Well, another shoe has dropped. My wife’s employer furloughed a bunch of people for “four months” but she’s one of the lucky ones to have only had her hours trimmed, with a 20% pay cut for the rest of 2020. Yay?
Officially, a record 3.2 million people filed new unemployment claims in America last week, but the true number of people who lost their jobs may be significantly higher than that since the unemployment offices were overwhelmed. Phone lines were jammed and online applications experienced delays too. It may be quite a while until we know the true impacts on employment and wages.
A great resource that I’ve only recently stumbled onto:
The COVID Tracking Project
The COVID Tracking Project collects information from 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and 5 other US territories to provide the most comprehensive testing data we can collect for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. We attempt to report positive and negative results, pending tests, and total people tested for each state or district currently reporting that data.
Las Vegas parking lot turned into homeless shelter during coronavirus crisis
”Federal Reserve opens up seventh liquidity facility, to supply US dollars abroad”
So, effectively, the Federal Reserve is bailing out other central banks. I continue to be amazed that so many people in America are focused on the government’s fiscal policy response as opposed to the Fed’s monetary policy response.
The Wall Street Journal reports ”Wheat and Rice Prices Surge in Coronavirus Lockdown”
Consumers are loading up on pasta, rice and bread. Farm supply lines are disrupted. Countries are restricting agricultural exports.
The result: Prices of wheat and rice, two of the world’s staple grains, are rising sharply. Difficulties moving grain within countries and across borders, coupled with frenzied buying, could exacerbate the impact of the pandemic on the global food market.
“If we could hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, that’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000 — so we have between 100- and 200,000 — we altogether have done a very good job,” Trump said during a task force press briefing in the White House Rose Garden. Imagine what the firestorm would have been like if Obama had said something that loathsome. How have we gotten to the point where the rantings of a sociopath have become normalized?
It looks like in America things may be on track to get much worse before they get better:
On a Hive note, self-voting can be self-defeating. Ever the slimy rat bastard, I upvoted a post that was six days old.
Sure, if you’re voting on something that’s been recently posted, it makes sense that the “projected” payout may swing wildly up or down as other people are near-simultaneously voting on it. But it’s less intuitive why the “projected” payout might drop when voting on an older “stale” post. Meh, that’s what I get for trying to sneak in a late self-vote.
