The Trump Administration Presents a False Choice Between Current COVID-19 Control Measures and ‘No Intervention’

The COVID-19 projections presented at a White House briefing yesterday imagine two scenarios, one utterly fanciful and the other intolerably vague. With “no intervention,” the main graph says, the United States could see 1.5 million to 2.2 million deaths from the disease. But “with intervention,” it says, the number of COVID-19 deaths plummets to somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000.

The “no intervention” scenario is clearly counterfactual, since it ignores all the steps governments, businesses, and individuals already have taken to curtail the spread of COVID-19. The “intervention” scenario assumes continued social distancing of the sort currently recommended by the federal government and enforced by state and local governments. What’s missing? Anything in between, which is the area that really matters for policy makers.

Governments right now are not deciding whether to do nothing or do something. Rather, they are confronting choices about which restrictions should be imposed, where they make sense, and how long they should be maintained. In this context, a simple binary choice between “intervention” and “no intervention” is highly misleading, since it obscures myriad options for confronting the epidemic, including measures more carefully tailored than mass business closures and stay-at-home orders. Sooner or later, those options will have to be weighed, taking into account not only the deaths they might prevent (or allow) but also their economic impact, which under the current approach is already severe and could get much worse.

In addition to presenting a false choice, the Trump administration’s framing relies on assumptions that may prove to be mistaken. One important variable is the number of Americans who will ultimately be infected by the COVID-19 virus. Another is the case fatality rate (CFR).

Because existing data are very limited in the absence of wide testing, we can do little better than guess at those numbers. Yet getting them wrong has profound implications, potentially leading to an overreaction that wrecks the economy while saving relatively few lives or (less likely, given the current political climate) an underreaction that costs many lives and allows hospitals to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.

The White House seems to be relying on projections by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), some of which were included in yesterday’s presentation. The IHME model, which assumes that current policies are maintained until June, predicts that “an estimated 97% of the population of the United States will still be susceptible to the disease” at that point, which implies that 3 percent of Americans, or nearly 10 million people, will have been infected.

If that happens, we can be pretty sure it will not be reflected in the official numbers, which include only confirmed cases. That tally underestimates the true number of infections, because many people with mild to nonexistent symptoms, which are typical of COVID-19, will not seek medical treatment or testing. The extent of that gap, which is by definition unknown, is crucial in estimating the true CFR, which federal public health officials say could be anywhere from 0.1 percent, making COVID-19 about as lethal as the seasonal flu, to 1 percent, making it 10 times as deadly.

The IHME projects that “approximately 81,000 people will die from the virus” by late June if current policies are maintained, which implies a CFR of about 0.8 percent. Projections by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assume the same CFR, while modeling by researchers at Imperial College in London is based on a slightly higher rate of 0.9 percent. Both of those estimates are near the upper end of the range that U.S. officials consider reasonable.

That does not mean those estimates are wrong, but their accuracy makes a big difference. If the CFR turns out to be 0.5 percent, the number of deaths in the IHME scenario of about 10 million infections by June would be fewer than 50,000 rather than 81,000. A CFR of 0.2 percent (still twice the estimated CFR for the seasonal flu) would reduce the death toll at that point to fewer than 20,000. By comparison, the CDC estimates that influenza has killed 12,000 to 61,000 Americans each year since 2010.

The true CFR matters even more when you consider alternatives to current COVID-19 control measures. It is hard to weigh the risks and benefits of relaxing restrictions—whether in May (as currently envisioned by the Trump administration), in June (as some experts suggest would be possible with wide testing), or even later than that (as assumed in the Imperial College’s “best-case” scenario)—when you don’t know the potential cost in terms of additional deaths, which could number in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, depending on your assumptions. One thing we know for sure is that the economic burden on millions of innocent people will be magnified with each passing week.

It seems that people who are pessimistic about the COVID-19 death toll want to have it both ways. When it comes to justifying immediate, sweeping, and sustained control measures, they emphasize how quickly the virus spreads. But high estimates of the virus’s reproduction number (the number of people the average carrier can be expected to infect) imply a bigger gap between confirmed cases and total infections, which in turn implies a lower CFR.

There is also a tension between the short-term goal of avoiding a hospital crisis by reducing transmission of the virus and the longer-term goal of mitigating the impact of COVID-19 through herd immunity, which requires widespread infection. After three months of lockdowns, the IHME model predicts, 97 percent of the population will “still be susceptible to the disease.”

I do not pretend to have the answers. But given the high level of uncertainty, I am skeptical of people who claim they do, and it seems to me that the potentially devastating economic effects of aggressive and prolonged interventions have not received the consideration they deserve. Eventually we will have a clearer picture of the price exacted both by the epidemic and by efforts to fight it. But that knowledge will come too late for it to figure in the decisions politicians are making now.

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Michigan Democrat Governor Begs Feds For Hydroxychloroquine Just Days After Threatening Doctors For Prescribing It

Michigan Democrat Governor Begs Feds For Hydroxychloroquine Just Days After Threatening Doctors For Prescribing It

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is now asking the federal government to send her hydroxychloroquine just four days after she threatened to revoke the medical licenses of doctors who prescribed it.

Last week, Whitmer sent a letter warning physicians and pharmacists of punishments for the prescribing of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine despite a major study recommending “COVID-19 patients be treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to cure their infection and to limit the transmission of the virus to other people in order to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the world.”

Medical professionals were threatened with “administrative action,” with Whitmer claiming that hydroxychloroquine had not met the benchmark for “proof of efficacy.”

How quickly things change.

Four days later, Whitmer is now begging the feds to send her hydroxychloroquine.

“We want to ensure that doctors have the ability to prescribe these medicines,” she said.

“We also want to make sure that the people who have prescriptions that predated COVID-19 have access to the medication they need. And so all of the work that we’ve done is trying to strike that balance.”

It’s also worth noting that Fox News host Laura Ingraham was forced to delete a tweet that promoted hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 cure under threat of suspension despite it already having been approved by the FDA.

In its approval letter, the FDA said, “Based on the totality of scientific evidence available to FDA, it is reasonable to believe that chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine sulfate may be effective in treating COVID-19.”

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden

Wed, 04/01/2020 – 15:30

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“Asking For The World’s Depositors”: Is It Time To Worry About The Banks?

“Asking For The World’s Depositors”: Is It Time To Worry About The Banks?

Until now, the media and financial commentariat had been very careful to frame the coronacrisis as merely a one-time shock to the global economy and a non-recurring hit to corporate earnings as the world is put into an induced coma, with hopes that once the coronavirus pandemic passes, the world can simply be woken up and a V-shaped recovery can commence.

Alas, the longer the coma lasts, the more unlikely the recovery is V-shaped, something a recent research report from the San Fran Fed admitted by looking at the aftereffects of some of the world’s most notable pandemics, to wit: “Significant macroeconomic after-effects of the pandemics persist for about 40 years, with real rates of return substantially depressed.”

Bloomberg confirmed as much today in “Trump’s Dire Forecast Reinforces Outlooks for Deep Economic Hit.”

And yet while the debate rages on whether the economy and corporate profits are due for a V-shaped recovery or instead a W- or even L-shaped “recovery” is more appropriate, so far nobody had mentioned, or rather dared to mention, the possibility that beyond a one-time economic shock, the corona-crisis could also affect the financial sector. Read: the banks. After all, the last thing the crippled economy needs now is a bank run to go with the total shut down of most businesses and cash flows.

That changed today when none other than CNBC anchor-at-large Bill Griffeth unexpectedly asked a “serious question” on behalf of bank depositors:

Was a global pandemic one of the scenarios in the bank stress tests?? Asking for the world’s depositors

We know the answer to this rhetorical question: after all all banks passed the Fed’s latest stress test without a glitch. here another CNBC anchor, Kayla Tausche helpfully chimed in reminding us just how laughable, in retrospect, was the Fed’s “severely adverse” scenario. In a nutshell, the banks were expected to have no problem with an outcome in which:

  • Unemployment jumps to 10%
  • GDP falls -8.5%
  • The US 10Y “plunged” to 0.75%

Under the severe scenario, banks would lose $410 billion if there were another severe global recession, but would maintain enough capital to keep lending to companies and individuals.

