The Wall Street Journal reports Marriott Begins Furloughing Tens of Thousands of Employees.
Marriott International Inc., the world’s largest hotel company with nearly 1.4 million rooms world-wide, said it is starting to furlough what it expects will be tens of thousands of employees as it ramps up hotel closings across the globe.
The company began shutting down some of its managed properties last week, a Marriott spokeswoman said. The employees at these properties won’t be paid while on furlough but the bulk will continue to receive health-care benefits that are ultimately paid by the hotel owner, she added, which for the vast majority of the brand’s properties isn’t Marriott. Marriott is also trimming staff through furloughs at properties that are still operating.
In the U.S., about 130,000 employees are on the Marriott payroll, the company said.
Occupancy levels at Marriott’s and other hotels throughout the U.S. have plummeted to 20% or lower, and many hotels are in single digits, hotel owners say. As a result, hundreds of hotels across the U.S. are expected to close their doors Tuesday or later this week, and many have already started the process by giving employees notice, owners said.
Fiscal Hit
Bloomberg reports From NYC to San Francisco, America’s Shutdown Brings Fiscal Hit
In New York City, the virtual shutdown from the coronavirus pandemic is threatening to create massive holes in the budget as billions of dollars in tax revenue disappears.
No one has a handle on how vast the toll will be on the nation’s local governments as much of the U.S. economy grinds to a halt, leaving it a near certainty that the economy is heading into the first recession in over a decade.
But the unprecedented uncertainty of how long and severe it will be is wreaking havoc in the $3.9 trillion municipal-bond market, which is usually a haven from financial market turmoil. Investors are pulling out their cash, bond prices are sliding, and even the potential for states and cities to raise funds is temporarily drying up as Wall Street banks put new debt deals on hold.
Even before the stepped-up directives to reduce crowds to curb the spread of the virus, ridership was down nearly 19% on New York City subways on March 11 compared with a year earlier, while morning commuters on the Metro-North Railroad fell 48% on March 12, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Rush for Jobless Benefits Crashes New York State Website
The New York Times reports Rush for Jobless Benefits Crashes New York State Website
The sudden flood of laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits swamped New York’s Labor Department on Monday.
After Mr. Cuomo waived the usual seven-day waiting period to apply, workers who had been let go over the weekend immediately tried to replace some of their lost income. Within hours, frustrated applicants were complaining on social media about not being able to apply online. Some said that the state’s system was crashing throughout the day.
“We are seeing a spike in volume that is comparable to post 9/11 but make no mistake, anyone entitled to these benefits is going to receive them in a timely manner,” department spokesperson Deanna Cohen said.
How Far Does $1,000 Go?
The stock market is surging this afternoon on news the Trump administration might start sending out $1,000 checks as part of an $850 Billion Stimulus Package.
But how far does $1,000 go?
For those laid off for three weeks or longer, that $1,000 will be used up pronto.
Three Weeks Without Pay
For example, San Francisco legally prohibits residents from leaving their homes except to meet basic needs including visiting the doctor, or buying groceries or medicine, until at least April 7.
That’s three weeks without pay.
The San Francisco minimum wage is $15.59 per hour.
Wage Math
$15.59 per hour * 40 hours per week * 3 weeks = $1,870.80.
How long will the hotel workers be furloughed? Casino workers? Airline employees?
Boeing employees (and they make far more than $15.59 per hour).
If You Need to Be Somewhere, Get There Before You Can’t
In regards to the San Francisco shutdown, please consider If You Need to Be Somewhere, Get There Before You Can’t.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
so we want the companies to go bankrupt paying employees that are laid off ? That sounds like a socialist agenda to me.
Orange, California just issued this:
The Rumanian Army could fit through those exemptions.
Wouldn’t this be the best time to introduce the Minimum Basic Income program (at least in phases) as much of the population will be without work and the scheme will be better received as it will be seen as a response to an epidemic rather than one due to AI/Robotics/Automation?
$1000 may go further than you think, when you consider that people will also get unemployment, food stamps, medicaid, and many more programs, plus that they will not be going out to spend any money. I suppose the people for whom every meal comes via Door Dash may have high expenses….
