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“What If The Lockdown Was A Giant Mistake?”: Ron Paul Rages “They Shouldn’t Be Able To Get Away With This”

“What If The Lockdown Was A Giant Mistake?”: Ron Paul Rages “They Shouldn’t Be Able To Get Away With This”

Submitted by Ron Paul of the Ron Paul Institute For Peace And Prosperity

From California to New Jersey, Americans are protesting in the streets. They are demanding an end to house arrest orders given by government officials over a virus outbreak that even according to the latest US government numbers will claim fewer lives than the seasonal flu outbreak of 2017-2018.

Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by “executive order” and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Americans, who have seen their real wages decline thanks to Federal Reserve monetary malpractice, are finding themselves thrust into poverty and standing in breadlines. It is like a horror movie, but it’s real.

Last week the UN Secretary General warned that a global recession resulting from the worldwide coronavirus lockdown could cause “hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths per year.” As of this writing, less than 170,000 have been reported to have died from the coronavirus worldwide.

Many Americans have also died this past month because they were not able to get the medical care they needed. Cancer treatments have been indefinitely postponed. Life-saving surgeries have been put off to make room for coronavirus cases. Meanwhile hospitals are laying off thousands because the expected coronavirus cases have not come and the hospitals are partially empty.

What if the “cure” is worse than the disease?

Countries like Sweden that did not lock down their economy and place the population under house arrest are faring no worse than countries that did. Sweden’s deaths-per-million from coronavirus is lower than in many lockdown countries.

Likewise, US states that did not arrest citizens for merely walking on the beach are not doing worse than those that did. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said last week, “we’ve been able to keep our businesses open and allow people to take on some personal responsibility.” South Dakota has recorded a total of seven coronavirus deaths.

Kentucky, a strict lockdown state, is five times more populated than South Dakota, yet it has some 20 times more coronavirus deaths. If lockdown and house arrest are the answer, shouldn’t those numbers be reversed, with South Dakota seeing mass death while Kentucky dodges the coronavirus bullet?

When Anthony Fauci first warned that two million would die, there was a race among federal, state, and local officials to see who could rip up the Constitution fastest. Then Fauci told us if we do what he says only a quarter of a million would die. They locked America down even harder. Then, with little more than a shrug of the shoulders, they announced that a maximum of 60,000 would die, but maybe less. That is certainly terrible, but it’s just a high-average flu season.

Imagine if we had used even a fraction of the resources spent to lock down the entire population and focused on providing assistance and protection to the most vulnerable – the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. We could have protected these people and still had an economy to go back to when the virus had run its course. And it wouldn’t have cost us six trillion dollars either.

Governments have no right or authority to tell us what business or other activity is “essential.” Only in totalitarian states does the government claim this authority. We should encourage all those who are standing up peacefully and demanding an accounting from their elected leaders. They should not be able to get away with this.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/20/2020 – 16:55

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IBM Reports Lowest Revenue This Century And Grotesque EPS Fudge; Pulls Guidance But Keeps Dividend

IBM Reports Lowest Revenue This Century And Grotesque EPS Fudge; Pulls Guidance But Keeps Dividend

There was some hope last quarter that IBM was finally turning things around: after all, after 5 consecutive quarters of declining revenues, the company had just managed to grow its top-line for the first time since Q2 2018, and only for the 4th time in the past 8 years. Alas it was not meant to be, and moments ago IBM revealed that revenue once again declined in the first quarter, down 3.1%, amid the spread of COVID-19, even as Red Hat sales boosted its cloud business.

Then again “boosted” may be using the term loosely: at $17.6BN in total revenue, and missing consensus expectations of a $17.7BN print, IBM’s Q1 2020 was its worst quarter for sales this century.

Some more details:

  • Cloud and cognitive software sales, which includes the recently acquired Red Hat, came in at $5.24 billion, missing analysts estimates of $5.3 billion.
  • Systems revenue, which includes mainframes, was $1.37 billion also missing the $1.42 billion consensus .
  • Global technology services revenue came in at $6.47 billion which completed the revenue miss trifecta (the Street expected $6.51 billion)
  • Global business services revenue was the only beat, coming in at $4.14 billion and above the $3.91 billion forecast.

Hilariously, even with revenue missing and sliding, and the world around it burning, IBM still felt compelled to “beat” sellside EPS estimates which were $1.80, reporting $1.84 in adjusted EPS (down from $2.25 a year ago).

As usual, this number was total garbage for two reasons:

  • First, the unadjusted EPS was $1.31, or 40% below the adjusted number. The GAAP to non-GAAP bridge was, as usual, absolutely ridiculous and a continuation of an “one-time, non-recurring” addback trend that started so many years ago we can’t even remember when, but one thing is certain: none of IBM’s multiple-time, recurring charges are either one-time, or non-recurring.

  • Second, and as has become an IBM habit in recent years, the company’s entire net income was thanks to a tax benefit, because whereas per-tax net “income” was a loss of $49MM, the company added a $1.2BN benefit from taxes to get an after tax “Net Income” number of $1.175BN. The fudge was so grotesque, IBM was even embarrassed to point out what the effective tax rate was and simply said “Not Meaningful”, when it clearly is meaningful for anyone who believes foolishly that the company beat earnings.

 

Of course, none of this matters as the only thing investors care about is the future in a post-corona world, and here IBM had nothing to say, as it pulled its profit forecast for the year, signaling that the Covid-19 pandemic has become another hurdle for the company in its transition to cloud computing.

IBM is withdrawing its full-year 2020 guidance in light of the current COVID-19 crisis. The company will reassess this position based on the clarity of the macroeconomic recovery at the end of the second quarter.

As Bloomberg notes, IBM’s new CEO Arvind Krishna, who took the reins from Ginni Rometty earlier this month, has the challenge of leading the 108-year-old tech giant through the economic shocks stemming from the coronavirus. Many organizations have delayed major information technology purchases to avoid projects that are expensive, complex and sometimes disruptive to existing business processes. Even before the coronavirus emerged, IBM had struggled to increase sales on a consistent basis.

The company has been trying to boost its share of revenue from hybrid-cloud software and services, which lets customers store data in private servers and on multiple public clouds, including those of IBM rivals Amazon and Microsoft. IBM bought RedHat for a massively overvalued $34 billion in 2018 (the price represented more than 30x EBITDA) to boost this effort.

“IBM remains focused on helping our clients adapt to the immediate challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, while we continue to enable them to shift their mission-critical workloads to hybrid cloud and expand their use of AI to help transform their operations,” Krishna said in the statement.

And while IBM has no idea what the future holds, it was confident enough to keep its dividend. In fact, in Q1 every dollar IBM made was returned to shareholders, to wit: “IBM’s free cash flow was $1.4 billion. The company returned $1.4 billion to shareholders in dividends.”


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/20/2020 – 16:43

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XMjKga Tyler Durden

Should Justin Amash Run for President?

Since Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) announced Wednesday that he has been “carefully consider[ing] a presidential run,” presumably with the Libertarian Party, there have been three bits of interesting news:

1) An April 14-16 Morning Consult national poll of 1,992 registered voters, the first of its kind in seven months, had the libertarian congressman at just 1 percent, compared to Joe Biden’s 46 and President Donald Trump’s 42 (5 percent said “someone else” and 6 percent said they would not vote). Removing Amash’s name from the options did not change the point-spread between the two leading candidates.

2) First-quarter fundraising numbers came in from Amash’s 3rd Congressional District in Michigan, and—unsurprisingly, given his announcement that he stopped campaigning actively in mid-February while pondering his presidential future—the independent incumbent finished in fourth place for January-March numbers, with $97,000, after having led the field the previous quarter. Republican supermarket magnate Peter Meijer, who this week won the endorsement of the influential former Amash backers in the DeVos family, raised $353,000, including a $150,000 loan to himself; state Rep. Lynn Afendoulis (R–Grand Rapids) raised $190,000, and Democrat Hillary Scholten raised $152,000. Amash still has a slight lead in cash on hand, with $645,000, compared to $634,000 for Meijer, $259,000 for Scholten, and $248,000 for Afendoulis.

3) As mentioned in this morning’s Reason Roundup, the coronavirus is hammering crucial signature-gathering exercises for third parties, potentially preventing the Libertarian Party from reaching its previously expected goal of being on the ballot in all 50 states.

So at this late date, one month out from the party’s scheduled (if physically uncertain) nominating convention, should Amash throw his hat into the ring? The reaction is mixed on the new Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. The quartet also, as you would imagine, discusses the coronavirus response, particularly the reopening debate, protests thereof, and the never-ending bailout/stimulus/printer-go-BRRRRing.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Music Credit: ‘Late Night Drive’ by Nat Keefe & BeatMower.

Relevant links from the show:

“Justin Amash Has Been Actively Pondering a Libertarian Presidential Run for 2 Months, and Will Decide Soon,” by Matt Welch

“Judge Jim Gray Thinks the Libertarian Party Needs Pragmatism, ‘Stature’ for 2020 Presidential Run,” by Brian Doherty

“Justin Amash Outraises Democratic and Republican Opponents in Fourth Quarter,” by Matt Welch

“Key Election Forecaster Switches Justin Amash’s House Seat to ‘Lean Republican’ in 2020,” by Matt Welch

“Candidates Vie to Represent the Libertarian Wing of the Libertarian Party,” by Matt Welch

“Will Justin Amash Run for President as a Libertarian in 2020?” By Matt Welch

“Pushy Politicians Make Stay-at-Home Protests Necessary,” by J.D. Tuccille

“Don’t Get Fooled by Fake Photos of Coronavirus Lockdown Protests,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Celebrities and the Media Shouldn’t Sneer at Coronavirus Lockdown Protesters,” by Robby Soave

“It Took Less Than 24 Hours for Trump To Undermine His New Plan for Reopening State Economies,” by Eric Boehm

“Trump’s Plan To Reopen the Economy Admits Governors Are in Charge, but We’re Probably Months Away From Anything Resembling Normalcy,” by Eric Boehm

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Should Justin Amash Run for President?

Since Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) announced Wednesday that he has been “carefully consider[ing] a presidential run,” presumably with the Libertarian Party, there have been three bits of interesting news:

1) An April 14-16 Morning Consult national poll of 1,992 registered voters, the first of its kind in seven months, had the libertarian congressman at just 1 percent, compared to Joe Biden’s 46 and President Donald Trump’s 42 (5 percent said “someone else” and 6 percent said they would not vote). Removing Amash’s name from the options did not change the point-spread between the two leading candidates.

2) First-quarter fundraising numbers came in from Amash’s 3rd Congressional District in Michigan, and—unsurprisingly, given his announcement that he stopped campaigning actively in mid-February while pondering his presidential future—the independent incumbent finished in fourth place for January-March numbers, with $97,000, after having led the field the previous quarter. Republican supermarket magnate Peter Meijer, who this week won the endorsement of the influential former Amash backers in the DeVos family, raised $353,000, including a $150,000 loan to himself; state Rep. Lynn Afendoulis (R–Grand Rapids) raised $190,000, and Democrat Hillary Scholten raised $152,000. Amash still has a slight lead in cash on hand, with $645,000, compared to $634,000 for Meijer, $259,000 for Scholten, and $248,000 for Afendoulis.

3) As mentioned in this morning’s Reason Roundup, the coronavirus is hammering crucial signature-gathering exercises for third parties, potentially preventing the Libertarian Party from reaching its previously expected goal of being on the ballot in all 50 states.

So at this late date, one month out from the party’s scheduled (if physically uncertain) nominating convention, should Amash throw his hat into the ring? The reaction is mixed on the new Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch. The quartet also, as you would imagine, discusses the coronavirus response, particularly the reopening debate, protests thereof, and the never-ending bailout/stimulus/printer-go-BRRRRing.

Audio production by Ian Keyser and Regan Taylor.

Music Credit: ‘Late Night Drive’ by Nat Keefe & BeatMower.

Relevant links from the show:

“Justin Amash Has Been Actively Pondering a Libertarian Presidential Run for 2 Months, and Will Decide Soon,” by Matt Welch

“Judge Jim Gray Thinks the Libertarian Party Needs Pragmatism, ‘Stature’ for 2020 Presidential Run,” by Brian Doherty

“Justin Amash Outraises Democratic and Republican Opponents in Fourth Quarter,” by Matt Welch

“Key Election Forecaster Switches Justin Amash’s House Seat to ‘Lean Republican’ in 2020,” by Matt Welch

“Candidates Vie to Represent the Libertarian Wing of the Libertarian Party,” by Matt Welch

“Will Justin Amash Run for President as a Libertarian in 2020?” By Matt Welch

“Pushy Politicians Make Stay-at-Home Protests Necessary,” by J.D. Tuccille

“Don’t Get Fooled by Fake Photos of Coronavirus Lockdown Protests,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Celebrities and the Media Shouldn’t Sneer at Coronavirus Lockdown Protesters,” by Robby Soave

“It Took Less Than 24 Hours for Trump To Undermine His New Plan for Reopening State Economies,” by Eric Boehm

