It couldn't be any clearer:
"As stock markets tumble because of coronavirus, this time feels different" by David J. Lynch The Washington Post, February 28, 2020
The stock market fell for the seventh straight day Friday, with the Dow Jones industrial average losing 357 points, or 1.4 percent, as the coronavirus outbreak began to look more and more like a worldwide economic crisis.
Uh-huh. Was a correction they were forecasting long before the virus showed up.
Only by staging a late rally in the final 15 minutes of trading was the Dow able to avert its third daily loss this week of more than 1,000 points. The week marked the fastest 10-plus-percent drop in history.
The plunge protection team feverishly at work.
The sustained selloff, driven by fears of global economic damage from the spreading coronavirus, prompted both the Federal Reserve and the White House to hunt for possible remedies, eyeing tools they have used during past crises to calm the public.
Those tools no longer work.
The traditional tactics, however, may not work against a financial panic driven by a global health scare that lacks precedent or antidote.
A sign of the crisis-fighting difficulties ahead came in the afternoon, when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell issued an unusual statement vowing to “act as appropriate” to defend the US economy from the outbreak. Many analysts interpreted the statement as a pledge to cut interest rates, a signal that often heartens investors, but this time, the selloff continued.
That's where the article called for the reader to turn in, and to hell with the concern over people and health, huh? You see the pre$$'s real concern, 'eh?
After a week that shaved more than $4 trillion from global stock values, Powell's effort was among a series of steps meant to reassure frazzled investors. Nothing, so far, appears to be working.
“The fundamentals of the US economy remain strong,” Powell said. “However, the coronavirus poses evolving risks to economic activity. We will use our tools and act as appropriate to support the economy.”
HOW? What kind vaccine do they have to inject into the economy, other than running the printing pre$$es like they have been doing all along?
Meanwhile, federal health officials scrambled Friday to get coronavirus testing up and running in every state, as the Trump administration signaled it may also invoke a 70-year-old defense law to guarantee the availability of protective gear should the virus spread.
The ALARM BELLS JUST WENT OFF!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said two more Americans tested positive for the virus out of the group of quarantined passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and Santa Clara County in California reported another case, bringing the national total to 63.
Health officials confirmed the Santa Clara case as the second in the United States believed to have been transmitted to a person who didn’t travel internationally or come in close contact with anyone who had it.
The World Health Organization upgraded the risk level from the virus to “very high” as it continued to spread around the globe. Friday evening, the State Department issued an advisory telling Americans to avoid nonessential travel to Italy, which has seen nearly 900 cases. A travel advisory already is in place for China.
The list of countries touched by the illness climbed to nearly 60 as Mexico, Belarus, Lithuania, New Zealand, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Iceland, and the Netherlands reported their first cases. More than 83,000 people worldwide have contracted the illness, with deaths topping 2,800.
There are cases in Mexico and the pre$$ and Democrats continue to support open border policies?
President Trump lashed out Friday at Democrats who have questioned his handling of the coronavirus threat, calling it their new “hoax.”
At a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump accused Democrats of “politicizing” the coronavirus and boasted about preventive steps he’s ordered in an attempt to keep the virus that originated in China from spreading across the United States.
I'm sure there is some of that involved here, along with several other agendas dovetailing at the same time.
Trump administration political appointees and nonpartisan career government scientists both agree that the current risk to Americans is low, although that could quickly change, but some political officials are continuing to offer assurances that concerns will blow over soon.
“I acknowledge that this could change. I acknowledge the situation could deteriorate. I acknowledge the risks,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters Friday. “But, given what we know ... looks to me like the market has gone too far.”
Evercore ISI, an investment firm, told clients Friday that it now expects the Fed to cut rates by a half-percentage point at its March 17-18 meeting, something few expected just one week ago.
No kidding?
Cui frikkin' bono?
Meanwhile, White House officials held meetings of their own Friday, considering potential tax cut packages that they hope might boost consumer confidence. This comes after several days of unsuccessful efforts by Trump and his economic team to cajole people to buy stocks and drive prices higher.
OMG, they are going to try and sneak through another tax cut package and giveaway to the rich while you are sniffling!
Typically, the Fed responds to economic trouble by lowering interest rates to make credit easier to obtain. It also can offer loans to banks or buy large quantities of US Treasury securities, effectively adding money to the financial system and making it easier for some corporate borrowers to get cash. The White House and Congress, meanwhile, can approve new spending or tax cuts to flood the economy with money, but the best remedy for the coronavirus could lie beyond Washington’s immediate powers.
