I Miss Sports So, So, So Much

I miss sports. I miss millionaires diving into billionaires to save a $150 basketball. I miss buzzer beaters, chin-high heaters, and even Astros cheaters. I miss one seeds and three putts and five holes. I miss Roger Federer faking his opponent so far the wrong way on a forehand that both guys have to laugh.

I quit full-time sportswriting six years ago partly because I was tired of the same old wheel, season after season, year after year—the Final Four to the NBA Finals to the World Series to the Super Bowl to the Final Four. But now that these events are inexplicably gone, I’d give my left pinky toe just to cuddle up with a cold beer and the Valero Texas Open.

This has never happened in American history. Sports is shut down, put up, and locked away. No March Madness, no NBA, no NHL, no golf, no tennis, no spring training, no NASCAR, no nothing. All I have is these two guys hitting a ball from one high-rise-apartment window to the other. I’ve watched it 11 times now.

I know we’re doing the right thing. Until the coronavirus calms down, Americans have to stay away from one another, and sports are the opposite of that. Fans, athletes, refs, writers, popcorn vendors, and sweat-mop boys have to avoid all contact. So, you know, just pretend you play for the Cleveland Browns.

The other day, I read the saddest paragraph in sports history. It was in a how-to-isolate-yourself directive: “Shooting hoops solo is OK … Also permitted: hitting a tennis ball against a backboard.” (Cue soft whimpering.)

Here’s how bad it’s gotten: The other day I came upon two teenage boys throwing a football in the alley near my home. I stopped. My sports-starved brain took over from there. The lefty has a nice tight spiral, but I don’t like his footwork. I’d like to see the redhead catch more with his hands than his body. Still—Suddenly, I noticed they were looking at me like they were about to dial 911.

What do we do with ourselves? After Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded baseball’s commissioner, Kenesaw Landis, to keep baseball going to take people’s minds off the war. A week after 9/11, baseball was back on. But even sports can’t get us through this. It’s a planet-wide stoppage until … who knows? And when they do finally come back, Tom Brady won’t even be wearing a New England Patriots uniform. We are through the looking glass, people.

by Rick Reilly, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Lucas Uebel/Getty

Ghost Town Seattle

America’s Coronavirus Ground Zero (Politico)
Images: Chona Kasinger

[ed. Coming to a city near you. I've been tremendously impressed with Governor Inslee's leadership.]

And It's Gone

[ed. The Everything Bubble is collapsing. See also: Le Freak (Freak Out).]

Today We Are Switching Our Coverage of Donald Trump to an Emergency Setting

Even this far into his term, it is still a bit of a shock to be reminded that the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president of the United States. For three years this has been a massive — and unsolved — problem for the country and its political leadership.

But now it is life and death. On everything that involves the coronavirus Donald Trump’s public statements have been unreliable. And that is why today we announce that we are shifting our coverage of the President to an emergency setting.

This means we are exiting from the normal system for covering presidents— which Trump himself exited long ago by using the microphone we have handed him to spread thousands of false claims, even as he undermines trust in the presidency and the press. True: he is not obliged to answer our questions. But neither are we obligated to assist him in misinforming the American people about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government.

We take this action knowing we will be criticized for it by the President’s defenders, by some in journalism, and perhaps by some of you. And while it would be nice to have company as we change course, we anticipate that others in the news media will stick with the traditional approach to covering presidents.

This we cannot in good conscience do.

Switching to emergency mode means our coverage will look different and work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming you through us. Here are the major changes:

* We will not cover live any speech, rally, or press conference involving the president. The risk of passing along bad information is too great. Instead, we will attend carefully to what he says. If we can independently verify any important news he announces we will bring that to you— after the verification step.

* We plan to suspend normal relations with the Trump White House. That means we won’t be attending briefings. (We can watch them on TV.) We won’t gather around him as he departs in his helicopter. We won’t join in any off-the-record “background” sessions with Administration officials. We won’t enter into agreements of any kind with the Trump team, which includes those nameless “senior advisers” who mysteriously show up in news stories.

