Experts Fear ‘Suicide Wave’ As The Social Fabric Of America Becomes “Unstitched”
Millions of Americans have just lost their jobs in the last several weeks due to the COVID-19 outbreak shutting down large swaths of the US economy. Households are coming under severe financial stress, with no savings, insurmountable debts, and job loss. Many are waiting for President Trump’s stimulus check to arrive in the mail, some have skipped out on their rent or mortgage payments on April 1, and others have called their credit card companies to defer debt servicing payments as incomes for tens of millions of people have gone to zero.
The panic buying of food and supplies over the last month shows just how many people were unprepared for a national health crisis, nevertheless, now developing into an economic crash, and soon could be followed by a period of social unrest.
But before the social fabric of America becomes unstitched – households are to crack first. Their finances are piss-poor, with no savings and insurmountable debts, which include auto, credit cards, and student loans.
At the beginning of March, we noted how the gig-economy was about to crash, and by looking at the employment data that has come out since, along with future estimates, it’s pointing to an economic depression that could be arriving as soon as the second quarter.
Households are in rough shape. Many people are heavily medicated, own weapons, and have some sort of substance use disorder, suggesting that in periods of extreme financial stress – suicides could increase.
What’s concerning is that a suicide wave among low-income folks, who are already feeling the side effects of job loss, could be imminent.
President Trump warned in the last week of March that nationwide lockdowns must be reversed to prevent “tremendous death” from the economic depression, referring to the likely increase of suicides.
The 2008 Great Recession resulted in more than 10,000 suicides. The Great Depression resulted in tens of thousands of people taking their own lives. If the economy continues to be shuttered through April and or even May, then the depression will deepen, and suicides will increase. That is just the nature of the beast.
“People get tremendous anxiety and depression and you have suicide over things like this, when you have a terrible economy, you have death,” President Trump said this week.
President Trump on economy: “We can’t turn that off and think it’s going to be wonderful. There’ll be tremendous repercussions. There will be tremendous death…probably more death from that than anything that we’re talking about with respect to the virus.” pic.twitter.com/82WEb4HJ8z
And with that being said, on Monday, a Pennsylvania man upset over losing his job due to the virus shutdown shot his girlfriend and then killed himself in an attempted murder-suicide. While this is only one incident, all the evidence above suggests suicides across the country will increase in the weeks or months ahead.
What could come next is social unrest – households are crushed, have no money and or job, and that is likely why President Trump signed an executive order last Friday to call up as many as one million National Guard and reservists – not just to fight the virus outbreak – but to maintain social order.
The Iranian regime’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic could ultimately pose a greater threat to the survival of the ayatollahs than the impact of Washington’s uncompromising sanctions regime.
Up until the coronavirus outbreak, the main challenge facing the clerical regime was the devastating impact the Trump administration’s hard-hitting sanctions were having on the Iranian economy.
With the economy shrinking at the rate of 10 percent a year, and unemployment hovering around the 20 percent mark, the regime was under increasing pressure from anti-government protesters angry at the regime’s mishandling of the economy.
Opposition groups claimed that more than 600 protesters were killed as regime hardliners tried to crush opposition to the regime.
Now the anger of ordinary Iranians at the regime’s economic mismanagement has been replaced by outrage at the clerics’ attempts to conceal the true extent of Iran’s coronavirus outbreak, which has spread to all of the country’s 31 provinces.
In its first public reference to the outbreak on February 19, the regime told people not to worry about the virus. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Iran’s “enemies” of exaggerating the threat.
A week later, as the number of cases and deaths surged, President Hassan Rouhani echoed the Supreme Leader’s words and warned against the “conspiracies and fear-mongering of our enemies”.
He said these were designed to bring the country to a standstill and urged Iranians to continue their everyday lives. More recently, state-controlled Iranian television channels have claimed the coronavirus could be a US-manufactured “bio-weapon”, with the Supreme Leader tweeting about a “biological attack”.
Consequently, as Iran’s ruling elite have been in a state of denial about the scale of the outbreak, the epidemic has spread to the extent that Iran is currently suffering from the worst coronavirus outbreak in the Middle East. The latest official death toll by Iran’s health ministry claims there had been 2,898 fatalities at the end of March, with more than 44,000 confirmed cases.
Other reports say the death toll could be much higher, and claim 4,762 people had died as of March 31.
The Iranian regime’s failure to grasp the significance of the outbreak in its own country has led 16 other countries in the region to claim that their own outbreaks originated in Iran. These include Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates.
The scale of the coronavirus crisis in Iran has resulted in increased tensions between the hardline supporters of Ayatollah Khamenei and the government of President Rouhani.
While the hardliners have flatly rejected offers of assistance from Washington to combat the outbreak, Mr Rouhani has adopted a more pragmatic approach which has resulted in Tehran receiving its first shipments of humanitarian aid from Britain, Germany and France — the so-called E3, which are also the European signatories to the controversial nuclear deal with Iran.