“Trump’s Plan To Reopen the Economy Admits Governors Are in Charge, but We’re Probably Months Away From Anything Resembling Normalcy,” by Eric Boehm

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A Harvard Plan To Use Massive COVID-19 Testing To Reopen the Economy

To fully restart the U.S. economy by August, massive population testing for infections with the virus that causes COVID-19 is essential, according to the roadmap to pandemic resilience just issued today by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Testing results should be available the next day at the latest. The roadmap also sketches out a system of tracing the contacts of people who are infected by the coronavirus. Those contacts are warned about their exposure and tested numerous times. If a contact’s tests turn positive they should be provided supported isolation that includes job protections, safe shelter, food, and health care. The authors of the report estimate that this scheme for testing, tracing, and supported isolation (TTSI) would cost between $50 to $300 billion over two years. As they note this is extremely cheap compared to “the economic cost of continued collective quarantine of $100 to 350 billion a month.”

How much testing would be required to implement their proposed roadmap? “We estimate that steady-state testing levels that would permit replacing collective stay-at-home orders as the main tool for disease control with a testing—tracing-and-warning—supported-isolation, or TTSI, methodology will eventually need to reach a capacity to test 2 to 6% of the population per day, or between 5 and 20 million people per day,” note the authors.

How would they achieve a rapid increase in testing capacity? Given how badly federal agencies botched testing as the coronavirus outbreak was growing, the authors wisely recommend turning to the private sector. “The government should not hesitate to pay substantial sums to incentivize the private sector to apply ingenuity and speed to develop solutions,” note the authors. “Prizes and advance market commitments are two tools to be considered.”

In order to warn people who have come into contact with an infected person that they should be tested, the authors recommend initially hiring and training 100,000 contact tracers at a cost of $3.6 billion. Such manual contact tracing could be supplemented with opt-in peer-to-peer cell phone warning apps. The researchers suggest that the deployment of such apps include maximal privacy protection, use open-source code amenable to independent and regulatory audit, and prohibit the use of any data from these apps for commercial purposes.

Frustratingly, the Safra Center authors do not discuss prohibiting government abuse of the tracking functions and data collected by the apps (that is, immigration authorities and law enforcement). In order to forestall our government from using the pandemic as an excuse to further violate our civil rights and privacy, we should adopt the proposals recommended by the Ada Lovelace Institute (ALI) in its similar testing-and-tracking scheme for the United Kingdom. The ALI authors warn that “there is a real risk that the expansion of state intrusion into individuals’ lives that occurs during emergencies endures beyond the originating crisis.” Consequently, they recommend:

Legal and technical sunset clauses must be built into the design of new powers and technologies. Government must provide advance primary legislation regulating the processing of data by both public and private sector actors in the use of technology to transition from the crisis. Government must encourage privacy-by-design in technical implementations and must choose privacy-preserving protocols to underscore technical measures.

Recommendations like these must be part of any wide-scale U.S. COVID-19 testing and tracing plan.

The Safra Center authors sketch out a four-phase program aimed at fully reopening the economy by the end of this summer. During phase one, they recommend increasing publicly-funded diagnostic testing capability to 2 million tests per day, focusing on everyone with symptoms and their close contacts, as well as essential workers, nursing home residents, and incarcerated people. With this amount of testing, they estimate that 40 to 55 percent of people could return to work.

With the testing and tracing regime solidly in place, COVID-19 case rates would decline, thus enabling the initiation of phase two in the next month. With further expansion of testing and tracing, 70 percent of the workforce could return to work. Those who can work at home would still do so and vulnerable people (e.g. those over age 60) would continue to limit their time in the community. In phase three, increased testing and tracing that covers 80 percent of the workforce in localities would allow most non-telecommuting laborers to return to work. In phase four, universal testing would be available and schools could reopen.

The roadmap, as outlined, could likely work. However, assuming that the real and substantial technical difficulties in ramping up that much daily testing can be overcome, the ongoing economic distress makes it unlikely that the public would endure the implementation of such a careful plan. And even if the public did remain patient, it’s doubtful that the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, including our chaotic president, have the competence to pull it off.

 

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Here Is The Full Explanation Behind Today’s Unprecedented Negative Oil Price

Here Is The Full Explanation Behind Today’s Unprecedented Negative Oil Price

Courtesy of IHSMarkit’s energy vice president Roger Diwan

How did you end up with negative oil prices today?  This happens when a physical futures contract find no buyers close to or at expiry. 