* We have always tried to quote public officials accurately, including President Trump. In emergency mode we add a further check. In addition to, “does this fairly represent what he said?” we will ask: is what he said something we should be amplifying? If it is simply meant to demonize a group of people, rewrite a history that now embarrasses the President, or extend his hate campaign against journalists who are doing their job, we may decide not to amplify it, even though it happened. An old tenet of White House reporting states that what the president says makes news— automatically, as it were. Today we are disabling that autoplay system and replacing it with a manual one.

* In general, we will be shifting the focus of our coverage from what President Trump is saying to what his government is doing. We will be de-emphasizing the entire White House beat and adding people who can penetrate the bureaucracy from the rim, rather than the center of the distortion machine.

* Experience has taught us that there will occassionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a newswriting formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true. 

Refusing to go with live coverage. Suspending normal relations with his White House. Always asking: is this something we should amplify? A focus on what he’s doing, not on what he’s saying. The truth sandwich when we feel we have to highlight his false claims. This is what you can expect now that our coverage has been switched to an emergency setting.

by Jay Rosen, PressThink |  Read more:

[ed. If only the mainstream media were as conscientious as Prof. Rosen. To see real leadership in action (from a couple posts above): Governor Jay Inslee, Washington. Contrasted with: this (NY Times)]

Coronalinks 3/19/20

A brief flurry of interest last week as the UK seemed to be trying a different strategy from everyone else – isolating their oldest and most vulnerable citizens, but letting everyone else get the virus to build herd immunity. They’ve since backtracked after people did the math and found that an epidemic even among healthy young people only would overwhelm their medical system. Here’s another critique of herd immunity, appropriately enough on UnHerd.com.

But the UK’s original point – that without herd immunity, all we can do is continue the lockdown until something happens – remains sound and worrying. Everyone is hoping for a quick vaccine or antiviral, but this is a field where “quick” sometimes means months or years instead of decades. If we don’t get a deus ex machina, eventually somebody will need to implement some long-term strategy.

Last week I predicted that this might look like titrating quarantine levels – locking everything down, then trying to unlock it just enough to use available medical capacity, then locking things down more again if it looked like the number of cases was starting to get out of hand. This would eventually develop herd immunity without overwhelming the medical system. A paper yesterday out of Imperial College London (discussed here) said the same thing, arguing for alternating periods of higher and lower quarantine levels based on how the medical system was doing:

The orange line is projected ICU cases. The blue line is government-mandated social distancing levels. Relax social distancing levels, then after ICU cases cross some threshold, reinstate them again. That way at least we can have a few weeks of normal economic activity and seeing friends in between each lockdown. Control systems are the solution to everything!

Problem: it would take forever to develop herd immunity under this system, and we might just have to keep turning quarantine on and off for a year or two until a vaccine gets developed. Does anyone have any better ideas?

The closest thing I’ve heard is “what China and South Korea are doing”, which seems to be having so many tests available, and such good health services, that it’s easy to detect cases, track down their contacts, and manage the epidemic even while life goes on mostly as usual. So maybe the end date isn’t “have a vaccine available”, it’s “have millions of test kits available”, which I think looks more like a few months than like years and years.

Flatten the curve

Is flattening the curve just another name for the “have a control system to titrate lockdown levels so that only the right number of people get it at a time” strategy? Maybe everyone just assumes that we’re never going to get the cases down to too low a level, so we should try to get them as low as possible and maybe hit the right amount? And overshooting and reducing it so far that you’re not using the medical capacity you have, and wasting an opportunity to have a normal life and/or build herd immunity, is just really unlikely without China-level resources?

An article called Flattening The Curve Is A Deadly Delusion has been going around this part of the Internet, saying that there’s basically no way to match a curve of any flatness with our current hospital capacity. Nostalgebraist says the math is wrong, mostly because it uses a normal distribution when it should use an exponential one. But I’ve seen some other people making this basic point now, so it could just a be a question of how bad things get, rather than whether they’ll be bad at all. (...)