The European aid package, which is said to be worth $548,000, is the first transaction conducted under a trade mechanism known as the Instrument In Support Of Trade Exchanges, or Instex, which has been set up by the Europeans to enable them to barter humanitarian goods and food with Tehran after the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal
Britain, Germany and France said last month they had offered a 5 million-euro ($5.5 million) package to Iran to help fight the coronavirus outbreak, and are also planning to send medical material, including equipment for laboratory tests, protective body suits and gloves.
Tehran would be well-advised, though, not to regard the aid delivery as raising the prospect of the sanctions being eased. The new trading arrangements set up by Europe have been designed not to breach the Trump administration’s policy of applying “maximum pressure” against Iran, so that Instex can only be used for the delivery of humanitarian aid and food.
This means that, while the aid delivery might help to fight the coronavirus pandemic, it will do little to alleviate the pressure on Iran’s incompetent, and increasingly unpopular, leadership.
“It’s Like 9/11” – New York Becomes Wuhan As Its Crematories Work Overtime
New York City is transforming into Wuhan, China, a sight that we showed readers on Thursday morning of body bags piled up at one Manhattan area hospital.
Now there are reports of crematories in the city, extending hours, and burning bodies into the night, with the expectation that corpses could be sent to upstate cemeteries as capacity has been reached.
We noted last week that morgues in the city were “nearing capacity” and would be full by the first week of April. It appears limits have been reached as the fast-spreading virus has resulted in more than 92,381 cases statewide and 2,373 deaths, with much of the carnage seen across the five boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.
“We’ve been preparing for a worst-case scenario,” said Mike Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association (NYSFDA), “which is in a lot of ways starting to materialize.”
Directors at the NYSFDA said several of their locations in the city had reached their maximum workload of 10 to 15 bodies per day, straining resources.
New York has relaxed air regulation rules to allow crematories to burn throughout the night, similar to what we reported in Wuhan in January/February:
JP Di Troia, president of Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens, told Reuters that the pandemic is the most devastating thing he has seen in five decades of business.
“No one could really imagine this happening,” Di Troia said,” well not if you read Zero Hedge. We’ve been documenting the spread of the virus since early January:
Another crematory, located in Brooklyn, called Green-Wood Cemetery, has seen a surge in bodies, now taking in 15 to 20 bodies per day, nearly doubling its capacity in the last week, according to cemetery president Rich Moylan.
Di Troia and Moylan said the latest influx of bodies at their facilities is unprecedented in their five decades of operation. They said the closest comparison would be the September 11 attacks.
“My fridge is full,” said Andrew Nimmo, manager of Bergen Funeral Service Inc, which can store about 40 bodies. “I can’t get people out (to crematories) right away.”
With bodies piling up and crematories working overtime, 45 refrigerated tractor-trailers were dispatched to the city last week to act as temporary morgues.
The makeshift morgues line the streets around some area hospitals in Manhattan, are being used to relieve the stress of the hospital system that has been overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.
With the mortality rate expected to surge, Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, warned on Wednesday that the virus death toll could hit 240,000 across the US. In the last month, the epicenter of the virus has transitioned from the West Coast to the Tri-state area.
David Fleming, legislative director for the New York State Association of Cemeteries, said bodies could be shipped to crematories upstate to alleviate the strain around the city.
“It’s not a crashing system. We do have plans in place if there needs to be release of capacity from the city to more outlying areas,” Fleming said.
Here’s evidence that New York City’s healthcare system has transformed into Wuhan in the last several weeks:
For those of you who continue to think or say that #Covid-19 is being exaggerated or its not that big of a deal. You can see in this video hospital workers in New York dragging dead bodies into 53’ft trailers.
Still dont think its that serious? #stayhome and #stayhealthypic.twitter.com/5fmEMj2S8R
New York hospitals full of coronary patients
A painful video from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, New York City, where coronary patients’ bodies are piled up!#coronaviruspic.twitter.com/a6mKvwmP5r
According to internal documents, Monsanto and Germany’s BASF knew their products would destroy farms in the United States. The firms disregarded the risks even while they planned on how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid the damages caused by their products.
The documents (some of them date back more than a decade) have been uncovered during a recent successful $265 million lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer. The internal documents were seen and released by theGuardian. They also revealed how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing, in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators. In some of the internal BASF emails, employees were even joking about sharing “voodoo science“ and hoping to stay “out of jail.”
“The documents are the worst that I’ve ever seen for any case that I’ve worked on,” said lawyer Angie Splittgerber, a former tobacco industry defense attorney who works with farmers who are suing Monsanto and BASF.
“So many of them put things in writing that were just horrifying.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Monsanto has been caught trying to hide the damages that are done with their products.
