A 10-year-old boy—Gavin Carpenter of Colorado Springs, Colorado—was playing with a toy gun and pointing it at passing cars.
This angered one driver, who stopped his vehicle, berated Carpenter, and followed the alarmed boy back to his grandparents’ house. The driver eventually called the cops as well.
When officers from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office showed up, they arrested Carpenter for menacing the driver. This included handcuffing the kid, booking him, and taking his mugshot. He was charged with a felony, and had to complete community service in order to have his record expunged. His family spent thousands of dollars defending him.
That’s according to The Washington Post, which detailed the fraught efforts of Carpenter’s parents to convince the authorities to relent:
“I knew I did something wrong,” Gavin told KXRM, “but I don’t think I should have got arrested and taken in a car with handcuffs on and taken to a place to get mug shots and my fingerprints.”
His mother said she shared the story on Facebook to warn other parents who might allow their kids to play with toy guns without realizing the possible consequences.
“I couldn’t believe they were following through with this,” she told KRDO. “I was waiting for the call from the cops saying that they were going to let this go, warn them, tell them it was wrong.”
On Facebook, the mother said her family is eager to move away from Colorado Springs when her husband, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army, is stationed at another post in about three months.
This is the criminalization of teenage boyhood in action, and it’s as harmful as it is stupid. In what universe is it reasonable to arrest a child for felony public menacing stemming from an incident in which no one was harmed? Carpenter should have been sent to bed without supper, or grounded for a week. We want children to learn from their mistakes, but the punishment should always be proportionate to the wrongdoing.
The only lesson Carpenter is likely to learn from this ordeal is that the criminal justice system is capricious and unfair. That’s a worthwhile lesson but not one he should have to experience firsthand.
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The United States lags way behind China, South Korea, and even Italy in deploying wide-scale diagnostic testing for the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 respiratory illness. For example, China had 5 commercial diagnostic tests available a month ago and can now administer 1.6 million tests per week, according to Science. Private U.S. companies have similarly developed Covid-19 diagnostic tests. In fact, Europe uses, among others, a test developed by the Utah-based biotech company Co-Diagnostics.
In the meantime, U.S. health authorities have insisted on using a diagnostic test devised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that turned out to be flawed. In addition, the use of the CDC test limited testing to folks who had traveled to affected countries or who had come into contact with such travelers. This narrow focus was all but guaranteed to miss any community spread of the disease.
On February 29, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) loosened its regulatory stranglehold on Covid-19 diagnostic testing. On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar promised a “radical expansion” of testing by the end of this week. The good news is that on Tuesday, Co-Diagnostics was allowed to begin selling its Covid-19 diagnostic test in the U.S.
At a Senate hearing earlier today, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told lawmakers that he believed that manufacturers should be able to supply by Friday 2,500 test kits enabling laboratories to perform up to 500 tests per kit, amounting to the ability to administer more than 1 million diagnostic tests. Assuming the tests are available, people still have to be tested. On CBS’ Face the Nation this past Sunday, former FDA Commission Scott Gottlieb estimated that testing could be ramped up to 10,000 persons per day by the end of the week and up to 20,000 per day by the end of the following week.
Once more widespread testing takes off, we will have a much better handle on just how dangerous Covid-19 is compared to other epidemics of respiratory illnesses such as influenza. Right now, I am betting that it is likely to be no worse than a particularly bad flu season, with a case-fatality rate somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5 percent. That’s not great, but it’s not apocalyptic.
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“Project Kennedy”: JPMorgan Tells Thousands Of Workers To Work From Home
America’s largest bank is going on lockdown.
According to Bloomberg, JPMorgan is asking thousands of US-based employees to work from home in test of “virus contingency plan” for closing domestic offices should the coronavirus spread. As part of the test, managers have requested that about 10% of staff across its consumer bank work remotely as part of the plan’s resiliency testing, which has been code-named “Project Kennedy” (it wasn’t clear why JPM picked that name for the project). And since JPMorgan’s consumer bank has 127,137 employees, the most of any of the firm’s divisions, that means that over 12,000 workers will be working from home for the foreseeable future.
As the coronavirus spreads, banks around the world have been scrambling ensure they can keep their businesses running and avoid a worst-case scenario by restricting travel, splitting up teams and traders amid different locations, and quarantining staff. As Bloomberg notes, some are also “dusting off regulatory plans for keeping “critical operations” open through a potential pandemic, some of which describe things like how far apart traders should sit from each other, or how many can work remotely.”
The key test for JPM’s will assess its telecommuting policy on a sampling of employees across businesses to ensure kinks are worked out before the plan needs to be rolled out more broadly in the event of a pandemic, one of the people said.