Carl, you seem to have a very distorted opinion about the level and ease at which people can be admitted to these programs. If workers were on the job long enough and furloughed through no fault of their own they will get unemployment after a two week waiting period. But, Food Stamps and Medicaid no. For food stamps you pretty much have to have either dependent children or be terminally ill. At least for single people. And it does not happen overnight, it can take months to get these things even if you do qualify. For one thing you have to prove you have no assets. Even owning an old beater car will get you disqualified, you have to liquidate all assets and spend down. We went through this when my stepfather had terminal brain cancer. It was a nightmare and almost a year of zero income until he was safely on MediCal, and food stamps, but there were no many other programs, that is all he got, my mother had to divorce him, he had to sign over a chunk of basically worthless industrial land he had forgotten he even owned. Anyone with any kind of retirement savings has to cash out and live off that and then apply when it is gone, and by the way even then these programs will only help if you are somehow permanently disabled and have an income below the poverty level. Even then the county/state offices that award assistance will want proof you filed for SSI and that can take years. SSI stands at $1,000 per month. I know it is crazy to think someone can get by in poverty at that income but that is what it is. Single able bodied adults just do not qualify for these programs. If you have no kids and are not sick yourself with a permanent disabling medical problem and collect unemployment you will get none of those things. You go into those offices and they will just tell you to get a job. It is possible that the government will announce a temporary lifting/softening of all those conditions, but unlikely.
Why do you think we have millions of homeless people?
A purely inflationary move beyond the short term.
Because money (the things people want) doesn’t really grow on trees.
Mike or anyone, How’s all those pension funds doing that were way underfunded when the Dow was at 29,000? Especially the Chicago public employee’s funds?
🙂
They’re toast. Collapsing asset prices, blown out spreads, rising long-term interest rates will kill them.
Public pensions are indeed in big trouble. However, bailouts in Biblical proportions are coming. The boomers will have their pension funds recapitalized by the drunken Moneterist fearing Civil unrest.
Pension funds promised 6-7% real returns in a 2-3% real return world. And held onto that fantasy long enough for con men to loot them. That’s the real problem. Not “low interest rates”.
Futures is down hard right now. Never seen this kind of volatility in my lifetime.
My view is if we have to bail out companies to save jobs , I’m typically opposed but if we have to then equity must get wiped out. Some of these companies were grossly mismanaged. UAL bought back massive amounts of stock, Boeing had the 737-max disaster. It’s not like anyone is going to clawback that money. There must be consequences for getting government money.
I wonder if the best policy isn’t what England is doing: tell the people at higher risk to isolate themselves, and let it burn through the low risk population, at which point herd immunity renders the virus unable to spread. Minimal (a very relative term) damage to the economy.
It could be the US is taking the worst possible path: economy tanks, and without draconian quarantines or a vaccine the disease comes to a halt only with herd immunity anyway. Possibly a much larger loss of lift.
Hard to tell, it will be interesting to see what pans out in England.
At my work, we’re going to shift work so that the number of people in the building goes from 13K to only 4K. Yeah, that will help a whole lot…. I need to play some high stakes poker with the CEO. Bottom line, since my work is “indespensible” and can’t be done via telework, there are going to be 13,000 possible (likely?) carriers in the local area, which I would think would cancel out the effectiveness of shutting down schools, restaurants, etc etc. Perhaps the Limeys have it right.
So far we don’t know if the human body can develop antibodies against COVID 19. As for shutting down everything they did, I think politicians are playing the “Never let a crisis go to waste” card.
Chris Martinson has already been through this on one of excellent podcasts.
Chinese research has shown that previous infection doesn’t guaranty immunity with this virus.
Indeed there’s a case at the moment in Japan where a patient cleared two weeks ago has already been reinfected.
Chris’s take is that there will be no real immunity until a vaccine is developed and released.
This is good information, thanks!
Holy crap. The Fed’s going to extend money and accept stocks as collateral. Market going to 100K!!!
We are the best country in the world. The Japanese have nothing on us!!!
We go big or we go home. So it’s either Dow 100K or Dow 0k. We don’t do small things. 😉
But the Japanese stock market is still down over 50% from 30 or so years ago. At least the BOJ bought stocks cheap, I guess, unlike Boeing’s incompetent executives.
The BoJ didn’t buy stocks. They bought stability. Japan as a country and society has quite a few issues, but it’s still my favorite country to visit, and I’ve visited quite a few.