Records showed that at private meetings dating back to 2009, agricultural experts warned that the plan to develop a dicamba-tolerant system could have catastrophic consequences. Dicamba herbicide would normally kill crops such as soybean or cotton, but Monsanto altered the genes in these crops to create genetically modified varieties that are resistant to the herbicide. This meant that farmers can spray the weedkiller directly on those soybean or cotton plants to destroy weeds but leave the crops unharmed.
The experts told Monsanto that farmers were likely to spray old volatile versions of dicamba on the new dicamba-tolerant crops. They have warned that even new versions were still likely to be volatile enough to move away from the special cotton and soybean fields on to crops growing on other farms.
What is more important, under the system designed by Monsanto and BASF, only farmers buying Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean seeds would be protected from dicamba drift damage. –RT
According to a report prepared for Monsanto back in 2009 as part of industry consultation, such an “off-target movement“ was expected. The company also expected things such as massive “crop loss”, “lawsuits” and “negative press around pesticides.” Monsanto’s own projections estimated that dicamba damage claims from farmers would total more than 10,000 cases, including 1,305 in 2016, 2,765 in 2017 and 3,259 in 2018.
Both Monsanto and BASF defended their products, claiming dicamba is safe “when used correctly,” and marketed it as an important tool for farmers. Industry estimates suggest that several million acres of crops have now been reported damaged by dicamba. More than 100 US farmers are engaged in litigation in federal court alleging Monsanto and BASF collaboration created a “defective” crop system that has damaged orchards, gardens and organic and non-organic farm fields in multiple states.
“Very Challenging” – Norway Wealth Fund Lost Record $113 Billion, Withdraws Money To Fight Virus Crisis
The stock market crash around the world, triggered by coronavirus pandemic, has led to unprecedented losses for the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund.
According to Bloomberg, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund lost $113 billion in the first quarter. The fund has generally used stock market declines or even bear markets to buy the dip. But maybe this time is different: The fund is offloading assets to cover emergency spending that the government needs to combat the virus.
As a whole, the fund lost 14.5% last quarter, clawing back some losses after a monster rip in global stocks last week. Still, its stock portfolio was down 21.1% over the period, with a slight gain in fixed income investments of 1.3%.
“The market situation is very challenging,” said Yngve Slyngstad, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM). “However, the fund has a long-term horizon.”
The virus situation in Norway is quickly deteriorating. There are now 4,848 positive cases and 44 people dead. What’s concerning health officials is that with increased cases, more and more people need hospitalization, which is straining the country’s healthcare system.
With its equity portion of the fund falling five percentage points below the 70% target, the fund will need to rebalance. Slyngstad said in the last week of March that rebalancing would likely happen through selling bonds rather than buying stocks.
The government withdrew $6.49 billion from NBIM last quarter as the virus crisis worsened in March.
We noted last week that traders were waiting for a rebalancing of sovereign pension funds such NBIM to buy the stock market dip and force a V-shape recovery, but we are finding out this week, that might not be the case.
Here’s how social media is reacting to the news:
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund lost a record $113bn in Q1 2020
Another example that this is an insolvency crisis.
— The Sirius Report (@thesiriusreport) April 2, 2020
Norway has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, but no gold reserves. Sold it all in 2004!
NB! Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund lost USD 113 billion in Q1!!
This is why a centralised wealth fund is not a good solution, and why Maggie T’s decision to let the profits from N. Sea oil flow back into the economy through the market was a much better solution for UK economy.
The world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund is about to start liquidating assets. Norway is facing its worst economic shock in 50 years & needs to withdraw record amounts from its sovereign wealth fund. Source: Bloomberg *Exposure to Indian companies*
Pl give ur opinion
The unknown that lays ahead for all of us is both exhilarating and scary. Exhilarating in the long term, but rather scary in the short term. All empires eventually die and we’re in the terminal phase of the New World Order that will not recover from the Russian roulette game it has been playing, for Vladimir Putin handed it a loaded gun and it pulled the trigger.
The last few weeks put everything in place for the last battle. There are so many different facts and events, left and right, and I will try to do my best to remain methodical in this complicated expose. Bare with me, I’ve been struggling for three weeks with this article because of the insane amount of additional details that each day provides. It might have been a wrong time to quit smoking, but I enjoy a good challenge.
Dropping dollars
A little context is required. The New World Order concept is simply the wish of a handful of international bankers that want to economically and politically rule the whole planet as one happy family. It started in 1773 and if it went through important changes over the years, but the concept and objective haven’t changed an iota. Unfortunately for them, international banks that have been looting the planet through the US dollar since 1944 are now threatened by hyperinflation, as their printing machine has been rotating for years to cover their absurd spendings to sustain oil and resource wars that they’ve all ultimately lost. In order to prevent this upcoming hyperinflation, they generated a virus attack on four countries (China, Iran, Italy and now the United States) to spread panic in the population, with the precious help of their ignominious medias. Even though this corona virus isn’t different from any new viruses that attack humans every year, the media scare pushed people to voluntarily isolate themselves through fear and terror. Some lost their jobs, companies are going bankrupt, the panic created a stock exchange crash that emptied wallets and dried assets, resulting in a few trillion virtual dollars off the market to release pressure off the currency.
