Two Trillion Dollar Stimulus Brings Back Bull, For Now
The Senate passed a two trillion dollar stimulus bill Wednesday night. And the Dow lurched forward 6.4% on Thursday. And that followed an 11% bump from the day before. But the 401k party was over by Friday and it was still down over 20% for the year.
Tokyo Olympics In Lockdown Until Summer 2021
The Tokyo Olympics are in lockdown due to the Corona Virus. Unlike the 2016 Zika Olympics in Rio, the 2020 games won’t go on this summer. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach agreed to postpone the games until 2021. But, for some reason, the name, Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, won’t change.
Senate Stock Market Tycoons
White House and Senate agreed to a $2 trillion stimulus deal for the economy. And the economy likes it. The Dow shot up 11% for its best day since 1933.
Speaking of stocks and Senators, some senators dumped stocks just before Corona virus market meltdown.
Senate Stock Market Tycoons
Here’s Professor Jonathan Turley writing in The Hill:
Senators Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, James Inhofe, and Dianne Feinstein together are responsible for as much as $11 million in recent stock sales. It turns out that many lawmakers become market investment geniuses after they enter Congress. A University of Memphis study found that 75 percent of randomly selected members had made “stock transactions that directly coincided with legislative activity.” A Georgia State University study noted that, from 1993 to 1998, senators beat the stock market by 12 points with their portfolios and outperformed “corporate insiders” by 8 points.
Bernie Sanders is Wasted on the Young
Bernie Sanders is wasted on the young. Millennials like the old socialist but they don’t show up to vote for him.
According to Vox Bernie won 58% of the under 30 vote on Super Tuesday. But there weren’t enough of them. Forty-two percent of the 45 to 64 crowd went for Biden compared to twenty-five percent for Sanders. And in the over 65 set Biden beat Sanders 48% to 15%.
Millennials
Interestingly, people over 65 are also more likely to die from COVID-19 . So they tend to shelter in place. Maybe Bernie’s millennials skipped the polls for spring break.
Cure Worse than Disease?
Is the cure worse than the disease? The war against the Covid-19 virus is destroying businesses and jobs. The Wall Street Journal in an editorial titled Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown thinks maybe so:
In a normal recession the U.S. loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or so. In this case we may lose that much, or twice as much, in a month.
Our friend Ed Hyman, the Wall Street economist, on Thursday adjusted his estimate for the second quarter to an annual rate loss in GDP of minus-20%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s assertion on Fox Business Thursday that the economy will power through all this is happy talk if this continues for much longer…
And David Katz, the founding director of the Yale- Griffin prevention research Center, wrote in the New York Times
I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself.
…A pivot right now from trying to protect all people to focusing on the most vulnerable remains entirely plausible. With each passing day, however, it becomes more difficult. The path we are on may well lead to uncontained viral contagion and monumental collateral damage to our society and economy. A more surgical approach is what we need.
