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!
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
Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.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
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
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]
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%
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."
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment