enjoy snow. A lot. Note: Please send silver and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.   Like Bloomberg Opinion Today? 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