But what happens if there is a global pandemic that results not in a severe global recession, but an outright depression. Which, as a reminder, is what Goldman’s latest forecast for at least Q2 is, when the bank expects GDP will plunge to -34%…

… and the unemployment rate soars to 15%.

In that scenario, which the world is now living through, nobody knows what happens to the banks, or perhaps hasn’t bothered to get the answer, because the last thing the “world’s depositors” want to hear is that not only are they quarantined at home, but a trip to the local ATM may reveal no cash in stock.

While we don’t know the answer to Bill Griffeth’s question, it appears that the market is trying to come up with one, and is not happy with what it is seeing, because not only is the stock index of GSIBs, or global systematically-important banks tumbling…

… as global broker counterparty risk soars…

… but most ominously, 1 Year CDS on the US have been on a tear lately, suggesting US default odds – it appears the CDS market is not a fan of that MMT idiocy that a currency issuer can’t default – are surging.

And while we are confident that others will soon start asking questions about whether this is also a financial crisis in addition to an profit and economic one, one thing we don’t know is whether US CDS are surging because of that… or because of the US response to the crisis which will see US debt exploding by $2-3 trillion this year alone with the Fed’s balance sheet doubling to $9 trillion and over.

In other words, is the CDS market starting to sniff out the beginning of the end – the moment when the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency?


Tyler Durden

Wed, 04/01/2020 – 15:13

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Matt Ridley on How To Beat the Next Pandemic

Matt Ridley is one of the best-selling—and best-regarded—science writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic “we are about to find out how robust civilisation is” and that “the hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known.” Given that Ridley’s best-known book is The Rational Optimist, this is bracing stuff.

Nick Gillespie spoke with Ridley from his home in northern England. His next book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, will be published in May. They discussed why the coronavirus caught Ridley by surprise, when he thinks we’ll be able to reopen the world economy, why Brexit is good for Europe, and whether he believes that sustained innovation and progress can take place in authoritarian countries such as China.

“I’m afraid it is necessary to be pretty draconian when you’re in the middle of a pandemic,” says Ridley, who nonetheless believes that limited government and individual liberty are essential bulwarks to creating a rich and prosperous society. “If you want to preserve freedom…you need to unleash the freedom to innovate, to solve the problem in good times.”

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Matt Ridley on How To Beat the Next Pandemic

Matt Ridley is one of the best-selling—and best-regarded—science writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic “we are about to find out how robust civilisation is” and that “the hardships ahead will be like nothing we have ever known.” Given that Ridley’s best-known book is The Rational Optimist, this is bracing stuff.

Nick Gillespie spoke with Ridley from his home in northern England. His next book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, will be published in May. They discussed why the coronavirus caught Ridley by surprise, when he thinks we’ll be able to reopen the world economy, why Brexit is good for Europe, and whether he believes that sustained innovation and progress can take place in authoritarian countries such as China.

“I’m afraid it is necessary to be pretty draconian when you’re in the middle of a pandemic,” says Ridley, who nonetheless believes that limited government and individual liberty are essential bulwarks to creating a rich and prosperous society. “If you want to preserve freedom…you need to unleash the freedom to innovate, to solve the problem in good times.”

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ADP Confirms The Worst Is Yet To Come

ADP Confirms The Worst Is Yet To Come

Submitted by Christopher Dembik of Saxo Bank

The ADP estimates that US companies cut 27,000 jobs from March 1 to March 12 after an increase of 179,000 in February. This is the first monthly contraction since September 2017. The 6-month average is down at 119,000 vs 183,000 in February. The final print is better than expected (consensus at -154,000), but it is important to keep in mind the report does not reflect the full impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the labor market. The most severe measures of containment were implemented after the survey, especially in the third week of March. There is no need to say that today’s statistic has zero value in forecasting the BLS number that will be released at the end of the week (see our conservative forecast here).

Digging into data, the only interesting trend is the very sharp cut in employment by small businesses (1 to 49 employees). As you can see in the below chart, over the first twelve days of March, small businesses have cut 90,000 jobs, which is the highest drop since the GFC. Given we don’t have data for the whole month and that the lockdown measures we re after the survey, it is likely that job cuts surpassed the previous record of February 2009, at minus 174,000.

We are living in unprecedented times and figures do not match historical reference anymore. We can discuss for a long time the real data for March, but what is really of prime importance is that job cuts by small businesses are doomed to last for many months. Investors need to keep in mind that small firms make up 90% of all companies in the United States and, in a normal economic expansion phase, they create around 3 million jobs every year. This is an understatement to say that small businesses are at the heart of employment growth. We need to get ready to a wave of bankruptcies and job cuts in the coming months.

The below tab represents the employment trend by industry. The goods-producing sector posted 8,000 job cuts in March mostly due to a drop in the construction sector (-16,000). We notice a slight increase in the manufacturing sector (+6,000) that is unlikely to last considering the slump in manufacturing demand and the steep downturn in production.

With the exception of the healthcare sector (for obvious reasons), all the service providing sectors experienced job cuts in March with the biggest decrease in trade and transport (-37,000) and leisure and hospitality (-10,000). It confirms that the service sector has been badly impacted by the crisis, with consumer-facing industries directly affected by social distancing and lockdown measures, while tourism has virtually been decimated.


Tyler Durden

Wed, 04/01/2020 – 15:01

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Gundlach, Marks, Rogers All Agree: It’s Going To Get Much Worse

Gundlach, Marks, Rogers All Agree: It’s Going To Get Much Worse

“We’re going to have the worst bear market in my lifetime,” in the next year or two.

That’s the message from billionaire cofounder (with Soros) of the legendary Quantum Fund, Jim Rogers, who told Bloomberg this morning that the impact of the virus on economies “will not be over quickly because there’s been a lot of damage. A gigantic amount of debt has been added.”

Rogers is far alone in his alarm. As Bloomberg reports, the fund manager overseeing the fortune of the Lego billionaires says equity markets remain too volatile to justify any bargain hunting.

“This is not the time to be brave,” Soren Thorup Sorensen, the chief executive of Kirkbi Group said in an interview on Tuesday,

“Volatility is at historic highs.” As a long-term investor, the best response is to “sit still and weather the storm,” he said.

Bond King Jeffrey Gundlach said similar things during his webcast last night,

“I think we’re going to get something that resembles that panicky feeling again during the month of April,” Gundlach said as economic uncertainty in April will rise further.

He added that stocks won’t hit their recent highs for a long time:

“It won’t be back to where it was prior for a long time to come,” he said, “particularly on a real basis.”

But it is yet another legendary investors,  OakTree Capital’s Howard Marks, who really laid out the case for not ‘buying the dip’ here in a 10-page note which can be summarized simply – “sell, don’t hold… worse is coming.”…

In the Global Financial Crisis, I worried about a downward cascade of financial news, and about the implications for the economy of serial bankruptcies among financial institutions.  But everyday life was unchanged from what it had been, and there was no obvious threat to life and limb.

Today the range of negative outcomes seems much wider… 

Social isolation, disease and death, economic contraction, enormous reliance on government action, and uncertainty about the long-term effects are all with us, and the main questions surround how far they will go.”

While Marks suggests that assets were “fairly” priced for an “optimistic case,” he warns that this “didn’t give enough scope for the possibility of worsening news.”

Marks concludes on an ominous note, saying that he expects asset prices to decline.

“You may or may not feel there’s still time to increase defensiveness ahead of potentially negative developments. But the most important thing is to be ready to respond to and take advantage of declines.”

Below is Marks’ summary of the “Negative Case”:

I always say we have to be aware of and open about our biases. I admit to mine: I’m more of a worrier than a dreamer. Maybe that’s what made me a better credit analyst than equity analyst. On average I may have been more defensive than was necessary (although somehow I was able to shift to aggressive action when crisis lows were reached during my career). Thus it shouldn’t come as a surprise today that my list of cons is longer than my pros (and I will elaborate on them at greater length).

I’m very worried about the outlook for the disease, especially in the U.S.

For a long time, the response consisted of suggestions or advice, not orders and rules. I was particularly troubled last weekend by pictures of college kids on the beach during spring break, from which they would return to their communities. The success of other countries in slowing the disease has been a function of widespread social distancing, testing and temperature-taking to identify those who are infected, and quarantining them from everyone else. The U.S. is behind in all these regards. Testing is rarely available, mass temperature-taking is nonexistent, and people wonder whether large-scale quarantining is legal.

  • The total number of cases in the U.S. has surpassed both China’s and Italy’s and is still rising rapidly (and is likely understated due to under-testing).

  • The number of deaths doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 between Thursday and Saturday.

  • From a recent tweet by Scott Gottlieb, MD, former commissioner of the FDA: “I’m worried about emerging situations in New Orleans, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, among others. In China no province outside Hubei ever had more than 1,500 cases. In U.S. 11 states already hit that total. Our epidemic is likely to be national in scope.”

  • The U.S. is under-equipped to respond in terms of hospitals, beds, ventilators and supplies. Under-protected doctors, nurses and first responders are at risk.

I’m concerned that the number of cases and deaths will continue to rise as long as we fail to emulate the successful countries’ actions. The health system will be overwhelmed. Triage decisions – including who lives and who dies – will have to be made. There will be a point where there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. I’m afraid the headlines are going to get much uglier in this regard.

The economy will contract at a record rate.

Many millions will be thrown out of work. People will be unable to patronize businesses. Not only will workers miss paychecks and businesses miss revenues, but businesses’ physical output will tail off, meaning essentials like food may run short. Last week, 3.3 million new unemployment claims were filed, versus the previous week’s 282,000 and the weekly record of 695,000. Prior to the government’s actions, expectations included the following:

  • unemployment would return to 8-10%, and citizens would soon run short of cash;

  • businesses would close;

  • second-quarter GDP would decline from the year-ago level by 15-30% (versus a decline of 10% in the first quarter of 1958, the worst quarter in history);

  • some forecasters said the combined earnings of the S&P 500 companies would decline 10% in the second quarter, but that seems like a ridiculously small decline. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen a prediction that S&P earnings would decline by 120% (that’s right: in total, the 500 companies would shift from profits to losses).

Government payments plus augmented unemployment insurance will replace paychecks for many workers, and aid to businesses will replace some of their lost revenues. But how long will it take to get these funds to recipients? How many should-be recipients will be missed? For how long will the aid continue? ($3,400 to a family of four won’t last long.) What will it take to bring the economy back to life after it’s been in a deep freeze? How fast will it recover? In other words, is a V-shaped recovery a realistic expectation?

It will be very challenging to resolve the conflict between social isolation and economic recovery.

How will we know whether the disease merits the cure? The longer people remain at home, the more difficult it will be to bring the economy back to life. But the sooner they return to work and other activities, the harder it will be to get the disease under control.

First, the growth in the number of new cases each day has to be reduced. Next, the number of new cases has to begin to decline from one day to the next (that is, the growth rate has to turn negative). Then new cases have to stop appearing each day. (Of course, we’ll need increased testing and mandatory quarantining for these things to occur.) As long as there are new cases each day, there are people who are infectious. If we send them back into the world and into contact with others, the disease will persist and spread. And if we seize the opportunity provided by a decline in the number of new cases to resume economic activity, we risk a rebound in the rate of infection.

For the most part, we have companies whose revenues are down and companies whose revenues are gone.

They can reduce their expenses, but because many of them are fixed (like rent), they can’t reduce expenses as fast as revenues decline. That’s why second-quarter profits will shrink, dry up or turn negative. Revenues may come back relatively soon for some industries (like entertainment), but less rapidly for others (like cruise lines).

Many companies went into this episode highly leveraged.

Managements took advantage of the low interest rates and generous capital market to issue debt, and some did stock buybacks, reducing their share count and increasing their earnings per share (and perhaps their executive compensation). The result of either or both is to increase the ratio of debt to equity. The more debt a company has relative to its equity, the higher the return on equity will be in good times . . . but also the lower the return on equity (or the larger the losses) in bad times, and the less likely it is to survive tough times. Corporate leverage complicates the issue of lost revenues and profits. Thus we expect to see rising defaults in the months ahead.

Likewise, in recent years, the generous capital market conditions and the search for return in a low-interest-rate world caused the formation of leveraged investment entities. As with leveraged companies, debt increased their expected returns but also their vulnerability. Thus I believe we’re likely to see defaults on the part of leveraged entities, based on price markdowns, ratings downgrades and perhaps defaults on their portfolio assets; increased “haircuts” on the part of lenders (i.e., reduced amounts loaned against a dollar of collateral); and margin calls, portfolio liquidations and forced selling.

In the Global Financial Crisis, leveraged investment vehicles like Collateralized Mortgage Obligations and Collateralized Debt Obligations melted down, bringing losses to the banks that held their junior debt and equity. The systemic importance of the banks necessitated their bailouts (the resentment of which contributed greatly to today’s populism). This time, leveraged securitizations are less pervasive in the financial system, and their risk capital wasn’t supplied by banks (thanks to the Volcker Rule), but mostly by non-bank lenders and funds. Thus I feel government bailouts are unlikely to be made available to them. (As an aside, it’s not that the people who structured these leveraged entities erred. They merely failed to include an episode like the current one among the scenarios they modeled. How could they? If every business decision had to be made in contemplation of a pandemic, few deals would take place.)

Finally, in addition to the disease and its economic repercussions, we have one more important element: oil.

Due to a confluence of reduced consumption and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, the price of oil has fallen from $61 per barrel at year-end to $19 today. The price of oil was only slightly lower immediately before the OPEC embargo in 1973, and in the 47 years since then it has only been lower on two brief occasions. While many consumers, companies and countries benefit from lower oil prices, there are serious repercussions for others:

  • Big losses for oil-producing companies and countries.

  • Job losses: the oil and gas industry directly provides more than 5% of American jobs (and more indirectly), and it contributed greatly to the decline of unemployment since the GFC.

  • A significant decline in the industry’s capital investment, which recently has accounted for a meaningful share of the U.S.’s total.

  • Production cuts, since consumption is down and crude/product storage capacity is running out.

  • The damage to oil reservoirs that results when production is reduced or halted.

  • A reduction in American oil independence.

As recounted above, the negative case encompasses rising numbers of infections and deaths, unbearable strain on the healthcare system, job losses in the many millions, widespread business losses and mounting defaults. If these things arise, investors are likely to shift from the optimism of last week to the pessimism that was prevalent in the rest of March. Contributing factors may include:

  • negative psychology surrounding the combination of threats to the economy and life itself,

  • fear of more, and 

  • a very negative wealth effect that depresses spending and investing.

The TL;DR version:

Bull case: everything opens in 6 weeks. The unemployed can go back to old jobs or as true Americans, bootstrap. Economy back to normal within 6 months. 2T $ in PE dry powder, low gas prices and 0% interest rates pour fuel onto on the economy. The roaring 20’s mean the 2020’s now.

Bear case: Unemployment goes to 20%+. Everything does NOT go back to normal before at least a year or two, and in the meantime, there is a huge demand shock. The effects of the lockdown on businesses as well as the oil shock create depression-like conditions.

Trade accordingly.


Tyler Durden

Wed, 04/01/2020 – 14:46

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Johnstone: People’s Skepticism About COVID-19 Is The Fault Of The Lying Mass Media

Johnstone: People’s Skepticism About COVID-19 Is The Fault Of The Lying Mass Media

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Coronavirus disinformation is the hot topic of the day, with pressure mounting on social media platforms to censor incorrect information about the virus and mainstream news outlets blaring dire warnings every day about the threat posed by the circulation of false claims about the pandemic.

“As fast as the coronavirus has raced around the globe, it has been outpaced by a blinding avalanche of social media sorcery and propaganda related to the pathogen, much of it apparently originating in Russia,” the Washington Post editorial board . 

“As always when it comes to its relations with the West, Moscow’s main currency is disinformation, and it spends lavishly.”

This would be the same Washington Post who falsely assured us that the Bush administration had provided “irrefutable” proof that the government of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The same Washington Post who falsely assured us that Russian hackers had penetrated the US electricity grid to cut off heat during the winter, and who circulated a McCarthyite blacklist of alternative media outlets designated “Russian propaganda” compiled by a group of anonymous internet trolls. The same Washington Post whose sole owner is a literal CIA contractor yet never discloses this brazen conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community as per standard journalistic protocol.

If outlets like The Washington Post had done a better job of consolidating their reputation as a reliable news source instead of constantly deceiving their readers about very important matters, people would believe them instead of believing a “blinding avalanche of social media sorcery” (and web wizardry and internet incantations and electronic enchantments and net necromancy).

We’re seeing these urgent warnings about coronavirus disinformation and misinformation from mainstream outlets who’ve sold the public lies about war after war, election after election, status quo-supporting narrative after status quo-supporting narrative.

“Here’s How to Fight Coronavirus Misinformation” reads a headline by The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg once assured us that “the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality,” and whose star writer is David “Axis of Evil” Frum.

“China and Russia have seized on the coronavirus outbreak to wage disinformation campaigns that seek to undermine the U.S. and its handling of the crisis, rather than addressing public criticism of their own struggles with the pandemic,” warns The New York Times, who played a leading role in the disinformation campaign to build support for the Iraq invasion and who aggressively pushed crazy-making Russia hysteria (including famously retracting its bogus “17 intelligence agencies” claim).

So it is understandable that people are suspicious and looking to alternate sources for answers. The outlets which are warning them about the dangers of this virus and defending massive, unprecedented changes which have an immense impact on the lives of ordinary people have an extensive and well-documented history of lying about very important things. People are aware of this, in their own ways and to varying degrees, and it doesn’t help that all the usual suspects are behaving in a way that feels uncomfortably familiar.

“This pandemic will be more consequential than 9/11. It probably already is. People just don’t realize it, because they still think — still feel — that once this is all over we’ll go back to the way things used to be. We won’t,” says The Bulwarkfounder Bill Kristol was also the founder of the wildly influential think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC famously argued a year before the 9/11 attacks that the massive worldwide increase in US military interventionism they were promoting at the time would not be possible without “some catastrophic and catalysing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”. All of which miraculously came to pass.

I personally believe there’s enough evidence that this virus is sufficiently dangerous to justify many of the significant precautions nations have been taking (though of course we must oppose and be vigilant against government overstepping into authoritarianism). The statistics are still very blurry and unreliable, but the mountains of testimonies by rank-and-file medical staff pouring in from areas where the outbreak is bad constitute enough anecdotal evidence for me to believe that this virus can very easily overwhelm our healthcare systems if we don’t collectively take drastic measures to contain it.

That said, I certainly can’t cast blame on people who believe the threat the virus poses is being greatly exaggerated. Not because I think they’re right, but because you don’t blame a population who’s been constantly lied to for their disbelief in what they’re being told by the very political/media class which has been lying to them. It’s not the fault of the rank-and-file public that they’re believing conspiratorial narratives, erroneous Facebook memes, right-wing pundits and the US president over the mainstream press; it is the fault of the mainstream press themselves.

I’ve taken a lot of flack in conspiracy circles lately for my relatively normie stance on Covid-19, but I also can’t really take it personally because it isn’t really their fault. Not everyone has the time and the resources to independently comb through many disparate bits of information about a single topic and synthesize a lucid understanding of what’s going on; that’s meant to be the job of the press, but since they’ve neglected to do their job time and time again they lack the credibility to demand that people believe what they’re reporting.

So I never join in the loud finger-wagging and aggressive demonization of those who express doubt in what’s really going on with this thing. I’ll leave that to those of a more mainstream bent, since they seem to enjoy it so much. As for myself, I will continue pointing out that the reason misinformation is so readily believed is the same as the reason Trump’s criticisms of the mainstream press are so readily believed: they have absolutely earned their garbage reputation.

The whole reason the world is the way it is right now is because people have been manipulated by the media-controlling class into accepting an absolutely insane status quo as normal. That’s the only reason anyone believes it makes sense for so few to have so much while so many have so little, for trillions of dollars to be poured into military expansionism and wars which benefit no one but the rich and powerful, for the environment to be destroyed to make a few more millionaires into billionaires, for a demented right-wing racist warmonger to be running against another demented right-wing racist warmonger for the most powerful elected office on the planet.

The big lies happen once in a while, but these little lies of normalizing our insane status quo happen every single day. On some level everyone is aware, however dimly, that our society is crazy and needs to change drastically, and so they are also aware that this is the opposite of the message they receive every day from the “authoritative” narrative-makers. The crazier things get, the more this awareness will necessarily grow, and the less people will trust the billionaire media whose only purpose is to maintain the status quo upon which its owners have built their respective kingdoms.

You can’t blame people for being distrustful when you make them that way. The people screaming the loudest about disinformation right now are the ones most responsible for it.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden

Wed, 04/01/2020 – 14:30

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

Visualizing COVID-19’s Financial Impact On Local Businesses

Visualizing COVID-19’s Financial Impact On Local Businesses

To quantify the impact of COVID-19 on local businesses across the U.S., the data science team at Womply is conducting ongoing, daily data analysis of transaction trends year-over-year at 400,000 local businesses across the country, including 48,000 restaurants, 10,000 grocery stores, 4,600 bars, 64,000 retail shops, and 6,400 lodging businesses. You can view that ongoing analysis here.

Here’s what the data revealed about last week’s impact on local businesses nationwide:

Restaurants

  • Weekly revenue was down 57% YoY. Daily revenue levels bottomed out on Sunday, March 22 at 68% below the same day last year. Revenue seems to be trending upward again, though still well below neutral.

Grocery stores

  • Consumer spending at grocery stores is returning to a semblance of normalcy. After daily revenue variance topped out at 100% YoY above neutral on March 16, sales have trended downward, averaging 18% above natural for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week. Weekly revenue is up 24% YoY.

Bars

  • Weekly revenue is down 47% YoY. Daily revenue levels bottomed out on Sunday, March 22 at 66% below the same day last year. Revenue seems to be trending upward again, though still well below neutral.

Lodging

  • Sales at lodging businesses continue to trend downward. Weekly revenue is down 83% YoY (down from 75% the previous week). Daily revenue levels dropped to as low as 87% under neutral YoY last Tuesday.

Firearm and sporting goods stores

  • Driven by consumer panic to buy guns and ammo, daily sales at firearm and sporting goods stores continue to hover at least 70% above neutral YoY. Weekly revenue is up 97% YoY. 

Arts and entertainment

  • Arts and entertainment businesses are entering their worst sales days to date. Weekly revenue is down 91% YoY. Daily revenue levels dropped to as low as 132% below the same day last year YoY last Thursday.

Retail

  • Local retail still hadn’t yet felt the full force of social distancing measures. Weekly revenue was up 10% YoY.


Tyler Durden

Wed, 04/01/2020 – 14:15

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

Another Trump-Appointed Judge Benchslaps the Trump Administration for Rewriting Federal Gun Laws

In response to 2017’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump vowed to use executive authority to ban bump stocks, a type of firearms accessory that the shooter reportedly used. The Justice Department soon delivered on Trump’s promise with a new rule amending “the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulations to clarify that [bump-stock-type devices] are ‘machineguns’ as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968” because “such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.” In effect, the Trump administration rewrote federal gun law in order to achieve the president’s preferred policy outcome.

That unilateral executive action has now come under blistering criticism from two federal judges appointed by Trump himself.

On March 2, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch issued a statement respecting the denial of certiorari in Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The executive branch “used to tell everyone that bump stocks don’t qualify as ‘machineguns.’ Now it says the opposite.” Yet “the law hasn’t changed, only an agency’s interpretation of it,” Gorsuch complained. “How, in all of this, can ordinary citizens be expected to keep up—required not only to conform their conduct to the fairest reading of the law they might expect from a neutral judge, but forced to guess whether the statute will be declared ambiguous….And why should courts, charged with the independent and neutral interpretation of the laws Congress has enacted, defer to such bureaucratic pirouetting?”

Gorsuch just got some company. This week, Judge Brantley Starr, a Trump appointee who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, issued an opinion in Lane v. United States that basically accused the Justice Department of ignoring basic principles of constitutional governance in its defense of the Trump administration’s bump stock ban.

The Justice Department justified the ban as a lawful exercise of the federal police power, Judge Starr observed. But “the federal government forgot the Tenth Amendment and the structure of the Constitution itself,” which grants no such power to the feds. “It is concerning that the federal government believes it swallowed the states whole. Assuming the federal government didn’t abolish the states to take their police power,” Starr wrote, he had no choice but to deny the government’s motion to dismiss the case. He then tartly added: “The Court will allow the government to try again and explain which enumerated power justifies the federal regulation.”

To say the least, Trump’s bump stock ban is not off to a winning start in federal court.

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