Let me explain what that means:

A physical contract such as the NYMEX WTI has a delivery point at Cushing, OK, & date, in this occurrence May.  So people who hold the contract at the end of the trading window have to take physical delivery of the oil they bought on the futures market.  This is very rare.

It means that in the last few days of the futures trading cycle, (which is tomorrow for this one) speculative or paper futures positions start rolling over to the next contract. This is normally a pretty undramatic affair.

What is happening today is trades or speculators who had bought the contract are finding themselves unable to resell it, and have no storage booked to get delivered the crude in Cushing, OK, where the delivery is specified in the contract.

This means that all the storage in Cushing is booked, and there is no price they can pay to store it, or they are totally inexperienced in this game and are caught holding a contract they did not understand the full physical aspect of as the time clock expires.

The contract roll and liquidity crunch that made the extreme sell-off today possible but it DOESN’T necessarily represent futures market conditions: NYMEX June settled today at $21.13.

The June contract is not out of the woods either: today’s action indicate that physical oil markets at Cushing are not in good shape and that storage is getting very full.

A decline of over 15% in the June contract price points to real worries that the physical stress will continue to reverberate, and will force a lot more production shutdowns during May than the ones announced so far.

So today negative prices are the reflection of dire market conditions for producers, with the hope that demand restart before the middle of May and that the June contract does not face the same fate.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/20/2020 – 16:14

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3cCf80q Tyler Durden

The Market Is Breaking… Everywhere

The Market Is Breaking… Everywhere

Today was historic…

…for a number of reasons.

1) Front-month oil traded at an utterly irrational and unprecedented negative $43 intraday (this was not about storage into settlement, this was forced selling into settlement, then notice the bounce, and then later more selling.)

2) Oil’s prompt-spread exploded to a record negative $60 (smells like at least one fund was carried out on an arb)

Source: Bloomberg

3) Oil ‘VIX’ exploded today to record highs…

Source: Bloomberg

4) Russell 2000 ‘VIX’ has never been higher relative to Nasdaq ‘VIX’ than today (The widening gap reflects the damage being done to smaller companies by the coronavirus, Julian Emanuel, head of equity and derivatives strategy at BTIG LLC, wrote in a report.)…

Source: Bloomberg

5) A AAA CLO tranche failed its O/C test (this is a major liquidity problem – it means that a key pillar of the credit market will be crushed for years: CLOs have been the biggest buyers in the $1.2 trillion leveraged loan market, helping fuel a surge in debt-fueled buyouts and other transactions.)

6) Liquidity shortages reappeared as the 3m FRA-OIS Spread blew out once again… despite the massive injections of cash from The Fed…

Source: Bloomberg

7) US Macro-economic data crashed at a record pace back to the worst levels since the peak of the 2008 financial crisis…

Source: Bloomberg

*  *  *

World stocks continue to make a mockery of every rational investor…

Source: Bloomberg

Chinese markets were a shitshow overnight when the CSI-300 Healthcare Index crashed 17% for no good reason, hung around there for hours and then spiked back to the green…

Source: Bloomberg

European stocks roundtripped from ugliness overnight to end mixed but all eyes were on Italian credit markets which were once again starting to signal redenomination risk…

Source: Bloomberg

US equity markets were in the red on the day with Nasdaq relatively outperforming once again and Trannies weakest (odd given the huuuge benefits from oil’s collapse)…NOTE the red rectangle shows the drop in all stocks as oil crashed into settlement…

 

Remember the last few minutes on Friday where The Dow shot up almost 400 points… well that’s all gone now…

The Dow was unable to hold above the 50% retrace level…

FANG Stocks made another new record high today…

Source: Bloomberg

Both HY and IG credit markets stumbled today…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields largely shrugged off everything today ending modestly lower (2Y -1bps, 30Y -3bps)…

Source: Bloomberg

10Y Yield drifted lower…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar trod water today for a second day, ending slightly higher…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos had an ugly day today, erasing gains from the weekend…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold prices rallied on the day (spot and futures) and compressed the premium modestly…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, the price of a barrel of oil has traded generally between 2.5oz and 5oz of silver for over 40 years… until today – using the June contract, it now costs just 1.3oz of silver to buy a barrel of oil – the cheapest ever.

