Michigan Governor Changes Plan, Says State Will Start Reopening On May 1
Less than one full day has passed since President Trump officially delegated responsibility for reopening their economies to the states, and to our surprise, it appears the first governor to start pushing for a May 1 target to begin reopening is Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) April 16, 2020
Earlier this week, a group of protesters swarmed the Michigan capital in Lansing, demanding that Whitmer, who has clashed with Trump earlier in the US outbreak, move to reopen the state ASAP.
Here’s what the state’s “curve” currently looks like:
Whitmer’s decision is such a surprise, that this Democratic pollster tweeted data purporting to show that the state’s residents “agreed” with Whitmer’s decision to hold off on reopening.
I think what the media is missing here is MI residents are with @govwhitmer here. She not only has a 71% job rating but over 60% of voters feel the worse is yet to come and a majority worry that social distancing will end too soon. Real people get it https://t.co/xi199BJIfs
And instead of announcing this new plan in an official release, she said it during an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Friday that she hopes to be in a position to ease her state’s strict stay-at-home order by May 1, although she warned that it must be a decision based on scientific data to prevent a second wave of the coronavirus. “I do hope to have some relaxing come May 1, but it’s two weeks away and the information and the data and our ability to test is changing so rapidly, it’s hard to tell you precisely where we’ll be in a week from now, much less two,” Whitmer said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Cantor Fitzgerald Slashes Jobs, Prepares To Cut More Amid Economic Downturn
Even before the virus pandemic crashed the global economy into recession, if not depression, for the second quarter, the investment bank industry was already on shaky ground.
As we’ve noted over the last year, investment banks, such as Barclays, JPMorgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and many others, have been slashing jobs and shrinking operations amid a global slowdown.
Now Cantor Fitzgerald has joined the party by slashing jobs to reduce costs and shore up operations.
Sources told Bloomberg that Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, has already slashed jobs across capital markets and commercial real estate units, with hundreds of more cuts expected through April.
“We have made prudent headcount and cost reductions to position the firm for the uncertain macroeconomic conditions expected for the remainder of the year,” the investment bank said in a statement.
People familiar with the cuts said Lutnick is taking precautionary measures as he worries about an economic downturn triggered by COVID-19 could extend through the year.
Lutnick appears to be breaking ranks from other major investment banks, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, who have all promised jobs will not be axed this spring. But with an economic depression unfolding and 22 million Americans jobless in four weeks, Lutnick is taking no chances and is tightening up operations as economic uncertainty plagues the 2020 outlook.
Sources said the cuts represent about 5% of Cantor’s workforce, with more reductions in some units than others. In total, the investment bank employs 12,000 people around the world.
Even with the Federal Reserve unleashing record amounts of stimulus, bailouts, and now buying ETFs, capital markets will likely remain damaged throughout the year – leading to further job losses for the investment bank community.
Conviction-Less Comeback In Stocks Smells Like A Big Bull Trap
Authored by Eddie van der Walt via Bloomberg,
Low volume at the start of the recent stock rally suggests it’s a bull trap, not a journey to record highs, based on algorithmic analysis of 30 years of data.
Momentum in the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Index and Stoxx 600 turned in March, thanks to collective action by central bankers.
Since then, the question in financial markets has been palpable: are the lows in?
History suggests not.
In eight bear markets across the three indexes since the 90s, the bottom was usually marked with a bang, not a whimper. Trading volume in the first 10 days of the turnaround on all but one occasion (the Stoxx 600 in March 2009) was at least 10% higher than the volume in the bear market as a whole.
And that makes sense. If a groundswell of money is ready to overturn a bearish consensus, volume is likely to pick up in an epic tug of war.
Across the series, volume below 110% of the bear-market average in the first 10 days of an advance correctly identified five false dawns, where the index rallied 15%, then continued to lower lows.
Volume is, however, a reasonable prerequisite, not a sufficient condition. Heavy trading would have triggered 12 false positives, which suggests that the study is best used to negatively screen rallies.
For the most recent S&P 500 bear market that started on Oct. 9, 2007 and ended on March 9, 2009, the total drawdown was 57% and average daily volume was 1,310,603,671.
Yet the bear-market rallies in this period offered mixed signals, as summarized in this table:
This year, all three indexes failed the test. The first 10 sessions after the local low saw average trading volume of ~98% the bear-market average for the S&P 500, ~94% for the Dow Jones and ~104% for the Stoxx 600.
As with all statistical analysis, this data should be treated with care and seen in context. The sheer velocity of the descent — the fastest in history — has meant that volume is probably skewed upwards. Volatility begets volume.
Yet conviction was stronger on the way down than on the way up, and that’s a worrying sign. More study is needed, but on volume alone, this bear market doesn’t appear to be over
Michael Cohen Gets Early Prison Release Due To COVID-19
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen can drop the soap in peace, after the federal Bureau of Prisons ruled that he can spend the remainder of his three-year sentence at home due to concerns over COVID-19 spreading in prisons, his lawyer said Thursday night.
The 53-year-old Cohen was initially set to be released from New York’s FCI Otisville facility in November, 2021, however his lawyers requested that his sentence be cut short or that he be allowed to serve the remainder at home because of unsafe prison conditions. He will remain quarantined for two weeks before returning to his home.
At least 14 inmates have tested positive for the virus at Otisville.
Confirmed… Inmate tests positive for #coronavirus at FCI Otisville Satellite Camp. It’s time for the Federal Government to act responsibly!
Cohen’s request was initially denied by a federal judge on March 24 calling it “just another effort to inject himself into the news cycle,” according to NBC News, however Cohen then had an “altercation” with another inmate and was sent to solitary confinement, according to his attorney, Roger Bennett Adler.
The former Trump attorney and fixer was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 after pleading guilty to a plethora of crimes which were mostly financial and had nothing to do with Trump, as well as making secret payments to women who claimed to have slept with Trump.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff accused acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell last week of ‘undermining critical intelligence functions’ but nothing could be further from the truth. Why? Because Grenell is restructuring an agency that should have been overhauled years ago.
In the four page letter Schiff sent to Grenell, which by the way was just 14 minutes before Schiff gave it to the press…
His letter was sent to the press before it was sent to me. These press leaks politicizing the intelligence community must stop. https://t.co/hdWIzGWvZr
…he charged the acting DNI with politicizing the intelligence community. Schiff accused Grenell of allowing his staff to “interfere with the production and briefing of intelligence information” on election security that was given to Congress.
“If accurate, this politicization of intelligence would constitute a grave breach of your duty as Acting DNI to preserve the independence of the IC, protect the integrity of U.S. elections, and keep the Congress fully and currently informed of intelligence activities,” Schiff wrote.
The organizational changes being made by Grenell are far from political.
In fact, they are absolutely necessary and he has every authority under the purview of the executive branch to do so. Grenell is working vigorously, according to sources, to consolidate the agency, reduce unnecessary complexity and eliminate redundant work.
These implementations should have happened years ago. Moreover, during the past 24 months the ODNI has conducted four internal studies that have identified opportunities to eliminate duplicate work already being done by other intelligence agencies. Further, the restructuring will allow the ODNI to combine offices within the intelligence agencies to make missions more coherent. More importantly, dozens of positions that have gone unfilled for years may be eliminated.
Intelligence officials and analysts, who spoke to SaraACarter.com, have said that for years employees of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have complained that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bureaucratically bloated. These officials stressed that the office, which was established in 2004 under the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, has strayed from its original mandate to ensure that all intelligence agencies coordinating, verifying critical intelligence and sharing that intelligence.
Instead, the office has become more of a competitor to the agencies they are supposed to oversee. The ODNI is competing for resources, employees and budgetary allocations that in fact, are repeating much of the same work being conducted by the CIA, FBI, and so forth, say sources.
Currently the ODNI has some 1800 staff employees, plus nearly as many contractors, a number that is far larger than intended when it was first established, intelligence officials added.
“America’s intelligence agencies need leadership and coordination, which is the purpose of ODNI,” said a U.S. Intelligence official, directly familiar with the restructuring.
“By implementing carefully considered reforms recommended by prior studies, ODNI can refocus on doing what it needs to do while rolling back duplication of effort and freeing up personnel to fill critical gaps inside the intelligence agencies. This will make American intelligence stronger.”