Don’t use aspirin

Doctors in Germany and France are saying that a suspicious number of young coronavirus patients who end up in the ICU took aspirin or other anti-inflammatory drugs (Advil, Motrin, Aleve, ibuprofen, diclofenac, etc, yes I know several of these are the same drug, I’m trying to inform readers) before getting worse. There’s a plausible biological mechanism; anti-inflammatories dial down the immune system. BMJ agrees: Ibuprofen should not be used for managing symptoms, say doctors and scientists. Tylenol, acetaminophen, or paracetamol (YES, I KNOW) is still okay, so use that for coronavirus-induced fever.

[EDIT: WHO is skeptical, but French and German doctors stick to their guns. It seems like there’s a longstanding debate on this with the French and German medical establishment thinking it’s bad for lots of diseases, and most of the rest of the world not believing them. I have no strong beliefs about whether France/Germany or everyone else is better, but switching from Motrin to Tylenol in this case seems pretty low cost] (...)

Ventilation, part 2

Right now the biggest bottleneck to treating coronavirus is likely shortage of ventilators and oxygen concentrators. Many people are trying to come up with ideas for solving the shortage. EndCoronavirus.Org is trying to get a team together, and is looking for doctors, engineers – and of course lawyers, to jump over the inevitable regulatory hurdles.

Meanwhile, at least according to Breitbart, existing ventilator manufacturers are just…not bothering to ramp up production yet? Does this make sense to anyone else? According to Forbes, ventilator manufacturers could quintuple capacity over the next few months, but…nobody has asked them to?…and they don’t want to take the initiative until somebody asks? Economists are begging the US government to ask, and maybe to ensure that every ventilator they make will get bought no matter what the circumstances are a few months from now – if they can’t, maybe private philanthropists should step in? Kudos to the UK government, which has just sent ventilator blueprints to a bunch of manufacturers and told them to get to work. But even if this comes through, how are we going to get enough skilled labor to ventilate this many people? [EDIT: As per WSJ, ventilator manufacturers are now ramping up production].

Also in medical supply news – when a hospital runs out of a critical $11,000 part and the manufacturer can’t supply more, a local guy with a 3D printer prints one up for $1. Now he’s being threatened with a lawsuit by the manufacturer. [EDIT: possibly not true or exaggerated, see here] This whole epidemic has been a fun adventure in “newspapers finally paying attention to what everything in health care is like all the time.”

Ventilation, part 3

When doctors need to ventilate someone in an emergency and don’t have time to hook them up to a real ventilator, they use manual ventilation, ie “bag and mask ventilation”, a really simple technique using a $30 piece of equipment which is literally just a bag attached to a face mask. Somebody squeezes the bag in a breathing-like rhythm, sending air into the person’s lungs until they’re able to get on a real ventilator. It’s not perfect but it saves lives.

In a New York Times article on the expected upcoming ventilator shortage, they say:

One doctor wondered if they could recruit enough volunteers to manually ventilate patients — which involves squeezing a small inflatable device by hand — indefinitely.

I know nothing about respiratory medicine, and I guess I always assumed that there were issues with bag-mask ventilation which made it unsuitable for longer than the few-minute-period it usually gets used for. If that’s not true, and the limiting factor is just getting enough people to keep squeezing the little bag, then surely our civilization can come up with some sort of automatic squeezing machine, right?

[EDIT: some discussion of why this may not work here and here.]

Come summer

The smart people seem to be going back and forth on whether the coronavirus might die down in summer like a seasonal flu. The good news is that this has sparked more interest in the absolutely fascinating field of disease seasonality:

Except in the equatorial regions, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a winter disease, Martinez wrote, but chickenpox favors the spring. Rotavirus peaks in December or January in the U.S. Southwest, but in April and May in the Northeast. Genital herpes surges all over the country in the spring and summer, whereas tetanus favors midsummer; gonorrhea takes off in the summer and fall, and pertussis has a higher incidence from June through October. Syphilis does well in winter in China, but typhoid fever spikes there in July. Hepatitis C peaks in winter in India but in spring or summer in Egypt, China, and Mexico. Dry seasons are linked to Guinea worm disease and Lassa fever in Nigeria and hepatitis A in Brazil.