In other words, JPMorgan thinks it’s just a matter of time before it gets… worse.
It wasnt exactly clear how JPM’s client-facing bank tellers will do their job by teleconference. While technology has made it possible for more professionals to do their jobs remotely, working from home generally isn’t an option for branch workers like tellers and bankers who deal directly with customers. JPMorgan had 4,976 branches around the country as of the end of December that are filled with thousands of employees who have to show up to work for business to run.
JPMorgan’s leaders have been double-checking contingency plans to be sure the firm can continue to serve customers in the event of widespread disruptions. The moves are part of broader resiliency planning at the bank. The firm last week followed the lead of major US corporations in restrictring non-essential international travel for all employees and has been urging workers to test their remote-access capabilities. JPMorgan has also been testing systems at backup trading sites over the past few days in case workers need to be moved off of the main trading floors in New York and London.
There is a silver lining: with hand sanitizer sold out virtually everywhere, the bank is providing that precious commodity – extra hand sanitizer – to customer-facing branch workers and taking extra steps to sanitize offices, branches and equipment, including elevator call buttons and door handles, according to a memo from Co-President Gordon Smith to consumer bank staff on Friday.
And just to nip any potentially viral problems at the bud, JPMorgan has been encouraging consumers to access bank services and products through digital channels instead of walking into branches when they can.
“This can make their life easier all the time,” Smith wrote.
With Super Tuesday Upon Us, Here’s What We’re Looking At From Now Till November
Super Tuesday is here – the first major milestone in the Democratic primaries that will set the tone for the rest of the 2020 election. Believe it or not,all of the primaries up till this pointhave amounted to just 4% of pledged delegates in the race. Super Tuesday, on the other hand, will see 34% of the overall delegates awarded.
Summing up what Super Tuesday’s results will mean for the rest of election season, Deutsche Bank‘s Karthik Nagalingam and Jim Reid have laid out a roadmap for the rest of the 2020 election season.
First, here’s a 2020 election calendar which notes the percentage of delegates awarded by state contest:
As far as the Democratic candidates go – in short, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) needs to score a decisive victorytoday in order to earn enough delegates to avoid a ‘brokered convention’, In particular, he’s looking to pick up as many of California’s 415 delegates as possible. He’s already got a 14 point lead in the state according to RealClearPolitics.
To win the nomination on the first ballot, the Democratic candidate must win a majority of pledged delegates – this year 1991 delegates. If no candidate has the required majority at the end of the first ballot, then the convention is contested, also known as a brokered convention (we will get into this more below) and goes to a second ballot and then on to subsequent ballots as needed. On the second and following ballots, the superdelegates are able to vote and now the winning candidate must secure a majority of the full 4,750 delegates, therefore 2,376 votes or higher. -Deutsche Bank
That said, DB notes that “No one” is likely to win the majority of pledged delegates unless Sanders wins something close to 50% of the delegates, and nobody comes close enough that the Democratic party would rally behind him out of fear of “alienating and disenfranchising just under half the primary voters.”
It is hard to project how exactly a brokered convention would unfold this far out and what the party and candidate machinations would be. It will come down to how the rest of the primary process unfolds, but one could see a world where Sanders has 30% of the vote and Biden or one more moderate candidate has just less than that and their voters decide to coalesce and try to say the party in aggregate wanted a more moderate candidate. Alternatively there is a scenario where Sanders ends up in the high 40s% and there is no close second place challenger and the party comes behind him for fear of alienating and disenfranchising just under half of the primary voters. -Deutsche Bank
If Sanders doesn‘t score a decisive win today, moderate Democrats will continue to rally behind this guy:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.. all men and women are created by… go… you know, the thing!”
This is the candidate that the Democratic Establishment is currently rallying behind. pic.twitter.com/GlKpblT3En
Who, has seen a serious surge in the last couple of days following his decisive victory in South Carolina last week, according to PredictIt.
The Democratic establishment has been circling the wagons around Biden as well, including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and former US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, both of whom endorsed the former Vice President on Monday.
Bloomberg, however, suggests that Biden’s surge still might not be enough to topple Sanders and translate that momentum into serious gains on Super Tuesday.
Sanders holds the advantage in key contests – including delegate-rich states like Texas and California – and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatens to play spoiler. So the risk for moderate Democrats is that the exit of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar is too little, too late.
…
Sanders – a self-described democratic socialist who many in the party fear would return President Donald Trump to the White House – seems certain to emerge with the most delegates. Biden’s task is to win enough support to stand as a credible challenger to Sanders as the primary calendar moves to frequent contests that stretch through June, a task that would be made easier by the growing support he’s received just since Saturday night. –Bloomberg
Meanwhile, Bloomberg – the candidate, not the news outlet, threatens to carve delegates away from the moderate Biden after pouring unprecedented personal resources into advertising his way into the nomination. If Biden is to stand any chance going forward, it’s clear that he needs to finish ahead of the former New York City mayor.
Bloomberg, if he wants to remain a contender, must blow past Biden today despite terrible debate performances and a slew of controversial past comments which have emerged to hurt the billionaire Democrat – who ran for NYC mayor as a Republican, and allegedly told a pregnant woman to ‘just kill’ her baby.
According to 11 polls released on Sunday and Monday, Bloomberg never placed higher than second place – and led Biden in just three of the 11 polls, according to The Hill.
Here are the candidates’ various positions. One point of agreement is that corporate tax rates will go up – effectively unraveling the 2017 Tax Act on businesses.
Still, as Deutsche Bank notes, “The most important takeaway from these policies for markets would be to measure what could they get done without a friendly Senate, given they could hold the House. We will have a much better idea of the probabilities later this summer as the Senate and White House races are decided and really start.”
Past the primaries
Once primaries are over by the end of the summer, the focus will shift to the Presidency and winning the Electoral College. There are 538 electors, for which a candidate requires an absolute majority of 270 electors to win the race.
In 2016, Trump won 306 electors in 30 states vs. Hillary Clinton at 232 in the other 20 states. Trump’s biggest electoral college victories were scored in the upper Midwest – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to the east – which he won by less than 100,000 votes combined, or roughly 1% in each state according to DB. Due to the slim margin, these will be important regions for Trump to win again in 2020, along with the “Sun Belt” swing states of Florida, New Mexico and possibly Arizona which has turned more blue in recent cycles (perhaps due to California transplants).
The map below shows the states that may be ‘solidly’ Democratic and Republican, having voted along those party lines over the last 5 elections. That is not to say they will all vote along the same lines in 2020 – as already mentioned, the vote spread in states like Arizona have been tightening. The final electoral college projection will need to be made in the summer after voters decide on who the Democratic contender is – a more moderate voter may be able to have better chances in southern swing states like North Carolina and Florida, while Sanders’s strength with young voters and independents may help him in states like Arizona and Colorado. -Deutsche Bank
Coronavirus curveball
While 95% of respondents in Deutsche Bank‘s monthly survey believe that President Trump will likely win a 2nd term – with 60% thinking it’s “very likely,” the research note mentions the potential impact of exogenous events such as the new coronavirus which has achieved ‘community spread’ in the United States (just two weeks after the CDC director said it would happen later this year, or next year).
The report notes that just 3 out of the 11 incumbents have been voted out of office since WWII – George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford, all of whom were impacted by rising unemployment going into November – which suggests that “an economic slump would damage Trump’s chance.”
President Trump is right to focus on the economy in his re-election bid, with historically low unemployment and strong consumer sentiment numbers. Nearly 7 months from the election, it looks like he should be in good shape on these metrics, outside of a large shock causing an inflection that we have yet to see. How Covid-19 develops over the spring and possibly into the summer could be key to this.
Also – consider that if coronavirus has gripped the country by November, the disease which is deadliest in older individuals may have an effect on who comes out to the polls.
Helping Trump is his strong approval rating, though he will likely need them to rise further in order to feel comfortable about his chances of re-election. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at the highs of his presidency – right around 50%, which is in-line with all of the other previous 7 presidents at the same point in their presidencies, according to DB.
So we’re looking at either Sanders or Biden vs. Trump, amid the potential backdrop of an exponentially worsening pandemic and its effects on people and the economy.
A 10-year-old boy—Gavin Carpenter of Colorado Springs, Colorado—was playing with a toy gun and pointing it at passing cars.
This angered one driver, who stopped his vehicle, berated Carpenter, and followed the alarmed boy back to his grandparents’ house. The driver eventually called the cops as well.
When officers from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office showed up, they arrested Carpenter for menacing the driver. This included handcuffing the kid, booking him, and taking his mugshot. He was charged with a felony, and had to complete community service in order to have his record expunged. His family spent thousands of dollars defending him.
That’s according to The Washington Post, which detailed the fraught efforts of Carpenter’s parents to convince the authorities to relent:
“I knew I did something wrong,” Gavin told KXRM, “but I don’t think I should have got arrested and taken in a car with handcuffs on and taken to a place to get mug shots and my fingerprints.”
