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Category: Economics/Business

Trump says he won’t close the country if second wave of coronavirus hits

Trump says he won’t close the country if second wave of coronavirus hits

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday said “we are not closing our country” if the U.S. is hit by a second wave of coronavirus infections. “People say that’s a very distinct possibility, it’s standard,” Trump said when asked about a second wave during a tour of a Ford factory in Michigan. “We are going to put out the fires. We’re not going to close the country,” Trump said. “We can put out the fires. Whether it is an ember…

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America’s billionaires got $434 billion richer during the lockdown

America’s billionaires got $434 billion richer during the lockdown

CNBC reports: America’s billionaires saw their fortunes soar by $434 billion during the U.S. lockdown between mid-March and mid-May, according to a new report. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had the biggest gains, with Bezos adding $34.6 billion to his wealth and Zuckerberg adding $25 billion, according to the report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program for Inequality. The report is based on Forbes data for America’s more than 600 billionaires between…

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Lockdowns trigger dramatic fall in global carbon emissions

Lockdowns trigger dramatic fall in global carbon emissions

The Guardian reports: Carbon dioxide emissions have fallen dramatically since lockdowns were imposed around the world due to the coronavirus crisis, research has shown. Daily emissions of the greenhouse gas plunged 17% by early April compared with 2019 levels, according to the first definitive study of global carbon output this year. The findings show the world has experienced the sharpest drop in carbon output since records began, with large sections of the global economy brought to a near standstill. When…

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Preventing a Great Depression will cost $10 trillion. Here’s how it can happen

Preventing a Great Depression will cost $10 trillion. Here’s how it can happen

Derek Thompson writes: Last week, House Democrats unveiled their latest pandemic-relief package. The bill combines aid for families, a bailout for struggling cities and states, and additional funds for testing, tracing, and hospitals. The price tag is about $3 trillion—and it comes just weeks after the president signed an economic-relief package worth about $2 trillion. Republicans have assailed the bill as a profligate wish list. Even Americans who are suffering from the health and economic ravages of the pandemic may…

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Biden campaign and Democratic Party develop plans for sweeping economic transformation

Biden campaign and Democratic Party develop plans for sweeping economic transformation

The New York Times reports: More than 36 million Americans are suddenly unemployed. Congress has allocated $2.2 trillion in aid, with more likely to be on the way as a fight looms over government debt. Millions more people are losing their health insurance and struggling to take care of their children and aging relatives. And nearly 90,000 are dead in a continuing public health catastrophe. This was not the scenario Joseph R. Biden Jr. anticipated confronting when he competed for…

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A $74 billion investment in testing, tracing and isolation could quickly rescue the economy

A $74 billion investment in testing, tracing and isolation could quickly rescue the economy

Alex Tabarrok and Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver write: With the unemployment rate at its highest level since the Great Depression — 14.7 percent and climbing — many Americans are clamoring to reopen the economy, even if it means that thousands of daily covid-19 deaths become part of the backdrop to life. It’s time to move on as “warriors,” President Trump has said, because “we can’t keep our country closed down for years.” We, too, favor markets and share the president’s eagerness…

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The economy is in free fall but Wall Street is thriving

The economy is in free fall but Wall Street is thriving

By Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica, May 10, 2020 Ten weeks into the worst crisis in 90 years, the government’s effort to save the economy has been both a spectacular success and a catastrophic failure. The clearest illustration of that came on Friday, when the government reported that 20.5 million people lost their jobs in April. It marked a period of unfathomable pain across the country not seen since the Great Depression. Also on Friday, the stock market rallied. The S&P 500…

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Why U.S. jobless figures don’t capture the true state of the coronavirus economy

Why U.S. jobless figures don’t capture the true state of the coronavirus economy

MarketWatch reports: ‘The virus is still spreading throughout much of the country. We have to continue to be very measured and not reopen too quickly because we may pay the price for that.’ That’s the cautious view Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari shared on NBC’s Today Show in an interview ahead of Friday’s monthly employment report, which he says won’t give the clearest picture of job losses amid the coronavirus pandemic. “That bad report tomorrow is actually going…

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The only way to get back to normal this summer is to test everyone in the U.S., says leading economist

The only way to get back to normal this summer is to test everyone in the U.S., says leading economist

The Washington Post reports: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer says a return to nearly normal life is possible this summer if the United States does wide-scale testing for the coronavirus. Romer is calling on the U.S. government to test everyone in the nation once every two weeks and isolate people who test positive for the deadly coronavirus. He estimates that doing so would cost $100 billion, a hefty sum but far less than the $2 trillion Congress has spent so…

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Economists agree that no quick rebound from recession is likely

Economists agree that no quick rebound from recession is likely

The Associated Press reports: Devastated by the coronavirus, the U.S. economy is sinking. And the plunge is accelerating. Now, as some businesses in a few states start to trickle back to work, hopes are beginning to arise that the economy, damaged as it is, might be poised to rebound by the second half of the year. If more employees and consumers were to gradually return to working and spending, the idea goes, the economy might be able to mount a…

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Energy: A silver lining in the pandemic

Energy: A silver lining in the pandemic

Michael T. Klare writes: Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise. The result: a greener, less climate-degrading system. In this future, fossil fuels would be overtaken by renewables, while oil, gas, and coal would be relegated to an increasingly marginal role in the global energy equation. In its World Energy Outlook 2019, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that, by…

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Private gain mustn’t be allowed to elbow out the public good

Private gain mustn’t be allowed to elbow out the public good

By Dirk Philipsen Adam Smith had an elegant idea when addressing the notorious difficulty that humans face in trying to be smart, efficient and moral. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he maintained that the baker bakes bread not out of benevolence, but out of self-interest. No doubt, public benefits can result when people pursue what comes easiest: self-interest. And yet: the logic of private interest – the notion that we should just ‘let the market handle it’ – has…

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Leading economist: U.S. coronavirus response is like ‘third world’ country

Leading economist: U.S. coronavirus response is like ‘third world’ country

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump’s botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis has left the US looking like a “third world” country and on course for a second Great Depression, one of the world’s leading economists has warned. In a withering attack on the president, Joseph Stiglitz said millions of people were turning to food banks, turning up for work due to a lack of sick pay and dying because of health inequalities. The Nobel prize-winning economist said: “The numbers turning…

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The facts about Trump’s chances of getting reelected

The facts about Trump’s chances of getting reelected

Daniel W. Drezner writes: Over the weekend, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts read a lot of analysis about what the Trump administration was thinking and doing about reelection. What all of this analysis had in common was a refusal to acknowledge some brute facts. My personal favorite is this headline on an Associated Press story: “Coronavirus could complicate Trump’s path to reelection.” I know the AP is as strait-laced as possible in its coverage, and to be fair,…

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Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’

Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’

The Financial Times reports: Unlike other world leaders, from Donald Trump in the US to Xi Jinping in China, who are trying to return their countries to where they were before the pandemic, the 42-year-old [French president] Mr Macron says he sees the crisis as an existential event for humanity that will change the nature of globalisation and the structure of international capitalism. As a liberal European leader in a world of strident nationalists, Mr Macron says he hopes the…

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East and West coast governors preempt move by Trump and form pacts to control reopening of economies

East and West coast governors preempt move by Trump and form pacts to control reopening of economies

CNN reports: States on the country’s East and West coasts are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen from the stay-at-home orders each has issued to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. The first such group to be announced came Monday on the East Coast. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts each plan to name a public health and economic official to…

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