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Back in early, DoubleLine’s Jeff Gundlach made a prediction that was viewed as anathema in “serious” circles: he said that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. And much to the chagrin of all his “serious” colleagues, he was proven correct which is why earlier today we said that the one thing we were most curious about from Gundlach’s latest webcast was who he thinks would win this time around.

Well, we got the answer, and once again if Gundlach is correct a whole lot of “experts” (not to mention pollsters) will again be humiliated on Nov 4, because according to the bond king Trump will once again emerge victorious.

One would know it based on such online betting sites as PredictIt (which incidentally are remarkably illiquid, and extremely easy to manipulate by anyone with modestly deep pockets), which show Biden as a clear favorite with a roughly 15 point lead…

… but then again the “experts” and odds in 2016 also said Trump had no chance of victory.

So it makes sense to ignore the pollsters, the online bookies and the exports who were dead wrong in 2016, and focus on those who called it right.

With that in mind, during a Q&A on his Tuesday afternoon webcast, Gundlach said that “my base case is actually that Donald Trump will win re-election,” adding that he’d “bet against” former Vice President Joe Biden defeating Trump in November.

“I think polls are very, very squishy right now because of the highly toxic political environment in which we live,” the 60-year-old billionaire said. Gundlach said he’s come across data suggesting that about “two-thirds of conservatives or moderate conservatives say that they have lied about their support for Donald Trump either directly or by omission.”

“I just think there’s a lot, a lot of time here. There’s going to be twists and turns,” Gundlach added.

Gundlach also voiced another contrarian view when he said that he expects “significant” volatility for markets, something which markets generally don’t as it is now conventional wisdom that whoever wins will be good for risk assets.

“This go-around, I expect much greater volatility around the election as the progressive policies, so-called, of tremendous increased deficit spending for basically wealth manipulation, that could get pretty heated, and we’ll see what happens.”

Finally, Gundlach did not spare criticism for Biden’s just announced running mate, saying said he didn’t think Kamala Harris was a “good pick,” adding that Harris is “maybe a little too charismatic.”

“She might be a little bit dominant with her personality, but I don’t have any particular thoughts on Kamala Harris. I’m not surprised that she’s the pick.”

Needless to say, if Gundlach is right again, there will be a whole lot more of this from the “resistance” who will then have another 4 years – in collaboration with the deep state – to come up with bizarre conspiracy theories “explaining” why they were dead wrong yet again.

One final observation non-political from the bond king: with the S&P now trading at all time highs, and more than 1,000 points above the March low, Gundlach remains confident that in the remaining 4 and a half months, the market will crash again, and that “we will see the March lows again this year.”

As Bloomberg’s Mark Cranfield noted this evening, small reversals are just not gold’s style after a major advance (typically somewhere between a 15% and 20% drop is more common), and the selling pressure on precious metals has continued as Japan and then China opens this evening with Silver futures back at a $23 handle and Gold futures back below $1900.

Sending the gold/silver ratio soaring…

After finding support at 2017 lows…

As Peter Schiff noted earlier:

Nothing goes up every single day, and gold and silver are not going to be the exception to that rule. There are no bull markets that are up every day. You’re always going to have down days.”

Peter said the fundamentals are better than any he’s ever seen.

The Federal Reserve is printing trillions of dollars. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said it isn’t even thinking about thinking about raising interest rates. And there are reports that the central bank is set to make a commitment to ramping up inflation. All of this is extremely bullish for gold.

In a CNBC interview, US Global Investors CEO Frank Holmes said he can see $4,000 gold in the relatively near future with G-20 finance ministers and central banks “working together like a cartel and they’re all printing trillions of dollars.”

We’ve not seen this level where central banks are printing money at a zero interest rate. At zero interest rates, gold becomes a very, very attractive asset class,” Holmes said.

You have to focus on the fundamentals. A lot of investors aren’t doing that.

They’re not looking into the future and realizing the monetary fiscal policies that have already driven gold past $2,000 are going to continue and drive it past $3,000, $4,000, $5,000… And therein lies the opportunity.”

Finally, we note that Central banks added another net 18.1 tons of gold to their reserves in June, according to the latest data from the World Gold Council, who also found that 20% of central banks globally plan to expand their gold holdings in 2020.

Factors related to the economic environment – such as negative interest rates – were overwhelming drivers of these planned purchases. This was supported by gold’s role as a safe haven in times of crisis, as well as its lack of default risk.”

This year’s surge in precious metals, as Peter Schiff warns, is not a happy occasion because it really portends some real big problems on the horizon. I mean, most Americans don’t have any gold. There is severe economic hardship that the vast majority of Americans are going to be enduring, and gold is basically letting you know that that hardship is on the way.”

 

The latest economic data suggest the US recovery stalled. One look at the Citi US econ surprise index, as of this week, shows the recovery ran out of steam last month. A fiscal cliff is already underway, set to enter the second week on Friday (Aug. 14) as tens of millions of Americans are unemployed and have yet to receive their stimulus checks. 

The recovery, so far, is a massive economic sugar rush, entirely a function of the Trump administration on a reckless spending spree. One way the administration can artificially supercharge consumption is through issuing direct transfer payments to the working poor. The extra money has been used by households to pay down credit card bills, put food on the table, and pay housing expenses, while others used the free money to buy automobiles and FANG stocks. 

President Trump signed an executive order over the weekend to fund another round of stimulus checks of approximately $400 per week, a reduction from the $600 federal aid seen in the first round from March to the end of July. 

Massive federal spending has transformed America into a welfare state under the GOP watch. Tea Party politicians aren’t pleased with the Republican establishment’s wild spending spree. 

With a fiscal cliff coming up on the second week, tens of millions of folks are unable to consume because they are insolvent and jobless, and their amount of consumption is dependent on the government. We’ve noted before, a quarter of all household income is derived from the government. And with no stimulus checks in the mail, that means Americans are returning to food banks: 

Claudia Raymer, who manages a network of food-security groups in Ohio County, West Virginia, told Bloomberg when stimulus checks stopped arriving in late July, there was an immediate impact on households, resulting in rising food bank activity among the working poor.

The fiscal cliff will be more damaging in lower-income communities (than major metros), such as small towns in West Virginia, where folks were being paid handsomely by the federal government to sit at home. The problem is, once the payments end, consumption plunges, and the local communities return to a recessionary environment. With federal aid already running out for the stimulus program, the fiscal cliff has already been realized in West Virginia: 

“We’ve definitely already seen food-security needs increase, just in a week, since the extra unemployment has ended,” Raymer said.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday the next round of stimulus checks could take a couple of weeks to distribute, which would suggest households might not receive their stimulus checks until the end of August. 

Days before the stimulus program ended (late July), a sizeable food bank line appeared in Baltimore, Maryland. 

behind the scenes: food bank line in Baltimore just getting started – a lot of hungry and broke families as fiscal cliff begins pic.twitter.com/30C1OBJDSP

— Alastair Williamson (@StockBoardAsset) July 26, 2020

The economic crisis is far from over. Households are entirely screwed as depressionary unemployment levels will continue into the election. Many folks are dependent on direct transfer payments from the government and food banks for survival. Who would’ve ever thought this would be the case in the “greatest economy ever.” 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the U.S. for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of information. 

Something would prevent it. So I believed. So most of us believed. 

Still it happened, all in a matter of days, March 12-16, 2020, and boom; it was over! We were locked down. Schools shut. Bars and restaurants closed. No international visitors. Theaters shuttered. Conferences forcibly ended. Sports stopped. We were told to stay home and watch movies…for two weeks to flatten the curve. Then two weeks stretched to five months. How lucky for those who lived in the states that resisted the pressure and stayed open, but even for them, they couldn’t visit relatives in other states due to quarantine restrictions and so on. 

Lockdowns ended American life as we knew it just five months ago, for a virus that 99.4-6% of those who contract it shake off, for which the median age of death is 78-80 with comorbidities, for which there is not a single verified case of reinfection on the planet, for which international successes in managing this relied on herd immunity and openness. 

Still the politicians who had become dictators couldn’t admit such astonishing failure so they kept the restrictions in place as a way of covering up what they had done. 

That shock of Spring has now turned to a Summer of wickedness, with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else for the sorry state of life. Patience has run out and a national viciousness has taken its place. It is evident not only online but in person where strangers scream at each other for behaving in ways in which they disapprove. 

What many states are calling “open” today would have been called “closed” six months ago. Sports are rare. Theaters aren’t open. In some places, you still can’t go to gyms or eat inside. Mask mandates are everywhere, and mask enforcers too. People are ratting out their neighbors, sending drones to ferret out house parties, and lashing out at each other in public places. 

In a mere five months, lockdowners have manufactured a new form of social structure in which everyone is expected to treat everyone else as a deadly contagion. Even more preposterously, people have come to believe that if you come closer than six feet of another person, a disease spontaneously appears and spreads.

America has become an extremely ugly place. This is what lockdowns did. 

All of this has occurred in the midst of the greatest political divide in many generations. Oddly, you almost predict a person’s politics based on their attitude toward the virus, as if sitting political figures are responsible for creating or controlling pathogens that have been part of the human experience since we first walked and talked. The politicization of this disease has been a terrible noise that has distracted from the wise disease management that characterized the American way for more than a century. 

But the American people support this, right? I’m not so sure. It’s true that the TV and online media are blaring panic all day every day. If that’s where you get your information, it surely must feel like a plague. There is also the problem that people feel tremendously powerless right now. They have been locked down, silenced, humiliated, brutalized. The few attempts to get out and protest the lockdowns were greeted with jeers and derision by mainstream media. But it turned out that this was because they were protesting the wrong thing. When the protests against police brutality and racism swept the country, the media wholly approved. Yes, it all felt like gaslighting. 

Where precisely does American opinion stand on lockdowns today? The polls one cannot trust: people know exactly what they are supposed to say to pollsters during a police-state lockdown. It’s usually a good guess that one-third of Americans take a position that is more-or-less consistent with human liberty – it’s not a fixed group and it shifts depending on the issue – so that’s probably a good guess now. 

The incredible frenzy of the lying media has confused vast numbers. A poll revealed that many Americans think that 9% of us have died from C-19 whereas it is really 0.04%.

So yes, we have a propaganda problem, starting with the New York Times, which just today…

…demanded “more aggressive shutdowns than have been carried out in the past. The United States has not had a true national lockdown, shuttering only about half the country, compared with 90 percent in other countries with more successful outbreak control.”

None of which is true. This is pure ideological propaganda. The people who are saying true things seem to be only the 1% vs. the barrage of nonsense coming from media culture today. 

We see almost no discussion in the mainstream press of the empirical evidence at home and abroad that the lockdowns make no sense from a medical and economic perspective. Medical experts for many decades have warned against disturbing social functioning in the event of disease. Preserving freedom has always been the policy priority: 1949-52, 1957-58, 1968-69, and 2005. The American revolution itself took place in the midst of a smallpox outbreak. Liberalism arose during centuries of pandemics. 

And yet here we are. 

This country needs a serious anti-lockdown movement, one that is not just political but cultural and intellectual, one that is deeply educated on history, philosophy, law, economics, and all sciences, and can rally around traditional American civic postulates concerning individual freedom and the limits of governments, and also around universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.

What should this movement – which need not be formally organized – study, believe, and teach?

Because property rights are the first violated in lockdown, the movement needs to embrace and champion the right of private ownership and control: of businesses, homes, and ourselves. The liberal tradition has long affirmed this principle, and it is nothing but appalling that the lockdowns took place as if private property doesn’t exist. Suddenly everything and everyone belonged to the state, and it would be the state to declare what is or is not essential, or even what is elective vs. nonelective for your medical care. 

It should embrace the freedom to choose our associations, since that is what came under attack next: we couldn’t gather in groups, hold conferences, go to the movies, do anything not “socially distant” (I’m so sick of that phrase, wth dubious origins, that I could barely type it), or even go to another state to visit friends and relatives. 

This movement needs to celebrate and defend religious freedom, since, incredibly, most houses of worship were forcibly closed by government. The modern idea of freedom came about in the late Middle Ages when exhaustion from religious wars gradually gave rise to the idea of tolerance. Religious toleration was the first great freedom that came to be codified in law. It’s stunning that it was so flagrantly violated this year. 

It must come to terms with free enterprise and the innovation that comes with it. How much wealth and creativity has been lost in the lockdowns? It’s unfathomable. The biggest victims have been small and medium-sized businesses, whereas the large tech firms have thrived. To start and manage a commercial enterprise is a human right, the realization of which was the great achievement of modern life, as it spread prosperity throughout the world and lifted up the world’s people from the state of nature and to levels of the entrenched hierarchies of old. 

Part of this liberal ideal is free trade, which has come under fire from both the left and right. Don’t forget that Donald Trump kicked off this dictatorial frenzy with his sudden and shocking bans of travel from China and Europe, which resulted in a frenzied and frantic mass crowding of airports in the days following. He did it with a stroke of a pen, overriding all his advisors. He still brags about it. 

How much did his extreme reaction here inspire governors to do the same? Of course his actions reflect his persistent isolationism on not only trade but immigration too. Even now, Trump is refusing to allow foreign workers into the U.S. (except for emergency cases) because he incorrectly believes this will help the American job market. It’s an outrage: free enterprise entitles the employment of anyone from anywhere. This is a policy that is good for everyone. 

So long as we are talking about freedom fundamentals, let’s talk about masks. They have become exactly what the New England Journal of Medicine called them: a talisman. They are symbols of social commitment and political loyalty. A free society rallies around individual choice, so if masks make a person feel safe, or if it makes them feel they are keeping others safe from their breath, fine. But when people attack others for resisting wearing them, and are apparently upset at the seeming appearance of rebellion from rules, this is imposition and intolerance – perhaps understandable given the times, but still illiberal. 

Laws requiring face coverings in public would never have been tolerated even six months ago. And yet here we are, not only with laws but a growing number of recruits within the public to enforce them with appalling rudeness. It’s hardly the first time in history. American sumptuary laws in Colonial times mandated that people not dress in fancy clothes for reasons of piety and social conformism. Part of the capitalist revolution included the freedom to dress as one wants and the mass availability of fashion for everyone. The mandatory mask movement and its shock troops among the public is but a revival of puritanism. 

The lockdowns crushed the economic prospects of millions, and government attempted to make up for that with wild spending of other people’s money and an unprecedented use of the printing press, as if government can somehow paper over the destruction it caused. Therefore, the anti-lockdown movement needs a commitment to fiscal sanity and sound money. We now know that a government with the capacity to create unlimited amounts of paper money cannot be constrained. This needs to be fixed. 

As for health, the topic or excuse that unleashed the lockdowns in the first place, we surely should learn from this experience that politics and medicine need to be separated with a high wall. We have medical professionals who are traditionally in charge of mitigating disease, and they do so in line with their own professional associations and best judgement. Politics should never override the doctor/patient relationship, nor presume to know what is better for us than our own physicians. 

On the matter of education, governors all over the country cruelly locked down all the schools, though there is near-zero threat to kids from the virus and there is no verified case of a child passing C-19 to an adult. Perhaps a small silver lining is that we have learned more about how parents can exercise more control over education than they have previously had. The anti-lockdown movement needs to embrace a multiplicity of educational alternatives including the possibility of full privatization so that education can again be part of the free enterprise matrix. 

It’s true that anti-lockdown carries a negative connotation. Is there a better word to convey the positive dimension? My preference: liberalism. Progressives have abandoned it. It is also correct from a historical and international perspective. Liberalism and modernity are inextricably linked in history, says Benjamin Constant. A liberalism of the future needs to be prepared to understand, advocate, and fight for freedom in a non-lockdown world. No exceptions. 

Which takes us to the final point. Whether this movement is working in the realms of academia, culture, journalism, or politics, there is an absolute urgency that it exercise unrelenting moral courage and integrity. Ferociously. It should be uncompromising on crucial points. It must be willing to speak even when it is unfashionable to do so, even when the media is screaming the opposite, even when the Twitter mob floods your notifications, even when you are shamed for thinking for yourself. 

This time around, as you have surely noticed, even the voices of good people with good ideas fell silent in fear. This fear must be banished. The blowback against this despotism will come but it is not enough. We need character, integrity, courage, and truth, and this perhaps matters more than ideology and knowledge. Knowledge without the willingness and courage to speak is useless, because (as E.C. Harwood taught us) for integrity there is no substitute. 

In the end, the case for unlocking society is a spiritual matter. What is your life worth and how do you want to live it? How important are the hard-won freedoms you exercise daily? What of the lives and liberties of others? These are everything. Freedom has never prevailed without passionate and courageous voices to defend it. We have the tools now, many more than before. They can throttle us but can’t finally shut us down. The notion that we would fail to speak for fear of the Twitter mob is absurd. 

This movement, whether it is called anti-lockdown or just plain liberalism, must reject the wickedness and compulsion of this current moment in American life. It needs to counter the brutalism of lockdowns. It needs to speak and act with humane understanding and high regard for social functioning under freedom, and the hope for the future that comes with it.

The enemies of freedom and human rights have revealed themselves for the world to see. Let there be justice. The well-being of us all is at stake. 

Just when you thought all universities were good for was churning out uninformed Marxists, the University of Georgia breaks that stigma by offering up some groundbreaking sexual health advice in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The University had written a section called “Covid-19 Considerations” on its University Health Center website several days ago, but the document was pulled down after the university was subjected to ridicule for its content, which actually suggested “wearing a face mask during sex.”

“Heavy breathing and panting can further the spread of the virus and wearing a mask can reduce the risk,” the entry on the site had said.

The site had also suggested practicing “solo sex”, which we’re guessing is now the gender-neutral politically-correct-approved non-binary non-triggering term for what used to be called masturbating. “You are your safest sex partner,” the site said. 

The site offered up other confidence inspiring notes like “Wash your hands for 20 seconds before and after sexual activity” and “We do not know if Covid-19 can be spread through vaginal or anal sex.”

Happy to see that tuition money going to good use…

Meanwhile, peers at the University of Maryland have disagreed and said that wearing a mask is “not likely to prevent transmission if one of the partners has COVID-19” on their website.

UGA spokesman Greg Trevor told the Athens Banner-Herald: 

“The information was consistent with language that appears on multiple health and medical sites across the country, including the Mayo Clinic. However, when the information was mocked, ridiculed and criticized on social media, we decided to take it down.” 

Authored by Zachary Yost via The Mises Institute,

“Never let a crisis go to waste,” the old adage goes, and the coronavirus fiasco has demonstrated this principle in action more times than one can count. From declarations of veritable society-wide house arrest to crazed government spending and monetary policy, there has been no shortage of opportunistic actors working to live out their dreams of power and dominion over others that “normal” times would not allow.

Another such instance of gleeful advantage taking has come to light in the form of the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s “Ethical Allocation Framework for Emerging Treatments of COVID-19” guideline, a document that barely conceals its authors’ desire to use the current fiasco as an opportunity to engage in their own schemes of egalitarian social engineering.

Just as a reminder of the kind of central planners we are dealing with, this is the same Pennsylvania Department of Health that decreed on May 12 that nursing homes “must continue to take new admissions, if appropriate beds are available, and a suspected or confirmed positive for COVID-19 is not a reason to deny admission.” Months later, nearly 70 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the state have occurred in nursing homes.

Not being content with causing such a disaster, the state health department has issued guidance on how healthcare facilities should ration the limited supply of the new drug Remdesivir in the event that there are not enough doses to go around, but notes that the guidelines should apply to any scarce form of treatment. While certainly an unpleasant subject to address, it is true that in the face of scarcity the limited supply of Remdesivir or any other treatment will need to be rationed and that some kind of method of choosing will be needed. Scarcity is simply a fact of life that must be dealt with. However, because the distribution of Remdisivir has been taken over by the federal government, which distributes it to state governments, which in turn distribute it to healthcare providers, the process has unavoidably become political.

Putting all the jargon aside, the guideline is very clear about several points. First, it is not considered acceptable to distribute care via a random lottery, or on a first-come-first-served basis. Rather, healthcare providers must take into consideration “community-benefit” when rationing care and the department recommends the use of a weighted lottery system.