So far, so good, but everything else went wrong in this desperate and ultimate banzai. The top virologist on the planet confirmed that chloroquine was being used by the Chinese with spectacular results to cure patients, then he improved his magic potion by adding a pneumonic antibacterial called azythromicin, and saved everyone of his first 1000 cases, but one. Donald Trump immediately imposed the same treatment through a fight against his own Federal Drug Administration, bought and owned by the deep state. This forced all medias to talk about Dr Didier Raoult’s Miracle Elixir, signing the death warrant on our confidence in all Western governments, their medical agencies, the World Health Organization, and medias that were trying to destroy the impeccable doctor’s reputation, while inventing sudden «dangerous side effects» of a nearly inoffensive drug that has been used for 60 years to treat malaria. Not so far away in Germany, internationally praised Dr Wolfgand Wodarg noted that the engineered panic was totally useless, since this virus isn’t any different than the others that affect us every years. This has been an amazing victory for Trump and the general population on social medias, whom exposed together the pathological lies of the official communication channels of every New World Order country. De facto, the credibility’s of these puppet governments have vanished in the air, and from the eye of the storm, Italy will surely exit the EU right after the crisis, which will trigger a domino effect running through every EU countries and NATO members. My friends, globalism is dead and ready for cremation.
Digging the abyss
International bankers couldn’t see it coming in 1991, when they dominated 95% of the planet after the fall of the Soviet Union. It seemed that nothing could halt their ultimate mission to complete their Orwellian dream: destroy a few countries in the Middle East, enlarge Israel, and get the total control over the world oil market, the last piece of their Xanadu puzzle that they’ve been working on for a whole century, starting with the Balfour declaration in 1917.
When Vladimir Putin got charge of Russia, there was no sign that he would do better than the drunk he had replaced. An ex KGB officer seemed like a choice more driven by nostalgia rather than ideology, but Putin had many more assets going for him than first met the eyes: patriotism, humanism, a sense of justice, cunning ruse, a genius economist friend named Sergey Glazyev whom openly despised the New World Order, but above all, he embodied the reincarnation of the long lost Russian ideology of total political and economical independence. After a few years spent at draining the Russian swamp from the oligarchs and mafiosis that his stumbling predecessor had left in his trail of empty bottles, Vlad rolled his sleeves and got to work.
Because his opponents had been looting the planet for 250 years through colonization insured by a military dominance, Vlad knew that he had to start by building an invincible military machine. And he did. He came up with different types of hypersonic missiles that can’t be stopped, the best defensive systems on the planet, the best electronic jamming systems, and the best planes. Then to make sure that a nuclear war wouldn’t be an option, he came up with stuff which nightmares are made of, such as the Sarmat, the Poseidon and the Avangard, all unstoppable and able to destroy any country in a matter of a few hours.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, gestures while speaking during an annual meeting with top military officials in the National Defense Control Center in Moscow, December 24, 2019. Putin said that Russia is the only country in the world that has hypersonic weapons even though its military spending is a fraction of the U.S. military budget. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of General Staff of Russia Valery Gerasimov, right, attend the meeting.
With a new and unmatched arsenal, he could proceed to defeat any NATO force or any of its proxies, as he did starting in September 2015 in Syria. He proved to every country that independence from the NWO banking system was now a matter of choice. Putin not only won the Syrian war, but he won the support of many New World Order countries that suddenly switched sides upon realizing how invincible Russia had become. On a diplomatic level, it also got mighty China by its side, and then managed to protect independent oil producers such as Venezuela and Iran, while leaders like Erdogan of Turkey and Muhammad Ben Salman of Saudi Arabia decided to side with Russia, who isn’t holding the best poker hand, but the whole deck of cards.
Ending in the conclusion that Putin now controls the all-mighty oil market, the unavoidable energy resource that lubricates economies and armies, while the banksters’ NATO can only watch, without any means to get it back. With the unbelievable results that Putin has been getting in the last five years, the New World Order suddenly looks like a house of cards about to crumble. The Empire of Banks has been terminally ill for five years, but it’s now on morphine, barely realizing what’s going on.
Tragedy and hope
Since there is no hope in starting WW3 which is lost in advance, the last banzai came out of the bushes in the shape of a virus and the ensuing media creation of a fake pandemic. The main focus was to avoid a catastrophic hyperinflation of the humongous mass of US dollar that no one wants anymore, to have time to implement their virtual world crypto-currency, as if the chronically failing bankers still have any legitimacy to keep controlling our money supplies. It seemed at first that the plan could work. That’s when Vlad took out his revolver to start the Russian roulette game and bankers blew their brains out upon the pressure on the trigger.
