Credit Acceptance Corp., the lender to car buyers with subprime credit scores, warned it’s seeing a sharp drop-off in payments as people shift their financial priorities to get through the coronavirus pandemic.
As unemployment soars, borrowers are putting off payments or “reallocating resources,” Credit Acceptance said in a regulatory filing Monday, explaining that it needs more time to publish a quarterly report.
New lending is also slowing as dealerships across the U.S. are forced to shutter their lots, the company said.
Ally Financial Inc. said on Monday that about 25% of its auto-loan customers have taken advantage of its payment-deferral program.
Forbearance Masks Problems
The filing by Credit Acceptance shows some consumers already can’t keep up.
Meanwhile, loan applications have plunged as dealers have closed their lots.
Archive Of Biden Accuser’s Mother Calling CNN Scrubbed From Google Play Catalog
An archived episode of CNN’s “Larry King Live” featuring a call from an anonymous caller later identified as the mother of Biden accuser Tara Reid appears to have been scrubbed from the Google Play catalog.
The August 11, 1993 broadcast is conspicuously missing from the catalog in between the August 10 and August 12 episodes, according to a screenshot taken by Twitter user @absinthol, who writes “CNN removed the August 11th, 1993 Larry King Episode from Google Play, the episode featuring a call from Tara Reade’s mother.”
“CNN is actively colluding with the Biden campaign to cover up evidence of Biden’s sexual assault,” the tweet continues.
CNN removed the August 11th, 1993 Larry King Episode from Google Play, the episode featuring a call from Tara Reade’s mother. CNN is actively colluding with the Biden campaign to cover up evidence of Biden’s sexual assault. pic.twitter.com/JqTcofIyqs
The Intercept broke the news that a transcript existed of the Aug. 11, 1993 broadcast, while Reade confirmed with Fox News that the woman on the call was in fact her mother, Jeanette Altimus.
“San Luis Obispo, California, hello,” King begins.
“Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him,” the caller says.
“In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?” King inquires – to which the woman says “That’s true.”
And now, it appears we have yet another example of Silicon Valley and CNN bending over backwards to help a Democratic presidential candidate – even if it means tossing a woman’s credible allegation of sexual assault in the dumpster.
OPEC and its partners have been cutting production since September 2016. Between September and November 2016 they cut production by more than 1.7 million barrels a day, a historical cut that was wrongly prolonged throughout the expansionary phase of the global economy. In December 2018 they cut production again.
OPEC’s most serious mistake in recent years has been forgetting its mission and principles and trying to artificially inflate the price of oil. No oil-producing country lost money at 2016 prices, the only thing they could not afford was to pay huge subsidies, civil servants and non-oil expenses that many OPEC members finance with export earnings.
This strategic error led to two negative effects for producing countries:
On the one hand, supply diversification and technological substitution accelerated. Customers responded.
And, on the other hand, the market share of OPEC fell to almost a decade-low.
The subsequent fiscal and monetary effects turned a strategic error into a disaster. The vast majority of these countries entered into significant fiscal and trade deficits (twin deficits) and, in the absence of local and international demand for their domestic currency, the vast majority increased their US dollar-denominated debt. With falling exports and dollar revenues, now they face a massive dollar shortage in the middle of a demand collapse.
Those production cuts, moreover, worked as an unintended subsidy to United States producers. The short-term rise in the price of oil due to the supply cuts meant an unprecedented capital injection for the North American oil industry, which was going through very dire financial times. OPEC bailed out shale and lost market share. This led to the United States reaching an all-time production record, beating Saudi Arabia and Russia in daily production.
Additionally, between 2015 and 2019 we witnessed an expansion of credit and historical levels of the global money supply. From China to the European Union, credit expansion was encouraged in such a way that investments of dubious profitability were financed at historically low rates, excess capacity and questionable oil investments were kept zombified and the companies that should have gone bust were kept alive through constant refinancing. issuing high-risk debt at increasingly lower yields. A tsunami of idle capacity was brewing despite the previously mentioned production cuts. New debt issued by the oil sector to finance investments and operations reached 200 billion US dollars a year, according to the Wall Street Journal … And with very low yields.