I’m not sure I understand your reply. The BOJ has purchased an enormous number of shares as part of its QE operations. The BOJ owns 77.5% of Japan’s ETF market. Are you saying the BOJ made these share purchases in order to buy stability?
In any event, I’ve also been to Japan and had the pleasure of climbing Mt. Fuji to watch a sunrise. It is certainly a beautiful country.
Yes, that’s exactly what I was saying. It might be temporary stability and that alone might be a mistake, but certainly they weren’t buying to make a profit. After all they are so huge now, they can’t sell them off without sustaining a huge loss.
Time is money, and that’s all they did. Bought some time. Honestly though, that’s all old people thinking. The older generations couldn’t and still can’t face the loss from the huge bubble from the 1980s. That’s stupid, but at the same time, crime has continued to drop, etc, etc, so maybe it’s not a bad thing after all. Everything in life has tradeoffs.
Oh, OK. I still watch Japan because I fear that is the path the US will take as it pursues bailouts and QE. Like Japan, the US can probably buy some level of stability but at the cost of future growth and opportunity. What happened in Japan can happen here if bad debts and zombie companies are allowed to survive. I don’t think a lot of stock investors appreciate that possibility. Japan is proof that not every crash in share prices is temporary.
Let’s not forget the many people in the “gig” economy who technically have not been laid off, but demand for their services has shrunken considerably. Sure, no one told them it was a good idea to depend on that income, but many, many people do and now they do not qualify for any unemployment.
And you thought the Fed was out of bullets! Nope, it just beginning. If the government did this without the Fed, interest rates would rise. But, a new version of Operation Twist will make sure more reckless government spending ensues.
Central banks were created to allow goverment to spend recklessly during wars. Now it to bail out Wall Street and the oligarchs that defacto run the government.
Trillions have already been announced to aid companies, reserve requirements at banks ended, interest rates at zero, a $850 billion bailout plan cooking up within a couple weeks will pay out. And now the Fed has announced they are going back to the Primary Dealer Credit Facility that doled out more than $9 Trillion to banks back in the GFC. They are also planning to get into the commercial paper market in a big way. The Fed wants to encourage banks to make riskier loans to businesses that have riskier profiles.
All of these measures taken together are pretty much a communist takeover of our economy with central banks becoming the only buyer and funding all company activity while we sit at home not getting paid.
This is BIGGER than the GFC.
The bars didn’t close during the wars.
They have no problem spending trillions on banks. So freeze all rent seeking behavior and let the banks take the blow. No rent, no mortgage, anywhere. Deal with it at the bank level.
I ‘give’ everyone $1 milllion tonight. What happens tomorrow, especially under quarantine conditions. You go to the car dealer to buy a Porsche but the salesmen aren’t there because they gone looking to buy a new house but the sales agents aren’t there to sell it because they are at the boat dealer looking to buy a yacht.
You can’t juice demand with no supply and, under present conditions, you’ll only create a shortage of toilet paper.
From Ron Paul:
Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.
It is ironic to see the same Democrats who tried to impeach President Trump last month for abuse of power demanding that the Administration grab more power and authority in the name of fighting a virus that thus far has killed less than 100 Americans.
Declaring a pandemic emergency on Friday, President Trump now claims the power to quarantine individuals suspected of being infected by the virus and, as Politico writes, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease.” He can even call out the military to cordon off a US city or state.
State and local authoritarians love panic as well. The mayor of Champaign, Illinois, signed an executive order declaring the power to ban the sale of guns and alcohol and cut off gas, water, or electricity to any citizen. The governor of Ohio just essentially closed his entire state.
The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the seasonal flu, a claim without any scientific basis.
On Face the Nation, Fauci did his best to further damage an already tanking economy by stating, “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.” He has pushed for closing the entire country down for 14 days.
Over what? A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide and less than 100 in the United States? By contrast, tuberculosis, an old disease not much discussed these days, killed nearly 1.6 million people in 2017. Where’s the panic over this?
If anything, what people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse. The martial law they dream about will leave people hunkered down inside their homes instead of going outdoors or to the beach where the sunshine and fresh air would help boost immunity. The panic produced by these fearmongers is likely helping spread the disease, as massive crowds rush into Walmart and Costco for that last roll of toilet paper.
