WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Friday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes.
· Saturday makes it three days. Three days until catharsis, healing and finally a truce in the culture wars. You could see it on Fox News, where Sean Hannity was mellowing, praising candidate Joe Biden as only “Dr, Doom and Dark Winter,” reaching out for mutual understanding. Sure, you had to sort of listen between the lines. When he called Biden feeble and faltering, he was probably trying to find the words to say, let’s declare peace and get together. When he said Biden was being given spoonfuls of “apple sauce and oatmeal” in his basement, he asked, why doesn’t his staff tell him of all the progress made against the coronavirus? One of Hannity’s Friday night guests was former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. Whups, Ari actually said, “I’ve got to give Biden the edge.” Hannity answered, “You’re wrong.”
· OK, maybe it will take a little longer for that catharsis and healing. Biden on the campaign trail Friday was saying, “Honk if you want to lead again. Honk if you want Americans to trust one another again.” What’s with all this honking? It has something to do the fact his supporters are in their cars, staying safe. President Trump’s Friday rallies were packed with a lot of people, many without masks. In Rochester, Minnesota, the state’s rule kept the primary crowd to only 250 people. So the president spent only 21 minutes talking to them, reflecting the attenuated enthusiasm among such a small group. But there was a secondary crowd nearby, those kept out of the rally. It was much larger and much more energized. Trump visited them as he criticized the governor for his approach to health care. Trump repeated that doctors get paid more if their patient can be designated a Covid victim, which he sees helping artificially inflate the death toll.
· On to Fox’s Laura Ingraham appearing from Minneapolis, after she attended MAGA rallies in Waterford Township, Michigan, then on to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where people were all about, “Getting back to our normal lives.” Finally that rally in Rochester where that secondary crowd broke out in what has become known as the Trump dance. “I’ve been in politics for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “It was a message of love, confidence, and a message of defiance.” Laura skipped the part where Trump picked her out of the crowd saying he had never before seen her wearing a mask. One of her guests was Trump adviser Scott Atlas, the White House’s mask and lockdown skeptic. Masks and lockdowns are “nonsense,” she said. More than two dozen more MAGA rallies to go before Election Day.
· And the death toll is depressingly stable, with a few more than a thousand dying in the past 24 hours as the average creeps larger by the day toward what some experts say will be around 2,000 a day by the middle of next month. At least 229,000 have died so far. Some estimates are that the total will about double by February if there’s no improvement in precautionary behavior. And as said earlier in the week, if the death toll begins to escalate dramatically around Thanksgiving, as former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb predicts, it will be because the coronavirus is now experiencing a new beginning, ravaging parts of the country for the first time even as it revisits many regions where it swept through previously. On CNN, incidentally, Susan Bailey, the president of the American Medical Association, Friday night called Trump’s charge of a Covid death bonus for doctors “patently untrue.”
· In the stock markets, some moderate declines, enough to make October the worst month there since March. There was an undercurrent of fear, of hearing more of the most unsettling words in marketland, “Cut the dividend.” The second most fearsome word, “consolidation,” seemed to haunt the restaurant industry where Arby’s is buying Dunkin for about $9 billion. More striking was the way oil keeps plunging, with West Texas Intermediate down to $35.72, a five-month low. Some of the expert talking heads were even saying that a Biden win is the only thing that could boost prices, by limiting supply. Meanwhile, the third-most scary word, “rationalization.” The day’s Baker-Hughes rig count did find nine more U.S. rigs, now down “only” 526 from a year ago.
· Economic data in the upcoming week includes the monthly jobs report. As Kevin Kastner points out in his preview of the busy week’s data points elsewhere on this macenews.com site, this time the jobs report is overshadowed by an election. And the FOMC policy announcement and news conference is on a Thursday. The preview includes a complete calendar for the week.
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