SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP'S ENERGY SECRETARY RICK PERRY SAYS BIG OIL MUST HAVE A MASSIVE NO-STRINGS BAILOUT LIKE GOLDMAN SACHS - You seen pump prices go down?!?!?

Top Harvard economist warns of 'mother of all financial crises' amid coronavirus pandemic

by Anthony Leonardi

 | April 01, 2020 04:24 PM

A top economist predicted that the coronavirus could cause the "mother of all financial crises."

Kenneth S. Rogoff, a widely cited, leading economist at Harvard University, predicted that the novel coronavirus could trigger an economic crash, both in the United States and globally. “This is already shaping up as the deepest dive on record for the global economy for over 100 years,” Rogoff said.

“Everything depends on how long it lasts, but if this goes on for a long time, it’s certainly going to be the mother of all financial crises," Rogoff said, who co-authored a comprehensive financial history book entitled This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

Last week, Congress approved and Trump signed a $2.2 trillion spending bill, the third relief package designed to alleviate economic concerns of small businesses, large corporations, and individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. It allocates $500 billion in loans to large companies, $350 billion in forgivable loans, and provides $1,200 in direct cash payments to many U.S. citizens, among other items.

Before the historic relief package was passed last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers must begin drafting a fourth relief package to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that the bill that was making its way through Congress was insufficient to address the needs of state and local governments, workers, and other entities affected by the spread of the virus.

On Tuesday, the president advocated for a $2 trillion addition to congressional economic relief bills designed to help workers and businesses during the pandemic, saying he hopes to increase employment through federal programs.

"With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4," Trump tweeted.

Since COVID-19 was first reported in the U.S., the Dow Jones Industrial Average has precipitously fallen, plummeting from over 29,000 to approximately 20,900.

More than 911,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, at least 45,000 have died from it, and more than 191,600 have recovered. The U.S. has seen at least 206,000 confirmed cases, with nearly 8,400 reported recoveries.

these filthy bribes sucking politicians sure kickick ass when wall street is in  trouble!

The calls will only get louder. According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday, investors and analysts say the more than 30 percent drop in the share market over the past month is not over, despite extraordinary actions by the Fed involving trillions of dollars.

Rick Perry Has a Dire Warning About the US Energy Sector Amid Wuhan Coronavirus Pandem

Leah Barkoukis

|

 @LeahBarkoukis

|

Posted: Apr 01, 2020 8:30 AM

 

Source: AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis

The nation is grappling with a virus that the White House coronavirus task force is warning could kill as many as 240,000 Americans. The economy has come to a grinding halt, and now, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry has another dire warning: the energy sector is on the verge of collapsing. 

With Americans advised to slow the spread of the virus by staying home, and guidelines extending now to April 30th, car and air travel have plummeted, which means so too has the demand for oil. 

"Our capacity is full and the Saudis are flooding this market with cheap oil," Perry told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. "I'm telling you, we are on the verge of a massive collapse of an industry that we worked awfully hard over the course of the last three or four years to build up to the No. 1 oil and gas producing country in the world, giving Americans some affordable energy resources.

"It's a driver of a massive amount of our American economy,” he continued. “There are some big companies out there, [but] there are independents out there that are the real buffer and if we were to lose that, if we woke up a year from now and there were five big companies because all these independents are going out of business and if there's a company called Aramco and a company called Rosneft [and] ExxonMobil, Chevron [and] BP, if that's it then I would suggest that would make a lot of Americans really nervous.” 

Carlson interrupted Perry to note that U.S. refiners are being flooded with foreign oil, wondering why we are allowing that to happen.

Perry then said what advice he would give the president for the next two to three months. 

“I would say, refiners, we’re going to refine U.S. crude, U.S. crude only. That would give a buffer to the market, it would send the clear message that we’re just not gonna let foreign oil blow in here, bust our energy industry, and here’s the most important thing,” he said. “This is about our national security. This is about Americans’ ability to defend ourselves. If our independent operators…if we lost that, we’d go back to 1974, 1975…where we were beholden to countries that didn’t have our best interests in mind.”

TRUMP’S ADMINISTRATION IS INFESTED WITH GOLDMAN  SACHS JUST AS OBAMA-BIDEN’S WAS WITH JAMIE DIMON OF JP MORGAN

 

Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008

Bullard Says Unemployment Could Rise to 30%

Photo by John Vachon/Library Of Congress/Getty Images

JOHN CARNEY

23 Mar 2020523

1:15

The unemployment rate in the U.S. could hit 30 percent, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said in Bloomberg News interview.

“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”

That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression.

Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary authorities.

“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,” Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.

Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,” as some Fed watchers have claimed.

“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”

Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html

 

“The legal ring surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT

TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE RICH…. and his parasitic family!

Report: Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit After He's Gone

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/secret-report-trump-vows-he-doesnt-give.html

 "Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect.  I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."

TRUMPERNOMICS:

THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/09/swamp-keeper-trumps-GOLDMAN -sachs.html

"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."

 

Global economic slump accelerating

 

As the coronavirus spreads, taking more lives at an escalating rate, its effects are penetrating ever deeper into the global economy.

GOLDMAN  SACHS warned last week that US gross domestic product (GDP) would contract by 24 percent in the second quarter. There are forecasts that up to 5 million jobs will be lost in the American economy this year, with the fall in economic output to total as much as $1.5 trillion.

GOLDMAN  expects, at this stage, that US output will contract 3.1 percent this year and the unemployment rate will rise to 9 percent from the current level of 3.5 percent. This is on a par with the jobless rate of 10 percent in October 2009, following the financial meltdown of 2008.

But just as the health impact of the virus was significantly underestimated, the same may apply to the current economic forecasts.

“Things look so gloomy right now that perhaps we should be grateful if we can get out of this health crisis with a brief recession,” Bernard Baumohl of the Economic Outlook Group told the Wall Street Journal.

“You just cannot rule out the prospect of a longer, more destructive depression,” he said.

In other words, a relatively short but deep recession is now the “best case” scenario.

The eurozone is expected to experience a fall of around 10 percent of GDP. But this forecast could well be exceeded. There is no end in sight to the spread of the virus and no clear assessment of the economic effect of the shutdowns being implemented to try to combat it.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the chief economist of the European Union, Paolo Gentiloni, indicated that officials were working on new measures.

“The consensus is growing day by day that we need to face an extraordinary crisis with extraordinary tools,” he said.

“This idea of a V-shape [recovery] that you can see in the first semester of 2020 is now completely impossible. We have no previous analysis of the impact of such a widespread lockdown in major economies.”

Gentolini conducted the interview as part of a political battle inside the EU over the economic and financial measures, bringing further into the open the widening rifts between leading member states.

Powerful forces in Germany and the Netherlands are opposed to all-European action, regarding this as a bailout for weaker economies such as Italy.

On the other side, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire last week warned that failure to act in a unified manner meant the eurozone was in danger of disappearing.

European Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Münchau wrote yesterday that the situation facing the eurozone was “far worse” than the sovereign debt crisis of 2012.

“The coronavirus will prove to be an economic shock, a corporate solvency crisis and a political crisis all folded into one,” he said.

Münchau noted that European countries had fiscal stabilisers such as unemployment insurance, but these “shock absorbers” were designed to deal with “normal fluctuations.” They were not “big enough or strong enough for emergencies like this one.”

Pointing to the deepening divisions in Europe, Münchau wrote that not everyone would want to be in a monetary union with countries like the Netherlands where the prime minister was “ideologically opposed” to all-European measures. “This sort of unwilling partnership is not sustainable.”

In the absence of data on overall output, the Financial Times conducted a survey, particularly covering retail and services, to give some indication of what to expect.

It showed that vehicular traffic had halved in many of the world’s largest cities, while spending in restaurants and cinemas had collapsed.

Greg Daco, the chief US economist at Oxford Economics, said: “Looking at the data across various sectors of the US economy, it appears we could be heading for the most severe contraction in consumer spending on record.”

The rapid shrinkage in the real economy will further escalate the already severe crisis in the financial system, and extend from the stock and credit markets to the banks.

In a Financial Times comment, Sheila Bair, the former chief of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, wrote: “Big banks throughout the world are substantially exposed to the pandemic, particularly as it hurts corporate borrowers.”

Around the world, non-financial corporations covering every industry, including the hard-hit energy, transport, retail and hospitality sectors, had racked up debts to the tune of $70 trillion, she wrote.

“To survive, they are increasingly hoarding cash and tapping into their massive back-up lines of credit, placing additional strain on the banking system,” Bair wrote, noting that as bond markets “seize up,” bank credit may be their only source of cash.

But the ability to supply credit, she wrote, had been considerably weakened by the $325 billion paid out by the major global banks last year on dividends and share buybacks, some $155 billion of which was laid out by the eight largest banks in the US.