He called a meeting with OPEP and killed the price of oil by refusing to lower Russia’s production, taking the barrel to under 30 dollars. Without any afterthought and certainly even less remorse, Vlad killed the costly Western oil production. All the dollars that had been taken out of the market had to be re-injected by the Fed and other central banks to avoid a downslide and the final disaster. By now, our dear bankers are out of solutions.
In the meantime, Trump also poked at the tie-wearing gangsters. While medias avoided the corona-killing chloroquine subject, an old pill designed to cure malaria, Trump imposed to the FDA the use of this life-saving drug on US infected patients. Medias didn’t have any choice but to start talking about it, which ignited a chain reaction: big pharmas CEO’s were fired because they had just lost the vaccine contract, countries like Canada looked like genocidal fools for not using the cheap and inoffensive medication, while a most outrageous criminal act by a government was exposed in full light: the Macron government had proclaimed in January 2020 that chloroquine was harmful and had restrained its use, just a couple of weeks before the burst of the fake pandemic! Russian roulette is a popular game in Western governments these days around.
On Saturday March 28th, Russia announced its own corona-killing brew, based on Dr Raoult’s magic potion. Yet another Cossack blow, this time to the big pharmas jugular vein, while most Western countries now have to implement the good doctor’s treatment, or face the slap of a Russian pill coming to save its citizen. Putin is in the lifesaving business these days: in the last week of March, he sent 15 military planes filled with doctors and supplies directly to North Italy, after an aid plane from China was blocked by the Czech Republic. We’re about to learn that European countries fear that China or Russia finds the truth in the Lombardy region, where people are not dying from some corona bug, but probably from a deadly cocktail hybrid from two earlier vaccines for meningitis and influenza, that they were injected in separate vaccination campaigns.
The punchline
I said earlier that everyday brings amazing news. Well on Sunday March 29th, the most stunning of them all fell like a ton of bricks on social medias: confined onlookers learned that Trump had taken control over the Federal Reserve, that is now handled by two representatives of the Treasury of State. Of all the crazy news within the last month, this is by far the best and most shocking. After three years in power, Trump has finally fulfilled his electoral promise of taking private banks out of the US public affairs, ending a century of exploitation of the American citizens. He has put the infamous Blackrock investment group to start buying important corporations for the Fed, meaning that he’s nationalizing chunks of the economy, while avoiding the crash of the market by implicating important private investors in the deal.
President Donald Trump gestures with Jerome Powell, his nominee to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve at the White House in Washington, U.S., November 2, 2017
This utmost daring move comes at a crucial point in time, and faces us with the realization that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are united and have taken humanity to the crossroads of the New World Order and freedom. As I have stated often before, I thought that the world would deeply change between 2020 and 2024, because these would be the last 4 years of these two heroes in political power of their nations.
The New World Order is facing the two most powerful countries on the planet, and this fake pandemic changed everything. It showed how desperate the banksters are, and if we don’t want to end up with nuclear warheads flying in both directions, Putin and Trump have to stop them now.
Terminate the BIS, the World Bank, the IMF, the European Central bank, the EU, NATO, now. Our world won’t be perfect, but it might get much better soon.
Easter resurrection is coming. This might get biblical.
Because not only food, but – most importantly – toilet paper is being stockpiled during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, producers of precious TP are on a roll.
Sales of toilet paper in the U.S. rose by an estimated 60 percent in March compared to the same month last year.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the increase was more than double that in Italy, which was hit by the outbreak earlier than the U.S. There, revenues generated with bathroom tissue rose by 140 percent.
The Statista Consumer Market Outlook compared data and calculated estimates for 16 countries to show that revenues had risen most in Italy, followed by Vietnam and Australia. In other countries hit hard by the virus, for example Spain and France, the sale of toilet paper rose by 82 percent and 30 percent, respectively.
Week 1 in a country in complete shutdown. Austria has been at the forefront of forcing its citizens to “shelter in place” by enacting measures so severe that even the country’s elderly cannot remember anything similar.
To snuff out a virus that originated in China in November and has since made its way around the world, roughly a month ago, the Austrian government, led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, thankfully heeded a dire warning by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took hard a look at Austria’s neighboring country, Italy, and immediately enacted a first set of measures, followed by the drastic rules mentioned above, that were first extended until April 13 and stepped up on March 30.
The new measures include wearing compulsory masks when grocery shopping, which, in due course, will be extended to the wearing masks when outdoors at any time. In addition, vulnerable men and women, that is, those whose immune systems are compromised, are required to stay home, with their salaries covered by the government. The chancellor warned the population that “what we are witnessing right now is the quiet before the storm” and added that if measures are loosened, they will start with the opening of shops and some restaurants; universities and schools will follow at the very end of this process. Schools in Austria are therefore unlikely to reopen before the fall, although there are already extensive courses online.
Noteworthy findings turned up, however, such as what public issues matter and what do not:
Borders matter.
For many years, Europeans have been told by their leaders that borders could not be closed to curb illegal migration due to the Schengen Agreement, to the detriment of security in European countries. Suddenly, with the numbers of COVID-19 deaths rising, and with the spread of the virus traced across Europe, border controls, barriers and other measures were swiftly introduced. The United States followed suit in closing its borders with Canada and Mexico. Strict border security helps to stop the virus from spreading. In the 14th century, Polish King Casimir III knew what to do in order to save his country from the plague, which had spread from China to Europe and killed countless millions of people. Poland was less affected by the plague because King Casimir isolated his country, closed borders and quarantined the border regions. Border security is health security.
Freedom of speech matters.
The Austrian government has installed a “ministry of truth” in the office of the chancellor, staffed by police cadets. In times of crisis, the search for the truth is more challenging than ever. Abundant propaganda, fake news and rumors are disseminated, even by the governments (here and here). But a cow remains a cow even if it is called a sheep. The Austrian government and the UK government have set up special task forces to weed out so-called fake news and “‘defend the country’ from misinformation” with respect to anything concerning Covid-19.
“It is absolutely stunning that a large police unit has now started to officiate in the Chancellery….The government acts as if it were in possession of the absolute truth amid a sea of lies and half-truths. On the contrary, the opposite is true… whenever a government got its hands on truth control, it has massively abused it within a very short time to gag and ban critical and oppositional voices. Once they have the power to control opinion, it is a massive temptation for those in power to use it in the self-interest of a government. The government ministers fail to realize the most important connection: the more a government carries out opinion control, the more people inevitably trust alternative sources of information, and not the government officials or those financed by the government.”
Sadly, not just the government but also Amazon, has discreetly eliminated a sizeable list of books from its listing, citing “dubious” information or even “conspiracy theories” on the defense against or even cure for Covid-19. Who decides what is a conspiracy theory? Amazon? Where has the marketplace of ideas disappeared to? Where, in fact, is the marketplace?
Sovereignty and nationalism matter.
The president of the American Freedom Alliance, Karen Siegemund, notes:
“Notice how each country – country! – took upon itself its right to sovereign action to protect its citizens.
Italy imposed quarantines; Austria closed its borders and implemented various restrictions on gatherings and mandated closures of entertainment venues, restaurants etc. Even Germany has now closed its borders.
Borders in the context of Europe is an astounding thing, and it’s heartbreaking that it took a virus, and the deaths it’s left in its wake, rather than the years-long invasions for [the countries] to assert sovereignty, and to finally, finally, turn to protecting their citizens.
“‘Europe’ in the form of the European Union has been silent. The United Nations does not even seem to be speaking out although, in a rational world they would — and should — be calling for “Crimes against humanity” charges to be brought against China. That silence under these circumstances is simply further proof of the UN’s uselessness at best, and of the EU’s utter irrelevance.
“It is nations putting the health, safety and security of their people above all else that will stem the spread of this virus; the nightmare is that it took this pandemic to wake governments up to the primacy of their people as the core of their responsibility.”
Leadership matters.
Whether the greatly differing measures taken by continental Europe or those in the United Kingdom are successful remains to be seen, but leadership in times of crisis is crucial. In the UK, it is prime minister Boris Johnson who on March 3 launched a four-step plan to combat the outbreak in the UK, later backing away from herd immunity. New and tough measures, including a lockdown, were later implemented. In Austria, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz exhibited tough leadership. It is too early to assess whether the government is taking the “right” steps; however, remaining calm and in control are key to garnering support even among his critics. Kurz is adept at team-building, by including all members of his government as well as by keeping the political opposition informed. This approach has led to bi-partisan support for all implemented measures. In the United States, President Donald J. Trump has been personally leading an extremely popular daily televised press briefing with members of his Covid-19 task force.
Receding into the background have been topics such as climate change, Greta Thunberg, and Fridays for Future. Health measures have clearly taken precedence over kids cutting school. Nevertheless, many have always been adept at “never letting a crisis go to waste” (Rahm Emanuel) and at using one to do things that could not be done before; they will probably be back to doing their best to see what they can land in their “dream catcher”.
Armed forces matter.
Germany has mobilized its military to assist in maintaining public order, with German Minister of Defense Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer reassuring Germans that “in these difficult times, the citizens can rely on their Bundeswehr.” Despite being financially starved in recent years, the Austrian armed forces were mobilized early on in the crisis to assist the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in repatriating Austrians from abroad, providing support in logistical tasks such as stocking grocery stores, and relieving police by protecting foreign embassies in Vienna. The move proved right the rejection of the 2013 referendum to end conscription and introduce a professional army.
Civil vigilance matters.