Source: Bloomberg


Tyler Durden

Mon, 04/20/2020 – 16:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3bock6B Tyler Durden

A Plan To Use Massive COVID-19 Testing To Reopen the Economy

To fully restart the U.S. economy by August, massive population testing for infections with the virus that causes COVID-19 is essential, according to the roadmap to pandemic resilience just issued today by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Testing results should be available the next day at the latest. The roadmap also sketches out a system of tracing the contacts of people who are infected by the coronavirus. Those contacts are warned about their exposure and tested numerous times. If a contact’s tests turn positive they should be provided supported isolation that includes job protections, safe shelter, food, and health care. The authors of the report estimate that this scheme for testing, tracing, and supported isolation (TTSI) would cost between $50 to $300 billion over two years. As they note this is extremely cheap compared to “the economic cost of continued collective quarantine of $100 to 350 billion a month.”

How much testing would be required to implement their proposed roadmap? “We estimate that steady-state testing levels that would permit replacing collective stay-at-home orders as the main tool for disease control with a testing—tracing-and-warning—supported-isolation, or TTSI, methodology will eventually need to reach a capacity to test 2 to 6% of the population per day, or between 5 and 20 million people per day,” note the authors.

How would they achieve a rapid increase in testing capacity? Given how badly federal agencies botched testing as the coronavirus outbreak was growing, the authors wisely recommend turning to the private sector. “The government should not hesitate to pay substantial sums to incentivize the private sector to apply ingenuity and speed to develop solutions,” note the authors. “Prizes and advance market commitments are two tools to be considered.”

In order to warn people who have come into contact with an infected person that they should be tested, the authors recommend initially hiring and training 100,000 contact tracers at a cost of $3.6 billion. Such manual contact tracing could be supplemented with opt-in peer-to-peer cell phone warning apps. The researchers suggest that the deployment of such apps include maximal privacy protection, use open-source code amenable to independent and regulatory audit, and prohibit the use of any data from these apps for commercial purposes.

Frustratingly, the Safra Center authors do not discuss prohibiting government abuse of the tracking functions and data collected by the apps (that is, immigration authorities and law enforcement). In order to forestall our government from using the pandemic as an excuse to further violate our civil rights and privacy, we should adopt the proposals recommended by the Ada Lovelace Institute (ALI) in its similar testing-and-tracking scheme for the United Kingdom. The ALI authors warn that “there is a real risk that the expansion of state intrusion into individuals’ lives that occurs during emergencies endures beyond the originating crisis.” Consequently, they recommend:

Legal and technical sunset clauses must be built into the design of new powers and technologies. Government must provide advance primary legislation regulating the processing of data by both public and private sector actors in the use of technology to transition from the crisis. Government must encourage privacy-by-design in technical implementations and must choose privacy-preserving protocols to underscore technical measures.

Recommendations like these must be part of any wide-scale U.S. COVID-19 testing and tracing plan.

The Safra Center authors sketch out a four-phase program aimed at fully reopening the economy by the end of this summer. During phase one, they recommend increasing publicly-funded diagnostic testing capability to 2 million tests per day, focusing on everyone with symptoms and their close contacts, as well as essential workers, nursing home residents, and incarcerated people. With this amount of testing, they estimate that 40 to 55 percent of people could return to work.

With the testing and tracing regime solidly in place, COVID-19 case rates would decline, thus enabling the initiation of phase two in the next month. With further expansion of testing and tracing, 70 percent of the workforce could return to work. Those who can work at home would still do so and vulnerable people (e.g. those over age 60) would continue to limit their time in the community. In phase three, increased testing and tracing that covers 80 percent of the workforce in localities would allow most non-telecommuting laborers to return to work. In phase four, universal testing would be available and schools could reopen.

The roadmap, as outlined, could likely work. However, assuming that the real and substantial technical difficulties in ramping up that much daily testing can be overcome, the ongoing economic distress makes it unlikely that the public would endure the implementation of such a careful plan. And even if the public did remain patient, it’s doubtful that the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, including our chaotic president, have the competence to pull it off.

 

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Ilhan Omar’s Bill Would Enable the Feds To Seize Landlords’ Properties for Trying To Collect Rent During Coronavirus

The movement to cancel rent during the COVID-19 pandemic is going national. On Friday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act, which does what the title suggests, and much, much more.

Omar’s legislation—which is being co-sponsored by “squad” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.), alongside three other progressive Democrats and a bevy of left-wing activist groups—would cancel rent and mortgage payments for the entire country “regardless of income or payment level.”

The rent and mortgage suspension would only apply to primary residences and would remain in effect until a month after the end of the national emergency President Donald Trump declared on March 13. Tenants and homeowners would not have to make payments on leases or mortgages during that whole time, nor could their landlords or lenders use their failure to pay as a cause for eviction or foreclosure.

