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Uber and Lyft have suspended all shared rides in the United States and Canada amid the global coronavirus pandemic, according to The Sun.

“Our goal is to help flatten the curve on community spread in the cities we serve,” said Uber Senior vice president of Uber Rides and Platform, Andrew Macdonald. The company added that it would be monitoring services in other countries on a case-by-case basis going forward.

As of Tuesday morning, the Uber Pool option was listed as “unavailable” on the app – but that’s not the only measure the company are taking.

Uber has urged people to “travel only when necessary” in both Canada and the US, as well as urging users to wash their hands before and after they ride in an Uber to protect their drivers.

The carpooling company is also waiving delivery fees for independent restaurants in both countries after eateries and bars shut down en masse to curb the spread of the virus. –The Sun

Meanwhile, Uber’s food delivery service, Uber Eats has introduced a ‘leave at door’ option – similar to delivery services Door Dash, Postmates and GrubHub, following a model which began in China after McDonald’s, Starbucks and other companies began offering ‘contactless delivery’ to reach customers at home and minimize the risk of transmission.

Uber is waiving delivery fees for independent restaurants in the US and Canada after eateries and bars have been shut down to foot traffic.

“We know there are always people who, for health and other reasons, might prefer a non-contact delivery experience and we believe this will provide customers with that option,” said Postmates in a blog post.

Guggenheim Investments’ CIO Scott Minerd has been very vocal about policymakers’ and the markets’ cognitive dissonance regarding its extreme fragility and the impact of the virus on the global economy.

Having seen central banks and politicians begin to address the issue – and fail so far, Minerd warns in his latest note to clients that “shock and awe has fallen short…”

Where are we now?

• The Federal Reserve’s (Fed) attempt to go for shock and awe seems to have been made with the idea that doing something unusual on Sunday night, after the market closed out strong on Friday, would be good for confidence.

• Of course, the market didn’t take it that way.

• Instead of inspiring confidence, the market seemingly responded as if the Fed knows something we don’t know and it’s actually worse than we think.

• Monetary policy is not designed to deal with pandemics. Monetary policy is designed to provide adequate liquidity to the financial markets to keep them functioning, and I think the Fed is doing a pretty good job at this.

• The Fed still has a number of tools at its disposal that haven’t yet been implemented. Probably the most important of these is Section 13(3) powers.

• Section 13(3) can only be invoked with the approval of the Treasury in the first phase. The second phase would allow for the establishment of programs like the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), only with the passage of legislation in Congress.

• Given the size of our economy relative to where it was 10–15 years ago, it would probably be appropriate for Congress to pass a TARP-style program of $2 trillion.

• Then on the back of that, the Fed would have the ability to introduce a TALF-style program again.

• So, it’s going to take some major firepower to resolve the forthcoming problems or the slide will continue.

What is your economic outlook?

• My expectation is that there is no economic growth in the near term, that we’ve probably already entered a global recession.

• The Chinese, for the first quarter, will print a gross domestic product (GDP) number which will not truly reflect the economic damage to their economy. Our best estimates are that the Chinese economy is contracting in excess of 15 percent at an annualized rate, and I’ve seen numbers as big as negative 40 percent.

• Europe is probably already in a fairly severe recession at this moment.

• If the United States is not already in a recession, it will enter one shortly.

• While shutting down restaurants, schools, and major events, a lot of people are going to be without a paycheck—people who probably don’t have $500 of savings in the bank—and they won’t be able to cover next month’s rent, their car payment, and their living expenses. Given this dynamic, I see this getting much worse.

• The risk is that for the first time since the 1930s we are facing the possibility of a downward spiral into something akin to a global depression.

• We have at least a 10–20 percent chance that that’s the path we are on if policymakers don’t act quickly.

• It depends on the policy response that we get out of Washington, D.C. We desperately need programs like TARP and TALF, that were used in the financial crisis to shore up failing industries.

• The idea that Congress can address one failing industry at a time—like the airlines now with the $50 billion proposed bailout package—is wrongminded.

• As the economy continues to slow, crisis will start to cascade through many industries, and the problems will come faster and faster.

• The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the Coronavirus emergency funding bill currently in front of Congress demonstrates how long it takes to react to something. There really needs to be a dedicated pool of money that is available to step in and salvage viable companies that are struggling.

• And remember, TARP was a money-making exercise for the government. We should get away from the idea that we are bailing people out. With TARP, the U.S. government becomes a distressed investor, and also is helping to sustain the economy and the working class.

• This is the scenario that leads to global depression. Should policymakers fail to get these sorts of programs in place quickly, there is increasing risk that we could fall into a deep, dark spiral.

What are you seeing in the markets?

• We have yet to see wholesale panic.

• From a value standpoint high-yield bonds or investment-grade corporates have only been cheaper relative to Treasurys 15 percent of the time. But valuation is a poor tool for timing the market. We’re not really seeing the kind of selling that you would see in a market capitulation. Selectively adding to risk is the prudent approach.

• We have maintained the discipline of our robust investment process which is based on the belief that investors simply have not been compensated for taking on credit risk.

• We believe our prudence leaves us positioned to deliver strong value for clients now and in the future by taking advantage of opportunities afforded to us in our position of strength.

• I’m more concerned about the stock market. In the worst-case scenario, we could go back to the old highs of the market prior to the financial crisis. This would put the S&P 500 in the 1600 ZIP code. I’m not saying we’re going there, but it certainly makes me pause before I think about loading up on equities.

• It is worth keeping an eye on emerging markets where interest rates have increased significantly. The next domino to fall as a result of the butterfly effect may well be here.

What would you advise investors?

• At this stage it would be unwise to make a tactical play to reduce risk, then try to figure out where the bottom is, then get back in. For those types of investors, I think at this point you missed your chance to get out.

• Investors panic too often and try to do too many tactical trades rather than just sticking with their long-term view. The opportunity to sell risk assets has passed.

The State Department’s Ambassador Deborah Birx poured some cold-water on Powell & Mnuchin’s coporate bailout rally when she told the American public that more must be done to contain this virus:

“If Americans continue going to bars, restaurants, other public places, we will fail in containing this virus.”

The Dow surged above Monday high stops, then tumbled on Birx comments…

Additionally, President Trump explained he was “not happy” with people who aren’t following the guidelines for self-quarantine, suggesting implicitly that the current “shelter-in-place” mandates may be elevated to full Italy/China-style lockdowns.

By now, it’s become abundantly clear that the federal government’s sluggishness in distributing functioning tests to labs around the country is one reason why governors and big-city mayors across the country are closing schools and businesses in preparation for a de facto 2 week quarantine.

The government seemingly had the whole month of February to distribute tests, which it should have been receiving from the WHO, which had contracted with a small Germany biotech firm to to produce millions of tests.

Instead, the CDC had only distributed a few thousand tests at the end of last month, and seems to have only taken steps to fix the problem over the last week, after a hail of criticism from doctors and experts as thousands of patients complained they didn’t have access to tests.

Well, the left-wing press has been carrying out a campaign to place the blame for the agency’s failures squarely on the shoulders of President Trump, with the Washington Post lambasting him for closing a pandemic preparedness office set up by President Obama to combat Ebola – even as the official charged with dissolving the office, writing also in the Washington Post, that these charges are specious.

At any rate, we’ve noticed that these claims have largely been circulated by former Obama-era CDC officials, who have leapt at every chance to criticize the administration’s overall response, along with the ‘botched’ testing rollout, on cable news.

But in an investigative piece overnight, the Washington Post laid out how the CDC, acting mostly independently of the administration and in keeping with the precedent for epidemic response, strung the White House along by claiming to ramp up testing while many of the tests were defective. But even as some labs figured out how to fix the defects, and others carried out testing on their own, the CDC remained inexplicably inflexible until suddenly admitting that it had been wrong, then promising to do better, once the demand for tests hit a critical apex.

Fortunately, President Trump’s decision to strike partnerships with pharma companies, both established firms and startups, has helped swiftly compensate for the shortfall. But the lapse in surveillance during the month of February has dealt a serious blow to the effort.

To be sure, it seems Trump badly erred by appointing Alex Azar to lead DHHS and Dr. Robert Redfield to lead the CDC. Coming from the lobbying world and academia, they didn’t have the experience to lead the response, forcing them to rely on underlings inside the CDC, many of whom are career bureaucrats who resent the Trump Administration’s management of the bureaucracy.

When these underlings insisted that the ‘red tape’ was there for a reason, Redfield had little choice but to defer to their expertise, at least initially, before other outside experts started to complain.

Meanwhile, all the Obama-era employees and underlings responsible for getting their leaders up to speed (like Dr. Messonnier, who is mentioned several times in the WaPo report), repeatedly told their bosses that this is the standard response and that they must wait for the CDC to figure out this knot of problems before opening the gates to corporate partners.

And as far as Dr. Fauci is concerned, he actually works for the NIH.

Now, as WaPo mentions in the final paragraphs of its story, a former CDC director who led the agency during the Obama years is calling for an “investigation” of the CDC’s botched response.

Thomas Frieden, an infectious disease physician who served as CDC director under former president Barack Obama, called on Sunday for an “independent group” to investigate what went wrong with the CDC’s testing process. He said in the past, the CDC moved quickly to produce tests for diseases such as H1N1, or swine flu.

