Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Get ready for a wild ride in the markets:

What started with the biggest oil-price collapse since 1991 is shaping up to be one of the wildest days in years for global markets.

Panic selling, margin calls, vanishing liquidity and coronavirus work-from-home arrangements were just some of the challenges traders faced as risk assets plunged, currency volatility soared and money flooded into government bonds. They also had to figure out how an oil-price war and rapidly spreading outbreak will affect the global economy, companies and geopolitics.

“The day has been absolutely chaotic,” said Eugene Kang, whose team trades assets including Russian government bonds at NH Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul. “Financial markets have been caught off guard.”

Trump's incompetence, it turns out, not only kills people, it kills IRAs.

Incompetence might also come home to roost:

A growing sense of concern and uncertainty about the reach of the novel coronavirus has begun to take hold in the White House, after an attendee at a recent political conference where President Trump spoke tested positive for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Trump was photographed shaking hands with Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who confirmed that he had been in direct contact with the infected man during the Conservative Political Action Conference last month.

The handshake at CPAC put Trump just two degrees of separation away from the virus that he has sought to minimize as it has rocked financial markets and tested his leadership skills. While the White House has maintained that Trump was never in direct contact with the infected person and does not have any symptoms, the potential close call at a political event underscores how the outbreak threatens to upend the president’s routine as he campaigns for reelection.

[Stifling snicker]

Trump might not be the only one who was exposed at the Conservative Crackpot Political Action Conference:

Two Republican lawmakers will self-quarantine in their houses after contact at a recent political conference with a person who later tested positive for coronavirus.

Senator Ted Cruz will self-quarantine in his Texas home. He said he had a “brief conversation and a handshake” with the unnamed person at the recent CPAC conference in National Harbor, Maryland. [snip]

Republican Representative Paul Gosar, a dentist by trade from Arizona who had extended contact with the person at CPAC, said in a statement that he will close his Washington office for a week. Gosar and three senior staff members will self-quarantine this week, with Gosar staying at home in Arizona.

Gosar said that he and his staff are not experiencing any symptoms.

[Stifling guffaws]

As Dave Remnick points out, we have the worst- possible person at the top of the command chain, with a cadre of followers who will always believe his self- serving spin: 

Trump’s misstatements and understatements in recent weeks are consistent with his general attitude toward empiricism. Which is to say, he has never shown much regard for fact. In the past, Trump has said that climate change is a Chinese “hoax” and that “vaccines can be very dangerous.” Disinformation and misinformation are rampant in his mental universe. Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, who said, last month, “The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” One of Trump’s ardent supporters in the Senate, Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, is among those who have suggested publicly that “we at least need to ask the question” of whether the virus was a bioweapon deliberately created in a Chinese laboratory outside the city of Wuhan–a theory rehashed in places like the Washington Times.  [snip]

Public-health officials worry that the consequences of living with a President and a general disinformation universe that undermine facts and science could have increasingly dire consequences. He is serving no one well. When you see a Trump supporter at a rally telling a reporter for CNN that she doesn’t believe that coronavirus exists, that it is an invention of the political opposition, there are reasons for that thinking. And such disbelief in the facts might well lead such a person to inadvertently make bad decisions about her health and her family’s health.

Meanwhile, hospitals (unlike Dr. Trump, PhD'oh) are preparing the worst case scenarios:

Nobody yet knows how serious the coronavirus outbreak will get in the U.S. But projections suggest it could place a tremendous strain on the U.S. health system, especially hospitals, leading to shortages of beds, supplies and personnel. 

The level of strain will depend on how many people ultimately get sick and, in particular, how many develop the kinds of severe symptoms that require hospitalization. 

The vast majority of people who develop COVID-19 will have symptoms no worse than the normal flu, allowing them to recover at home. Some may even be asymptomatic.

But when the illness settles in the lungs, as it will especially for some of the elderly and the most medically vulnerable, it can be life-threatening. Those cases require intensive inpatient care, and the ability of hospitals to provide that care has its limits.

As always, please check out Infidel 753's excellent link round-up, otherwise your Monday reading would not be complete!