His mother said she shared the story on Facebook to warn other parents who might allow their kids to play with toy guns without realizing the possible consequences.
“I couldn’t believe they were following through with this,” she told KRDO. “I was waiting for the call from the cops saying that they were going to let this go, warn them, tell them it was wrong.”
On Facebook, the mother said her family is eager to move away from Colorado Springs when her husband, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army, is stationed at another post in about three months.
This is the criminalization of teenage boyhood in action, and it’s as harmful as it is stupid. In what universe is it reasonable to arrest a child for felony public menacing stemming from an incident in which no one was harmed? Carpenter should have been sent to bed without supper, or grounded for a week. We want children to learn from their mistakes, but the punishment should always be proportionate to the wrongdoing.
The only lesson Carpenter is likely to learn from this ordeal is that the criminal justice system is capricious and unfair. That’s a worthwhile lesson but not one he should have to experience firsthand.
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The United States lags way behind China, South Korea, and even Italy in deploying wide-scale diagnostic testing for the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 respiratory illness. For example, China had 5 commercial diagnostic tests available a month ago and can now administer 1.6 million tests per week, according to Science. Private U.S. companies have similarly developed Covid-19 diagnostic tests. In fact, Europe uses, among others, a test developed by the Utah-based biotech company Co-Diagnostics.
In the meantime, U.S. health authorities have insisted on using a diagnostic test devised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that turned out to be flawed. In addition, the use of the CDC test limited testing to folks who had traveled to affected countries or who had come into contact with such travelers. This narrow focus was all but guaranteed to miss any community spread of the disease.
On February 29, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) loosened its regulatory stranglehold on Covid-19 diagnostic testing. On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar promised a “radical expansion” of testing by the end of this week. The good news is that on Tuesday, Co-Diagnostics was allowed to begin selling its Covid-19 diagnostic test in the U.S.
At a Senate hearing earlier today, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told lawmakers that he believed that manufacturers should be able to supply by Friday 2,500 test kits enabling laboratories to perform up to 500 tests per kit, amounting to the ability to administer more than 1 million diagnostic tests. Assuming the tests are available, people still have to be tested. On CBS’ Face the Nation this past Sunday, former FDA Commission Scott Gottlieb estimated that testing could be ramped up to 10,000 persons per day by the end of the week and up to 20,000 per day by the end of the following week.
Once more widespread testing takes off, we will have a much better handle on just how dangerous Covid-19 is compared to other epidemics of respiratory illnesses such as influenza. Right now, I am betting that it is likely to be no worse than a particularly bad flu season, with a case-fatality rate somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5 percent. That’s not great, but it’s not apocalyptic.
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On Sunday, March, 1, Peter Schiff appeared on Fox News to discuss the market and economic turbulence surrounding coronavirus. Peter said the coronavirus isn’t the real problem. It’s the Fed. Everything the central bank has done since 2008 has only made things worse and set us up for an even bigger crisis.
Peter opened up the interview saying that even with the big declines through the previous week, the US stock market is still significantly overvalued.
The market was priced for perfection and clearly we’re not going to get that. But the larger economic issue is not the coronavirus itself. If the US economy were fundamentally healthy, this virus wouldn’t make it sick. The problem is the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates so low for so long to artificially stimulate the economy, that it has inflated a gigantic bubble, and the coronavirus may be the pin. But the problem is not the pin, but the bubble that the pin pricks.”
The anchor pointed out President Trump thinks rates are artificially high. He wants cuts. Peter laughed.
No, no. Sure, the president wants to keep the bubble inflated long enough to get reelected. But if you remember, when he was a candidate and Obama was still in office, he was very critical of Janet Yellen doing political things. Look, everything the Fed has done since the 2008 financial crisis has only exacerbated the problems that created that crisis, which is why we’re on the precipice of a much larger one and why the pricking of this bubble is so risky. And if the Fed, of course, goes back to the drawing board and just cuts rates again, all it’s doing is throwing gasoline on the fire that it lit.”
Marco Rubio blamed China for the escalation of the coronavirus, saying the Chinese are more interested in protecting their global image than they are in containing the virus. But as Peter pointed out, the US has plenty of problems of its own.
Look, the Chinese government is not responsible for our massive budget deficits, our trade deficits, the fact that the Fed has inflated a stock market bubble or a bond market bubble. We’ve done this stuff to ourselves. We have pursued these policies that have left our economy so vulnerable. I mean, we have nothing saved for a rainy day and now even if we get a drizzle we have a crash.”
Paul Alan Levy (Public Citizen) moved to unseal the documents on Feb. 25 (see my post on his motion). A couple of South Carolina newspapers wrote about it here (briefly) and here (at length); and yesterday Judge Brian M. Gibbons ordered that the documents be unsealed:
The Court is issuing this Order sua sponte in its capacity both as the presiding judge and as the Chief Administrative Judge over the 6th Judicial Circuit. This matter was before the Court for a hearing on a summary judgement motion back on October 14, 2019. All parties entered into a Consent Protective Order in 2018 and subsequently entered into a Consent Order to Seal the record to keep certain deposition transcripts involving the parties confidential. The Court issued these orders primarily because all parties requested the same.
However, upon further reflection of the balancing factors set forth In Rule 41.1 of the SCRCP, the Court finds the drastic remedy of sealing the record in this case, even though presented lo the Court as a Consent Order, is not appropriate. As such, the Court vacates the Consent Order lo Seal and Consent Protective Order previously issued.
The judge issued the order “sua sponte,” which might have allowed him to unseal the case without waiting for a response; but it seems pretty clear that the unsealing was prompted by Paul’s motion—as usual, Paul gets results.
Thanks to Prof. Eric Robinson (Univ. of S.C.) for the news about the order.
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Paul Alan Levy (Public Citizen) moved to unseal the documents on Feb. 25 (see my post on his motion). A couple of South Carolina newspapers wrote about it here (briefly) and here (at length); and yesterday Judge Brian M. Gibbons ordered that the documents be unsealed:
The Court is issuing this Order sua sponte in its capacity both as the presiding judge and as the Chief Administrative Judge over the 6th Judicial Circuit. This matter was before the Court for a hearing on a summary judgement motion back on October 14, 2019. All parties entered into a Consent Protective Order in 2018 and subsequently entered into a Consent Order to Seal the record to keep certain deposition transcripts involving the parties confidential. The Court issued these orders primarily because all parties requested the same.
However, upon further reflection of the balancing factors set forth In Rule 41.1 of the SCRCP, the Court finds the drastic remedy of sealing the record in this case, even though presented lo the Court as a Consent Order, is not appropriate. As such, the Court vacates the Consent Order lo Seal and Consent Protective Order previously issued.
The judge issued the order “sua sponte,” which might have allowed him to unseal the case without waiting for a response; but it seems pretty clear that the unsealing was prompted by Paul’s motion—as usual, Paul gets results.
Thanks to Prof. Eric Robinson (Univ. of S.C.) for the news about the order.
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Purell Run Starts, Sold Out Across The Country Amid Pandemic Fears
Hours after the Surgeon General urged people to “stop buying masks” on Saturday morning, tweeting that they’re not effective in preventing the general public from catching Covid-19, a run on masks, hand sanitizers, and food began across the country at Costco stores amid fears of a pandemic.
We noted in a weekend post that 3M N95 masks had been sold out across the country for some time. Any remaining supply is on Amazon, where sellers have marked up some masks by over 10x in the last month.
New reports have surfaced a run on Purell, a multi-surface disinfectant spray, started last week and continued into the weekend, with bottles running out at brick and mortar stores, and prices surging on Amazon.
Bloomberg says Amazon is “clamping down on price gouging for products that supposedly prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, but at least some online resellers appear to be still making money hand over fist.”
In one instance, a $2 Purell bottle was selling on the e-commerce platform for $20 last week, a 10x jump as shortages of health products to shield people from the virus has developed.
On the hunt for hand sanitizer? You’re not alone. Brian snagged the last two travel size bottles at the Walgreens on Denny. The CVS and Bartell’s we’ve been to are wiped out. That small bottle retails for about $2 – on Amazon, a 2-pack is going for $20 #KOMONewspic.twitter.com/GAexD2EUdj
Another instance of price gouging on Amazon was seen when another seller offered a pack of two 8-ounce bottles for over $100.
When I couldn’t find hand sanitizer at Fred Meyer, I turned to #Amazon. But $114.97 for a 2 pack of Purell??!!Check out how #coronavirus concerns are driving up prices. pic.twitter.com/ygbipBflMY
Amazon said it purged sellers from the platform last week after it found many were jacking up prices of facemasks, disinfectant, and cleaning supplies. The company said it continues to monitor sellers that violate its policies.
Last week, CVS, Walgreens, and other pharmacies across the US warned hand sanitizers, facemasks, and cleaning supplies were running low as an influx in demand has been seen since the CDC spooked Americans about a “community spread” of the virus.
“This demand may cause temporary shortages at some store locations and we re-supply those stores as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for CVS said.
On Tuesday morning, a quick search on Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and CVS online stores reveals that Purell continues to be ‘out of stock’ across the country.