As you can see, the example lottery that the health department provides uses three different criteria to determine how a patient’s lottery chance is weighted: membership in a disadvantaged community, being an essential worker, and likelihood of death in the next year.

While the state’s determination of who is and who is not an essential worker is arbitrary and has been full of problems, one can at least see the logic behind such a consideration, as well as for those patients who are not likely to live much longer, although one must question where the state gets the authority to dictate such things to hospitals.

What raises the most concern is the idea that members of “disadvantaged communities” should be given a better chance at receiving treatment than others.

According to the guidance, because “low-income communities and certain racial/ethnic minorities” are being disproportionately burdened by the coronavirus, the end goal of public health is served by benefitting some groups over others.

According to the guidance, “the rationale is that a core goal of public health is to redress inequities that make health and safety less accessible to disadvantaged groups.”

One might have thought that the main goal of public health was to save as many lives as possible. But instead, it seems that the state department of health considers the emergency room to be the perfect place to start “mitigating the structural inequities that cause certain communities to bear the greatest burden during the pandemic.”

This formulation makes it unclear what the guidance means when it states that the first goal of the ethical framework is “to safeguard the public’s health by allocating scarce treatments to maximize community benefit.” Does community benefit mean saving as many lives as possible? Or is it some kind of grievance studies conception of equality where arriving at a more “equally distributed” survival rate based on race and socioeconomic status is the goal?

One can certainly argue that certain populations do not have very good access to healthcare resources, but it seems outrageous to think that the time to attempt to remedy such inequality is when triaging patients.

Similarly concerning is the way the guidance recommends that the treating physicians be removed from the rationing process and that it be left in the hands of hospital bureaucrats instead, effectively tying doctors’ hands to treat their patients. Is this the kind of state-run healthcare that we have to look forward to in the future? Doctors as helpless as their patients as bureaucrats “assess” a patient’s social suitability to be worthy of treatment?

The guidance goes on to recommend some procedures for how membership in a “disadvantaged community” should be determined. After noting that both members of low-income communities and racial minorities have been adversely affected by the virus and therefore deserve an increased chance of receiving treatment, the racial component drops entirely from consideration in recommendations, no doubt because such discrimination would be highly illegal and result in a torrent of lawsuits against the state and any hospital foolish enough to try it. The guideline is explicit that “no one is excluded from access based on age, disability, religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity and to ensure that no one is denied access based on stereotypes, perceived quality of life, or judgments about a person’s worth.” However, one can’t help but think that if racial discrimination were not illegal the logic of this guidance would dictate that it be undertaken in the name of “equality.”

What that list is lacking is a prohibition on discrimination based on socioeconomic status, which is the method the guidance suggests should be used for the purposes of weighing the lottery. Specifically, it recommends the use of the Area Deprivation Index, which is based on data from the 2015 American Community Survey. Hospitals would use the index’s Neighborhood Atlas to enter a patient’s address and determine if they are a disadvantaged community member.

One can’t help but feel that such a system is arbitrary to the extreme. When I entered my address into the Neighborhood Atlas I discovered that no one in my neighborhood would receive any weighted advantage if Remdisivir were needed. However, when I Google mapped the distance between my home and the nearest sector considered to be disadvantaged, I discovered that it was a mere two-minute drive away. Can anything based on something so arbitrary as five-year-old aggregated census block data be considered a useful tool for the fair rationing of treatment?

This entire scheme is just a taste of the ways medical care would be infected with politics if it were to be run by the government. In a system of socialized medicine would we see similar redistributionist schemes of rationing introduced? No doubt, many people of all political persuasions would view it as a fertile field for attempts at social engineering. Similarly, it is not hard to see politicians scheming to ensure that favored constituents and voting blocs have access to care at the expense of their opponent’s supporters, or that whole classes of people are purposefully and consciously disadvantaged based on whoever holds the keys to power at the moment.

The middle of a pandemic is no time for social engineering, but it is also not a time for state involvement in healthcare to begin with. That involvement has led to thousands of nursing home patients dying and has now led to a blatant redistributionist drug-rationing scheme. Further involvement is only going to make matters worse and continue to poison a crucial aspect of our lives with politics even more than it already is.

School districts across the nation are on edge now that we’re entering mid-August into September, when K-12 schools typically open. And during more normal times Fall sports like football are already in full swing in terms of practices, which in some places, for example in most parts of Texas, appears to be resuming as normal.

Many districts especially in the South are offering an ‘online option’ especially for middle through high school students while simultaneously opening their doors, albeit with strict safety measures in place, such as temperature checks and the wearing of masks.

But one Mississippi public school opened its doors as scheduled in early August, only to now be living the nightmare that most fear: “Roughly 100 students were sent home from a southern Mississippi high school on Tuesday after coming into contact with a teacher who was exhibiting mild COVID-19 symptoms,” The Hill reports.

Amid raging school board debates and varying opinions among administrators over re-opening, many who say schools should stay closed altogether this fall argue that the moment a cluster of COVID-19 confirmations emerges in any given school they are going to shut their doors anyway.

In this latest case in Gulfport, Mississippi it’s not even as yet clear whether the teacher actually has coronavirus. But while a test is pending students were sent home anyway “out of an abundance of caution to keep everyone safe,” the district said in a statement.

Any students and faculty that had contact with the teacher will enter a 14-day quarantine – again estimated at about 100 – not returning to campus, pending the teacher’s test results return, The Hill continues. In the case of a negative test, the school said classes will resume as normal. The school says social distancing measures have been in place. 

The whole episode presents a serious dilemma which high schools and hesitant colleges are sure to experience: assuming a school reopens, how much panic will ensue the moment students and teachers naturally catch common colds or other viruses? 

Outbreaks of various types of illnesses, or coughs, or also bacterial illnesses like Strep throat tend to be all-too-common on school campuses particularly in the fall and winter months.

It begs the question: will schools go on lockdown every time someone catches a common cold?

Add to this scenario the concern that many doctors and health officials have expressed, namely there’s a greater likelihood that after multiple months of much of the nation staying at home and social distancing, people’s immune systems tend to be much weaker, and thus could experience a ‘shock’ of sorts (in the form of illness) the moment individuals are back among crowds.

Two weeks ago we reproted that “in an uprecedented move, Congress proposes taxpayer-funded bailout Of $550 billion CMBS industry.” And now this: according to Chain Store Age, legislation has been introduced that would make “meaningful” temporary changes to bankruptcy laws, related to commercial real estate.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and supported by the International Council of Shopping Centers, would allow for the facilitation of commercial tenant rent deferrals and providing additional flexibility for small business tenants that file Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“The legislation will help businesses struggling with bankruptcy to weather the storm,” ICSC president and CEO Tom McGee said. “The bill provides significant relief to small business debtors and landlords. It also reinforces what many landlords have done since spring, as well as encourage deferred deals going forward.”

Under current law, rent deferral agreements waiving some or all of the current rent to be repaid in the future can be undone if the commercial tenant later files for bankruptcy. This risk discourages such agreements from happening. Specifically, Bankruptcy Code Section 547 deems the installment payments as “preferences” and commercial landlords can be forced by the court to forfeit such payments. 

The Tillis bill would prevent this from happening, providing “certainty” to business landlords, as well as tenants, according to ICSC.

Additionally, the Tillis bill would allow an extra 90 days for commercial tenants in bankruptcy to decide whether to continue with current leases. And for certain small businesses, the bill would give tenants the ability to spread the payment of some post-bankruptcy rent over a longer period. The extra time would provide liquidity to small businesses, preserving jobs and businesses, noted ICSC.

As we reported previously, a parallel attempt to bail out the ultra-rich investors who are holding impaired commercial mortgage-backed securities was introduced by Reps Van Taylor (R., Texas) Rep. Al Lawson (D., Fla.). According to the initial proposal, and as usual, taxpayers would end up being on the hook via the various Fed-Treasury JVs that will fund these programs, as any new money injected to rescue CMBS debt will by default be junior to existing insolvent debt as “many of these borrowers have provisions in their initial loan documents that forbid them from taking on more debt without additional approval from their servicers. The proposed facility would instead structure the cash infusions as preferred equity, which isn’t subject to the debt restrictions.”