"Central banks don't make vaccines," said David Kotok, chairman of Cumberland Advisors.
I just puked.
Have the pharmaceuticals made a vaccine to guard against them yet?
The renewed selling intensified calls for the Fed to rescue the economy from an unforeseen shock.
Really?
The medical emergency already has disrupted global production networks, curtailed air travel, and hobbled economies in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. With medical experts urging Americans to prepare for serious disruptions in their daily lives, pleas for early action are coming from Wall Street and some former members of the Fed’s rate-setting committee.
The calls for action came as Capital Economics told clients that the continued spread of the disease in the United States “could be enough to tip the economy into a mild recession.”
(GA$P)
Between Election Day in 2016 and Feb. 12 of this year, the Dow Jones industrial average rose by 61 percent. In four days this week, it surrendered one-third of that gain.
It’s uncertain how effective cutting interest rates might be. Economists call episodes like the epidemic or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks an “exogenous shock,” meaning an unpredictable development that arises from outside the economy or financial system yet has significant economic consequences.
OMG, the 'crow was right!
This is the end. It's all they have left. Medical Martial Law.
The Fed normally acts only after assessing voluminous data on business and consumer activity, using sophisticated computer models that forecast the future by comparing current conditions to what's happened in the past. There is no recent precedent for the coronavirus outbreak for the Fed to use in its models.
Our lives and futures are dependent on the computer models of $elf-$erving intere$t be it economic or environmental.
If the United States suffers a serious outbreak and people stay home, fearing possible contagion, cutting interest rates would probably do little to persuade them to return to work or go out to shop or dine. "This is a very tough one for the Fed to deal with," said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The Fed has a long history of fighting financial and economic downturns, including the 1987 stock market plunge known as Black Monday and the Russian debt default more than a decade later. In 2008, after the collapse of the housing bubble, the Fed dropped interest rates to zero.
Yeah, the same guys that caused the problems were the heroes who saved us. So says the banker's mouthpiece media and pre$$.
Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with financial markets closed and smoke still curling from the World Trade Center rubble, then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan cut the benchmark US lending rate by half a percentage point. The central bank also pumped $102 billion into the financial system.
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If you have any questions about the coronavirus, this $hould an$wer them:
"Cambridge biotech Moderna leads in the race for a coronavirus vaccine; The company has already produced an experimental medicine, but its CEO cautions that an approved treatment is more than a year away." by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff, February 28, 2020
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel opened an e-mail on his cellphone Monday afternoon and smiled. Up popped a picture of a box that had just been placed inside a refrigerated truck bound for Bethesda, Md. The package held a few hundred vials, each containing an experimental vaccine for the new coronavirus, manufactured at the Cambridge biotech’s $130 million plant in Norwood.
A mere 42 days. That’s how long it had taken the high-flying biotech to produce the shipment after receiving the genetic sequence of the virus that causes the Covid-19 illness. The Maryland-based National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, plans to begin testing it on 45 people next month, making Moderna the first company to enter clinical trials with something that could prevent the disease that has stoked fears and rattled financial markets worldwide, but Bancel took pains Friday to dampen any hope that the vaccine, if approved, will be injected in millions of exposed shoulders any time soon.
That is an awfully short time to have developed a vaccine, and informed speculation could draw the conclusion that the virus itself is a designed bioweapon by the U.S. with a ready antidote. That's the only way they could have come up with this so fast. I'm wondering which government lab handed them it.
Look at how badly they want to get that needle into you, too.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID — which helped Moderna design the vaccine — said this week that it would be at least 12 to 18 months before it could be deployed. Bancel is coming down on the conservative end of that time frame.
OMG, he has an intere$t in it as well!
“I think it’s very, very low probability that it would be [next] February,” Bancel, 47, said. “I’m not aware of any vaccine that’s been approved in a year."
The vaccine, which relies on custom-built messenger RNA to produce an immune response, will be tested first on 45 healthy volunteers and then will likely undergo two more phases of testing on many more people, he said. Even if all goes well, it would take time to clear regulatory hurdles and to make enough vaccine to inoculate millions.
“You can’t go from 45 people in Phase 1 to selling it to millions of people,” Bancel said. “You need to make sure the vaccine is safe and is working. There’s a very high bar for safety.”