The madness over the coronavirus is not limited to politicians and the medical community. The head of the neoconservative Atlantic Council wrote an editorial this week urging NATO to pass an Article 5 declaration of war against the COVID-19 virus! Are they going to send in tanks and drones to wipe out these microscopic enemies?
People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus “pandemic” could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit – financially or politically – from the ensuing panic.
That is not to say the disease is harmless. Without question people will die from coronavirus. Those in vulnerable categories should take precautions to limit their risk of exposure. But we have seen this movie before. Government over-hypes a threat as an excuse to grab more of our freedoms. When the “threat” is over, however, they never give us our freedoms back.
“A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide…”
A give these days is when someone bases their argument on TODAY’S numbers. As if the future is irrelevant, haha. Have to pretty dense to do that. Every epidemiologist on the planet is projecting that hospitals in the US and EU are in danger of being overrun with COVID cases in the next several weeks.
What are these people going to say on December 31st when “only” 50,000 or 100,000 people died from this virus in 2020 — “see, that wasn’t so bad” ??!!
The seasonal flu kills ~50k people in the US alone. Extending this number worldwide I’m sure the deaths due to flu are >$250k, the number that seems to scare you. This flu may be a bit more deadly, but not much more. Ron Paul is right. What about many other illnesses that cause much greater number of deaths? The bigger harm is the economic consequences of the fear and panic that has gripped the public and govt in the US. He’s right to point the finger at the fearmongering by the CDC and the media. Of course the media love a story with a strong emotional hook (fear) like this one.
Another 50K dead in the US isn’t scary? Hmm. Do you know that without social distancing that number wouldn’t be 200K or more? If so, please pass on the knowledge.
Not to say I think this is being handled well by our bureaucratic, power-lusting overlords. Sounds like massive testing MIGHT have mitigated some of the need for extreme social distancing, but big government squeezes out rational activity. As is, we shall see if hospitals in NYC and elsewhere won’t be overflowing with critical cases all at once — something the flu does NOT do.
I never thought there would come a time when I would actually agree with Ron Paul, but now I do. Fearmongers are driving the hysteria. You would think that people were dropping dead in the streets, yet there are only 100 deaths in the whole USA so far.
So what is his big mouthed kid doing now? Why is the right so quiet? I never thought it would be possible to shut them down.
URL?
The number of deaths is increasing by 13% daily in Italy, with 2500 deaths currently. That rate of increase is dropping, but nowhere near fast enough to avoid hitting 10K within the next few months. There’s 60 million people in Italy. If the same thing happens among a fifth of the world population, that means 250K deaths.
Slowing all of this down means fewer deaths for a few obvious reasons: don’t overburden medical providers, and buy time until vaccines and antivirals exist.
Maybe the people who don’t put much value in slowing the death rate just don’t like their parents very much?
I do appreciate Ron Paul’s point that governments are making a tremendous power grab here. Thousand-dollar checks from the US Treasury to tens of millions of Americans in 2020, when the annual deficit was already going to be $1T, is better than the most retarded regressive could have hoped for.
Ridiculous assertion we have proof. Stop reading idiotic propaganda sites
The government is a leech planning to suck on it’s own blood since the former host is broke. Won’t last long.
oh for gosh sakes , expand the weeks covered by unemployment insurance .
Prez Ford did that when I got laid off as a carpenter. There was 50 percent unemployment in construction. Went to grad school in Finance to figure out what happened. Good job Gerald.
And it stayed that way for a long time, they also did it during the GFC under Obama, good job Obama. I did what you did when I was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 1979, went back to school for a degree in finance, but unemployment in my county in California was over 33% and Carter had set up the CETA program. I got a job with them in the local redwood state park for almost two years starting when I was 21 and it was the best two years of my life even though it only paid $7.25 per hour. Government CAN help in hard times. I am pretty sick of younger people thinking baby boomers had it so easy, I would not have had to go into the service except that when I graduated high school college was OUT OF THE QUESTION, we did not have all these student loans, if you could not pay and had no schalorships you became a waiter or maybe went into a trade. But, when unemployment is 30% like in 1975 in my hometown those options are already filled. That is why I get so peeved when I hear people bitching about their student debt, why did they OPT to get into that debt and who held a gun to their head to sign those loan docs? Oh right, they are special and deserved a college education. What they do not understand is that MAYBE some of the first babies born in the post war era did have it pretty good, but all their younger brothers and sisters were always at the end of a very long line for education and jobs. That was why government first started setting up these programs in the first place. There were way more people than slots in schools and jobs. And unlike the first ones born we were still kids when OPEC decided to shatter the global economy and Nixon took us out of the Bretton Woods arrangement. We graduated to minimum wages if we could get a wage at all.