Their explanation for why we don’t know more about this:

“It’s an absolute swine of a field,” says Andrew Loudon, a chronobiologist at the University of Manchester. Investigating a hypothesis over several seasons can take 2 or 3 years. “Postdocs can only get one experiment done and it can be a career killer,”

As for the coronavirus itself? Unclear. The latest study says it might be seasonal, but a lot of comments on it point out continuing epidemics in tropical countries like Malaysia (currently 900 official cases). If your hometown isn’t going to get warmer this summer than Kuala Lumpur is right now (95 degrees at time of writing), you may not quite be off the hook.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Taylor Swift

[ed. More bad news. I think we all know the deal by now, the only question being just how bad it gets. Enjoy some music. It'll get better.]

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

The Robert Glasper Trio

Keith Richards

via:

Why Sending $1,000 Checks to Everyone Won’t Solve the Coronavirus Crisis

... Meanwhile on the question of broader economic stimulus, several Republicans are now outflanking Pelosi to the left. On Monday, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) rejected the Pelosi bill as insufficient, while Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) proposed an immediate payment of $1,000 to every adult. On Tuesday, the White House released a massive $850 billion stimulus plan (which may get even bigger), including “$500 billion in a payroll tax cut, a $50 billion bailout for airlines struggling from plummeting demand, and $250 billion for small business loans,” Reuters reports.

Even though these are big numbers, recall yesterday that Edmund Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s back of the envelope calculation was that the US GDP could suffer a 10% fall in GDP. Even Stephanie Kelton’s guesstimate that $2 trillion in stimulus was needed is light relative to that.

Moreover, more delay and more complexity leads to permanent damage. Even though the Administration claimed they’d get their $1000 checks out in two weeks, there’s no way that will happen between getting the legislation passed and the operational requirements of printing all the envelopes and checks and getting them out. In 2009, under an Obama stimulus program, the Federal government sent out 52 million checks, fewer than one expects here (presumably to ~155 million filers of Federal tax returns,1 since those are the addresses on hand; Social Security recipients are set up for electronic deposit, but they aren’t the group most in need). It took five months to distribute them, from May to October. One assumes there was also a sense of urgency then.

And what does $1,000 per adult do? The average US mortgage payment is over $1,000, so for a couple, in most cases, housing costs will eat up a lot. It doesn’t take a lot of budget estimations to show that for most this money will support critical payments like housing, car expenses, the cell phone, perhaps student debt payments, for a month. It’s a very short term stopgap.

And even more important…that amount of money is chump change compared to paying any coronavirus treatment-related bills, and all we have from the officialdom on that front so far is empty promises. Look at an indicator of the costs even for those with insurance. From The Verge:

Someone with health insurance from their employer could pay $1,300 or more out of pocket for treatment if they’re hospitalized with a severe case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, according to one analysis. Health researchers based that prediction off of the costs associated with hospitalization for pneumonia… 

Rae and his co-authors analyzed a database of insurance claims for people enrolled in employer insurance plans. They found that the total cost of treatments for people on those insurance plans who were hospitalized with severe pneumonia with complications was, on average, around $20,000 — though it ranged from around $11,000 to around $24,000. Insurers covered most of that cost, but the out-of-pocket expense for most people usually reached or exceeded $1,300.

And for those who have jobs or a bit more of a cushion, a lot will be saved. It was for the most part in 2008 when the Bush Administration also launched a stimulus package that included sending checks of up to $600 to individuals, $,1200 for couples, and an additional $300 per dependent child. Even thought there was more to spend it on at that time (shops and entertainment venues were open), that was also a juncture when it looked like the economy might collapse into a depression. From The Balance:

The Bush Economic Stimulus Package didn’t have the impact it should have. A 2008 survey found that only 20% of those who received checks spent them. Another 32% put the money into savings. The rest use the checks to pay off debt.

In other words, while saving people from bankruptcy or living on the street is a worthy goal, stimulus this ain’t. It’s a band-aid over the gunshot wound of business closures, job losses and pay cuts.

And loans to small businesses? Are you kidding? What small businessman wants to take on more debt when he isn’t sure of his income or even business survival? A few who are in situations where they have genuine reasons to think the coronavirus impact on them is as blip rather than a body slam might take the plunge, but the rest? Fuggedaboudit. Plus the time and effort involved in getting together a loan application and the uncertainty as to if and when any money might be forthcoming are further stressors when someone is fighting for his commercial survival. A business owner hit by the coronavirus lockdown needs money to pay his bills now, if he still has a prospect of riding out months of the new normal, and that’s just not how these programs work.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Getty via

[ed. Yes. $1000 or even $2000/person is a panic, drop in the bucket solution (For each family member, or per family? For millionaires? One time? Monthly?). A better solution, if we have to go with something like this (everyone is apparently a socialist now) might be what China is doing - time sensitive coupons/vouchers that have to be spent within a certain time-frame or risk becoming useless. See: More of China’s local governments, companies resort to coupons to boost flagging consumer spending (South China Morning Post).]

After Blowing $4.5 Trillion on Share Buybacks, Airlines, Boeing, Many Other Culprits Want Taxpayer & Fed Bailouts of Their Shareholders

The Trump administration is putting together a rumored $850-billion stimulus package that will include taxpayer funded bailouts of Corporate America, according to leaks cited widely by the media. Trump in the press conference today singled out $50 billion in bailout funds for US airlines alone. A bailout of this type is designed to bail out shareholders and unsecured creditors. That’s all it is. The alternative would be a US chapter 11 bankruptcy procedure which would allow the company to operate, while it is being handed to the creditors, with shareholders getting wiped out.

So get this: The big four US airlines – Delta, United, American, and Southwest – whose stocks are now getting crushed because they may run out of cash in a few months, would be the primary recipients of that $50 billion bailout, well, after they wasted, blew, and incinerated willfully and recklessly together $43.7 billion in cash on share buybacks since 2012 for the sole purpose of enriching the very shareholders that will now be bailed out by the taxpayer.

Share buybacks were considered a form of market manipulation and were illegal under SEC rules until 1982, when the SEC issued Rule 10b-18 which provided corporations a “safe harbor” to buy back their own shares under certain conditions. Once corporations figured out that no one cared about those conditions, and that no one was auditing anything, share buybacks exploded. And they’ve have been hyped endlessly by Wall Street.

The S&P 500 companies, including those that are now asking for huge bailouts from taxpayers and from the Fed, have blown, wasted and incinerated together $4.5 trillion with a T in cash to buy back their own shares just since 2012 (...)

And those $4.5 trillion in cash that was wasted, blown, and incinerated on share buybacks since 2012 for the sole purpose of enriching shareholders is now sorely missing from corporate balance sheets, where these share buybacks were often funded with debt.

And the record amount of corporate debt – “record” by any measure – that has piled up since 2012 has become the Fed’s number one concern as trigger of the next financial crisis. So here we are. (...)

No one could foresee the arrival of the coronavirus and what it would do to US industry. I get that. But there is always some crisis in the future, and companies need to prepare for them to have the resources to deal with them.

A company that systematically and recklessly hollows out its balance sheet by converting cash and capital into share buybacks, often with borrowed money, to “distribute value to shareholders” or “unlock shareholder value” or whatever Wall Street BS is being hyped, has set itself up for failure at the next crisis. And that’s fine. But shareholders should pay for it since they benefited from those share buybacks – and not taxpayers or workers with dollar-paychecks. Shareholders should know that they won’t be bailed out by the government or the Fed, but zeroed out in bankruptcy court.

The eventual costs of enriching shareholders recklessly in a way that used to be illegal must not be inflicted on taxpayers via a government bailout; or on everyone earning income in dollars via a bailout from the Fed.

The solution has already been finely tuned in the US: Delta, United, American, and other airlines already went through chapter 11 bankruptcies. They work. The airlines continued to operate in a manner where passengers couldn’t tell the difference. The airlines were essentially turned over to creditors and restructured. When they emerged from bankruptcy, they issued new shares to new shareholders, and in most cases, the old shares became worthless. The new airlines emerged as stronger companies – until they started blowing it with their share buybacks.

Companies like Boeing, GE, any of the airlines, or any company that blew this now sorely needed cash on share buybacks must put the ultimate cost of those share buybacks on shareholders and unsecured creditors. Any bailouts, whether from the Fed or the government, should only be offered as Debtor in Possession (DIP) loans during a chapter 11 bankruptcy filing where shareholders get wiped out.

In other words, companies that buy back their owns shares must be permanently disqualified for bailouts, though they may qualify for a government-backed DIP loan in bankruptcy court if shareholders get wiped out. Because those proposed taxpayer and Fed bailouts of these share-buyback queens are just heinous.

by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street | Read more:
[ed. Debtor in Possession (DIP) loans. Or else, fund and nationalize. See also (previous): Boeing Seeks 'Tens Of Billions' In Bailouts After Fully Drawing-Down $13Bn Credit Line (Duck Soup). See also: Other options: How To Structure the Coronavirus Bailout (BIG/Matt Stoller).]

Chaz Hutton
via:

Bob Marley & The Wailers

[ed. See also: Annie Lennox's excellent version.]

Shelter in Place

[ed. We're all learning a lot of new pandemic phrases these days, and Shelter in Place (ominously) is one of them: Bay Area orders ‘shelter in place,’ only essential businesses open in 6 counties (SF Chronicle). See also: Life under 'shelter in place': long lines, empty roads, panic-buying cannabis; and, What does 'shelter in place' mean? California's coronavirus order, explained (Guardian).]
Image: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Boeing Seeks 'Tens Of Billions' In Bailouts After Fully Drawing-Down $13Bn Credit Line

A new disclosure on Tuesday afternoon details yet another troubling development for Boeing.

In its latest 8K, the plunging planemaker has completely drawn down its $13.8 billion credit line that it entered in October 2018 as it "navigates current business challenges" exposing just how fast this company is burning through cash.

"As of March 13, 2020, Boeing has fully drawn on the Credit Agreement, consisting of approximately $13.8 billion, which amount includes additional commitments made subsequent to the initial closing date.

For additional information on the terms and conditions of the Credit Agreement, see Boeing's Current Report on Form 8-K dated February 6, 2020. 

We continue to have access to revolving credit agreements entered into on October 30, 2019, which have also been disclosed. These facilities, which to date have not been drawn upon, provide us with additional liquidity as we navigate the current business challenges. For additional information on these credit facilities, see Boeing's Current Report on Form 8-K dated October 30, 2019."

This comes just hours after sources told Reuters that Boeing is seeking a bailout of 'tens of billions' in US government loan guarantees amid the Covid-19 crisis.

President Trump has already been on record telling airlines that his administration is prepared to pledge $50 billion in support after passenger activity has fallen off a cliff due to the virus scare.

Boeing was struggling before the virus outbreak, dealing with 737 Max groundings, production halts, and cancellation orders.

As we raged previously, this bailout demand comes after the company blew nearly $100 billion on stock buybacks since 2013 helping push its stock to all-time highs not that long ago, and instead of selling stock to get liquidity, they're asking the Trump administration for a massive bailout.

So, no, nobody in their right minds should give Boeing even one penny in "short term aid". Instead, management and the board should be ordered to sell as much stock as they need - you know, the opposite of buying it back - to maintain the business, even it means sending the stock price crashing far lower.

Because it's called capitalism, and because there is no reason why taxpayers should foot the bill for a company which instead of saving cash when times were good, was handing it out to shareholders and a handful of executives, and which should now for some insane reason be eligible for a bailout when times suddenly go bad.

No: force Boeing - and others like it that spent billions repurchasing its stock while incurring massive amounts of debt - to sell its stock. After all that's what a public company's stock is - a currency - and just as Boeing could repurchase it when it had cash, and lifted its stock price to all time highs, it should now sell its stock and use the proceeds to fund itself, like any other corporation does when it needs funding. Last time we checked, Boeing's market cap was $73 billion, and it certainly afford to drop much more as the company now does the buyback in reverse.

This is also a warning to Congress and the White House: if chronic stock repurchasers such as Boeing, are bailed out instead of ordered to find their own sources of liquidity, there will be a mutiny in America and rightfully so, because it was Boeing's shareholders that got rich on the way up, and now it is somehow up to taxpayers to make sure the company, loaded up with record amounts of debt used to fund buybacks, survives one more quarter.

That, in a word, is bullshit.

by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. With several massive stimulus programs in the works, sharks smell blood in the water. See also: Boeing, Which Repurchased Over $100BN In Stock, Is Downgraded To BBB, Seeks "Short-Term" Bailout (ZH). And it's not just Boeing: U.S. Airlines Spent 96% of Free Cash Flow on Buybacks (Bloomberg).]

Washington state to shut down restaurants, bars, and cap gatherings at 50 to stop spread of coronavirus (Seattle Times).
Image via:

Panic at the Fed

With Wall Street desperate for the Fed to announce emergency measures on Sunday (after disappointing last week), and ideally before the futures open, Jerome Powell did not disappoint and moments ago the Fed announced a barrage of emergency measures which included:

• Welcome back ZIRP: Fed cuts rates by 100bps to 0-25bps from 1.00 -1.25bps. This is in addition to the 50bps rate cut on March 3, which means that in just under two weeks the Fed has cut rates by 150bps to zero.
• Fed officially launches QE5 (no more "Non-QE" bullshit), consisting of "at least" $500BN in Treasury purchases and $200 billion in MBS.
• Boosting intraday liquidity: The Fed announces Measures related to the discount window, intraday credit, bank capital and liquidity buffers, reserve requirements, and—in coordination with other central banks—the U.S. dollar liquidity swap line arrangements
• Reserve requirements cut to zero: The Fed cuts reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26.
• Coordinated swap lines: The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank announced a coordinated action to enhance the provision of liquidity via the standing U.S. dollar liquidity swap line arrangements. The pricing on the dollar liquidity swap arrangements is cut by 25 basis points, so the new rate will be the US dollar overnight index swap (OIS) rate plus 25 basis points.

Amusingly, the Fed announces that the emergency action wasn't unilateral, with Loretta J. Mester voting against the action, as she was "fully supportive of all of the actions taken to promote the smooth functioning of markets and the flow of credit to households and businesses but preferred to reduce the target range for the federal funds rate to 1/2 to 3/4 percent at this meeting."

The full statement is below (link): (...)

With all due respect to Thursday's massive repo expansion, this is the Fed's bazooka. It also means that after this, the Fed - which just cut rates to zero and launched QE5 - is now out of ammo, as Powell will have to cut rates to negative next and/or buy stocks outright for further monetary stimulus, something that would require the permission of Congress. And since that is unlikely absent a total collapse in the financial system, we are now down to fiscal stimulus and US politicians acting in a bipartisan fashion. Which may be a huge gamble.

Curiously, in this barrage of emergency actions, the one which arguably was most needed, a commercial paper facility, was missing. As such, it wouldn't be unthinkable to see the dollar funding squeeze worsen after the initial euphoria fades on Monday despite the launch of enhanced global swap lines.

The good news is that at least there is nothing more the Fed can announce on Wednesday, absent buying single stocks and ETFs of course, and as such all attention will now be on Congress and what additional fiscal stimulus the Fed can push through.

by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge |  Read more:

Image: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images

[ed. Futures market is tanking on the news. Probably because this was an emergency decision that couldn't wait two days for their next scheduled meeting. Smells like panic. I don't usually link to ZH, but they do stay on top of what's going on financially (if  you can ignore all the crackpot comments). See also: Fed Disaster: S&P Futures Crash, Halted Limit Down; Gold, Treasuries Soar After Hisotric Fed Panic (ZH); and Fed Cuts Rates To Near Zero As Coronavirus Rips Through Economy (NPR).]

The Struggle To Bring Up Better Boys

Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks. Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. These are attributes of “the ideal guy” according to the young American men who spoke to author Peggy Orenstein for her new book, Boys & Sex.

In contrast surveys reveal that teenage girls are now more comfortable about rejecting stereotypical roles, thanks in part to simple slogans such as “Girl Power” and “Yes She Can”, coupled with the liberating message of the popular Frozen animation franchise. Music, sport and young adult literature have all been happily singing from this feminist hymn sheet for some time.

How about the boys then? Now the daunting task of exposing and exploding some of the equally damaging conventional pressures on male children and teenagers has received a boost with the publication of two striking new studies and the arrival in cinemas of Disney-Pixar’s recent release, Onward.

All attempt to show that boys need urgent help to express their feelings and deal with what society expects of them. And all three have met with a negative reception in some quarters.

The two books, Orenstein’s Boys & Sex, available here in paperback on Friday, and Cara Natterson’s Decoding Boys, out last month, argue that unless parents move swiftly to tackle their sons’ adolescent confusion and alienation, their daughters will soon leave them far behind when it comes to coping with emotions. Sex education for boys, they warn, has been left to the pornographers and football coaches, while the effects of changing male hormones are commonly misunderstood.

The aims of these twin examinations of modern boyhood sound pretty laudable, but they have already prompted accusations of bias and a suspicion that they’re designed to berate men, rather than help them.

Writing angrily in the conservative online magazine The Federalist, Glenn T Stanton alleges that Orenstein and Natterson’s books have only been welcomed by the liberal press, as represented by The Atlantic magazine, because they appear to support the idea that “toxic masculinity” is running rampant. By concentrating on examples of poor, insensitive male behaviour, Stanton believes the findings of the authors are just fuelling calls for current ideas of manhood to be ripped up and chucked away. Defining any social group, including young men, by its extremes is wrong, he argues.

Another male critic, who wrote in from Chicago in response to an article by Orenstein in The Atlantic, suggested that symptoms of “toxic masculinity” tend to be shrugged off by men as they grow up. He also felt that Orenstein’s choice to study young white “jocks”, or college sportsmen, had skewed her results: “Had she spoken with members of the debate team, for instance, or the drama club, or the school band, she might have opened a window to a very different landscape.”

Orenstein’s book, which has the full title Boys & Sex, Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity, is a follow-up to her 2016 hit, Girls & Sex, and its frank attitude to discussing sex means it is likely to appeal well beyond academic circles. Before writing, she took two years out to talk to boys across America, mostly college-bound and between the ages of 16 and 21. What she found was that when these intelligent young men were asked to describe “the ideal guy”, they frequently “appeared to be harking back to 1955”.

It made Orenstein wonder if parents have been looking the other way for too long: “Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: the definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting.”

In Natterson’s book, which has the subtitle, New Science Behind the Subtle Art of Raising Sons, a series of useful bits of advice have been crafted from the author’s long practical experience as a paediatrician. The New York Times has judged it a good guide for all parents of boys and praised its “zippy, big-hearted” tone as it explains that puberty starts much earlier in boys than we used to think. It also argues that teenage boys should not be allowed to retreat into monosyllabic and fleeting family interactions. According to Natterson they need more emotional and physical reassurance than we ever realised.

by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Allstar/Disney/Pixar

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