The oil industry became one of the main areas of malinvestment in the years of massive liquidity and low yields. This perpetuated excess capacity and kept inefficient companies unnecessarily alive. OPEC cuts added another layer of support that ultimately came back to bite producer nations.
Before Covid-19, there were dangerous signs of a slowdown in the energy world. The IEA (International Energy Agency) already lowered demand growth estimates in 2019 and warned of the pace of weakening. In June 2019, the Oil Market Report lowered demand growth expectations to 1.2 million barrels a day, a cut in estimates that it had also made in May and April of the same year. Global oil inventories were comfortably at the average of the previous five years and oil stored on sea was beginning to rise worryingly for a world that was apparently growing steadily.
America’s storage problems were already evident years before the Covid-19 crisis. The United States has a historic problem with the storage and evacuation of oil. Cushing storage issues surfaced already in 2007. Back in 2007, a price crash on WTI (West Texas Intermediate) occurred when a Valero refinery in Texas was temporarily closed. Storage filled quickly and the reference price of crude oil collapsed. The United States has 91 million barrels of crude oil storage capacity in Oklahoma, but most refineries are a long distance away or in other states, and there is an evacuation problem that was not solved when some major pipeline projects were halted by government and judicial decisions.
The oil market was showing a small backwardation curve in mid-2019, reflecting a reasonably positive environment for the sector, yet idle capacity and weakening demand growth were already evident. Then, Covid-19 arrived and, with it, the forced closure of the economy.
All of these factors have been key to the perfect storm, which was generated in April 2020 when the May WTI crude oil contract price came to a negative price. Storage capacity collapsed with slumping demand, which in March and April fell in the United States to the lowest levels seen since 1995. According to Bloomberg, oil demand in the United States would drop more than 9 million barrels a day in April. 2020, erasing all the consumption growth of the decade. The collapse of the price of crude oil led to monster “margin calls” and an urgent fire sale when nobody wanted to buy and those who could execute the contract had no place to store it.
In the most international benchmark crude (Brent) the situation is similar but not as dramatic. The price has plummeted more than 70% in 2020.
Crude oil stored in tanks has soared in 2020 to 3.2 billion barrels, and to this must be added hundreds of ships floating in the world’s seas with crude oil. At least 160 million barrels in ports from Singapore to Suffolk.
Worldwide, there is an idle capacity to store crude oil of around 1.4 billion barrels, not much considering the speed at which demand is destroyed and a point has been reached where many producers have to continue delivering barrels because shutting down production is more expensive than maintaining it, and others need to generate any possible cash. Demand, according to the IEA, may drop by 9.3 million barrels a day in all of 2020, with a slump of 29 million barrels a day in April.
Supply will likely be cut in 2020 by about 12 million barrels a day, but it is not enough to mitigate the destruction of demand or the lack of storage capacity.
Many market participants are wrong when they think that bankruptcies in the oil sector will balance the market and limit supply. When a company goes bankrupt, the assets are absorbed by another more efficient and debt-free business.
Governments all over the world are going to bail out their so-called strategic sectors, and the energy complex stands at the forefront of these actions. Betting on creative destruction to curb overcapacity will be a mistake. Governments and central banks will bail out the entire malinvestment binge of the past decade and, more importantly, incentivize even more overcapacity through massive stimuli, liquidity injections, and negative rates.
The oil market was already weak in 2019. Now it faces a cataclysm. Producers will have to adapt, as always, by adjusting costs. Cutting production only disguises the problem in the short term and creates more problems later, as we explain in The Energy World Is Flat (Wiley).
The reason why the oil market is broken is because it was not a free market. It benefitted from direct and indirect subsidies to create overcapacity and excess supply, and it has become a consequence of the excess in monetary and fiscal policies. The energy sector has become the clearest example of a “too-big-to-fail” mistake. Unfortunately, malinvestment will be -again-rewarded, and the oil market is likely to remain as inefficient and bloated as the coal and alluminium ones.
There will be volatility. But the long-term value destruction of the sector, both from state-owned and private entities, will remain.
Small Businesses In Catch-22 Begin Revolt: ‘Defy State’s Stay-At-Home Order Or Face Collections’
As some states begin hesitantly reopening aspects of their economies, many small business owners find themselves in a Catch-22, as one Atlanta fitness studio operator who says he lost a family member to a likely coronavirus-related illness describes.
“I am in a Catch-22,” Ramese Long – who had only opened his gym in January of this year – lamented, saying“I am anxious to get open. However, rolling the dice medically, I don’t think is a good idea.”
States like Georgia, Colorado, Florida, Texas and a handful of others have stay-at-home orders expiring by end of this month, and have signaled that restrictions will begin to be rapidly lifted. Colorado, Minnesota and Montana are among those planning further to drastically ease social distancing guidelines. And Tennessee plans to go so far as to allow restaurants to welcome diners at 50% capacity starting Wednesday, according to Governor Bill Lee.
File image via CNBC
But as decision-making regarding freedom to open or close is set to be transferred back to the individual businesses, it’s unclear just how fast things will actually get back to normal.
“For small-business owners, it can come down to life-or-death decisions, for their firm, for their employees and for their customers,” Bloomberg writes. “The tasks at hand are concrete: how to rearrange a restaurant to allow for social distancing and where to buy noncontact infrared thermometers. While many owners are struggling to obtain financial aid and simply get by every day, they wrestle with daunting questions: Is my business model viable at half-capacity and will the customers come back?“
Yet other states, considered to have been more hard-hit by the pandemic such as New York, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington, have yet to suggest any level of a timetable as to when businesses might resume.
Some health officials are advancing models which call for state-wide lockdowns to continueall the way into late June and early July. Researchers behind a University of Washington model that’s now making waves say that no state should open their economies before May 1.
Getty Images
While some sit on the fence in terms of the health risks of welcoming clients and customers – or at least fearing they won’t come back over negative perceptions – others in more restrictive states have taken matters into their own hands.
For example, despite California hair salons and barbershops being ordered closed across the state since March, at least two are making local and national headlines for defying the order:
After more than a month without income, two business owners in Auburn have decided to defy that order and reopen their doors to customers anyway.
For Clip Cage owner Breann Curtis, it was either defy the state’s stay-at-home order or face collections.
“I have to do what I have to do. I’m fighting to provide for my children and myself and my family right now,” explained Curtis.
A local FOX affiliate describes that the hair salons have lost thousands in income as debts are mounting.
They’re forced into a ‘defy or die’ situation, where they’ve out of desperation opted to open while implementing a vigorous sanitization regimen:
“It’s been very hard. I’m pregnant. I have children at home,” said Curtis.
Closing shop in March meant she could no longer work to support her family, missing out on thousands of dollars in lost income.
She’s not the only salon owner who reached their breaking point.
Tisha Fernhoff runs the Beauty Bar Salon in the same Auburn shopping complex and also made the call to open her doors.
“How much longer am I supposed to go down the rabbit hole before I just throw in the towel and go back to work?” Fernhoff told FOX40.
Hair salons and barbershops across the state have been closed since March under the state’s stay-at-home order. https://t.co/4TjKdpfYYx
They say they were denied applications for the Paycheck Protection Program. Meanwhile it’s unclear whether they’ll suffer legal backlash from local authorities.
In many instances across the US, police have visited local business – especially ones where people come into close contact like hair and nail salons, or gyms and massage parlors – to order them closed.
But as some states reopen, it’ll be all the more temptation for many businesses still in neighboring restricted states to take the early initiative and defy state and local closure orders.
Harvard University law professor has called for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling — claiming that the freedom to do so under our current laws is “authoritarian.”
“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Elizabeth Bartholet said in an interview with Harvard Magazine.
“I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”
Bartholet stated that there is “an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” with “very few requirements that parents do anything.”
“[P]eople can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves,” she said.
Bartholet also stated that homeschooling can make it easier for parents to get away with abusing their children and/or indoctrinating them with white supremacy and misogyny:
[I]t’s also important that children grow up exposed to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.
I do not, of course, want to minimize the absolute horror of child abuse. It’s disgusting; it’s heartbreaking; and anyone who isn’t a sociopath agrees that it’s necessary to protect our children.
Unfortunately, however, it’s also true that abuse is hardly something that can occur only in a child’s home. In fact, as Harvard grad and homeschooler Kerry McDonald pointed out in a letter to Harvard Magazine in response to its article, “many parents choose to homeschool their children to remove them from abuse at school, whether it’s widespread bullying by peers or, tragically, rampant abuse by teachers and school administrators themselves.”
“Banning homeschooling, or adding burdensome regulations on homeschooling families, who in many instances are fleeing a system of education that they find harmful to their children, are unnecessary attacks on law-abiding families,” McDonald continues.
What’s more, another of Bartholet’s suggestions — that the freedom to homeschool equals masses of children being painfully undereducated by illiterate parents — is as offensive as it is inaccurate. In fact, many, many children don’t simply receive an adequate education through homeschooling but an exemplary one that sets them up for greater success than any traditional school could have. As McDonald pointed out in her letter, although “there may always be outliers and more research is needed, most peer-reviewed studies on homeschooling outcomes find that homeschoolers generally outperform their schooled peers academically, and have positive life experiences.”
In any case, and even apart from all of this, Bartholet’s characterization of the freedom to homeschool as “authoritarian” is nothing short of absurd. A government allowing its citizens the freedom to educate their own children is not only not authoritarian, it is also the exact opposite of authoritarian. That’s a fact, and you don’t even need to know the first thing about homeschooling to understand that — really, you just need to know what the word means.
In terms of knowing about homeschooling, though, I can also say that I personally do know more than the average person.
I was homeschooled for fourth and fifth grade, and can confidently say that the two years I spent with my father as my teacher were responsible for countless positive outcomes in my life — ones that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. For example: Before I was homeschooled, I was struggling to learn math the way that the public school had been teaching it, and getting the chance to learn some fundamentals in a way that worked for my own particular brain was instrumental in making the subject much easier for me in the future.
But that wasn’t all. See, unlike math, I loved reading and writing. Those subjects had always come easily to me, and I enjoyed them. Homeschooling provided an advantage for me in this area, too. It allowed me to learn advanced aspects of grammar. I had the liberty to read works of literature that I wouldn’t have studied in a traditional school because they would have been “above” the designated level for my classroom. I wrote poetry and short stories about subjects of my own choosing. When I returned to public school in the sixth grade, the English lessons were things that I’d already learned — but fortunately, having had the opportunity to develop a love of writing and curiosity about books is something that kept me reading and writing what I wanted in my own time. Hell, I’m still doing it now.
Finally, it’s also patently ignorant how Bartholet aims to use the fact that children must be exposed to varying viewpoints and people while they’re growing up as some kind of argument against homeschooling. McDonald states that “research on homeschoolers finds that they are tightly connected with their larger community and may have more community involvement and participation in extracurricular and volunteer activities than schooled children due to their more flexible schedules and interaction with a wide assortment of community members,” and I’m not surprised. In fact, this was my experience exactly.
I mean, does Bartholet think not attending a traditional school somehow means that I never left the house at all? Because honestly, that couldn’t have been less true. I was quite active in my community, even participating in activities such as Girl Scouts with my friends from public school. I didn’t miss out on any of that.
In fact, I was actually exposed to far more experiences and perspectives specifically because I was homeschooled. I was able to act in community theater plays at multiple venues, interacting with all kinds of interesting people from various walks of life, without having to worry that a late-night dress rehearsal would make me too exhausted to learn in the morning because my schedule revolved around me. For the same reason, my family was able to take a random trip to New York City to see my father’s friend’s play — and within hours of arrival, I decided I was definitely going to move here when I grew up and work either on a stage, in front of a camera, or both. I had the luxury of learning from truly transformative, unique experiences, ones that I certainly wouldn’t have had if I’d been forced to spend that time square dancing in a gymnasium.
Harvard Magazine points out that “rapidly increasing” numbers of Americans are choosing to homeschool their children. (By “choosing,” by the way, I mean that this was true before coronavirus essentially forced this lifestyle on everyone.) Bartholet apparently sees this as some kind of tragedy that will lead to a future generation full of sexist Nazis who don’t know how to read, but this simply isn’t fair. No, homeschooling isn’t perfect for everyone, but it can and has worked uniquely well for many people, myself included. We shouldn’t be taking that option away, and certainly not in the name of stopping authoritarianism.
It isn’t hard to see how completely a**-backwards that “logic” is — after all, even a former homeschooler like me was able to figure it out.
New bull market? No. Unproven. New lows to come or a retest? No. Unproven.
Markets are engaged in a key battle between the worst evolving fundamental picture in our lifetimes on the one hand, and the largest set of liquidity injections in history. A looming $3.7 trillion deficit, a Fed balance sheets on a path to $10 trillion, zero rates as far as the eye can see and even calls for negative rates in the US with no plan or vision to ever extract ourselves from this future growth sapping venture. Record deficits, record debt, record unemployment are not a recipe for organic growth. Far from it. But let’s chase record liquidity injections.
The footprints of these liquidity injections can be found in the distortions in asset prices versus the fundamentals.
And this is what this market right now is all about, the three pillars: Fundamentals, liquidity and technicals.
Last week we saw a correction off of the key monthly 2oMA pivot (Just One Chart), this rejection produced a 170 handle correction on $ES, then more liquidity announcements on the side of the Fed on Thursday evening, and a new stimulus package by Congress to the tune of nearly half a trillion dollars and the correction was again saved, but has so far produced lower highs.
This is what it takes. Ever more intervention. But hopes for a structural quick recovery are misplaced. Recovery yes, but back to where we were? Hardly.
For a run down on the macro picture I encourage you to watch these two interviews belie if you haven’t seen them:
Firstly, my own take on things on the macro view via ABC in Australia this week:
Laugh with me at my buzzcut, cry with me at the reality of the situation we’re all confronted with.
Good conversation with @ElysseMorgan, thanks for having me on!
The liquidity injections can’t fix the economy, all they can do it goose asset prices above their fundamental worth.
Next week will be an important week in markets: A key new Fed meeting next week, what will they think of now? And of course we have month end with motivation to perhaps mark up stocks right in front of Sell in May? In addition, the big 5 mega cap tech stocks that have carried this entire market on the way up last year (and are again doing so now) will report earnings and speak to outlooks.
Be clear without these 5 stocks the entire index picture would look far worse than it now appears:
Be the massive divergence in equal weight vis-à-vis $SPX:
Or be it relative index performance (since the January 2018 highs):
The largest liquidity injections in history and 5 stocks only are masking the extent of the damage inflicted on markets. The bull market remains unproven. Bulls need to prove their case by getting above key resistance levels and then defend these areas as support. Without capturing these levels this rally here looks to follow the historic script of a bear market counter rally.
For the levels and this week’s macro and technical assessment please see the video below:
Please be sure to watch it in HD for clarity. To get notified of future videos feel free to subscribe to our YouTube Channel.
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For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.
Lindsey Graham Explains Why He’ll Be “Shocked” If North Korea’s Kim Isn’t Dead
The well-known hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham took to Fox over the weekend to explain he’ll be shocked if ongoing rumors and speculation about the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un don’t turn out to be true.
Graham told Fox host Jeanine Pirro that international reports are so rampant at this point that Pyongyang would otherwise be forced to offer proof that he’s alive. Instead there’s been deafening silence.
“It’s a closed society. I haven’t heard anything directly, but I’ll be shocked if he’s not dead or in some incapacitated state because you don’t let rumors like this go forever or go unanswered in a closed society which is really a cult, not a country, called north Korea,” the senator said.
Via Daily Express
He concluded: “So I pretty well believe he is dead or incapacitated”.
He added that the people of North Korea “will get some relief” if Kim is indeed dead, and that it remains in such a case that President Trump “is willing to do business with North Korea in a win-win fashion”.
Lindsey Graham believes Kim Jong-un is dead or incapacitated. He calls North Korea a cult and hopes the next leader will work with the president pic.twitter.com/GgfyNMrNmD
“So if this guy is dead, I hope the guy who takes over will work with President Trump to make North Korea a better place for everybody,” the Republican Senator and Trump ally stated.
Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made the comments late Saturday just two days following Trump saying in a Thursday press briefing he believed the early reports saying Kim died following a botched heart surgery were “incorrect”.
The rumor mill over the fate of Kim Jong Un has gone into overdrive, as the North Korean leader hasn’t been seen since April 11 – over two weeks ago.
And as the New York Times notes in a Sunday morning report, North Korea’s recent silence on Kim is indeed highly unusual, considering that rumors are flying that their leader is either dead or in a vegetative state, which has reportedly begun to send the local population in Pyongyang into a panic as international reports from outside the country seep back in.
Chinese company Da Jiang Innovations, the world’s largest maker of drones, has donated drones to 43 law enforcement agencies operating in 22 U.S. states to enforce social distancing rules.
Police in Elizabeth, N.J., for example, are using the drones to surveil residents in places where patrol cars can’t easily reach, such as spaces between buildings and back yards.
“If these drones save one life, it is clearly worth the activity and the information that the drones are sending,” Elizabeth mayor Chris Bollwage told MSNBC.
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned in a memo that DJI was “selectively targeting government and privately owned entities within these sectors to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive U.S. data.”
The Interior Department in 2019 grounded its entire fleet of DJI-manufactured drones, which had been used to surveil U.S. land, due to concerns that China was using the drones to gather data on critical U.S. infrastructure.
DJI has asserted that concerns about its drones are groundless.
“There are people who don’t like China but they are trying to score ideological points by trying to dicourage the use of equipment and important tools that save lives,” DJI spokesman Alex Lisberg told Fox News in response to allegations of spying.
Chinese authorities have deployed drones to police citizens breaking lockdown rules during the coronavirus pandemic. Footage gathered from police UAV’s shows the drones, operated by police on the ground, warning residents by loudspeaker to return to their homes. Residents of China have faced sweeping lockdowns in response to the coronavirus, with reports of authorities locking some citizens in their homes for quarantine.
Twitter Suspends Account Of Biotech Company Testing UV Light To Treat Coronavirus
Twitter has suspended the account of a Colorado biotech company which is working with Cedars-Sinai to test and develop a potential coronavirus treatment using UV light inserted into the lungs – the same week as Homeland Security’s head of Science and Technology, Bill Bryan, suggested that UV light could have a significant affect on viruses such as COVID-19.
UPDATE: @Twitter just suspended the account of the publicly traded biotech company AYTU BioScience that created a novel COVID-19 treatment approach utilizing UV light in the lungs that @realDonaldTrump was talking about.
The suspension of Aytu BioScience’s account comes shortly after YouTube removed a video demonstrating the technology (which can be seen below on Vimeo).
Wow. YouTube takes down biotech company’s video describing their novel UV light treatment for COVID-19 patients.
Here’s a screenshot of Aytu CEO Josh Disbrow sharing the now-removed YouTube video, while tagging the now-banned Twitter account.
Aytu’s “Healight” is a medical device which administers intermittent ultraviolet (UV-A) light inside a patient’s trachea, which has the “potential to positively impact outcomes for critically ill patients infected with coronavirus and severe respiratory infections,” according to a corporate press release.
The company is working with the Medically Associated Science and Technology (MAST) team at Cedars-Sinai medical center, and are seeking expedited FDA approval for near-term use of the technology.
Twitter and YouTube’s ban of Aytu couldn’t have anything to do with this, could it?
Maryland Joins Push To End Lockdowns As China Claims Coronavirus Has Been Eradicated From Wuhan: Live Updates
As the number of confirmed coronavirus cases around the world moves closer to the 3 million mark, more countries and US states are beginning the process of reopening their economies, while China and Singapore continue to struggle with rising numbers of new cases, forcing them to tighten restrictions all over again.
After reporting another single-day increase of nearly 1,000 new cases (almost all of them migrant workers, a persistent theme), Reuters reported that Singapore was taking a page out of China’s play book and rapidly building bed space for coronavirus patients in cavernous exhibition halls and other temporary facilities.
In some parts of China, authorities are closing gyms and swimming pools as the number of new cases continues to rebound. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, Chinese health officials on Sunday claimed that the city no longer has any coronavirus patients in hospitals, according to the Washington Post.
Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission, said the achievement was a result of the “hard work from Wuhan and health officials from around the country,” according to Chinese state media. China recorded only 11 more cases of the virus on Sunday and has had no new deaths for almost a week.
While in the US, millions are looking ahead with a mix of trepidation and anticipation as several states plan to dramatically reopen their economies during the coming week. Last night, we reported that the global coronavirus death toll surpassed 200k, with roughly a quarter of deaths reported in the US alone.
As the Washington Post examined each state’s plans for reopening on Sunday. The reporters pointed out that so far, the process of reopening has “cleaved largely along party lines, with some Republican governors moving to reopen key sectors and Democrats moving more slowly.” In states such as New York, where the virus has exacted its heaviest toll, there are no plans for letting up. In nearby Connecticut, businesses likely won’t reopen until June.
However, on Sunday morning, Maryland Gov Larry Hogan – a moderate Republican governing a typically blue state – became the first non-southern, non-western governor to declare his intentions to reopen despite a record jump in deaths in his state reported over the weekend. “I want to get our economy back opened just as soon as we can,” Hogan told ABC News on Sunday. He’s shooting to start the process in early May, meaning some ‘non-essential’ businesses might start reopening as soon as this week.
Since the states have largely taken the lead in fighting the virus, we’re surprised that the media hasn’t focused on the fact that high-tax states with more resources are largely planning to stay closed for longer, while states that collect less in tax revenues per capita are generally looking to reopen more quickly.
In Tennessee, restaurants will start reopening on Monday. In Missouri, the state is planning on allowing”almost every business” to reopen starting a week from Monday. And in Idaho, churches and other places of worship could be unlocking their doors by next weekend.
Even the states that are plotting their reopenings understand that the process must be controlled, or else risk reversing “all that we’ve accomplished,” as Iowa Gov. Brad Little warned. Still, many epidemiologists are less-than-thrilled about the reopening plans, since most states don’t have nearly enough testing capacity to adequately monitor their progress.
“We don’t have the resources in place to do the level of testing and contact tracing we need to make sure we’re monitoring this effectively,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. “We’re flying blind.” No matter how you slice it, states that are reopening first are willingly becoming test subjects in a high-stakes experiment. Nobody can say for sure how this will play out.
Georgia isn’t the only state that has opened up: Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt announced on Wednesday that salons, barbers and pet groomers would be allowed to reopen as of Friday. Though, to be sure, that’s only a handful of businesses in the grand scheme of things
Florida’s decision to reopen some beaches has been widely criticized by the MSM, but as WaPo admits in its latest story about the reopening, in many areas, beaches are the largest swaths of public land and basically analogous to public parks. Even states like New York and Connecticut haven’t closed their parks.
Whatever happens with the reopenings, as more Americans realize that many of the stores in their once-vibrant downtown areas are being emptied out of all inventory and quietly closing their doors, it’s becoming apparent that the US likely won’t see the true extent of these closures for weeks; even in Georgia, many small businesses that are technically allowed to reopen still haven’t for myriad reasons.
Outside the US, the biggest news on Sunday was Boris Johnson’s announcement that he will be returning to No. 10 on Monday and retake the reins as the debate about reopening rages in Britain. More conservative lawmakers are pushing to at least release a plan for reopening to ease the anxieties of the people.
Another reason for the reopening push: many small businesses are on the verge of collapse. More than half the owner-managed businesses in the UK will run out of cash within 12 weeks, according to a survey by accountancy network Association of Practising Accountants (APA), which has a network of tens of thousands of clients. Roughly 900 participated in the survey.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who has been running the country in BoJo’s stead, said the PM’s return would be “a boost for the country” as polls have shown the overwhelming majority of Britons want the PM in the driver’s seat.
In Spain, young children were allowed outside their homes on Sunday for the first time since the lockdown began as the Spanish government eases some restrictions while extending the lockdown to May 9.
Spain on Sunday reported its lowest daily coronavirus death toll in more than a month. And it wasn’t alone: Iran on Sunday reported its lowest number of deaths in 47 days as the government presses on with its rapid reopening to stave off a complete economic collapse.
Finally, in a tweet Saturday evening, President Trump announced the cancellation of future White House briefings.
What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!