“We were able to get test kits out fast,” Frieden said on CNN. “Something went wrong here. We have to find out why so we can prevent that in the future.”

Frieden said the agency has been muzzled under President Trump and despite the multitude of problems with the rollout of testing, “the CDC is still the greatest public health institution in the world.”

We suspect he already knows where the bodies might be buried.

Authored by “V.F.” via TheChicagoEconomist.com,

The Sport Of Speculation

I’m beginning to believe the current “pandemic” is perhaps just the latest contrived “enemy of the state”. An opportunity taken by western governments that have, over the past 20 or 30 years, gotten bolder in their willingness to fabricate fear to secure a political end. Political ends are always about greater control, corruption, and ultimately, cover ups.

In the age where air has become second to digital noise in terms of ubiquity, and hyperbole has replaced truth as the journalistic objective, governments’ ability to leverage misinformation (i.e. propaganda) has become a precision tool. Like it or not, society has become confused by the amount of information thrown at us and that makes us susceptible.

But if this is contrived political hysteria, what is the objective?

I’ve heard people on either side of the aisle suggest it is to help or hurt Trump. And perhaps, it is that simple. However, given equally good points on both sides of that argument I am skeptical. So then what? Well, I think back to 9/11 and whether you believe it was an act of terrorism by our own government or some other group, the end result was the same – The Patriot Act, and a truckload of knock-on legislation that quietly edged out our individual rights and freedoms. All in the name of keeping us safe from harm.

Ok, but do we see any of that happening as a result of this current narrative? Of course. Right now a bill is making its way through Congress that most legislators, have admittedly, not read but are ready to approve. And perhaps the most glaring action is the $5 trillion financial bail out that took place over the weekend. This is by far, the biggest financial industry bailout ever to take place, at least on this planet. Most Americans have no idea a bailout is taking place and those that do will never come to know that the bailout began in early September. On September 2nd, the Fed began its second epic “bank bailout”. That is, it has nothing to do with the virus.

And it isn’t just banks but the entire sport of speculation that require a bailout. The leverage inherent in the sport of speculation, across all asset classes, has created an aggregate risk position so large there is no longer enough cash to cover the margin call.

And this is where we’ve run into trouble. In 2008, we had levered specific collateral instruments up using nonsensical economics. At the time I was studying financial engineering at Chicago Booth. I graduated in December 2008, after spending 2 years studying the models that were proving, in real time, to be absolutely wrong and creating massive pain for the bottom half of the economic food chain. To crawl out of that mess we printed trillions of dollars to bail out the large risk positions that had earlier created immense wealth for those on the top of the economic food chain.

This past weekend, once again the Fed announced a $5 trillion bailout and it went completely unnoticed by the public because we are distracted by a “world ending virus”. The largest financial bailout in the history of the world and nobody knows it happened because the focus is on a virus that to date, has resulted in 50 deaths in America (at the same time 8,000 deaths have resulted from the flu in America).

I am constantly having Italy being thrown at me evidence that the virus is going to wipe out humanity. So I decided to look into Italy, specifically. What I found is that each year in Italy has about 16K flu related deaths each year. That’s a little over 2K flu related each month of the flu 7 month flu season. And here are Italy’s Covid figures.

The new cases are in decline and the total death count in the 2 months since the outbreak began there, is at 2158, so about 1K per month (half that of the flu during the same period). And Italy is the worst case scenario in terms of mortality rate (fatality to recorded infections – yes this is a less than ideal statistic in terms of meaningfulness). Germany, for instance has an incredibly low mortality rate.

And let me be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t take this seriously. My point is whether or not the severe response from western governments is a reasonable response given the “threat”.

In 2009, the Swine Flu hit America’s shores. Let’s look at the spread and mortality figures of the Swine Flu outbreak that went almost unnoticed by the public and media. In fact, I had no idea Swine Flu hit our shores until the writing of this article. As of mid-March 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that about 59 million Americans contracted the H1N1 virus, 265,000 were hospitalized as a result (0.4% of the estimated total number of people who contracted it), and 12,000 died (0.02%).

Now let’s look at the US Covid outbreak to date.

59 million Americans contracted Swine Flu, 265,000 were hospitalized, and 12,000 died from the 2009/2010 outbreak. Yet the public noise over that outbreak was so muted that I don’t even remember that it took place. Today, we have Covid, and in 2 months it has infected 4,600 Americans and 85 have succumbed to the virus.

If I were to show these figures to an alien and ask them to identify which scenario resulted in a lockdown of society, which do you suspect they’d point to? Exactly. 100% of you pointed to Swine Flu. 100% of you.

So how is it that the western governments picked Covid? And more importantly, why?