Still, Moderna clocked a blistering first mile in what might be considered a marathon.
This report from Saltzman is bordering on gro$$, and I wouldn't run this year if I were you (nor go to a high school basketball game).
Consider that after a 2002 outbreak of an older coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in China, it took roughly 20 months for NIAID to get a vaccine into the first phase of human testing.
Moderna, which went public in December 2018 and raised $600 million in the largest initial public offering in biotech up to that point, isn’t the only drug maker seeking to develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus.
There are at least a dozen efforts underway at large pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and academic laboratories. Several scientists in the race to develop a vaccine say their work will proceed even if Moderna appears to have the inside track.
Dr. Peter Hotez, codirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, is trying to get two potential vaccines for the coronavirus into clinical trials.
One is a SARS vaccine he helped develop at the Baylor College of Medicine, where he is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine. It was shelved after that epidemic receded and funding dried up. The potential vaccine has since been stored in a freezer in Houston, he said.
Although it was developed for a different coronavirus, Hotez believes the vaccine has the potential to protect patients against the new disease, which has caused 83,000 global cases and killed more than 2,800 people since emerging in China. He’s looking for government funding to get the vaccine and another that his laboratory has developed into clinical trials. Both rely on recombinant proteins, a scientific approach that predates Moderna’s.
OMG, he is $uffering from a $ELF-$ERVING $ICKNE$$!
He said mRNA vaccines and DNA vaccines such as one under development by Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals have been discussed for years, but none has been approved. It’s imperative, he said, that scientists working on other vaccines receive the financial support they need to get them into clinics.
“You need to get four or five shots on goal instead of one shot on goal,” said Hotez, who is seeking funding from the National Institutes of Health, the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and other sources.
It's an effin' game to him!
Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, agreed. His laboratory is also working on two vaccines, one DNA-based and another that uses the common cold virus to deliver a coronavirus antigen into cells. Work on multiple potential vaccines and drugs to treat Covid-19 must continue, he said, because no one knows which approach will work best.
Like many biotechs in the state’s booming life sciences sector, Moderna hasn’t yet brought a product to market since the company was founded 10 years ago, and Bancel acknowledged that winning approval of the coronavirus vaccine is hardly a foregone conclusion. Nonetheless, he seems confident about its prospects.
They have never marketed a product, huh?
Then the coronavirus showed up just in time, huh?
Moderna has had positive results in early-stage clinical trials over the past four years for six other vaccines, to prevent influenza, respiratory infections, a virus that can cause birth defects in pregnant women, and other diseases. All use the same mRNA approach.
Beginning around March 6, the vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19 will be tested on healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 55 in the first phase of the trial, according to the federal website ClinicalTrials.gov. The volunteers will be divided into three groups, each of which will receive a different dosage. The first phase of the trial is expected to conclude around June 1.
Bancel said the trial will determine whether the vaccine is safe and whether blood drawn from volunteers who received it contains antibodies that neutralize the virus.
“I think it has a good chance of working,” said Bancel, a native of France who ran bioMรฉrieux, a diagnostics company, before he joined Moderna.
He said Moderna hasn’t even considered how much the vaccine would cost, but public health experts say a vaccine must be widely accessible to be effective.
Founded by the Flagship Pioneering venture capital firm and given a name whose last three letters refer to the company’s scientific underpinnings, Moderna wants to use custom-built mRNA to turn the body’s cells into medicine-making factories.
mRNA is a single-stranded molecule that carries genetic code from DNA in a cell’s nucleus to the cell’s protein-making machinery. Vaccines and drugs based on mRNA give instructions to cells in the body to make proteins to prevent or fight disease.
How do you feel with them messing with your DNA and RNA?
Moderna raised billions of dollars from private investors, and then pushed through its record-breaking initial public offering, but the firm struggled to convince the public markets of its game-changing potential, and the company’s stock price slumped 30 percent in the months after the 2018 IPO, wiping out about $2 billion in market value.
OMG, then the coronavirus was godsend that arrived JIT!
Through the years, the firm has also weathered criticism by current and former employees. A 2016 investigation by STAT, a publication of Boston Globe Media Partners, described Moderna’s work environment as caustic and said it had driven away top talent, but after the news about the shipment of the coronavirus vaccine, shares of Moderna had their biggest one-day gain Tuesday.
