Dow Tanking Like a Weinstein Hooker from Corona Virus Fallout

[Nickdfresh]

Dow plunges nearly 1,200 points as coronavirus fears send markets diving
NBC News
Lucy Bayly
,NBC News•February 27, 20201,411 Comments

Dow plunges nearly 1,200 points as coronavirus fears send markets diving

Wall Street suffered brutal losses on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average swinging wildly through more than 1,000 points before closing down 1,190 points. It marks the worst week for the blue-chip index since the financial crisis.

The Dow has now lost 3,200 points this week, or 10 percent, including a decline of 1,031 points on Tuesday and 879 points on Wednesday.

The S&P 500 fell by 4.4 percent and the Nasdaq Composite was down by around 4.6 percent, putting all three major indices in correction, or a drop of 10 percent from the 52-week high. Transport-related stocks, tech stocks, and the energy sector all took the heaviest hits, as fears spread that the coronavirus epidemic would strangle global movement.

Thursday's rollercoaster ride started even before the opening bell, with Dow futures trading down almost 400 points after the Centers for Disease Control confirmed a case of coronavirus in Sacramento County, California. The patient had not traveled to virus-infected areas and was not exposed to anyone who had the virus, the CDC said.

Investors were clearly not assuaged by President Donald Trump's efforts to ease concerns about the spreading epidemic, which has now killed almost 2,800 people around the world. In a news conference on Wednesday night, Trump said his administration has the situation under control and is "ready to adapt" if the virus spreads.

While Trump acknowledged that markets had fallen this week because of coronavirus fears, he said Wednesday that he believed the plunge was likely also due to "the Democrat candidates standing on the stage making fools out of themselves."

Several Wall Street analyst firms issued dire forecasts for 2020 revenues, with Bank of America slashing its annual outlook from 3.1 percent global growth to 2.8 percent, a level last seen in 2009, and Goldman Sachs saying U.S. companies will see zero growth this year due to the epidemic.

“U.S. companies will generate no earnings growth in 2020,” the firm wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. “We have updated our earnings model to incorporate the likelihood that the virus becomes widespread.”

Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Wednesday the virus could push the U.S. into a recession.

"It is just conceivable that it could throw the United States into a recession,” Yellen said Wednesday at an event held by the Brookings Institution. "Market participants will look to the Fed to provide some support," she noted. "The Fed does have some scope — but it will provide a little bit of support to consumer spending and to the U.S. economy and for financial markets.

“We’ve hit a pocket of fear,” Gregory Faranello, head of U.S. rates trading at AmeriVet Securities, told CNBC. “We could be in trouble because, let’s face it, the U.S. consumer is what’s holding this thing together.”
....
Rest at YAHOO

[Nickdfresh]

And Trump panics with idiotic press conferences and appointing a complete fucking antiscience idiot Pence as a Czar, because he knows his one shot at reelection was the strong market...

[Nickdfresh]

The Daily Beast LINK
Michael Daly
February 28, 20203,321 Comments

Even as China was announcing that its deaths from the novel coronavirus had surpassed its toll from SARS, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget for 2021 that slashed funding for our chief defender against epidemics by 18 percent.

Within the overall proposed cuts detailed on Feb. 10 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a reduction in spending to guard against “emerging and zoonotic diseases” from $635,772,000 to $550,464,000.

Zoonotic diseases are those that have crossed from animals to humans, as the novel coronavirus is believed to have done. The $85,308,000 proposed budget cut is less than the cost of 5 miles of border wall.

The budget proposal would save the cost of another 2 miles of border wall by zeroing out a $40 million funding line for the Epidemic and Lab Capacity Program. The ELCP supports state labs that monitor health emergencies at the local level. A state lab in Texas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the U.S. in 2014.

For the cost of less than 7 miles of border wall, the proposed budget would leave all of us less protected against a potential epidemic. The Trump administration made its priorities even more explicit when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar discounted a suggestion that border wall funds could be diverted to fight the spread of the coronavirus.

We might have had earlier warning of the outbreak, but previous budget cuts caused the CDC to end its global security program in China in 2017.

In another failure of foresight two years ago, the White House eliminated the National Security Council’s position for combating global health crises. The NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats post was held by the highly regarded Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer—whose sudden departure in May of 2018 happened to coincide with a new Ebola outbreak in Africa.

That outbreak proved to be no threat to America, so most of us quickly forgot about it. So what if there was no longer anybody on the security council to guard against such threats? And as long as the rich are getting their tax breaks and the stock market is booming, who cares if the CDC is being cut year after year?

But fear of this new bug caused the stock market to tank this week. And worrisome news came on Wednesday even as Trump was insisting there is little cause to worry because of his bold, prescient leadership.

California made the startling announcement that a resident of Solano County had tested positive for novel coronavirus without having traveled abroad or coming in contact with somebody known to be infected. The chronically underfunded public health system had needed four days to make the diagnosis, as the swab had to be sent to the CDC, which is hampered both by a shortage of tests and reliability problems with the ones it does have.

Trump Spends 45 Minutes With ‘Deep State’ Play Actors Amid Coronavirus Mayhem

We can only hope that the doctors were able to get as much information as they could from the patient before she was intubated. One near-certainty is that she got it from somebody who is still out there.

Our Germophobe-in-Chief should consider that a president is as vulnerable as anybody else to a virus. President Woodrow Wilson was stricken while visiting France during the Spanish flu pandemic early in the last century. Wilson survived, but some historians believe he suffered lasting neurological damage that became apparent at the negotiating table, making for considerably less art to his dealing.

Wilson could have just as easily caught the flu at the White House. And the present viral threat could arrive there as easily as any other place with a cough or a shaken hand.

During Wednesday’s press conference, Trump announced that he was putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of responding to the threat.

Nobody who is aware of Pence’s role in enabling an HIV outbreak when he was governor of Indiana could have been rightly heartened by his new role. But one hopeful sign came when Pence enlisted the help of a physician scientist who has been leading the national fight against HIV. Dr. Deborah L. Birx will now direct the effort against novel coronavirus. She is held in nearly as high esteem as Rear Admiral Ziemer, but she is only now being put in place. Ziemer would have already been on the case had he not been pushed out.

Other hopeful news came with word that state laboratories across the country are poised to start testing for novel coronavirus. That effort will initially require $25 million, which is all but sure to be allocated now that Trump is suddenly prepared to answer the threat with bigger than big bucks

But the time to hire a fire chief and fund firehouses is before a fire.

And not even a thousand miles of border wall can keep out what may be already spreading amongst us.

[FORD]

[FORD]

[FORD]