The world should top over the mark in the next few days:
- 10,000,000 cases
- 500,000 deaths
Many businesses are using “the pandemic as a cloak” to cut jobs that they had wanted to cut even before the coronavirus outbreak, “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary told CNBC on Wednesday.
“Their jobs will never come back,” O’Leary said on “Squawk Box.” “This is great for earnings in the S&P. It’s not great for employment.”
O’Leary said that mandatory closures in particular — put in place by state and local governments to help slow the spread of Covid-19 — can be used by businesses as cover to scale back their employee count going forward. “They wanted to do this anyways, and they’re doing it under the cloak of, ‘Gee, I can’t open so I’m just going to do it.’”
Tens of millions of Americans have filed for unemployment insurance since the coronavirus pandemic began to intensify, but a large share of those filing for claims have said they believe their layoffs will be temporary. There were 15.3 million unemployed people on temporary layoff in the May jobs report, a decrease of 2.7 million from the month prior, according to the Labor Department.
However, permanent job losses rose by 295,000 in May to 2.3 million. Overall, the U.S. unemployment rate in May dropped to 13.3% from 14.7%, following a surprising gain of 2.5 million jobs that served as a positive indication of the economy’s recovery from the Covid-19 crisis.
Speaking of "cloaking", here comes the usual bullshit push for less regulation because EMERGENCY!!!!
Forbes:
The Covid-19 crisis is demanding the focused attention of all innovators. Before the pandemic, I believe there was often too much priority given to regulation and bureaucratic oversight of certain industries. This was something I saw while assessing timelines as a professional investor in heavily regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical research and development.
Now that priorities have shifted due to global emergency, regulation is going to take a back seat to innovation. Governments need to strike a better balance between regulation and research and development in the interest of public health. I want to see governments speed up the processes to get new testing kits and supplies manufactured and get new drugs into development. Now that our priorities have radically changed, our regulatory frameworks need to change, too.
No, goddamn it. Poor regulation due to the typical laissez faire attitude on the part of big business and their coin-operated politicians is a major contributing factor to how this shit got started, and why we're so fucking deep in the shit right now.
You can't tell me some businesses are posting enormous profits because of a pandemic they helped create and exacerbate, and then tell me we'll have to lower our standards even further in order to help them turn ever greater profits at the expense of people who'll have to choose which way they prefer to fucking die.
You can't tell me some businesses are posting enormous profits because of a pandemic they helped create and exacerbate, and then tell me we'll have to lower our standards even further in order to help them turn ever greater profits at the expense of people who'll have to choose which way they prefer to fucking die.
- With Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon, the S&P is up 23% YTD
- Without those 5 companies, it's down 8% YTD
We're being played for suckers again - or still.
