Saturday, April 11, 2020

TRUMP PANICS ABOUT 2020 - THE DEPRESSION WILL END HIS GOLDMAN SACHS REGIME



Trump Wants to Reopen the Economy Because He’s Panicking About Reelection Polls


Photo: Shutterstock
Progressive voters have spent weeks hand-wringing about the small polling bump President Trump received for appearing to take the coronavirus seriously, even berating cable-news networks for airing his briefings, which supposedly gave him the benefit of uninterrupted airtime. Ironically, Trump’s own advisers are upset about the same briefings. The New York Times reports that Republicans have been pleading with the president to scale them back, arguing that Trump “was handing Mr. Biden ammunition each night.” Trump’s internal campaign polling shows that the president has “mostly lost the initial bump he received early in the crisis.” New public polls from ABC and CBS show the same decline.
That political desperation is the context to understand Trump’s palpable desire to reopen the economy by May 1 or sooner. Trump has been publicly oozing impatience with his current policy for days, and The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have new reporting that suggests the money wing is once again regaining the upper hand over public-health officials within the administration. Trump “regularly looks at unemployment and stock market numbers, complaining that they are hurting his presidency and reelection prospects,” reports the Post. He is reversing course, not because of any public-health reason, but because he is losing the election.
Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to “reopen” the economy, but it’s not clear exactly what this means, or what he can do about it. Governors and mayors have issued the orders shutting down public spaces. Trump can’t overrule those, though if he wants to pry them open, he does have some tools: He can urge his supporters to resist, or use federal resources to pressure states and localities that resist his advice.
Public-health experts have argued that social-distancing measures can only be relaxed after several benchmarks are reached. Community spread has to be contained, and the government needs to have the capacity to conduct mass testing and to be able to trace the contacts of anybody who tests positive. This is not just some liberal-weenie precaution. The conservative American Enterprise Institute made this case in March, and CDC director Robert Redfield confirms it in a new NPR interview.
The notion that we’re going to be ready to do this within a few weeks seems utterly fanciful. At a recent press briefing, reporters tried to drill down on how much testing Trump planned to have available to accommodate the reopening. Trump simply denied the premise that testing to scale was even necessary. “Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes. We’re talking 325 million people. That’s not going to happen, as you can imagine,” he said at one point. Asked about the number of tests his former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has said would be needed, Trump scoffed, “I don’t like using the word needed, because I don’t think it’s needed.”
Rather than ramping up a massive national testing regime, the federal government has been signaling to states that they’re soon going to be on their own. And as for contact tracing — like a cell-phone app, or an army of public-health officials, to track down every contact of a person who tests positive — well, there’s simply no sign whatsoever that either project is even in the works, let alone ready for an early May rollout. And if the government doesn’t have the capacity to quickly identify and isolate new cases, relaxing social distancing will simply lead to renewed outbreaks.
So, given the government’s utter unreadiness to transition away from social distancing, what does Trump have in mind when he talks about reopening? The answer seems to be retreating into denial.
The most concrete step toward reopening the economy is the reported formation of a new coronavirus task force with the mission of reopening the economy. There are already two coronavirus task forces: a government one, run by Mike Pence, and a quasi-private one, run by Jared Kushner. The purpose of the newest task force would supposedly be to focus on reopening the economy. “Administration officials have started contacting outside economic experts and other allies of the president to gauge their interest in working with the task force,” reports the Journal.
The delicate phrase “economic experts and other allies of the president” captures the awkward reality that the economic task force’s staff — whose members are reported to include such luminaries as Larry Kudlow, Steve Mnuchin, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump — are not necessarily actually experts in the economy, or even experts of any kind. They are not enhancing the administration’s coronavirus response team with specialized knowledge. They represent the impulse to override public-health expertise.
Likewise, the obsession with hydroxychloroquine among Trump’s loyalists is primarily a form of escapism. “He thinks that it’s the drug that’s going to get everyone back to work,” a Republican close to the White House told Politico. “It’s the only thing anyone has held out as offering an immediate reprieve from what’s become his greatest challenge — and political threat,” a former senior administration official explained to the Post. The official described the hydroxychloroquine craze as Trump’s “overwhelming desire for a silver bullet to make it all go away.”
It is irrational for Trump to believe he can restart the economy without first putting into place a robust public-health apparatus to contain new outbreaks. But it is not irrational for Trump to worry about his reelection. The state of public opinion may be even grimmer than even the top-line numbers would indicate. The public believes Trump was unprepared to deal with the virus by overwhelming margins — 63 percent to 22 percent, according to YouGov, and 71 percent to 29 percent, per CBS. YouGov also asks if Trump could have reduced the damage had he acted sooner, and 40 percent say “a lot,” while 25 percent say “somewhat.”
Two-thirds of the country believes Trump bungled the early stages of the crisis and subjected the country to unnecessary pain. So, on what everybody expects to be the single question that decides the election, Trump has lost the entire premise. Trump is already losing, and the current course seems far more likely to widen the gap than to shrink it. Whatever slim benefit of the doubt the public was willing to cede as he tackles the crisis is quickly expiring, and he stands (justifiably) to be blamed for the hardships that will follow.
It’s no surprise that Trump and his loyalists are grasping for some kind of deus ex machina. Maybe the models will all be wrong. Maybe there will be a magic pill. The country needs the diligent, patient work of recovery. But Trump’s reelection — the only thing he truly cares about — requires something closer to a miracle.


NANCY, IT WAS ALREADY A DEPRESSION FOR MIDDLE AMERICA!


40% OF CALIFORNIA LIVES BELOW 
THE POVERTY LEVEL. 40% OF CALIFORNIA 
ARE DEM VOTING ILLEGALS!



Pelosi: ‘We Could Have a Depression’

1:24

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Thursday on CNBC’s “Mad Money” that the United States could slip into a depression as a result of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown’s impact on the economy.
Host Jim Cramer said, “You are a natural optimist. If we can get this additional money, which I think is certainly warranted, and we get some breaks in science, do you think, is it possible to say— I know you don’t want to put a date on it, but we can stay closed—is it possible that maybe enough people in May, enough younger people, enough people who have already had it, enough people who tested, tested, tested, get the country moving? I’m getting worried about not a recession, but a depression.”
Pelosi said, “We could have the depression because so many people are out of work. And that’s why we have to get the system really energized and working. Let’s get out those unemployment checks. Let’s get out those direct payments. Let’s get these loans freed up to let the banks about the friends to the whole system they are this is entrepreneurship like we’ve never seen before because of the challenge to small businesses let’s recognize what that is, that optimism is to America. I don’t think anybody can tell you what date unless you just take it a week at a time. Let’s be hopeful it will be soon.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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
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


 "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!

"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.



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