Meanwhile, fears are growing that the enormous pile of debt around the world could start to collapse as the economic effects of the coronavirus deepen and widen.

According to the Institute of International Finance, in a report published last November, total global corporate, government, finance sector and household debt had reached $253 trillion, equivalent to 322 percent of global GDP.

The unravelling could start in so-called emerging market economies where there is $72.5 trillion of debt, much of it denominated in US dollars. The growing dollar shortage in international markets, which has seen national currencies fall against the greenback, means obligations on interest and principal payments are rapidly rising.

This increase in the debt burden is occurring as all economies drop into recession, or something worse, and have less cash to meet their commitments.

It is not just emerging market economies that are affected. The Australian dollar, one of the most traded in the world, saw its rate against the US dollar drop to as low as 55 cents last week, compared to just under 70 cents a few months ago.

This means that the debt burden of a company or financial institution that had raised $100 million, when the Australian dollar traded at 70 cents to the US currency, would rise in Australian dollar terms from $A143 million to more than $A180 million when the Australian dollar fell to 55 cents, placing it under enormous strain as revenues drop.

The cash flow crisis is striking at the heart of the major economies as well.

In the UK, the Tory government is considering a plan to take out equity holdings in airlines and other companies because the economic stimulus packages announced so far are not sufficient to prevent collapses.

In the US, the Wall Street Journal has reported that “scores of US companies,” from the aircraft maker Boeing to the telecommunications Verizon, are “furiously lobbying” to be included in the bailout packages being prepared by the Trump administration that could run as high as $2 trillion.

For more than a century, the semi-official religion in the US has been the denunciation of socialism, which Trump had planned to make the centre of his re-election campaign.

Now the universal cry is: the state must intervene; once again billions must be handed to the corporations on an even larger scale than in the crisis of 2008.

The calls will only get louder. According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday, investors and analysts say the more than 30 percent drop in the share market over the past month is not over, despite extraordinary actions by the Fed involving trillions of dollars.

Summing up the voracious outlook in corporate and financial circles, a representative of the global investment and banking firm State Street, told the Journal: “Market participants need to feel they are backstopped without question.”

Then Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose main purpose was to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.

Coronavirus deaths in US nearing 4,000 as Trump washes his hands of responsibility

The coronavirus killed at least 812 people in the United States Tuesday, the highest death toll since the pandemic began, while nearly 25,000 new cases were reported, bringing the total number infected to more than 188,000, the largest number in the world by far.

Along with the unprecedented scale of the infection, its sheer speed is staggering. On March 10, there were only 1,000 reported coronavirus infections in the United States. Three weeks later, it is nearing 200 times that level. Another such three weeks would see 40 million people infected in the United States.

The US death toll has not yet reached the level of Italy (12,428) or Spain (8,464), but that is only a matter of days. And White House officials continue to escalate their projections of the total number of deaths in a “best-case” scenario, setting the figure at a staggering 240,000, with Trump himself hinting that the total could be double that.

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, March 13, 2020, in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

Four countries—Italy, Spain, the US and France—have now seen more deaths than China, where the epidemic first broke out in the city of Wuhan last December. After 3,305 deaths, China claims to have largely suppressed the outbreak through systematic testing, contact tracing and quarantining of those exposed to the coronavirus.

The American media and the Trump administration continually describe efforts to counteract the coronavirus as a war, where the frontlines are being drawn in emergency rooms and ICUs throughout the United States, and especially in the New York metropolitan area, where half of all COVID-19 cases are located. On Tuesday the death toll in New York City itself hit 1,096, and 10,000 people were hospitalized, with 2,700 of them requiring ventilators.

But in this war, under the incompetent “commander-in-chief” Trump and his hapless lieutenants among the state governors, the troops are being sent into battle haphazardly, without weapons, and largely without regard for their own safety. Healthcare workers lack sufficient personal protection equipment, and they are being infected and incapacitated at an alarming rate, with many deaths.

In Spain, the healthcare workers accounted for 14 percent of the country’s cases, while in Italy, they accounted for 10 percent. The same process is under way in the United States. NPR reported that 345 employees of Boston’s four largest hospitals have tested positive for COVID-19. In New York City, hundreds of workers have fallen ill. At Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, 50 percent of the intensive-care staff have been infected.

The result is that in addition to the shortages of hospital rooms, ICU beds, masks, and ventilators, there is a growing shortage of medical staff who can cope with the increasing volume of patients seeking medical attention.

