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Stranger Than Fiction
A brief daily note of things you might find interesting or useful
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TOP NEWS
Stay home. California ordered all 40 million residents to remain at home and only leave for “essential” activities. New York mandated a 75% reduction in nonessential in-person workforces.
Confirmed coronavirus cases reach 230,000 globally. Two-thirds of coronavirus cases are now outside mainland China. U.S. cases surpassed 10,000 and 205 deaths. The U.S. death toll has more than quadrupled over the past week. The number of U.S. cases was 1,700 one week ago. The WSJ has created a handy tool to check what stores are open.
The jobpocalypse is coming. Economists are forecasting job loss numbers the likes of which we have never seen. The worst month during the financial crisis was March 2009, when non-farm payrolls decreased by 800,000. Economists expect a range of between 500,000 to 5 million this April.
Senator sold off stocks before sharp market declines. Senator Richard Burr is the committee chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Financial disclosures show he sold a significant share of his stocks last month, including many industries hardest hit such as hotels and restaurants, shipping, drug manufacturers and health care. Other Senators with suspect sales were made by Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, as well as Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.).
The Fed continued to try to calm markets. The Federal Reserve announced on Thursday it would purchase an additional $150 billion in securities on top of the $125 billion earlier this week. The current round of purchases is on pace to exceed the total amount of QE2 which was $600 billion between November 2010 and June 2011.
THE ELECTION
THE COMMENT
“Even as some cities and states enter a phase of exponential spread, with the number of confirmed cases doubling every few days or so, social distancing is not being paired with the basic epidemiology that’s needed. Contact tracing — the practice of identifying and testing every person that an infected person came into contact with after they themselves contracted the virus — has not been prioritized. Almost no efforts are underway to develop the infrastructure for quarantining the exposed or isolating the infected outside their homes, away from their families. In some places, as the case counts surge, doctors who think they’ve been exposed are being advised to keep on working.” - New York Times editorial board
THE STRANGEST
THE AV ROOM