Unemployment insurance doesn’t actually cover many of the unemployed.
Government botched it in china. Botched it in italy. Botched it here…. clearly we need to give them more power
We need a freeze on payments with deadlines. The economy flows from the bottom up not the top down.
but profits are vacuumed up and therein lies the rub
Tax deadline for people and small businesses have been extended 90 days.
I’m not worried about taxes on no income. I’m worried about my rent on my business space. But the owner of the property, has to pay the bank on the loan. It all leads back to banks.
Good Gawd, most people and purportedly the entire financial system one step away from catastrophic default and collapse. And the only solution that people and companies and banks and funds of all sorts will be able to think of is for gov to take on greater powers.
Guns for the win!
You sound surprised ..
I bet the Lumpy Trumpy StopNFleece Hotel chain is first beneficiary of this benevolent disbursement of wished-into-existence cash.
Ed McMahon for Federal Money Clearing House: “Congratulations, Your a Winner”!
$1000 a month even in Midwest.you do not need to be in San Francisco with a high rent to need more than $1,000 for three f****** weeks. But I do appreciate the sentiment in the thinking.
I doubt anyone will be allocating their scarce funds to rent. During a lockdown, eviction is pretty unlikely.
There is no way the Fed can replace the income and products produced by the entire nation. If this goes on for more than a month, future stimulus programs will entail money printing on a scale previously considered incomprehensible.
quintillion, sextillion and so on. Many of us have known for years where this was all headed just no one knew when or how. Ive been told im an idiot so many times I finally threw away my tin foil hat and now look at it.
I clicked ‘like’ but it ignored me, just had to say thanks for the best laugh of the day.
Yep, you nailed it. Get ready for a brand new financial system. Sooner than you ever imagined.
These people will lose medical, can’t afford cobra and much of this $1000 will go straight to the pharmaceuticals.
This has got to stop. $23.5 trillion in just Federal debt, not including states, corps and personal, money for half a dozen credit markets, money here, money there … Trump always could scam a bank for $ before he wound up with no one left for funding except Duetschebank. But in his mind, spare no expense and borrow whatever to win and stay out of jail. Who cares about 2030. This is crazy. There are limits.
1,000 bucks won’t help in an economy in such a sorry shape for such a long time,million a piece maybe.Bigger question is…what happens when those govt checks stop?Those govt handouts stop?those govt bailouts stop?Those govt subsidies stop? Those govt this stop? Those govt that stop???
Mp worries for me. I am going to spend it all on lottery tickets. Win BIG!
President Trump said the economic distress companies like Boeing are in is not their fault. I beg to differ. Boeing and others like it have been systematically extracting capital by using debt to buy their own stock, leaving them very vulnerable to a market downturn. Risk management is part of reasonable corporate governance and they did not do that. It is totally their fault.
So, here we are back to privatizing gains and socializing losses under these circumstances. It has to stop. If not, then we are really more of a fascist society than a capitalist society.
Government needs to help individual people get through this; corporations that loaded up to the eyeballs on debt, not so much. The assets of those corporations will still be there and can continue to be productive, but they should go through bankruptcy and an ownership change.
I want to give this a 1000 likes if I can. I don’t always agree with AOC, but she nailed in on this one. Bail them out, but ZERO corporate buybacks. Replace whole management.
But nah, this is a BANANA republic.
As far as AOC goes, when you make random statements you are bound to hit the bulls eye once in a great while.
AOC is a whole lot smarter than the right gives her credit for….
Bartenders will say anything you pay them to say. they all have their price.
Now we get to a real crises of our own making….will be interesting to see if Trump will allow Powell to open the spigot to Germany and China again? 15 trillion line of credit to the world’s banks in 2009, will take more than 30 trillion this time
You don’t just replace “management.” You take over all equity, and then sell it to the highest, or only, or whatever bidder the next day.
Or, you take all equity, hand it all to Fauci, tell him to do whatever hew wants with it with the sole and only goal of minimizing virus casualties come what may, and then hold off firesaling it until new daily cases drop below 10 or 50 for a few weeks.
One way or the other, without the complete takeover and subsequent firesale of all “assets” requiring even a penny of government of Fed support, this “nation” is such a complete and utter irredeemable dump, that the virus, or Xi, may as well have it all.
back to privatizing gains and socializing losses? when did we leave away?
Stock buybacks used to be illegal. How much cash can they save before they become a hostile takeover target? Remember Bendix vs Martin Marietta?
Exactly.
Marriot will be renamed into …. MAGA Hotel
Trump is looking for franchisees now.
Let’s have winners and losers chosen by government, i.e. at gun-point, because that’ll be fairerer than leaving people to use their own brains. Guns for the win!
we’ll be lucky to keep this at 25% unemployment….
Employment dropped ~25% during the Great Depression. That record can easily be shattered because of the pandemic.
The market is far outpacing 1929…
This situation has the potential to make 1929 look like a mild recession….
My great concern is that back-in-the-day (1929), people stood in-line with a coat and tie and did so without pushing, shoving and fighting. Today, society is compromised of animals..
The site loads and freezes the page for me now :/ . A Java error because with it off it loads fine but no functionality. No longer asks for cookie permissions, blocks as soon as function bar appears at bottom of screen, whether in mobile or pc view. The independent reply box to an article is back though, haha. Had to scroll down to comments to write this before it blocked. Android/Monument browser.
Repored – Thanks
Welcome . This is the bar I mean, even after closing the X. As soon as it loads it freezes.
The browser is up to date and works with every other site. Had to scroll to comment without Java, then enable java and reload, and it jumped to the comment before freezing, to reply. Ha.
windows 7 – no problem
Mr Bond Market has spoken.
He does not care for it. Both 10 yr and 30 yr up around 30 bps. With $US (dxy) strong around 100, the Federal Reserve has room to step up QE if necessary.
Has the Bond Market just twigged? The Fed Will be extremely worried. They’re used to pushing yields down with QE. Stopping them from rising is a different ball game. More free money on the way, more fiscal stimulus? A bottomless pit, supposedly. I wonder.
Good. Let’s get this over with. Fiat currency implosion. Right here, right now.
Every child alive today will benefit from a complete reset.
Did someone request the United States pay for the Spanish Influenza, which started in Kansas due to poor animal handling practices/hygiene?
The China-America relationship is toast, but for other reasons.
There is no proof that the Spanish Flu started in the US…..just foolish propaganda articles. We certainly have proof that the Corona Virus started in China.
We don’t have proof it didn’t start in America either regarding the Spanish flu. Also the fact that it started in China didn’t mean they deliberately started it. Their economy too has tanked. Commerce requires sellers AND buyers. Also H1N1 STARTED in the US. Where’s the bill for that? Certainly it’s not as bad, but did anyone ask for a payment then. Stop being ridiculous. Next people will ask the US for global warming payments.
I think the one obvious difference is this corona virus was almost certainly CREATED by CCP scientist in CCP bio lab and almost certainly accidentally released by CCP scientist and definatly covered up by CCP.
All other virus’s mentioned really were unforeseen random occurrences..until proven otherwise.
They do seem to bear responsibility.
Dude, please provide proof for all your statements. So far you only sound like a right winger. Everything the US does is correct and perfect or unintended, but everybody else is evil. What’s next? The Iraqi people will ask the US for repayment for the invasion. NOW in that case, the absence of WMDs has been 100% proven.
How could anyone seriously say the CCP has been honest and forthright during this whole disaster?
There is a bio lab that has been studying bat corona virus for many years right there in Wuhan. The CCP has their hands in everything of any importance in China so there is no reason to believe this is an independent lab.
This virus is 96% genetically identical to bat corona virus? Not much room for doubt is there?
The US is responsible for unbelievable f-ups, completely embarrassing and yes the invasion of Iraq is one of them.
I’m not a right wing nut job just someone reading what’s out there and making logical assumptions.