Meanwhile, hospitals and healthcare systems are threatening doctors and nurses who make their concerns over working conditions public. An emergency room physician, Dr. Ming Lin, in Washington state, was fired because he gave an interview to a newspaper complaining about inadequate protective equipment. Ruth Schubert, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Nurses Association, told Bloomberg, “Hospitals are muzzling nurses and other healthcare workers in an attempt to preserve their image.” Nurses who have spoken under conditions of anonymity with WSW S reporters said that they have been told they would be fired if they talked to the media.

In some cases, state governors have made statements that amount to a confession of bankruptcy. On CNN Live, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland said, “We are all trying to get more testing, but this is a pinch point on testing, on supplies, and materials, and PPE and ventilators. Everybody in America knows we don’t have enough of these things … and without the tests we are really flying blind. We are guessing about where the outbreaks are, what the infection rates in the hospitals are, and the mortality rates.”

However, the Trump White House manages to combine moronic expressions of optimism (largely in the form of testimonials to Trump’s personal genius) with ever more ominous declarations that the death toll in the United States will reach six or even seven figures.

On Sunday, White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said that 100,000 to 200,000 deaths was a midrange figure that could be substantially lowered if proper measures were taken. On Monday, White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that 100,000 to 200,000 was now the floor, the best-case scenario if everything went perfectly, while Trump himself declared that a death toll in that range would represent “a good job” by his administration.

On Tuesday, Fauci and Birx presented a slide show to a press briefing indicating projections that without severe mitigation, total deaths due to COVID-19 could reach 1.2 million to 2.2 million. Birx admitted that even with strict mitigation efforts throughout the month of April, the number of deaths could range as high as 240,000. At the peak of such a “best-case” outcome, 4,000 to 5,000 people would be dying every day.

Shocking as such figures are, even more outrageous is the blithe indifference displayed by Trump personally and his closest aides to the likely results of their own policy of refusing to conduct a serious struggle to contain the pandemic, not merely mitigate it.

Trump himself, towards the end of the press “briefing” that lasted more than two hours—a clear indication, in and of itself, that the White House antivirus campaign is an exercise in political propaganda and media manipulation—made comments that amounted to a self-indictment for criminal negligence on a monumental scale.

“We’re going through the worst thing this country has probably ever seen,” he said. “Look, we had the Civil War. We lost 600,000 people, right? Had we not done anything, we would have lost many times that, but we did something, so it’s going to be hopefully way under that. But you know, we lose more here potentially than you lose in world wars as a country.”

Given that the US death toll in the Second World War was 405,000, Trump is saying, in his semiliterate and meandering way, that the US death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic could well be between 400,000 and 600,000.

There was remarkably little push-back from the journalists of the corporate media who appeared to be in a daze. While several media outlets had taken note that on Tuesday morning, more Americans had died from coronavirus than were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not even this comparison, inadequate as it is, was made.

The US government’s response is best characterized as malign neglect to a pandemic that was both foreseen and preventable. With complete indifference to the fate of the people, the Trump administration’s primary focus was on ensuring the financial markets were protected. Only when the markets began to implode did the government’s machinery begin to churn to prevent its complete collapse. Everything else was deemed an afterthought.

First, on March 3, the Federal Reserve slashed rates by 0.5 

percent, the most significant cut since the 2008 financial crisis. 

On March 12, the Federal Reserve added $1.5 trillion of liquidity

 into the banking systems by massively expanding short-term 

loans to the banks to keep money markets stable and provide 

banks with cash in hand. When the markets continued to 

plummet on March 15, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a

full percentage point down to almost 0.00 percent. They also 

resumed quantitative easing by purchasing $500 billion in 

treasuries and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities. 

Then Congress rushed through a record 

$2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose 

main purpose was to provide the Treasury 

and the Federal Reserve the necessary 

authority to bail out corporate America 

and Wall Street.

Comparing the gargantuan and energetic efforts to save the markets with the slapdash, indifferent and grossly incompetent actions in relation to public health, it is easy to see what are the priorities of the American financial aristocracy.

But there is another force to be heard from in this crisis—the working class. Instacart, Amazon, and Whole Foods workers have initiated strike actions against forced work under unsafe conditions. Workers at General Electric have protested, demanding their company begin producing ventilators. Many other workers are rebelling against being forced to remain on the job without protective gear.

As the crisis escalates, the decisive question is for the working class to develop a conscious political response, recognizing that it must fight the capitalist system as a whole, based on a socialist program.