As coronavirus cases spike across America, California announces an across-the-board shelter-in-place order, the Republican Congress pursues a bizarre bailout policy, and senators fall under scrutiny for some rather conveniently timed stock sales.
00:00:00.000As coronavirus numbers spike across America, California announces an across-the-board shelter-in-place order, the Republican Congress pursues a bizarre bailout policy, and senators fall under scrutiny for some rather conveniently timed stock sales.
00:00:42.000Slash Ben, we are here to provide you with all of your coronavirus updates, Where everything stands, as we say, we'll get to the California lockdown in just a second.
00:00:52.000It is enforceable by law, so people presumably will be pulled over and asked where they are going if they're not going to the grocery store, or if they're not going to the pharmacy, then presumably they'll be given some sort of ticket.
00:01:01.000It is hard to imagine exactly how that's enforced on 40 million citizens across the state of California.
00:03:16.000And then this flattened curve is supposedly what is going to happen if we stay home and if we all lock down and if we all involve ourselves in social distancing, right?
00:03:26.000This is sort of the been presented to you by the media as well as by the Trump administration.
00:03:31.000So across the board, this is the chart that is being used.
00:03:33.000The problem is that there are two questions about this chart that people have yet to answer.
00:03:37.000Question number one, is the line actually here or is the line down here?
00:03:42.000Because if the line of medical capacity is not actually over that shallow curve, if, as it turns out, you could flatten the curve and the medical capacity line is still all the way down here at the dotted line, it ain't going to matter.
00:03:55.000You can flatten the curve and just as many people are gonna die.
00:03:57.000And so you will have shut down the economy to no effect, which is why what I've been saying is the entire purpose of what we are doing right now is to raise the line from this dotted line to this top line, is to raise medical capacity.
00:04:07.000So what exactly are the plans to do that, guys?
00:04:09.000And floating hospital ships ain't gonna do it.
00:04:11.000Adding a thousand beds by floating a Navy ship off the coast isn't going to cover it.
00:04:15.000Adding a few thousand ventilators is not going to cover it.
00:04:18.000If what we are being told is true, that this thing is super transmissible and super deadly, and all of that is true, we need a radical escalation in the number of beds.
00:04:25.000Well, those are the sorts of estimates that the government should be giving us right now.
00:04:28.000Have you heard anything from the federal government or from the state governments in terms of their prospectus in terms of increasing capacity?
00:04:35.000You've heard some numbers floating around.
00:04:36.000You've heard that there are more masks floating around, but you're not seeing that on the ground.
00:04:39.000You have heard that there are more ventilators floating around, but you are not actually seeing that in the hospitals, so far as I am aware.
00:04:45.000You've heard that more ICU beds are being built, but so far I've yet to see any evidence that massive new numbers of ICU beds are being built.
00:04:50.000So if we are not increasing this dotted line to this top line, it will not matter whether or not you flatten the curve.
00:04:55.000Okay, then there is the second problem.
00:04:57.000The second problem is that, as you see, this chart conveniently ends at the right side of this piece of paper.
00:05:03.000For you, the right side of this piece of paper.
00:05:37.000Then you have the chart that we've been shown, which typically is said to end somewhere around here, right, where my pen is, right?
00:05:44.000This is where the chart always ends, when you see it in the media, and when you see it in the media, and when you see it from the White House, right?
00:05:50.000If there's going to be a lower curve, it's going to somehow be below the level of medical capacity, and therefore, everybody is going to live.
00:05:57.000What happens if that's not what happens?
00:06:00.000What I mean by this is that what happens if, in fact, you let everybody out of confinement and instead of everything petering out the way it did on chart number one, right on the right side of this chart, it peters out at the very end.
00:06:19.000What if instead of that, you end up with everybody comes out of confinement and boom, secondary spike, which is exactly what you are currently seeing in Singapore.
00:06:27.000You're starting to see it in Hong Kong.
00:06:29.000What if when you release the lockdown measures it turns out people go out and infect each other anyway?
00:06:34.000And so you end up with a secondary spike that actually is close to as high as the first spike except there's still not herd immunity and you've not really raised your medical capacity.
00:06:42.000So what that means is that what we really need to be looking at is how do we raise our medical capacity Seriously, that is the big question.
00:07:02.000If we do not have a plan, I said this yesterday, I am fine with locking things down so long as there is a plan to raise the level of medical capacity, so long as there is a plan for applying treatment, so long as we know that when we are let out of confinement, that we are actually going to live in a world in which if you come down with COVID-19, you don't end up in a non-ICU bed that we are actually going to live in a world in which if You end up dying on your couch, right?
00:07:23.000As long as that is the case, as long as they are increasing capacity, then we can take a two-week break.
00:08:05.000It's all fun and games until you lose your job.
00:08:07.000Because as much as the government says they're going to float these small businesses loans and all of this, small businesses cannot survive simply paying employees to be sick without any stream of income and knowing that there's going to be a recovery on the other side of this.
00:08:19.000Because the government doesn't just The economy doesn't just snap back in place immediately upon the end of this thing.
00:08:25.000People are going to have to go out again.
00:08:26.000All those restaurants that have been shut down, you think their clientele is going to come back day one?
00:08:29.000Or do you think that people are more likely to order takeout for another year before a vaccine is developed?
00:08:34.000All of these entertainment areas where people are getting together in crowds, do you think people are going to go to MLB ballgames?
00:09:00.000And if you extend it for two months, maybe two months.
00:09:02.000And so with this government lockdown comes the possibility, and this is what freedom-minded Americans should be thinking about too, with that possibility comes the possibility of permanent, huge-scale government in our lives, not going away.
00:09:13.000Because if the government causes the crisis, and the government becomes the solution to the crisis, and the crisis does not abate, then the government just becomes a permanent feature of our life, and the economy doesn't go back to normal.
00:09:22.000Now, again, all of this is an argument worth having, If, and only if, there is a plan to save lives.
00:09:29.000But if the plan to save lives does not kick in, if all that's happening here is the government marking time until they let us all out of confinement, we infect each other anyway, and all the old people die, then what exactly are we doing here?
00:09:46.000We've seen no clarity on how the government plans to actually lower the death rates.
00:09:51.000Okay, yes, again, we can flatten that curve, but there are two real problems with the flatten-the-curve scenario.
00:09:57.000One is, if our medical capacity is actually not where the chart says it is, it is all the way down here, if our medical capacity is way lower than they say it is, then people are still going to die, and all we've done is wreck the economy to no avail.
00:10:07.000Or, possibility number two, there's a secondary spike, which is what most doctors are saying there's going to be in the fall anyway.
00:10:13.000In which case, if you have not raised capacity by then, then we're screwed anyway, right?
00:10:17.000And all you've done is shut down the world economy to achieve pretty much absolutely nothing.
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00:12:06.000It's a healthy, easy-to-stick-to way of life.
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00:12:48.000Okay, so what are the best case scenarios and the worst case scenarios here?
00:12:51.000So Nicholas Kristof, believe it or not, has a pretty good column at the New York Times talking about this.
00:12:55.000Best case scenario is the possibility that the virus mutates and actually dies out.
00:13:00.000Dr. Larry Brilliant, I hope aptly named.
00:13:04.000An epidemiologist who as a young doctor was part of the fight to eradicate smallpox explained that only in movies do viruses seem to become worse over time.
00:13:27.000China lied to the WHO and the WHO believed them.
00:13:29.000This is why when you hear prescriptions from the WHO or their takes on life, the WHO, you should really take that with a major grain of salt.
00:13:36.000With that said, according to Nicholas Kristof, Singapore would be the best case scenario where everything is sort of shut down for a while and then you go back to a more open society.
00:13:45.000Tom Inglesby, expert on pandemics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said the fact that Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and China and to some extent Japan have all flattened their curves despite having the initial onslaught of cases should give us some hope we can sort out what they're doing well and emulate it.
00:13:58.000Washington state seems to have been stabilizing.
00:14:01.000The weather may also help us because some respiratory viruses decline in summer from a combination of higher temperatures and people not being huddled together.
00:14:07.000So it's possible that northern hemisphere nations enjoy a summer break before a second wave in the fall.
00:14:12.000Okay, that is the second wave is what I'm worried about.
00:14:15.000And I think most epidemiologists are worried about is what happens when you release people from confinement.
00:14:18.000Even if this thing goes away during the summer, if it comes back with a vengeance during the fall, it can be super damaging.
00:14:23.000The Spanish influenza, which by the way, you know how ridiculous it is in our political world?
00:14:27.000Somebody went on Wikipedia and just changed it to the 1918 flu because they wanted to forestall Trump's argument that you can say Spanish flu so you can say Chinese virus.
00:14:38.000The goal would be that maybe this thing dies out, it loses sort of its fire and its flair.
00:14:43.000Also, the death rates, I've been saying this for weeks and I've been criticized for it, the death rates that were being put out there by the WHO were just not real.
00:14:48.000In South Korea and in China, outside Hubei province, about 0.8% of those known to be infected died.
00:15:36.000Dr. Neil Ferguson, a British epidemiologist, he produced a sophisticated model that showed a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
00:15:43.000His best case scenario, according to Nicholas Kristof, is 1.1 million deaths, which is obviously frightening as all hell.
00:16:01.000We are still, as I mentioned, way behind in testing, so far behind that you end up with situations like Peggy Noonan.
00:16:07.000So Peggy Noonan from the Wall Street Journal was sick with two weeks, 101 fever, coughs, and chills, and she had to lie in order to get a COVID test.
00:16:14.000Because right now the CDC still has restrictions that suggest you can only get a COVID test even if you are in the most risky age demographic and you have all the symptoms.
00:16:25.000You can only get a COVID test if number one, you have been traveling to China or number two, you know somebody who has been diagnosed with coronavirus.
00:16:32.000Which of course is ridiculous since we've now had community transmission in the United States for weeks on end.
00:16:38.000Which demonstrates the dramatic lack of testing.
00:16:40.000And that is the fault, as we will talk about, of the CDC.
00:16:44.000And at the highest level of the Trump administration, because in the end, the buck does stop with the president.
00:16:48.000That doesn't mean the president isn't doing the right things now to fix it.
00:16:51.000But it does mean that those two months where the CDC was blowing it, heads need to roll over there.
00:16:56.000Nicholas Kristof says that there is an interactive model of the virus that suggests that up to 366,000 ICU beds might be needed in the U.S.
00:17:04.000for coronavirus patients at one time, which is more than 10 times the number available.
00:17:09.000There's a Harvard study that has said the same.
00:17:12.000How quickly can we roll those things out?
00:17:15.000And we've heard no, no estimates as to how fast all of that is going to be rolled out.
00:17:20.000And that does raise the question of how long are we going to have to do this?
00:17:23.000How long exactly is this going to last?
00:17:25.000And as I say, you know, even this is a suggestion that there won't be a massive second wave that takes out an enormous number of people.
00:17:32.000The fact is that in China, which is now claiming they've tamped this thing down, there are serious questions about whether they are lying about tamping it down in the first place.
00:17:41.000In California, the governor has now announced that we are in a state of lockdown.
00:17:46.000Gavin Newsom on Thursday night ordered 40 million residents to stay home except for essential trips, extending similar restrictions statewide barrier counties have previously enacted.
00:17:55.000One of the serious questions about this, particularly, is number one, whether it's effective.
00:17:59.000Number two, whether it is designed to achieve the goals that they say it's designed to achieve.
00:18:03.000Meaning, how can you lock people down this long?
00:18:05.000And the answer is, it's going to be very, very difficult to lock people down this long.
00:18:08.000The stricter the lockdown, the less time it can last.
00:18:10.000It's one thing to tell people, as I said yesterday about diets.
00:18:13.000It's one thing to tell people, for the foreseeable future, no cookies.
00:18:16.000It's another thing to tell people, for the foreseeable future, no food.
00:18:19.000That's just not something that people are going to be able to outlast for a very long time.
00:18:23.000Here's Gavin Newsom, our Kendall of a governor, announcing that it's time to shelter in place in the state of California.
00:18:30.000Number of days ago, there were six Bay Area counties that led with stay-at-home orders.
00:18:36.000Now, as I speak, some 21.3 million Californians reside in a community, in a city and or county that have similar orders.
00:18:47.000A state as large as ours, a nation-state, is many parts, but at the end of the day, we're one body.
00:18:54.000There's a mutuality, and there's a recognition of our interdependence that requires of this moment that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home.
00:19:05.000That directive goes into force and effect this evening, and we were confident, we are confident, that the people of the state of California will abide by it.
00:19:17.000Okay, so, we will see how long people abide by it, because you cannot tell people interminably to stay in their homes again, especially as the economy dies, and these jobs do not come back.
00:19:24.000It's very easy for the government to say, we're going to freeze everything in place, none of these jobs will die.
00:19:29.000These are major systemic changes taking place throughout our economy, and they have significant, significant ramifications.
00:19:36.000Newsom said, this is not a permanent state, it's a moment in time.
00:19:38.000Okay, well, then we need to know how long the moment's gonna last, or what your estimate of the moment is going to be.
00:19:43.000I was talking to panicked friends last night who have businesses in the state of California, and now those businesses simply will not run because nobody can go into the office.
00:19:51.000And this order, by the way, from Newsom is supposed to last until April 19th.
00:21:00.000The best you can do at this point is provide floating loans to the banks to not call in their bridge loans to businesses.
00:21:07.000Back the commercial paper window, for example.
00:21:09.000But at a certain point, people are not going to buy American bonds.
00:21:11.000And number two, what makes everybody think there's going to be a V-shaped recovery?
00:21:15.000The longer these businesses are out, the less a chance there is that these businesses ever go back in.
00:21:19.000If you spent your life savings to purchase a rib joint, And now you've been running that rib joint for 10 years, and the government just shut it down, and shut down every restaurant across the country, effectively.
00:21:28.000Do you think that's coming back anytime soon, and that $1,000 a month check is going to suffice?
00:21:49.000This is not to argue that we should be weighing the economy against human life.
00:21:51.000This is arguing that we should always take the tack that is most likely to preserve human life, and that would also include human quality of life.
00:21:59.000This is not an argument we should let everybody out right now.
00:22:01.000I've not made that argument anywhere in here.
00:22:03.000Instead, the argument I'm making is, if you are going to do the most restrictive thing any American government has ever done in the history of the United States to the American people, right?
00:22:15.000If you're going to do this unbelievably restrictive thing, you better damn well have a plan for how we come out of this and that it saved lives.
00:22:23.000Because if you just destroyed 20% of the American economy and sent the unemployment rate up to 15 or 20% and you saved zero lives in the process, Or, there's a net loss of life because it turns out that poor people are more likely to get involved in the opioid epidemic, and people who have just lost their jobs are more likely to feel despair, and families are more likely to break apart, and all of this.
00:22:44.000And so you're going to put the net loss of life after all of this?
00:22:46.000Then people are going to be asking some serious questions about whether this was in fact a smart move, or whether this was not in fact a smart move.
00:22:51.000So you better damn well have a plan to increase medical capacity above all of the possible curves.
00:22:57.000Because if you don't, then Americans are not going to stand by this.
00:23:00.000They're just not going to stand by this.
00:23:02.000And we're going to get to more of all of this in just one second.
00:23:06.000First, let us talk about how you can fix that car.
00:23:09.000It's sitting in your driveway right now.
00:23:10.000You're probably not driving too much right now.
00:23:12.000Now would be a good time to fix up that car.
00:23:14.000You got a problem with the part in your car.
00:23:15.000You can't exactly drive over to the auto parts shop.
00:23:26.000You can limit contact instead of someone sitting in your car handling your wheel after doing the same for multiple other cars and coughing into their elbow.
00:23:32.000RockAuto.com is so much easier than walking into a store and demanding quick answers to things like, is your Odyssey an LX or an EX?
00:23:38.000And then they have to order the part online anyway.
00:24:55.000I mean, like, you need to go to the pharmacy.
00:24:58.000So now you have to have a friend go to the pharmacy.
00:25:00.000But we've also been told that germs pass so easily that if I hand you a plastic bag, maybe it's living on the plastic bag.
00:25:07.000Like, if no one can test, then no one knows who the hell's a carrier.
00:25:11.000Okay, and that is exactly why you have these social distancing measures put in place by the government.
00:25:15.000But the only way to alleviate that would be widespread testing in the mode of South Korea.
00:25:18.000As I've been saying for a week now, the goal here is to move from the Chinese model, lock everything down, to the South Korean model.
00:25:24.000And even that South Korean model is going to assume that there's no second wave, which may or may not be true.
00:25:28.000Hey, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that when cases of the new coronavirus began emerging several weeks ago in California, Washington State, and other pockets of the country, U.S.
00:25:36.000public health officials worried this might be the big one, according to emails and interviews.
00:25:39.000The testing program they rolled out to combat it was a small one.
00:25:42.000Limited testing has blinded Americans to the scale of the outbreak so far, impeding the nation's ability to fight the virus through isolating the sick and their contacts.
00:25:50.000And that is why you're seeing these massive numbers rack up.
00:25:52.000We should actually be encouraged by the fact that massive numbers are racking up, because that means that testing actually is taking place.
00:25:57.000As I say, In the last week alone, in the last couple of days, we've seen a doubling of the number of diagnosed cases in the United States, and that is simply because of the number of tests taking place, not because a bunch of people just got the disease.
00:26:09.000But as I say, the government policy that is currently being pursued is not well calibrated, at least in the absence of information as to what exactly they plan to do.
00:26:19.000I mean, a good sign of this is that the Trump administration is now asking states to suppress specific unemployment claim data.
00:26:27.000The Trump administration is now apparently asking state labor officials to delay releasing the precise number of unemployment claims they're fielding, an indication of how uneasy policymakers are about further roiling a stock market already plunging in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
00:26:40.000Okay, if you're asking people to hide information and you're the federal government, that means things are really bad, like a lot worse than people are telling you.
00:26:45.000This is not a minor shock to the economy.
00:26:47.000This is the biggest shock to the economy we have ever seen.
00:26:49.000Okay, including the Great Depression, because the Great Depression was an inflation-caused, on the one hand, or liquidity-crunch-caused problem.
00:26:57.000It was not an external caused problem by a giant pandemic virus that has not been alleviated in any way.
00:27:02.000And it was not the government forcibly shutting down every business in the United States.
00:27:07.000It is never a good sign when the Department of Labor is telling people not to report unemployment statistics.
00:27:12.000That should scare the living hell out of everyone.
00:27:14.000And as far as the plans to alleviate this crisis, I'm sorry, but spending a trillion dollars this month and a trillion dollars next month and a trillion dollars the month after that is not going to be a solution.
00:27:23.000And certainly what is not going to be a solution is making these programs permanent over time.
00:27:28.000So apparently the bill that President Trump signed into law this week that was designed to get immediate relief to people included a paid sick leave provision.
00:27:36.000According to the HR specialist that I have talked to, that paid sick leave provision not only mandates that businesses have to pay 14 days of paid sick leave when they have no money on hand because they have no income on hand, it also mandates that if you have a sick family member and you say that you can't come into work, that you are supposed to, you basically have maternity leave, 12 weeks of 60% salary from your company.
00:27:58.000How many companies do you think are going to abide by that?
00:28:01.000And what happens if the company just says, listen, I'm not going to do any of that.
00:28:04.000Why do you think unemployment rates are skyrocketing?
00:28:06.000Why do you think companies preemptively fired everyone before Trump signed that bill or went into effect?
00:28:11.000Okay, the government action here to mandate that private business cover the losses incurred by the government and increased by the government is insane.
00:28:18.000It's why this isn't a bailout, what the government is doing right now.
00:28:20.000This is the government paying you back for what the government is taking away from you, but the government is not capable of paying you back for what it's taking away from you, because it's not just taking away from you the next month of business.
00:28:30.000It may be taking away from you the capacity for your business to even operate at all after a month is over, because we don't know what the hell is going on beyond this.
00:28:38.000So Senate Majority Leader McConnell released a massive economic stimulus bill on Thursday to fight coronavirus's fallout.
00:28:45.000And the suggestion is direct cash payments to many Americans.
00:28:50.000The problem is it's means-tested based on your 2018 income, which makes no sense whatsoever.
00:28:55.000Your 2018 income has nothing to do with what you made this year.
00:28:58.000Also, by the way, let's say that you made $200,000 in 2018, when the economy was a hell of a lot stronger.
00:29:05.000And let's say that today your business just went bankrupt.
00:29:09.000So, you made $200,000 in 2018, so you do not get any money from the government, but now your business is bankrupt, and so you are bankrupt, and so you have no money.
00:29:18.000Why are we means-testing based on 2018 income?
00:29:21.000Even means-testing based on today's income is probably a mistake, given the fact that you have bills.
00:29:27.000The means-testing, by the way, kicks out at like $100,000.
00:29:36.000For how long are you going to do that?
00:29:38.000And when that business is no longer there, do you think that the evictions, when they are unfrozen, are going to take stock of the fact that your business no longer exists?
00:29:46.000Senator Lindsey Graham is among several GOP senators voicing concern or outright opposition to the idea of direct payments, even as McConnell unveiled the trillion-dollar stimulus plan that would be the starting point for negotiations with Democrats.
00:29:58.000McConnell called for the talks to begin today.
00:30:00.000A number of economists have predicted the U.S.
00:30:03.000The unemployment rate could soar because Americans are staying home out of fear of catching the virus.
00:30:08.000The centerpiece of the Senate GOP plan would be hundreds of billions of dollars sent to Americans in the form of checks as a way to flood the country with money in an effort to blunt the dramatic pullback of spending.
00:30:19.000Okay, if you're freezing the mortgages or if you are freezing the evictions, the best thing that you can do right now is float actual no-interest loans to small businesses via the banks that are already providing those loans.
00:30:30.000That is the best thing that you can do right now because the biggest problem here is banks calling in loans on small businesses that are operating on a day-to-day basis.
00:30:38.000These small checks are simply, like, are they going to help some people?
00:30:42.000But one of the problems here is that one of the other factors in this legislation, apparently, is that if you haven't paid federal income tax, then you also don't receive a check back.
00:30:49.000Okay, that's a lot of poor people, gang.
00:30:51.000That's a lot of people who may not be receiving the money.
00:30:54.000The size of the checks would diminish for those earning more than $75,000 and phase out completely for those earning more than $99,000.
00:31:00.000The poorest families would see smaller benefits.
00:31:18.000The democratic clans make even less sense because they are looking for permanent plans that would basically turn an enormous swath of human beings into wards of the state even after this crisis ends.
00:31:28.000Every crisis amounts to a dramatic growth in American government involvement in the economy.
00:31:34.000If you're talking about the biggest crisis in the history of the American economy, presumably that would also, according to Democrats, mean the most American government economic involvement in history, and they're trying to make it permanent.
00:31:45.000House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer have slammed the stimulus proposal.
00:31:49.000They said it tilted too much toward helping business, even though the vast majority of this is directed at direct cash payments to individuals.
00:31:55.000Pelosi and Schumer said, we're beginning to review Senator McConnell's proposal, and on first reading, it's not pro-worker.
00:32:00.000It puts corporations way ahead of workers.
00:32:02.000By the way, if those corporations go under, who is around to pay people their salaries when this thing ends?
00:32:08.000It's the jobs disappearing that is the problem.
00:32:10.000Yes, the money disappearing for the next two months is a major problem.
00:32:13.000The jobs disappearing is a forever problem.
00:32:15.000If those businesses go under, who exactly is going to hire the workers?
00:32:19.000This is how you get to Bernie Sanders' federal jobs guarantee.
00:32:21.000And the government made this happen all by simply declaring that the economy was shut down.
00:32:25.000Now again, you want to say it's temporary?
00:32:26.000You want to say you got a plan to fix this thing?
00:32:28.000Then show me how it's temporary and the plan to fix this thing is actually going to be effectuated.
00:32:32.000Otherwise, we seriously need to be considering what the measures we are taking here are.
00:32:37.000The Wall Street Journal editorial board has a good piece on this today, titled, Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown.
00:32:43.000They say financial markets paused their slide on Thursday, but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over.
00:32:48.000If this government-in-order shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine.
00:32:55.000This will not be popular in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their antivirus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.
00:33:05.000The vast social distancing project of the last 10 days or so has been necessary and has done much good.
00:33:09.000Warnings about large gatherings of more than 10 people and limiting access to nursing homes will save lives.
00:33:13.000The public has received a crucial education in hygiene and disease prevention.
00:33:16.000Even young people may get the message.
00:33:19.000With any luck, the behavior change will reduce coronavirus spread so that we're not overwhelmed.
00:33:22.000But the costs of the national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don't mean federal spending.
00:33:26.000We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease.
00:33:32.000Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue, but that isn't true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.
00:33:37.000Even cash-rich businesses operate on thin margins and can bleed through reserves in a month.
00:34:06.000loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or two.
00:34:09.000In this case, we may lose that much, or twice as much, this month alone.
00:34:14.000Wall Street economist Ed Hyman on Thursday adjusted his estimate for the second quarter to an annual rate loss in GDP minus 20%.
00:34:22.000That is the entire economy of the United States losing one-fifth of its production.
00:34:28.000If GDP seems abstract, consider the human cost.
00:34:30.000Think about the entrepreneur who has invested his life in the Memphis ribs joint, I mentioned this earlier, only to see his customers vanish in a week.
00:34:36.000Or the retail chain with 30 stores that employs hundreds but sees no sales and has to shut its doors.
00:34:40.000Or the recent graduate with 20 grand in student loan debt who finds herself laid off from her first job.
00:34:44.000Maybe she can live at home, but what if mom and dad don't have a job?
00:34:47.000Or, alternatively, what if she is 20 and her parents are 65?
00:34:51.000Some of the media who don't understand American business say that China managed a comparable shock.
00:34:55.000Yeah, the difference is that China is a communist country.
00:34:56.000They don't care if a bunch of people are out of work or die.
00:34:59.000If they cared about that, they wouldn't be a communist country.
00:35:02.000The politicians in Washington, says the journal, are telling Americans, as they always do, they're riding to the rescue by writing checks to individuals.
00:35:07.000But there's no amount of money that can make up for losses in the magnitude we are facing if this extends for several more weeks.
00:35:13.000After the first trillion this month, are we going to spend another trillion in April and another in June?
00:35:17.000And you can see this in the bond yields.
00:35:19.000Who the hell is going to buy this stuff?
00:35:22.000Who the hell is going to buy any of this stuff?
00:35:24.000By the way, the market is off again today.
00:35:26.000The market immediately, upon opening, dropped something like 500 points.
00:35:32.000The market continues to drop fairly dramatically, and that is because nobody feels secure here.
00:35:38.000Nobody is going to buy up debt they feel is never going to be repaid.
00:35:42.000By the time the Treasury Small Business Lending Program runs through the bureaucratic hoops, complete with ordering owners they can't lay off anyone as a price for getting the loan, which of course is not going to be a thing.
00:35:51.000Millions of businesses will be bankrupt.
00:35:55.000Because you're not even allowed to lay anybody off in the knowledge that the next couple of years are going to be super rough.
00:36:01.000So are you going to take that loan only to not be able to pay anyone anyway and go bankrupt two months from now?
00:36:06.000Perhaps we'll be lucky, says the Wall Street Journal, the human and capitalist genius for innovation.
00:36:09.000We'll produce a vaccine faster than expected, or at least treatments that reduce COVID-19 symptoms.
00:36:14.000Barring that, our leaders in our society will very soon need to shift their virus-fighting strategy to something sustainable.
00:36:19.000Dr. Fauci has explained this severe lockdown policy is lasting 14 days in its initial term.
00:36:23.000The national guidance would then be reconsidered, depending on the spread of the disease.
00:36:26.000That should be the moment to offer new guidance on what might be called Phase 2 of the coronavirus pandemic campaign.
00:36:33.000And that will surely include strict measures to isolate and protect the most vulnerable, our elderly, those with underlying medical problems.
00:36:39.000There shouldn't be a debate over how many lives to sacrifice against how many lost jobs we can tolerate.
00:36:43.000Substantial social distancing, other measures will have to continue in some form for some time, but no society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of the entire economy's health.
00:36:53.000Even America's resources to fight a viral plague aren't limitless and they'll become more limited by the day when no one has a job.
00:36:59.000When no one is able to go out of the house.
00:37:02.000Meanwhile, the White House is trying to float 50 and 25-year bonds to finance the stimulus packages.
00:37:08.000Like seriously, why would you buy a 50-year bond?
00:37:12.000Because either you believe that the economy is going to rise, in which case you wouldn't buy a 50-year bond, you'd buy stock, or you believe the economy is going to decline, in which case, why in the living hell would you trust the American government to pay you back 50 years from now?
00:37:23.000I can't trust the American government to pay me back 5 minutes from now!
00:37:37.000They don't trust the government right now.
00:37:39.000Now speaking of lack of trust in government, you want to talk about dramatically undermining and continuing to undermine trust in government?
00:37:46.000This story from the Daily Beast is devastating.
00:37:49.000Senator Kelly Loeffler apparently dumped millions in stock after a coronavirus briefing.
00:37:54.000She's the second senator who got rid of her holdings right as the stock market went bad.
00:37:57.000It turns out there are four such senators who got rid of their stocks as the stock market went bad.
00:38:02.000Now some of these, I want to be accurate in the reporting here.
00:38:05.000People are listing, for example, Senator Dianne Feinstein among the senators who got rid of stock.
00:38:10.000The pattern of her selling stock does not appear to be the same as some of the more egregious apparent abuses of the system.
00:38:18.000Feinstein serves as a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her husband sold between $1.5 million and $6 million in stock in California biotech company Allogene Therapeutics between January 31st and February 18th, according to the New York Times.
00:38:30.000Feinstein apparently was not directly involved in the sale.
00:38:32.000Her assets are in a blind trust, according to her spokesperson.
00:38:35.000She has no involvement in her husband's financial decisions.
00:38:39.000Reports identified three other senators, James Inhofe, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Richard Burr of North Carolina, as people who are selling vast amounts of stock.
00:38:46.000Feinstein's doesn't appear to match the pattern simply because she didn't actually make a lot of money on the stock sale.
00:38:53.000As opposed to, and the same thing is true of Inhofe, Loeffler and Richard Burr are a bit of a different story.
00:38:58.000Burr apparently, who's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, used more than 30 transactions to dump between $630,000 and $1.72 million on February 13th, according to ProPublica.
00:39:09.000That report said the transactions involved a significant percentage of the senator's holdings and took place about a week before the impact of the virus outbreak sent stock prices plunging to the point where gains made during President Trump's term in office were largely erased.
00:39:21.000A Burr spokesperson said, Senator Burr filed a financial disclosure form for personal transactions made several weeks before the U.S.
00:39:27.000financial markets showed signs of volatility due to the growing coronavirus outbreak.
00:39:31.000As the situation continues to evolve daily, he's been deeply concerned by the steep and sudden toll this pandemic is taking on our economy.
00:39:38.000On Friday, the Senator tweeted an updated statement saying he relied only on public news reports to guide his decision on the sale.
00:39:44.000He's asking for a Senate Ethics Committee review of his actions.
00:39:49.000Burr was an author of the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act, a law that helps determine the federal response to situations like coronavirus outbreak.
00:39:56.000Burr's office would not comment on what kind of information Burr received about coronavirus prior to his stock sales.
00:40:02.000Apparently, Burr made ominous comments about coronavirus behind closed doors last month.
00:40:08.000He said at a February 27th meeting of business leaders in Washington, quote, There's one thing I can tell you about this.
00:40:12.000It's much more aggressive in its transmission than anything we've seen in recent history.
00:40:15.000It's probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.
00:40:19.000So supposedly, Richard Burr was getting inside information, because he's a member of the Intelligence Committee, about the extent of the pandemic.
00:40:28.000He was telling people about it in particular speeches.
00:40:31.000He was not speaking super publicly about it, and he was dumping his stock at insane rates.
00:40:37.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:40:38.000First, if you haven't had a chance to see some of the new content we started this week called All Access Live, you should head over to dailywire.com and you should check it out.
00:40:45.000Jeremy Boring and I kicked off Monday evening.
00:40:47.000Jeremy and Michael Molls followed up on Tuesday night.
00:40:48.000Matt Walsh and Andrew Klavan did live streams the last two nights.
00:40:51.000I am planning another stream tonight, exigent circumstances notwithstanding.
00:40:55.000We'll continue all of next week at 8 p.m.
00:41:33.000This Sunday, I have the great pleasure of sitting down with Hollywood mogul Jason Blum, who's made some of my favorite movies, including Whiplash.
00:41:38.000He's also producer of the horror series, Paranormal Activity and The Purge.
00:41:41.000We discussed his latest movie, The Hunt, which is now available video on demand.
00:41:44.000A thrill with some unexpected political commentary.
00:41:49.000Hollywood created a certain way information is consumed.
00:41:55.000One of the reasons President Trump was elected was because the way that we consume information has been changed by the media industry across Hollywood and New York.
00:42:14.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:42:17.000Now, meanwhile, according to the Daily Beast, it's not just Richard Burr who's in hot water over allegations of insider trading.
00:42:30.000It is also Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia.
00:42:34.000Apparently, she sold off seven figures worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S.
00:42:42.000Lafleur reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on January 24th, the very same day her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private all-senators briefing from administration officials including CDC Director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Coronavirus.
00:42:59.000She tweeted, appreciate today's briefing from the president's top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak.
00:43:04.000The first transaction was the sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies, valued between $50,000 and $100,000.
00:43:09.000The company's stock has fallen by half since then.
00:43:12.000It was the first of 29 stock transactions Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales.
00:43:18.000One of Loeffler's two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.
00:43:32.000Loffler's office did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast on the transactions and whether they are prompted or informed by information shared at that late January briefing.
00:43:39.000It's illegal for members of Congress to trade on non-public information gleaned through their official duties.
00:43:44.000That's the reason, presumably, why Richard Burr is saying, yeah, I was just trading based on public reports.
00:43:48.000And the question is, is that true or is that not?
00:43:50.000And how do you prove that it's not true if it is not true?
00:43:54.000Late Thursday night, she offered a statement.
00:43:55.000She tweeted, this is a ridiculous and baseless attack.
00:43:58.000I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio.
00:44:00.000Investment decisions are made by multiple third party advisors without my or my husband's knowledge or involvement.
00:44:05.000As confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on February 16th, 2020, three weeks after they were made.
00:44:14.000Now, one of the big problems here is that that statement does not say that she was not communicating with her husband or with her investment advisors.
00:44:21.000Like, I don't actually handle my own investments either.
00:44:24.000But if I went to my investment advisor and said, guys, I have some pretty good information that this coronavirus thing is going to be an absolute bleep show and the economy is probably going to tank.
00:44:39.000Okay, that is still a violation of law.
00:44:42.000So we're gonna have to find out what exactly the communications chains were here.
00:44:45.000At the very least, it looks very suspicious.
00:44:48.000In the week after her spate of stock trades, Loeffler sought to downplay the public health and financial threats posed by coronavirus.
00:44:54.000She tweeted on February 28th, Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on coronavirus readiness.
00:44:59.000Here's the truth, Donald Trump and his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy and safe.
00:45:05.000And she tweeted on March 10th, concerned about coronavirus.
00:45:07.000Remember this, the consumer is strong, the economy is strong, jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle COVID-19 and keep Americans safe.
00:45:17.000who is using insider information to profit off of coronavirus should not only be ousted from their job, impeached if they are guilty of this.
00:45:26.000Again, everyone should have the opportunity to provide the evidence.
00:45:28.000There should be Senate ethics investigations on every senator who involved in this.
00:45:32.000That does include Senator Feinstein, even if she appears to be more innocent than some of these other transactions, which facially appear to be pretty corrupt.
00:45:39.000Everybody should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
00:45:42.000Okay, and nothing undermines faith in both the private market and in government, like the sort of crony garbage that these allegations involve.
00:45:50.000The sort of crony capitalism that is involved in senators trading on private information, which by the way, the author Peter Schweitzer has been writing about for a very long time.
00:45:58.000That sort of activity undermines not only faith in government, but in private markets.
00:46:14.000Senator Burr should have that ethics committee check him out.
00:46:18.000You know, we have to have due process in this country.
00:46:20.000We do have to have people provide their side of the story.
00:46:22.000And if it turns out that he can provide no evidence, On his behalf and that there is evidence on the other side that he was calling up his stockbrokers or that he was in or that he was talking openly with his financial people about the implications of coronavirus while publicly downplaying it and selling stock at the same time.
00:46:38.000Not only should he be impeached, not only should he be thrown out of the Senate, he should get whatever the law can give to him in terms of a prison sentence.
00:46:44.000The same thing holds true of lawful or it holds true for anybody.
00:46:47.000If guilty, if guilty, the allegations on their own are devastating.
00:46:58.000The only good news today is that the testing does appear to be ramping up generally across the United States.
00:47:03.000We can hope that the government is actually taking measures that are designed to alleviate the problem in the near term.
00:47:09.000But if we are looking at the leviathan growth of government, because here's the problem, the longer this thing lasts, the more damage is done, the more damage is done, the more permanent damage is done, the more permanent damage is done, the more permanent government programs are going to be seen as the solution.
00:47:21.000If you throw 20 million Americans out of work.
00:47:24.000Unemployment benefits are going to be made permanent.
00:47:29.000If you throw 20 million Americans out of work, there will be... The Bernie Sanders agenda starts to look a lot more popular after the government forcibly destroys the economy.
00:47:39.000When the economy is booming, it's easy to say to people who want to nationalize large swaths of industry, guys, you really want to destroy the economy?
00:47:45.000When the economy is already destroyed, even if government did it in the first place, it becomes a lot easier sell to replace the private economy with something resembling a command and control economy.
00:48:11.000Then not only has this been the biggest cluster F in the history of American economics, it has been a meticulous attempt by incompetent people to destroy the fundamentals of the most powerful economy on the face of the planet.
00:48:53.000I am asking one simple thing, for the government to do its effing job.
00:48:57.000And if the government does not do its job, Then not only is this thing going to get worse, and I'm not talking about the virus, it is going to result in a completely different America.
00:49:10.000The government forcibly shutting down the economy to take control of the economy would be the worst thing to happen in the history of American government outside of slavery and Jim Crow and overt rights abuses like that.
00:49:50.000If you think the American people are sitting around and just angry at President Trump for calling it the Chinese virus when the Chinese government released this virus, they did.
00:50:05.000So yesterday, somebody took a picture of the president's speech that he was giving from the podium, and he had crossed out the word coronavirus and he had written above it Chinese.
00:50:29.000Every step of the way from allowing these wet markets to continue being open for years on end after the release of SARS, after multiple diseases have been unleashed from these wet markets.
00:50:40.000Not only that, they then censored anybody who talked about this thing.
00:50:51.000When they say that the economy is back on track in China and that this thing is not spreading in China, They certainly could be lying.
00:50:57.000I have a very hard time believing that the Chinese government that was lying about this thing back in December is suddenly telling the blatant overt truth about it.
00:51:16.000Susan Rice, who busily lied on American television about how the Benghazi terror attacks were not in fact terror attacks, they were a response to a YouTube video.
00:51:53.000But apparently if you say Chinese virus, it's very bad according to Susan Rice, pathological liar.
00:51:59.000Certainly China is not behaving well in trying to blame this on the United States.
00:52:05.000But the flip side of it is we are not behaving well when we talk about, as the president does every day, the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, and all of these racist descriptions.
00:52:16.000The fact of the matter is that viruses don't know borders.
00:52:22.000Like, so we have to work with the Chinese government?
00:52:25.000Blaming people for where viruses arise, which can arise anywhere on the planet, and get into the business of working together to defeat them.
00:52:49.000Obviously, it's Tim Kaine, the former vice presidential candidate, the most forgettable vice presidential candidate maybe in the history of the United States.
00:53:16.000But Mr. President, that does not excuse your weeks and weeks of tweeting lies and misinformation about the virus, while the leaders of other nations were taking steps to make sure their populations could be safe.
00:53:28.000The President's decision to call this China virus or Wuhan virus or other epithets that he and members of his team use are a crass effort to deflect blame away from the acceptance of responsibility that a president should do.
00:53:45.000The buck stops with you, Mr. President.
00:53:48.000Okay, but the thing started with China.
00:53:54.000So that makes a rather large-scale difference.
00:53:56.000It does make a rather large difference.
00:53:58.000By the way, there are polls out today from ABC News about the president's handling of the coronavirus situation.
00:54:03.000He's at about 55% approval rating on the coronavirus situation, which frankly is kind of astonishing given the slow response of the federal government at the outset.
00:54:10.000The response has been significantly better, as I said, over the last week and a half.
00:54:13.000It's been significantly better lately.
00:54:14.000The federal government better get its ass in gear because those approval ratings ain't going to last.
00:54:19.000If we're two months into this thing, everybody's still at home and we haven't increased capacity enough to get ready to go back to work and every small business in the country is under.
00:54:27.000Okay, so move fast, move in concerted fashion because the current status cannot continue to be the new normal.
00:54:36.000And when I say it can't, I'm not talking about two months from now.
00:54:40.000I'm talking about three weeks from now.
00:54:43.000This is not going to be the new normal.
00:54:44.000Americans will not take it, nor frankly, if they don't see the prospect of lowering death rates by a significant amount, should they take it.
00:54:51.000All righty, well, we will be back here a little bit later today, we hope, with two additional hours of content.
00:54:56.000Also, later today, I am planning to stop by to hang out with you, like 5 p.m.