They got a big boo$t, huh?
Alan Carr, an analyst for Needham & Co. said the public health crisis represents a terrific opportunity for the biotech.
How psychotic is that, huh?
“It’s a great way to pressure-test technologies to see if you can actually develop and produce vaccines really quickly,” he said.
Of cour$e, it is the cu$tomer, 'er, patient that they care about.
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Let's hope the state lab testing patients for coronavirus is run better than the drug lab or state police.
I $uppose there is no place like home:
"Wayfair stock takes another hit amid sales slowdown; Executives at the Boston retailer face tough questions as they balance growth with profitability" by Jon Chesto Globe Staff, February 28, 2020
You can’t blame Wayfair investors for complaining about dรฉjร vu on Friday: another slowdown in revenue on the horizon, another stock plunge.
Wayfair was once a relentless hiring machine. Not anymore. Chief executive Niraj Shah and his team are turning off the spigots.
This slowdown would be easier to accept if Wayfair turned a profit. That hasn’t happened yet, not once in the five-plus years since the company became publicly traded, and the losses approached $1 billion in 2019, on some $9 billion in revenue. That’s almost double the loss of the previous year. Chief financial officer Michael Fleisher on Friday promised positive earnings in the US.
Then there’s China. Long before the coronavirus struck, investors fretted about Wayfair’s China ties. About 60 percent of Wayfair’s products were once imported from Chinese factories, so trade-war tariffs drove up prices in many cases. Shah said Wayfair’s suppliers have been steadily sourcing from other countries, bringing that percentage down to the “low 50s.” There’s no question the coronavirus will cause disruptions, Shah said, but he noted the geographic diversity of Wayfair’s supply chain.
Emory University marketing professor Dan McCarthy said Wall Street gave Wayfair a pass for years because revenue growth had been so strong. Many investors saw a new Amazon taking shape; they were patient with losses when they thought they were betting on a company that could dominate an industry, but McCarthy said Wayfair will need to be more efficient going forward. That could translate into more marketing cutbacks, he said, more layoffs, or both.
This trajectory will have implications for Boston’s economy. We’re talking about one of the city’s biggest private employers.....
Time to move on.
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Better get yourself some help around the house:
"For some busy middle-class families, tired of trying to do it all, a house manager is becoming an essential tool in the arsenal....."
WTF kind of middle cla$$ are they talking about?
Also see:
"Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, on Friday blamed the media for exaggerating the seriousness of coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president; that’s what this is all about.” Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mulvaney played down concerns about the virus that is spreading around the globe and panicking investors. Mulvaney said the administration took “extraordinary steps four or five weeks ago,” to prevent the spread of the virus when it declared a rare public health emergency and barred entry by most foreign citizens who had recently visited China. “Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mulvaney said of travel restrictions that were widely covered in the news media. “What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about.” The news media has been covering the global spread of coronavirus for months, but Mulvaney said the news media was too preoccupied covering impeachment, “because they thought it would bring down the president.” The media’s focus switched to the coronavirus for the same reason, he continued. “The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” he added. Following the president’s lead, Mulvaney also brushed off concerns over the virus. “The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS; it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence; it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”"
Mulvaney is right. All they wanted to print was impeachment, and the NYT appears to be quite defensive about it.
Related:
Federal appeals court blocks Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy
I dismissed the ruling when I saw that it came from a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. The USSC will overturn that as they have in the past, and that was before the coronavirus threat.
The Globe made the day of hopes uplifted and dashed their national lead while next to it was this:
Former White House counsel Donald McGahn does not have to testify to House, appeals court finds
Fox led with that, and it simply confirms the Globe's bias! There function seems to be reassuring their readers no matter how disconnected from reality they become.
Judiciary Committee chairman asks Barr to permit testimony from Stone prosecutors
At least they aren't focused on impeachment, 'eh?
Trump picks Ratcliffe as top intelligence official, again
Along with Richard Grenell, and somehow, I'm still supposed to be worrying about a snow day as GM ramps ups production of gas-guzzlers in an article totally devoid of any mention of "climate change."
Some Boston restaurants are ditching almond milk, citing environmental concerns
Some view almond milk’s rise to beverage supremacy as outdated as wearing a fur coat or ordering veal because they are wasting water and killing honeybees, yup. Ever notice the $olutions offered turn out worse, then they offer another $olution!
Why not worry about the whales instead?