Daniel Hoffman, who spent more than three-decades in the CIA clandestine service and a three-time station chief abroad, told this reporter that although many people in the CIA “recognized the value of having a partner that could collaborate with the agencies, there was concern that the DNI itself, was a bureaucracy and was going to grow and become bloated.”
This is what happened over the years with the ODNI, added Hoffman, who was at the CIA when the ODNI was established.
He said that the decision to reorganize the ODNI by Grenell is far from the political accusations raised by Schiff.
“You’ll find the majority of intelligence officers and pundits would agree with the fact that the DNI needs to be reduced in size and that goes far beyond whether you think Rick Grenell is the right guy for the job,” said Hoffman, who is known for his nonpartisan stance in issues related to national security.
“I don’t think you can find an intelligence agency director that would be against the restructuring. We don’t have an unlimited number of people to do the jobs and our foreign counterparts see this bloated bureaucracy and wonder who they should go to? Who do they talk to and who they need to deal with directly.”
“The reality is the ODNI is taking people from other agencies to fill the slots and you risk that the mission will suffer when this happens,” said Hoffman, who added that the reforms that are being implemented are necessary.
Hoffman compared what Grenell is doing at the ODNI to what is being done at the National Security Council by National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien. Last year, in October, O’Brien announced plans to reduce the staff, which had ballooned to over 200 people by the end of the Obama administration. Concerns regarding internal leaks of classified information and politicization of the agency may have instigated O’Brien’s actions but regardless it was a necessary measure just based on the history of the NSC. For example, during President Eisenhower’s administration the staff was at a maximum of 50 people. Later, President John F. Kennedy reduced the staff to 20 people, which stayed the same during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.
Those numbers roughly stayed the same during Nixon’s presidency and then went up to 50 during the first Bush administration, then to 100 during President Bill Clinton and then to 136 during the second Bush administration. Those numbers then jumped to over 200 during the Obama administration.
“Grenell is doing what should’ve been done long ago,” said a former CIA clandestine officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the nature of their ongoing work.
“The ODNI isn’t going to be negatively effected by these changes, in fact, just the opposite – the restructuring of the ODNI will set our intelligence agencies back on track and back where they should be.”
The Market Is Now Just 5 Stocks: S&P Now More Concentrated In Top 5 Names Then Ever
Yesterday, when we showed that the Nasdaq had turned green for the year as FANG stocks hit a new all time high…
… even as small cap stocks were down 30% in 2020, we showed that the ratio of the tech (and buyback) heavy Nasdaq to the small cap (and cash flow zero) Russell had hit a level not seen since the depths of the dot com bubble..
… prompting even “veteran” retired hedge fund managers (who apparently still need a cashflow commenting on markets) to declare that tech was now in a bubble (newsflah: tech has been in a bubble for years, mostly thanks to the unprecedented amount of stock buybacks undertaken by tech names).
Picking up on this unprecedented dislocation in the market between the success of big names that are just getting bigger, and in the case of Amazon, set to become supreme monopolists, and the decimation of small and medium business, overnight Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett writes “The Kings, Princes & Paupers of Wall St”, noting that the rally is extraordinarily polarized and highlights the retracement from crash lows vs. Jan 1st level as follows:
IG bonds 109% (thanks to the Fed now buying IG bonds and ETFs),
tech stocks 95% (as tech buybacks are still active) compares with EM stocks 32% (Chart 3)
small cap 27%
global financials 22%
oil 0%
“down-in-quality” credit market theme (HY yield compresses toward IG) not replicated in stocks (large cap growth crushing small cap value – (Chart 4);
And the punchline: the S&P is now just a handful of mega stocks, because as the chart below shows the largest 5 stocks in S&P500 now account for 22% of market cap, even higher than during the dot com bubble.
Hartnett’s summary:
“Wall St split into Kings (EPS up), Princes (EPS down but can pay dividend), Paupers (EPS, dividend down).”
We would make one small change: instead of Kings, we’d use emperors, and with ad spending – which is behind the bulk of megatech revenues – crashing, the entire world will soon realize just how naked these emperors were.
