iftttwall

Dr. Anthony Fauci has a simple message for the states to be delivered during his Tuesday testimony before the Senate HELP (that’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Committee: Moving to reopen states too quickly could risk a deadly resurgence of the outbreak.

Full Fauci email message to me: pic.twitter.com/yq8IAa9f8g

— Sheryl Gay Stolberg (@SherylNYT) May 12, 2020

Here’s more on Dr. Fauci’s testimony via CNBC.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist and a key member of President Donald Trump’s White House coronavirus task force, reportedly plans to publicly warn states Tuesday that prematurely reopening their economies will cause “needless suffering and death.”

On Monday night, The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported that Fauci had sent her an email ahead of his public testimony the following day at a hearing of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” Fauci wrote in the email, which Stolberg posted on Twitter.

“If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal,” wrote Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Fauci’s message comes just one day after PA Gov Tom Wolf slammed Trump for pressuring him to reopen his state (which has done an excellent job of flattening the curve) more quickly (the governor was reportedly pushing for another delay). Notably, PA is an important swing state, which Trump won by just ~50k votes out of more than 6 million cast back in 2016 (the narrowest margin for a victorious president-elect in the state’s history).

Most of the mainstream press pointed out that Dr. Fauci’s message would seem to put him “at odds” with President Trump (who has once again been pushing states to reopen more quickly, an issue that Trump has notoriously flip-flopped on several times, like when he said he didn’t support Georgia’s reopening). Though PA was among the states with a more serious outbreak, state officials have done a remarkable job flattening the curve. As of Tuesday morning, the state had roughly 57k confirmed cases.

By Friday, more than half of the counties in PA will have entered “the yellow zone”, according to Wolf’s comments from yesterday’s press briefing.

President Trump has a well-established reputation for bickering with political rivals over issues both big and small. This pugnacious approach might seem baffling to members of the Washington press corp, but for Trump, it has yielded no small amount of success. Officially, both Dr. Fauci and President Trump – as well as the rest of the task force – are backing the same position: State’s should follow the official White House guidelines.

For any readers who want to watch Dr. Fauci’s live testimony, it will stream below beginning at 10amET.

Via SchiffGold.com,

The US Labor Department released its April non-farm payroll report on Friday and it was as bleak as expected. As Peter Schiff put it, it was the weakest jobs report in the history of jobs reports. And even worse, a lot of these jobs are never coming back.

A record 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs last month and the unemployment rate surged to 14.7%. It was the largest and most sudden rise in joblessness since the government started tracking the numbers.

This piles onto the March job losses, which were revised up from 701,000 to 870,000.

Not only did millions lose their jobs; a lot of Americans dropped out of the job market completely. The labor force participation rate fell to 60.2.

Average hourly earnings soared, but this isn’t a good sign. It certainly doesn’t mean people got raises. It reveals that a lot of lower-income workers lost their jobs.

As bad as the numbers were, they actually weren’t as bad as expected — that is until you read the fine print. The Bureau of Labor Statistics added sort of an asterisk saying that the actual job losses could have been close to 30 million and unemployment could be at 19.5%. Peter said, “Who the hell knows,” but he’s pretty certain the picture is probably worse than the one the official numbers paint.

The government is even indicating that. Just take these numbers with a grain of salt, because as bad as they are, they’re probably a whole lot worse.”

Peter said a lot of people seem to assume that this is temporary and that the jobs are going to come back. That’s simply not going to happen.

As one example of the uphill road facing the economy, retail stores have been crushed during the pandemic and they are going to have a hard time coming back. In an interview, a department store manager talked about the steps the store would take to protect employees and customers from COVID-19. For one thing, it isn’t going to allow people to try on clothes. But as Peter pointed out, that’s one of the few advantages a brick and mortar store has over online shopping. And as Peter pointed out, we’re going to see these kinds of inconveniences across the retail and service sectors.

The conditions under which these businesses are going to have to operate are just not very appealing to the customers and the customer has a choice. Most of this stuff is discretionary spending. We have the discretion to do it or not. And you know what? I mean, let’s just not do it. Lots of people are going to be thinking that way.”

A lot of these companies were in for a difficult time without COVID-19. Now they have this added burden. Peter reiterated we’re not going back to normal.

The system itself is working against a recovery in employment. In many cases, the “enhanced” unemployment benefits pay more than working. People are incentivized not to go back to work. Former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the enhanced unemployment program needs to stay in place until unemployment falls back to pre-pandemic levels. Peter said that could take a decade or more.

How can we continue these kind of payments? In fact, if we do continue to pay people more money not to work than we’re paying them to work, they’re never going back to work. They’d be idiots to go back to work. So, just continuing this program guarantees that people are not going to go back to work.”

Peter also pointed out something that should be pretty obvious – the economy can’t recover if people don’t go back to work. Handing out government money created out of thin air and hoping people spend it to support the economy doesn’t solve the problem. People can’t consume if they aren’t producing any stuff. There’s nothing to buy.

Of crouse, we can theoretically buy stuff other countries are producing, but at some point, they’re going to stop taking our useless paper.

If we’re just going to shelter in place, and we’re going to dole out money, and we’re just going to run up trillions and trillions and trillions in annual budget deficits, how much longer is the dollar going to hold up?

…How much longer can the dollar stay afloat when we’re basically sinking it? We’re basically daring the world to dump the dollar.”

And there’s no sign that the extraordinary monetary policy that is undermining the dollar will end ever. In fact, the markets are starting to bet on negative interest rates by the end of the year.  Peter digs into the Federal Reserve balance sheet numbers in this podcast as well.

“Netflix and quarantine” has been made famous by the pandemic as cord-cutting erupts in the first quarter. Millions of people were confined to their homes in March as the fast-spreading virus terrorized the nation, many folks, some of which lost their jobs, cut traditional cable and satellite TV at record speeds. At the same time, streaming TV also recorded a net loss in the period, reported Variety. 

Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson said cord-cutting accelerated in the first quarter and continued into the second quarter, as he believes virus-related shutdowns triggering an economic downturn has forced consumers to become more frugal, resulting in trimming expensive pay-TV service. 

Moffett’s latest research note said it was a combination of high prices and economic devastation, along with the loss of live sports and other events, which led to an estimate of 1.8 million pay-TV subscribers dropped their service in the first quarter. In annualized terms, this is a 7.6% decline, the fastest on record. 

“At 63% of occupied households, traditional pay-TV penetration has reached a level not previously seen since roughly 1995,” Moffett wrote. “There are now as many non-subscribing households (46M) as there were pay-TV subscribers in 1988.”

In a separate report, UBS Securities analyst John Hodulik said the virus outbreak is creating a “perfect storm” of cord-cutting: 

“We believe the [coronavirus] outbreak could drive modest acceleration in cord-cutting in the lockdown phase but more dramatic declines post-lockdown given the expected recession,” Hodulik said. “The absence of sports should pressure sports nets in the near term as distributors balk at paying high fees and post-lockdown if sports (especially professional and college football) do not return in the fall, potentially creating a cord-cutting perfect storm.”

Variety says while pay-TV was hemorrhaging subscribers during the period, this was also seen to a lesser degree with streaming TV: 

“In Q1, the losses disproportionately fell on satellite TV: AT&T shed a whopping 1 million TV subscribers, mostly from DirecTV, while Dish Network dropped a net 413,000, the company’s biggest-ever quarterly loss.

Meanwhile, virtual pay-TV players, which include AT&T TV Now, Dish’s Sling TV, Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV and FuboTV, collectively lost an estimated 341,000 subscribers in Q1, per Moffett’s calculations. That indicates that former subs to Sony’s PlayStation Vue — which ceased service at the end of January — “appear to have gone… nowhere,” he added.

The only notable subscription-TV services to add subscribers in the first quarter of 2020 were Hulu + Live TV — which picked up about 100,000 to stand at 3.2 million — and Google’s YouTube, which netted approximately 300,000 to reach 2.3 million per Moffett’s estimate.

Amid the cord-cutting pain, large media companies — Disney, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia — have launched or are about to launch direct-to-consumer streaming services. Disney Plus, for one, notched 54.5 million customers worldwide as of May 4 less than six months after initial launch. That will be joined by HBO Max later this month and NBCU’s Peacock, which is slated for a national rollout in July.”

And it appears staying-at-home public health orders could be a double-edged sword for media companies. Yes, more content is being consumed, but in the pandemic, massive cord-cutting is seen while some of the first net losses in streaming services have been realized as tens of millions of people have lost jobs and become more thrifty as recession unfolds.

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

A new poll has revealed that the vast majority of people in Britain are happy for the government mandated lockdown to continue, with just 4 percent expressing a desire to see it lifted immediately.

According to the Deltapoll survey, published Sunday, the masses are happy to continue to follow orders to stay at home, with close to half saying that they don’t want the lockdown lifted until sometime beyond June.

The poll also found that 50 per cent of Britons are happy not working, as long as they are getting paid or receiving government subsidies.

Only 11 per cent said they wanted everyone to go back to work now.

The survey highlights how as the economy collapses, and working class people suffer tremendous hardship, which will result in huge increases in poverty and death, a large section of the British population would rather live under house arrest and collect government credits.

The findings come as the Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the nation, announcing vague and confusing changes to the lockdown that basically only amount to people being allowed to sunbathe outside, so long as they don’t go near anyone else.

Basically, the “easing” of the lockdown comprises of us being allowed to sunbathe. That’s it.

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) May 10, 2020

Johnson also announced a five tier colour code covid alert system, that essentially allows the government to ease and tighten lockdown restrictions whenever it desires:

Colour coded COVID alert levels in UK mean government will be able to re-inforce lockdowns on a whim at any time. This makes the power permanent.

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) May 10, 2020

In a babbling address, Johnson alluded to mountaineers coming down from the peak and it being ‘the most dangerous bit’, as it is easy to ‘run too fast, lose control and stumble’.

May 8, 2020 marked 75 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe – VE Day. While the conflict which claimed millions of lives on European soil is firmly committed to the annals of history, Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that conflict in the East of the continent is still a harsh reality in the present day. The Ukrainian crisis, ravaging the Donbass region of the country, has so far amassed a death toll around the 13 thousand mark.

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres appealed for an immediate global ceasefire, saying in March:

“Our world faces a common enemy: COVID-19. The virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or faith. It attacks all, relentlessly. Meanwhile, armed conflict rages on around the world.”

As extensive data collection by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) shows, a large portion of the globe is engulfed in some form of conflict.

You will find more infographics at Statista

This infographic shows countries in which there have been reports of armed clashes involving state forces and/or rebel groups in 2020. Even using this simplified definition, the presence of war across the world is extensive.

Unlike the situations in Donbass and Syria, for example, not all conflicts fit the picture we may have in our minds when thinking of war. In Mexico for example, ACLED has recorded 3 armed clashes involving state forces. Each one though was a battle between different law enforcement entities – providing a snapshot of the ongoing fight against police corruption and the deep-seated influence of organized crime.

At the time of writing, Guterres’ call for a sweeping global ceasefire has not yet won the backing of the United States and Russia. According to a report by the American news publication Foreign Policy: “Both governments fear that a universal cease-fire could potentially constrain their own efforts to mount what they consider legitimate counterterrorism operations overseas.”