In addition, tenants and homeowners could not be charged late fees or penalties, nor could they have their credit scores downgraded. People who feel they’ve suffered an “adverse action” for exercising these protections could sue their landlord or mortgage lender in federal court for damages.

The attorney general would also be empowered to take civil action against property owners and mortgage lenders for violating renters’ and homeowners’ rights under the act. Violators could be hit with a $5,000 fine for a first offense and a $10,000 fine for the second offense. Landlords who violate the act three or more times could be fined $50,000 or could even have their property seized.

That means the government could snatch up a landlord’s rental property just for reporting three tenants who didn’t pay their rent to a credit reporting agency.

These are all extreme measures, which Omar argues are justified by the extreme circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Congress has a responsibility to step in to stabilize both local communities and the housing market during this time of uncertainty and crisis,” said the Minnesota congresswoman in a press release. “In 2008, we bailed out Wall Street. This time, it’s time to bail out the American people who are suffering.”

One common criticism of rent and mortgage forgiveness policies is that they just pass on the costs of housing to rental property owners and lenders who have their own bills to pay.

To that end, Omar’s legislation would create two funds to compensate landlords and mortgage lenders for any income they lose as a result of her bill. But this money would come with a lot of strings attached.

In order to be eligible for relief funds, landlords couldn’t raise rents for five years. They would also not be allowed to discriminate against tenants based on their credit score or criminal history during that same five year period. According to a summary of the bill put out by Omar’s office, landlords making use of these relief funds would also have to give tenants a 10 percent equity stake in their properties.

A relief fund for mortgage lenders would also be created and would come with requirements to report detailed lending data to federal housing authorities. Both funds would be administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The bill would create a new Affordable Housing Acquisition Fund, also administered by HUD. This fund would give money to government entities and nonprofits to buy up private buildings and convert them to income-restricted affordable housing. To facilitate these purchases, property owners would have to notify HUD when they intend to sell a rental property, and then give low-income housing providers 60 days to make an offer on their building.

Anyone who did purchase a property through HUD’s affordable housing fund would have to agree to provide tenants with free “wrap-around” services, including healthcare, childcare, employment and education assistance, and financial literacy education.

One might ask themselves how exactly free financial literacy classes at federally-funded public housing fits into an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The answer is it doesn’t.

Rather it appears that Omar is using the pandemic, and the swell of support for rent cancellation that it’s created, as a vehicle for enacting her ambitious, preexisting housing policy goals.

Much of what’s included in Omar’s bill appears borrowed from the $1 trillion public housing legislation that she introduced in November of last year. That bill called for creating millions of new public housing units that would come with free social services provided on-site.

Omar’s latest legislation is effectively an attempt to strong-arm landlords into getting this same result.

To summarize, her bill would eliminate landlords’ ability to earn income from their properties, and then attach a number of incredibly costly conditions for accessing relief funds.

Landlords who balk at the bailout conditions Omar proposes, but who can’t afford to earn $0 for the duration the coronavirus emergency would be left with the option of selling their properties. When they do put their properties on the market, they’d be first required to offer them to low-income housing providers who’d be receiving generous federal aid to snap up units.

This is all incredibly coercive, not to mention constitutionally dubious. It’s also wildly impractical from a fiscal perspective. The federal government is currently looking at a quadrupled $3.8 trillion budget deficit this year, according to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

In addition to this staggering amount of debt, Omar’s bill would have the federal government offering to pay the nation’s rent and mortgage bills, not to mention financing the purchase of an untold number of private rental buildings.

The extremity of the Minnesota congresswoman’s proposal also makes it unlikely to gain much traction in Congress. That’s good news for advocates for private property, even if it does speak ill of Omar’s priorities as a legislator. With even some Republican members of Congress talking about rent forgiveness, there’s potential that a more modest and targeted bill could actually attract significant support.

The radicalism of Omar’s proposal is nevertheless evidence of just how much of an opening some progressives see in the coronavirus pandemic to enact any number of policies that would have been unthinkable in February.

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Ilhan Omar’s Bill Would Enable the Feds To Seize Landlords’ Properties for Trying To Collect Rent During Coronavirus

The movement to cancel rent during the COVID-19 pandemic is going national. On Friday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act, which does what the title suggests, and much, much more.

Omar’s legislation—which is being co-sponsored by “squad” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.), alongside three other progressive Democrats and a bevy of left-wing activist groups—would cancel rent and mortgage payments for the entire country “regardless of income or payment level.”

The rent and mortgage suspension would only apply to primary residences and would remain in effect until a month after the end of the national emergency President Donald Trump declared on March 13. Tenants and homeowners would not have to make payments on leases or mortgages during that whole time, nor could their landlords or lenders use their failure to pay as a cause for eviction or foreclosure.

In addition, tenants and homeowners could not be charged late fees or penalties, nor could they have their credit scores downgraded. People who feel they’ve suffered an “adverse action” for exercising these protections could sue their landlord or mortgage lender in federal court for damages.

The attorney general would also be empowered to take civil action against property owners and mortgage lenders for violating renters’ and homeowners’ rights under the act. Violators could be hit with a $5,000 fine for a first offense and a $10,000 fine for the second offense. Landlords who violate the act three or more times could be fined $50,000 or could even have their property seized.

That means the government could snatch up a landlord’s rental property just for reporting three tenants who didn’t pay their rent to a credit reporting agency.

These are all extreme measures, which Omar argues are justified by the extreme circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Congress has a responsibility to step in to stabilize both local communities and the housing market during this time of uncertainty and crisis,” said the Minnesota congresswoman in a press release. “In 2008, we bailed out Wall Street. This time, it’s time to bail out the American people who are suffering.”

One common criticism of rent and mortgage forgiveness policies is that they just pass on the costs of housing to rental property owners and lenders who have their own bills to pay.

To that end, Omar’s legislation would create two funds to compensate landlords and mortgage lenders for any income they lose as a result of her bill. But this money would come with a lot of strings attached.

In order to be eligible for relief funds, landlords couldn’t raise rents for five years. They would also not be allowed to discriminate against tenants based on their credit score or criminal history during that same five year period. According to a summary of the bill put out by Omar’s office, landlords making use of these relief funds would also have to give tenants a 10 percent equity stake in their properties.

A relief fund for mortgage lenders would also be created and would come with requirements to report detailed lending data to federal housing authorities. Both funds would be administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The bill would create a new Affordable Housing Acquisition Fund, also administered by HUD. This fund would give money to government entities and nonprofits to buy up private buildings and convert them to income-restricted affordable housing. To facilitate these purchases, property owners would have to notify HUD when they intend to sell a rental property, and then give low-income housing providers 60 days to make an offer on their building.

Anyone who did purchase a property through HUD’s affordable housing fund would have to agree to provide tenants with free “wrap-around” services, including healthcare, childcare, employment and education assistance, and financial literacy education.

One might ask themselves how exactly free financial literacy classes at federally-funded public housing fits into an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The answer is it doesn’t.

Rather it appears that Omar is using the pandemic, and the swell of support for rent cancellation that it’s created, as a vehicle for enacting her ambitious, preexisting housing policy goals.

Much of what’s included in Omar’s bill appears borrowed from the $1 trillion public housing legislation that she introduced in November of last year. That bill called for creating millions of new public housing units that would come with free social services provided on-site.

Omar’s latest legislation is effectively an attempt to strong-arm landlords into getting this same result.

To summarize, her bill would eliminate landlords’ ability to earn income from their properties, and then attach a number of incredibly costly conditions for accessing relief funds.

Landlords who balk at the bailout conditions Omar proposes, but who can’t afford to earn $0 for the duration the coronavirus emergency would be left with the option of selling their properties. When they do put their properties on the market, they’d be first required to offer them to low-income housing providers who’d be receiving generous federal aid to snap up units.

This is all incredibly coercive, not to mention constitutionally dubious. It’s also wildly impractical from a fiscal perspective. The federal government is currently looking at a quadrupled $3.8 trillion budget deficit this year, according to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

In addition to this staggering amount of debt, Omar’s bill would have the federal government offering to pay the nation’s rent and mortgage bills, not to mention financing the purchase of an untold number of private rental buildings.

The extremity of the Minnesota congresswoman’s proposal also makes it unlikely to gain much traction in Congress. That’s good news for advocates for private property, even if it does speak ill of Omar’s priorities as a legislator. With even some Republican members of Congress talking about rent forgiveness, there’s potential that a more modest and targeted bill could actually attract significant support.

The radicalism of Omar’s proposal is nevertheless evidence of just how much of an opening some progressives see in the coronavirus pandemic to enact any number of policies that would have been unthinkable in February.

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