It is possible the US government planted this almost certainly created virus to set China back but to me and I think any reasonable person its MUCH more likely a made in China f-up. And there have been many f-ups by many countries. Yes the US too.
Trump was dishonest and downplayed the whole thing too, as it spread around the US. Weeks later and we still don’t have nearly enough tests. But you really need to blame a government that’s not even answerable to you?
Dude why dont’t you give us proof of all your rhetoric and take your head out of the sand….by the way what country is your origin? The messages you are displaying seem pro every other country except America.
Look this is clearly a more serious Virus than H1N1 and CHINA should bear the responsibility for their careless behavior. Keep up your pro Chinese cheering leading ….the CCP is looking for people like you.
The world should send China an Invoice for all the costs and of the chaos that they created with engineering this virus in a lab and somehow escaping the lab ……not to mention all the deaths worldwide. CHINA PAY UP.
What makes you so sure this was not the US attacking China?
That is a possibility but it seems a lot more likely it came from the bio lab 900′ away from the wet market the CCP said it started from. Either escaped by accident or a worker took some of the animals (bats) they were working on and sold them to a vendor at the market for extra money or traded for some other “meat” instead of incinerating them. I read on ZH the wet market was demo’d Jan 2nd long before the west picked up on the story, I can’t verify thats true but one thing for sure is they’ll probably never admit the truth.
as if the US would admit truth
The US government has proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy.
What makes you so sure it was?
I didn’t say I was sure it was. I simply asked a question. But I realize having an open mind has fallen out of fashion.
“The stock market is surging this afternoon on news the Trump administration might start sending out $1,000 checks as part of an $850 Billion Stimulus Package.”
…
Well, needs to get through Congress first.
No doubt it will pass … in the dead of night at gunpoint so back benchers don’t have a chance to read … but those 2000 page spending bills … that need to be written by corporate lobbyists to ensure all the insiders get their snout in the trough first … takes time to write.
How long?
So far this fiscal year, treasury issuance has been running at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. And that was with a modestly growing economy.
I don’t know how it is all going to end up, but are we talking about a $3 trillion hole in the budget this year? Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.
But you don’t hear anyone talking about this future problem (as the current problem is so much bigger). But I think we are now going to enter a period of rolling problems given how much the Fed is printing and backstopping. And now that they are providing all of it (with still calls for even more), will it again be years before they will try to take it away?
Should we be preparing for the Everything Everything Everything Mega Bubble?
What’s the problem if you can ‘just print money’. We are heading to hyper-inflation, nailed on. The issue is that the authorities don’t understand the problem (yet).
Get prepared.
Those laid off also get unemployment benefits of 40-50% of salary, starting on day 1 under the recently passed package. So at SF minimum wage that’s an extra 250/week ad infinitum.
One time Shot not every month
The laid off/furloughed will get their $1000 one time check like everyone else, PLUS a weekly unemployment check. That’s good for 6 months normally but I can’t imagine they will be cut off in this circumstance.
Well nobody’s going to pay rent. And no landlord will dare evict, nor utility turn off the electricity or gas. So that will go 100% into food and liquid fuel. The real risk here is that the banks zero out the credit card amounts drawable. The Fed needs to generate hyperinflation in some asset right now, and practically the only one they could generate such is in gold — if they want any hope of anyone rebooting the demand side of the economy. The US Treasury holds 8000 tons of the stuff so the US government would be solvent again at $50k/ounce or whatever the amount calculated is.
So in short, the US Treasury needs to: Print money, buy gold from the open market, take physical delivery, and keep doing so until the goldbugs are rich enough that they start buying everything else up.
I had to laugh reading this. Driving the price of gold higher? No, they are busy driving it into the ground. Gold will probably bottom at $1000 but it could be a lot lower.
8000 tons of gold doesn’t go as far as it used to. About 284 billion at today’s price.
“And no landlord will dare evict, nor utility turn off the electricity or gas.”
Have to agree, eviction enforcement is probably going to zero, fast. No municipal gov/police department wants to be in the headlines for throwing people out of their homes … when no one is supposed to leave their homes.
The problem they’re going to run into if they keep buying UST’s in their QE program is that more purchases will create higher long-term yields, and so on and so forth, as confidence is diminished. At least gold monetization would restore confidence.
And………………………. The free for all starts in California: