Hey Snackers,
The shutdowns continue. The SF Bay Area ordered 7M residents to stay home (except for essentials like grocery shopping & doc appointments) until April 7. NYC, LA, Washington, and Illinois shut bars/restaurants, while schools and offices continue to close across the nation.
The 3 major stock indexes fell around 12% each Monday on the growing economic shutdown — That includes the Dow's largest point drop in history. Meanwhile, shares of Clorox hit a 52-week high. Sign of the times...
"FTC" is becoming a solidarity slogan... Before mandated government shutdowns, American companies and citizens independently took initiatives to "flatten the curve" of the COVID-19 outbreak — aka, reduce the number of infections so that our healthcare capacity can handle them. Most countries are taking the FTC approach:
The grassroots spirit takes hold... “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens” — Tocqueville said it, and American individuals/companies are still practicing it, decidedly acting to make flattening the curve possible:
FTC has us walking a very fine line... Small/medium sized businesses and hourly wage workers are majorly hurt in this FTC economy — no foot traffic = no sales = no work for hourly workers. Private companies have implemented ways to soften the blow and provide relief for those who can't afford to stay home when they don't feel well or when their bosses tell them to:
Like a slasher film... But with interest rates. The Fed's yanked out all the stops in its financial medicine arsenal. On March 3, the nation's central bank doled out the first emergency rate cut since the '08 financial crisis. On Sunday, it cut interest rates to near 0% and announced it's dropping $700B on long-term bonds. Here's what the Fed wants:
But the Fed is fighting a different beast... The COVID-19 pandemic. It's trying to prevent the virus from causing a financial crisis — but investors are looking for medical solutions, not monetary ones.
There's only so much the Fed can do... And it's already done it. With all these drastic measures, the Fed has run out of rockets in its economic bazooka. Now it's up to Congress and the White House to help with changes in taxes and spending to help the consumers and small businesses seriously squeezed by the econ shutdown. This might include government bailouts for struggling industries (reportedly, airlines could be first).
Wait, he said what?... Alphabet's reaction to Friday's press conference when President Trump talked up Project Baseline, Google's initiative to point people who are COVID-19-worried in the right direction. With the President's public support and the Google parent's huge tech and financial resources, Project Baseline could be big for diagnosing COVID-19:
In South Korea and China, the authorities have apps tracking infected people... Verily isn't proposing that, but it insists on being able to share your data with authorities. Claaaassic Privacy vs. Security tradeoff. Giving Google your health data may seem scary, but letting COVID-19 spread is scarier.
This could be Google's opportunity to get into healthcare... America's personal health data literally sits in paper files in filing cabinets. That's painful for Google to see after indexing the entire internet. Project Baseline is Google's moment to capture health records on millions of Americans. And it's made other major health-data moves lately:
Disclosure: Authors of this Snacks own shares of Alphabet, Apple, Lululemon, Starbucks, Disney, and Amazon
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