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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Trump Tweets “Cuomo Wants Independece…That Won’t Happen” As US COVID-19 Deaths Near 25k: Live Updates

Courtesy of ZeroHedge View original post here.

Summary:

  • Trump and states battle over who decides on reopening
  • European cases (Germany, Spain) continued to slide
  • G7 calls for debt standstill for poor countries
  • Russia reports another record jump in new cases
  • Cuomo says he would disobey Trump order to reopen economy if it endangered his state
  • China reports another 89 new infections
  • US Dept. of Ag prepares to unveil coronavirus farm bailout
  • IMF calls for global economy to contract 3% in 2020
  • Florida surgeon general says social distancing should continue until a vaccine is released
  • Cali pastors sue state to reopen churches
  • Iran plans to divest 10% of Shasta as selloff of state assets begins
  • Sweden deaths cross 1k
  • UK department of health reports 778 new deaths
  • NATO warns supply chains of important medical supplies should be moved out of ‘non-member’ states

*     *     *

Update (1015ET): In a series of tweets sent Tuesday morning, President Trump bashed Democrats for refusing to agree to a deal to replenish the small business loan program, and also slammed Andrew Cuomo for seeming to want “independence” from the federal government, with Trump claiming “that won’t happen!”.

The pissing contest started with Cuomo’s claim, broadcast on CNN, that he would sue the administration if its orders endangered the public.

And really, even before that, when President Trump said the authority to reopen the economy rested with him.

Cuomo responded by taking a much more aggressive tack during an appearance on MSNBC. During that appearance, he mocked Trump and said there’s “no value” in watching his pres briefings.

“A governor should not watch that. There’s no value in it. It is infuriating and offensive and frankly ignorant of the facts,” Cuomo said. Cuomo also mocked Trump for standing up and repudiating the Republicans’ longstanding preference for ‘States’ Rights’.

“You know, the president stood up and said, ‘Forget the Constitution of the United States, forget the concept of federalism,'” Cuomo said.

“To hear a Republican stand up there, by the way, and argue big government and total authority of the federal government is somewhat amusing. You know, if it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny, all of this. It could be a comedy skit.”

Watch that clip below:

With Mike Brzezinski asking the questions, Cuomo accused the president of “declaring himself ‘King Trump'” and added that “the governors are in charge because the president put them in charge…he could have closed the economy, but he didn’t want to.”

He also warned that Trump is risking causing “the worst Constitutional crisis we’ve seen in decades” if states started defying the feds.

Though, of course, it’s a little more complicated than that.

More good news from the Continent: The Netherlands just reported that the number of occupied ICU beds has fallen for the third straight day as more seriously ill patients have died, while some more have recovered.

Meanwhile, as the IMF slashes its global growth forecast, as we mentioned below, to -3% for 2020 (compared with the +3% forecast from January), its economists are warning that the downturn ahead will be “worse than the Great Recession” and likely become the world’s worst since the Great Depression, per the SCMP, which cited the IMF’s “World Economic Outlook” report.

Although China has pulled out all the stops to get its economy up and running at full steam, the IMF said it doesn’t expect the world’s second largest economy to make a full recovery, with projected 2020 GDP growth of just 1.2%. The economies of Italy and Spain, two of the most vulnerable in Europe, will contract by 9.1% and 8%, the IMF believes.

*     *     *

Update (0940ET): As expected, the G7 has just released a communique calling for a debt standstill for the poorest sovereign borrowers, if the G20 agrees. Rumors about the plan emerged yesterday. In the communique, the G-7 said creditor countries will work out arrangements using the IMF and World Bank as intermediaries to provide a large degree of temporary debt relief to the hardest-hit emerging nations.

In other news, Iran reported its first daily death toll below 100 in more than a month. The UK Department of Health announced 778 new deaths on Tuesday, along with 5,252 new cases.

Sweden, the biggest economy in Scandinavia, just reported a handful of new deaths bringing its national total to 1,033 – breaking above the critical 1k death milestone, as more critics urge the government to consider lockdowns and other more strict measures to combat the outbreak. Per BBG, 22 academics wrote an op-ed urging the government to alter its course. “The approach must be changed radically and swiftly,” they wrote in an opinion piece published in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

And it’s quickly outpacing its Scandi neighbors.

*     *     *

Update (0800ET): New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was back on CNN Tuesday morning (the network where his brother Chris works as an anchor) to rebut the president’s claims that the true authority about when to reopen the country rests with the White House. During the governor’s spot, he insisted he would sue the federal government and – if it comes down to it – simply resist Trump’s order if it “endangered” New Yorkers.

“We don’t have a king, we have a president…and that was a big decision,” Cuomo said. Yesterday, he said that his state doesn’t have enough tests to conduct mass testing before reopening the economy. He suggested that if this is what the federal government wants, it will need to provide the tests and money to run them.

Cuomo, who is always shown great deference by CNN’s servile reporting staff, added that although Trump did the right thing by stopping travel from China, he did not issue the order to shut the US economy – that was done in a piecemeal way by the states, beginning with California.

Cuomo, on CNN, says he would sue the fed govt if Trump ordered N.Y. to reopen before the state wants to










“We would have a constitutional challenge between the state + the federal govt, and that would go into the courts,” he says










And that would be bad for the country, he says pic.twitter.com/ZyJ0mNYGfa

— David S. Joachim (@davidjoachim) April 14, 2020

We suspect this pissing contest will consume a surprisingly large amount of this week’s news cycle.

*     *     *

As states on the West and East coasts of the US promised to work together to develop plans for regional reopenings of economy – plans that could be released as soon as Tuesday, according to Cali Gov. Gavin Newsom – President Trump on Tuesday continued to insist that the decision of when to reopen the economy rests with him alone.

The issue of when to reopen the economy, and the battle between the states and Trump, appears to be the big issue looming over the US this week, now that it’s become clear that the urgent shortage of supplies that certain Democratic governors had warned of actually wasn’t a problem after all.

Last night, we shared a detailed timeline developed by Morgan Stanley illustrating how the bank’s analysts expect the reopening will unfold.

Tensions between the President and the press reached a new breaking point last night, as Trump jousted with a CBS News reporter and insisted that “everything we did was perfect” and that he had “total authority” over when to reopen the economy, which he said would happen “ahead of schedule.” Meanwhile, Dr. Fauci insisted he didn’t mean to imply that the administration should have ordered a lockdown in mid- or late-February, a time when even Dr. Fauci was cautioning the public that the most strict measures weren’t necessary – at least not yet.

All the while, US deaths are nearing 25,000, as the total number of confirmed cases in the country near 600k.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, Italy and Spain are beginning to let more workers return to their shops and worksites while French President Emmanuel Macron last night warned that France still had a long way to go, before extending the French lockdown until mid-May while acknowledging that “we weren’t prepared”.

This week’s Bank of America fund manager survey discovered that fund managers are sitting on more cash right now than at any time since 9/11.

As millions of Americans clamor for bringing more of the medical supply chain back under the control of the US, now that the world has seen what relying too heavily on China-based supply chains can lead to, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that there would be a meeting of alliance members to discuss moving more production of critical medical supplies out of “non-member” countries.

“We have to look into issues like supplies of medical equipment, protective suits, medicines…and also ask questions about whether we are too dependent on production coming from outside, whether we need to produce more of this equipment from our own countries,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

In the UK, the FT reported that more deaths were recorded in England and Wales during the week ending on April 3 than in any week since comparable estimates started 15 years ago, the Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday.

Global cases of the virus increased by 71,572 yesterday, the 4th day in a row that the number of newly infected around the world has fallen. Still, the pace of increases brought the total number north of 1.9 million.

Meanwhile, with the IMF and World Bank annual meetings slated to begin later this week, the IMF has said it would supply grants to some of the poorest nations in Africa and Asia.

Vladimir Putin now officially has reason to panic as Russia records 2,774 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, a third consecutive record daily increase. Russia now has 21,102 cases of the virus, and 170 people have died from the disease. Russia’s outbreak has soared over the past 2 weeks, as numbers have doubled roughly every 4 days. China, meanwhile, reported 89 new cases, a slight drop from yesterday, with almost all of the being classified as ‘foreign’ cases.

Following warnings that first emerged late last week, Iran is set to kick off its privatization push to save its economy from the coronavirus: To accomplish this, Iran will sell off 10% of Shasta, the investment arm of the Social Security Organization of Iran – which is one of the state’s crown-jewel assets.

As cases in Europe continued to slow, Germany reported 2,082 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, the lowest number in more than three weeks, and an increase of under 2%. Germany has confirmed 125,098 cases so far, according to official data from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Spain also reported a less-than-2% (1.8%) jump in new cases, its slowest rate since the beginning of the outbreak, according to the Washington Post.

In the US, the US Department of Ag will reportedly unveil as much as $15.5 billion as part of the first phase of coronavirus aid to the farming industry on Tuesday. Meanwhile, late yesterday, Florida’s surgeon general reportedly said that social distancing should continue until a vaccine has been developed. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has requested a roughly 3-month delay on all US census field operations. The administration also asked Congress to postpone the deadline for delivering key data that will affect redistricting.

As millions of religious Americans continue to skip worship-related gatherings like Church, several pastors in California are suing the state and local officials over their stay-at-home edicts prohibiting in-person services, claiming these rules violate the 1st Amendment. And finally, more than 2,100 US cities are bracing for serious budget shortfalls.

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