WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Monday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes
- Top of the Monday news, simply the 200,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States. OK, maybe 182 short of that according to John Hopkins University of Medicine. By Tuesday it will be there. But Americans have learned to be patient, learned to be resigned to their fate. What unrest there is has nothing to do with the virus. So having the worst death toll of any country doesn’t spark much outrage, no anti-virus marches. The comparison numbers don’t seem to mean anything. UK fears a second wave. The first wave? 41,866. China, the president says, lies about its death toll. So we dismiss its 4,737. Not even 5,000. India is supposedly a mess on virus control, 87,882, less than half the U.S. total with four times the population. Brazil? 136,895. And no one wants to hear about South Korea any more, 385. Or Taiwan, 7. Cuba? 115. Ireland, 1,792. Thailand, 59. Germany, 9,390. Does anyone doubt the United States will reach 400,000 by the end of the year, lengthening the lead over everyone else, as projected? The numbers have already started to climb again. Twenty-nine states have cases increasing. On CNN consultant Dr. Jonathan Reiner estimated Monday night that if the president had said “mask up” from the beginning perhaps 150,000 of those lives would have been saved. Meawhile the NFL imposed fines from $100,000 to $250,000 on three coaches for failing to wear masks during Sunday’s games.
- The Centers for Disease Control continues its sad meltdown, publishing a much belated warning Friday about aerosol virus transmission and four days later, withdrawing it. A draft posted in error was the explanation.. Some version may be back soon, describing what has already been well established, that the tiniest droplets stay airborne a comparatively long time and are responsible for at least some of the spread. Eventually what seems like a CDC leadership campaign to have a house cleaning someday will succeed, maybe after the agency is not needed nearly as much.
- Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Robert Kaplan was on Bloomberg early in the day, saying a pullback in stocks might even be “healthy.” So stocks pulled back, but in a way to suggest tech’s leadership is unchallenged. The Dow was down as much as 942 points and ended down a lot less, 509.72 or 1.8%. The tech-oriented Nasdaq, though, almost ended up on the positive side, losing only 0.1%.
- Fed Chief Jay Powell testifies mainly on the coronavirus and the Fed’s response programs Tuesday and his brief prepared remarks to the House Financial Services committee were posted Monday. As if it needed to be said again, he repeated, “A full recovery is likely to come only when people are confident that it is safe to reengage in a broad range of activities.” Powell has appearances before two more committees this week, twice accompanied by Treasury’s Stephen Mnuchin.
- Candidate Joe Biden was in Wisconsin, to be followed in the state later in the day by incumbent Donald Trump. Said Biden, “Trump panicked. The virus was too big for him. All his life he’s been bailed out. … He failed to act. He panicked.” Trump had bragged last week he had reached a deal with higher ups at Fox to be interviewed every Monday, to be answered by an anchor there was no such deal. But this Monday morning, there he was, on Fox, saying he would announce his nominee to be RBG’s successor Friday or Saturday. “There’s plenty of time,” he said later, to get a confirmation before Election Day. He met during the day with one of the candidates, Amy Coney Barrett, one of the 14 judges sitting in Chicago on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Will Biden be offered or accept equal time on Fox? Trump does Pittsburgh Tuesday. In Wisconsin, fact checkers counted more than two dozen major untruths in Trump’s late-day remarks.
- Analysts seemed to give up trying to decipher the tangled TikTok deal that is cementing a new paradigm of presidential brokering. When Microsoft won the $10 billion JEDI contract from the Pentagon, and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon got shut out, some analysts saw a presidential thumb on the scale. No one has had to guess about thumbs and scales with TikTok. Will Oracle and Walmart win out? Oracle thinks so. Will China step in to block the deal? Will President Trump get his $5 billion for “patriotic” education from parent ByteDance? Who really ends up with majority control? Not only China but Treasury’s CFIUS has the last word. How the committee’s newly expanded powers are used in this case will be closely scrutinized after the fact so there might be an actually rigorous review, not just a presidential edict one way or the other.
- Upcoming economic data includes the weekly Johnson-Redbook reading of same-store retail at 8:55a ET, existing home sales at 10a along with a speech by Chicago Fed’s Charles Evans and the Richmond Fed’s manufacturing index. The Fed’s Powell/Treasury’s Mnuchin hearing at House Financial Services starts at 10:30a. There’s a Boston Fed’s Eric Rosengren speech at noon.
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