That’s a myth a lot of people in the mainstream have peddled since governments started shutting down the economy in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
That’s not going to happen. We’re not going back to normal.
In fact, things weren’t “normal” before the pandemic.
As Peter Schiff has been saying, too many mainstream pundits and prognosticators have focused exclusively on the pin and ignored the economic bubble that it popped. They argue that since the economic damage due to the COVID-19 shutdowns was self-inflicted, it’s not a real recession. It’s not a real economic collapse. It’s not that businesses are closing because the economy is bad. We just decided to shut them down. Therefore, we can just decide to open everything back up and everything will be fine. But as Schiff said, it’s not that simple.
What matters is that we got a wound. Look, if I grab a knife and I stab myself in the chest, I’m not OK because the wound is self-inflicted…
It doesn’t matter how I got stabbed. What matters is I have a knife in my chest and I’m bleeding. So, I can’t just ignore the wound because I was dumb enough to stab myself.”
I’ve been saying the same thing for weeks. The economy doesn’t stop and start on a dime. Just because Donald Trump snaps his fingers and says, “Go!” doesn’t mean that the crisis ends. The economic damage done to the economy by that knife is deep. In fact, the economy was already suffering from multiple knife wounds long before COVID-19 reared its ugly head.
The writer points out that the 9/11 attacks shut down airlines for three days. It took three years for the industry to recover. After the housing crash, it took five years before the balance between builders and buyers was healthy enough to revive the construction industry.
And the economic damage already inflicted by the government shutdown is staggering.
Meanwhile, US manufacturing output hit its lowest level since 1946. Factory production dropped at a 7.1% annualized rate in Q1 2020. That’s the sharpest decline since the first quarter of 2009. A separate survey showed New York state manufacturing activity plunged to its lowest level in the history of the survey.
And retail sales plummeted 8.7% in March. That means we’re about to see the biggest plunge in consumer spending in decades.
Those self-inflicted wounds can kill.
The Reuters’ columnist said we can’t expect consumers to just snap back to normal when the government begins lifting the coronavirus meltdown. As he put it, when public behavior suffers a shock, it’s slow to recover.
There is no doubt that this downturn will be historic in depth. But the nature of the event behind it is the core hurdle to an economic restart: A health crisis that has killed more than 28,000 people in the country, according to a Reuters tally, and has left fear and confusion in its wake. Behavioral economists note that even much smaller shocks to how people perceive the world can cause lasting effects in how they behave.”
Schiff pointed out that this will be a wakeup call for a lot of people that will also shift behavior. They will realize they need to have savings. They almost certainly won’t just jump in and start spending again.
Solid analysis. But it still misses the point.
It assumes everything was “normal” to begin with. It wasn’t normal. The economy was a big, fat, ugly debt bubble. Normal was abnormal. The economy was levered up to the hilt. Consumers were driving the economy with borrowed money. Corporations were already carrying record debt-loads. The government was already spending money as if we were in the depts of an economic recession.
Coronavirus popped the bubble. It pulled the last piece out of the Jenga game. It turned a fan on the house of cards. We’re not going back to normal any time soon.
This is not to say the coronavirus isn’t a problem. Even a healthy economy would suffer significant impacts under this kind of shutdown. But the government and central bank response, with trillions of dollars in stimulus, bailouts and money-printing, is making things worse. This is the arsonist throwing gasoline on the fire it started.
Consider this from Seeking Alpha:
The American government has committed more than $6T to arrest the economic downturn from the COVID-19 pandemic, with $2.35T in fiscal spending and $4T from the Federal Reserve. The figure represents more than a quarter of US economic output, and will mean for the first time since WWII, the nation will owe more than its economy can produce in a given year.”
The people who are just focusing on coronavirus are missing the bigger picture. You can’t understand what’s happening now if you don’t understand what was happening two months ago. Schiff summed it up.
We have a debt bubble. Now, everybody is defaulting on their loans. It doesn’t matter why they’re defaulting. All that matters is that they defaulted. And the cat’s out of the bag now. It’s gone. It’s over. The bubble has popped and now we are dealing with the consequences, not just of the virus, but of the consequences of the bubble.