A particularly worrisome trend is having politicians using crises to increase the power of the state — a terrifying thought. Although in this instance, people actually did need to be quarantined to prevent the rolling spread of the virus, the widespread lockdowns in the UnitedStates, Europe and in Israel — which, in Austria’s case, took place after unprecedented accelerated parliamentarydiscussion — are likely bound for even more debate after the return to normalcy. Also potentially problematic is the British Coronavirus Bill, which “will enable the police and immigration officers to detain a person, for a limited period, who is, or may be, infectious and to take them to a suitable place to enable screening and assessment”. In a different situation, the words “may be” could be ominous in their broadness. For now, however, we should be thankful to our governments for trying to contain a runaway virus to which we have no immunity until some form of limiting its medical and economic harm can be found.
March Jobs Preview: The First Negative Print In Ten Years, And Then All Hell Breaks Loose
As RanSquawk notes, the data for March are already stale, given the release of the timelier initial jobless claims data, which showed another record high number of claims, and some 10 million laid off workers in the past 2 weeks. Additionally, the survey period of the BLS Employment Situation Report runs through the month ending 12th March, and therefore does not capture the full effect of the coronavirus disruptions on the US labor market, with “stay at home” orders being issued only after the 19th March in some US states.
Still, even though it captures only the slowdown in the first half of the month, the March jobs report will almost certainly show a decline in monthly payrolls – the first since Sept 2010 – and breaking the longest stretch of positive payroll prints on record.
That said none of that matters: with the Fed having now gone full tilt in perpetuity no matter what the data says, we know that the data for the next 3-6 months will be catastrophic, with Goldman predicting 15% unemployment in Q2, meaning that in the next two months tens of millions of people will lose their job.
As such what the BLS reports tomorrow is completely meaningless. Still, for what it’s worth, here’s what Wall Street expects:
Non-farm Payrolls: Exp. -100K, Prev. +273K
Unemployment Rate: Exp. 3.8%, Prev. 3.5%
Avg. Earnings M/M: Exp. 0.2%, Prev. 0.3%
Avg. Earnings Y/Y: Exp. 3.0%, Prev. 3.0%
Avg. Work Week Hours: Exp. 34.1, Prev. 34.4
Private Payrolls: Exp. -163k, Prev. +228k
Manufacturing Payrolls: Exp. -20k, Prev. +15k
Government Payrolls: Prev. +45k
U6 Unemployment Rate: Prev. +7.0%
Labor Force Participation: Prev. 63.4%
Speaking of Goldman, the bank estimates nonfarm payrolls declined 180k in March, below consensus of -100k. In addition to employment surveys falling into contractionary territory and jobless claims rebounding dramatically, sharp declines in commuting patterns in both New York City and Seattle indicate a sizeable drag from the coronavirus in those MSAs during the survey week. Goldman also estimate declining payrolls in the food services, accommodation, recreation services, social assistance, and temporary help subindustries (both in these cities and nationwide). Goldman also thinks the unemployment rate rose three tenths to 3.8%, with risks skewed towards a larger increase (consensus 3.8%). Jobless claims data indicate that the pace of layoffs increased sharply and an NPR/PBS poll found that 18% of employees were laid off or had their hours reduced. The silver lining, at least for those who still have jobs, is that the average hourly earnings increased 0.2% month-over-month and 3.0% year-over-year, reflecting negative calendar effects but a possible composition shift towards higher-paid workers (consensus also +0.2%/+3.0%).
And as noted above, while Goldman looks for a weaker-than-consensus report tomorrow, the March employment numbers are already fairly stale and insignificant in our view, “because the April report will likely show job losses in the millions.”
Here are some general observations courtesy of RanSquawk:
TREND RATES: The trend rates are meaningless going into the data, given disruptions caused by coronavirus. After the release of the February data, the 3-month average trend rate was at 243k (prev. 239k); 6-month was 231k (prev. 220k); 12-month at 201k (prev. 178k).
ADP EMPLOYMENT: ADP reported 27k payrolls were shed from the US economy in March, better than the consensus view for -150k. However, while the data appear encouraging, the ADP itself noted that the survey period ran through the 12th of the month, meaning that much of the COVID impact has not been captured in the data. It is also worth noting that the official BLS employment situation report also runs through that same period and therefore may be subject to similar caveats.
WEEKLY INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS: Weekly jobless claims for the week ending 28th March rose to a fresh record high 6.648mln, around double last week’s tally which was in itself a record high. The latest spike in jobless claims will not have an impact on the BLS data; in the corresponding survey period for the BLS data, initial jobless claims rose from 211k to 282k. But ahead, the data signals April’s Employment Situation Report will be grim, given accelerating claims; and ahead, analysts are not convinced the peak is in yet. Total layoffs between the March and April payroll surveys look destined to reach perhaps 16-to-20mln, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics, which would be consistent with the unemployment rate rising to 13- to-16%. “We have consistently argued from the beginning that the USD 2trln CARES Act is nothing like big enough; these data, and the numbers which will follow, make another huge package inevitable,” Pantheon said.
Additionally, some individuals may classify themselves as “employed but not at work”, which could limit the magnitude of the increase in the jobless rate tomorrow. Taken together, the March unemployment rate likely rose three tenths to 3.8%. And while the risks tomorrow are skewed towards a larger increase, the majority of the unemployment rise will occur in April and subsequent reports, with the jobless rate reaching 15% by midyear.
CHALLENGER JOB CUTS: Job cuts announced by US-based employers surged to 222,288 in March from 56,660, the highest monthly tally since January 2009; challenger noted that the data did not include the hundreds of thousands of workers who were furloughed in March. “The virus has caused total whiplash for HR, hiring managers, and recruiters. The labor data for February showed a strong economy with a tight labor market. Companies were fighting for talent across industries. Now, millions of workers have filed for unemployment, companies have frozen hiring, and in many cases, cut operations or closed completely,” Challenger said. It notes that the shut-down of nonessential businesses caused 141,844 cuts, primarily in entertainment/leisure; of the 54,300 cuts announced where no specific reason was provided, Challenger suspects many are due to COVID-19. Challenger notes that despite the jump in job cut announcements, hiring announcements have also surged during the outbreak. Instacart recently announced they would hire 300,000 new drivers, while grocery stores, like Kroger and Albertsons, are hiring tens of thousands of workers, and Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Papa John’s are hiring thousands of delivery drivers. “The pandemic has created an opportunity for grocers and food delivery services, as well as consumer products delivery services, to thrive right now. The issue is whether they can find the workers to do jobs that now come with inherent risks that did not previously exist,” said Challenger.
BUSINESS SURVEYS: Not all of the business surveys are in ahead of the March jobs report. However, the March manufacturing ISM report saw the employment sub-index fall by 3.1 points to 43.8; ISM said this was the eighth month of employment contraction, and at a faster rate compared to February. It is again worth highlighting that the manufacturing sector accounts for around 11% of the US economy, and as such, it is difficult to infer what the ISM means for the BLS Data, particularly since manufacturing surveys have held up better than their services equivalent, of late. Additionally, some analysts, like those at UBS, have questioned the usefulness of survey data at the moment, noting that they are subject to quirks around a) some of the treatment of supply chains, which has flattered data, b) the fact that many respondents will not be replying to surveys during the virus disruption period, and c) survey data will give more accurate assessments during ‘normal’ times, perhaps not as much in unusual times.
CORONAVIRUS: As shown below, Seattle public parking and NYC subway usage both declined 30% during the survey week (and by -14% and -18% on the Monday of the survey week, respectively), consistent with a sizeable drag on economic activity and employment from the 6.5mn payroll employees in these cities. And across the entire country, OpenTable reservations declined 25% year-on-year during the survey week, with declines in 35 out of 37 major cities on Monday of the survey week. Because of the coronavirus, expected declining payrolls in the food services, accommodation, recreation services, social assistance, and temporary help subindustries in this week’s report (both nationwide and in New York City and
Seattle).
Mnuchin Says Energy Firms Can Be Bailed Out By The Fed
As part of the Coronavirus CARES Act, the $2 trillion fiscal stimulus meant to resuscitate the US economy, Congress allocated $454 billion to help underwrite the special lending programs from the Federal Reserve. This could generate up to $4.540 trillion in new lending (assuming 10x leverage for highly-rated assets) likely geared toward small and medium-sized businesses.
It now turns out that the first industry to benefit from direct Fed loans is the imploding US energy sector, which for the past decade benefited indirectly from Fed generosity by issuing junk bonds to yield starved investors who are now facing near certain bankruptcy in the face, as the price of oil – if it stays at this level – assures they will never be repaid.
Speaking at a White House news conference on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said energy companies squeezed by the oil-price war can turn to the Federal Reserve’s lending facilities for aid but won’t get direct loans from his department.
“I have very limited ability to do direct loans out of the Treasury,” he said, suggesting that distressed shale companies should instead beg the Fed.
As Bloomberg notes, the $2.2 trillion coronavirus-related economic package authorizes the secretary to provide loans and grants to passenger airlines, cargo airlines, contractors and companies important to national security, Mnuchin said. Other companies must turn to the Fed, which is authorized to inject $4 trillion into the U.S. economy through various lending facilities approved by Congress.
“Our expectation is the energy companies, like all our other companies, will be able to participate in broad-based facilities, whether it’s the corporate facility or whether it’s the main street facility, but not direct lending out of the Treasury,” he said, leaving the Fed as the only option.
And now we look forward to the populist backlash when a line of insolvent shale CEOs forms outside the Marriner Eccles all begging to have their junk bonds taken out at par, and refinance with a Fed loan yielding, well, nothing and ideally forgiveable if the new round of cheap debt manages to bankrupt Saudi Arabia as the price of oil goes negative.