In fact, we’re dealing with the consequences of the bubble that popped in 2008. We’re dealing with the consequences of the bubble that popped in 2001. Because we never finished dealing with them. Because the Fed kicked the can down the road and we’ve caught up with that can.
And now we have to deal with all of the bad consequences of repeated bubbles that are now blowing up.
And now the Fed, of course, is trying to reflate this, but it is never going to work.”
Twitter Outlaws Political Satire, Civil Disobedience With Fresh Bans Of Conservative Influencers
Twitter has taken it upon themselves to remove two prominent voices from the public square, once again.
The first victim of Twitter’s ban hammer was Infowars host Owen Shroyer – who was encouraging followers to gather in person at the Texas state Capitol in Austin on Saturday to protest coronavirus restrictions. Shortly after Media Matters wrote about the event, Shroyer was banished from the platform. Apparently the public cant be trusted with decisions concerning their own personal safety, so nanny @Jack stepped in to protect us from Owen’s persuasiveness.
A question, though… How many more people have died in the pandemic because the World Health Organization (WHO) told the public there was no human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 (when Chinese doctors who were silenced by the CCP said otherwise, and their own coronavirus expert disagreed), or not to wear masks, or that travel bans are unnecessary and racist?
How many more people have died or are still battling the effects of coronavirus after Nancy Pelosi told people to come on down to Chinatown on February 24 and mingle – when footage of dead and dying Wuhan residents were all over the internet?
Nancy Pelosi, 2/24/20:
“Come to Chinatown. Precautions have been taken…We think it’s very safe and want others to come.”pic.twitter.com/Pa41NRNf6k
The second conservative influencer banned by Twitter on Thursday was @ALX, a Turning Point USA staffer who dared to parody Joe Biden’s avatar generator with the following picture:
In other words, political satire is now off-limits because, presumably, using humor to point out that Joe Biden has an uncomfortable relationship with China is simply too effective.
Thanks for keeping us safe Jack, and don’t listen to everyone who says you’re shilling for the CCP and the Democratic Party by silencing powerful conservatives that are more compelling – and let’s face it, way funnier than the spoon-fed NPCs on the left.
Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Chinese researchers are said to have used coronaviruses in their work to develop an AIDS vaccine. HIV DNA fragments are believed to have been found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.
We knew that the Chinese version of how the coronavirus emerged was increasingly under attack, but here’s a thesis that tells a completely different story about the Covid-19 pandemic, which is already responsible for more than 110,000 deaths worldwide.
According to Professor Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for “discovering” HIV as the cause of the AIDS epidemic together with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the SARS-CoV-2 is a virus that was manipulated and accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in the last quarter of 2019.
According to Professor Montagnier, this laboratory, known for its work on coronaviruses, tried to use one of these viruses as a vector for HIV in the search for an AIDS vaccine!
“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue:
Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great.
In a challenging question Dr Jean-François Lemoine inferred that the coronavirus under investigation may have come from a patient who is otherwise infected with HIV.
“No,” says Luc Montagnier, “in order to insert an HIV sequence into this genome, molecular tools are needed, and that can only be done in a laboratory.”
According to the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, a plausible explanation would be an accident in the Wuhan laboratory. He also added that the purpose of this work was the search for an AIDS vaccine.
The truth will eventually come out
In any case, this thesis, defended by Professor Luc Montagnier, has a positive turn. According to him, the altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads:
“Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”
Luc Montagnier added that with the help of interfering waves, we could eliminate these sequences and as a result stop the pandemic.
This is enough to feed some heated debates! So much so that Professor Montagnier’s statements could also place him in the category of “conspiracy theorists”:
“Conspirators are the opposite camp, hiding the truth,” he replies, without wanting to accuse anyone, but hoping that the Chinese will admit to what he believes happened in their laboratory.
To entice a confession from the Chinese he used the example of Iran which after taking full responsibility for accidentally hitting a Ukrainian plane was able to earn the respect of the global community. Hopefully the Chinese will do the right thing he adds.
“In any case, the truth always comes out, it is up to the Chinese government to take responsibility.”
