My Kingdom for a Leader

Nearly 3 million of my countrymen filed for jobless benefits last week.  Counting those claims there are now 36.5 million total applications submitted over two months.   

Welcome to the feast of the Trump economy.  

Ask yourself this:  

Are you better-off today than you were four years ago?  

How about your balance sheet - better or something else?  

Has your retirement plan been altered?

Oh, you say you're not retired.  Is your job secure?  Is your employer on solid ground? 

If you have a job maybe you're working from home with school age children.  How's that working out for you?

Are you coping under the weight of all this winning?  

You're not going to like reading this - but in the near term it could get worse, folks.  Possibly ugly worse.  

Nevertheless, I am reasonably sure my Trump-supporting friends remain firm in their beliefs. As the COVID-19 death toll mounts and the economy continues to roller-coaster in the coming months I expect their devotion to Trump will remain unshaken.  It’s a curious phenomenon for sure and continues to be a puzzlement to me.

Nevertheless, it did not have to come to this level of badness denial. The head of the Chinese CDC was on the phone to Robert Redfield of our CDC on January 1^st.  By January 13 the Chinese had a coronavirus test.  Three days later the Germans had a test to detect coronavirus ready to deploy..   

Meanwhile, Donald Trump shrugged-off the notion of testing in favor of prioritizing short-term management of the stock market.  

Depending-upon your point of reference that was either a calculated risk or a reckless gamble - either way Trump ran with it.  Keeping-up appearances with an optimistic tone on the markets was clearly a reelection strategy and priority.   Because Trump had embraced the stock market as the yardstick of the success for his presidency he had painted himself into a corner.  And, naturally, this strategy was at cross-purposes with public health priorities and all the things that needed to be accomplished to minimize the damage from a pandemic.      

As with testing (both then and continuing today) Trump gave short shrift to the lethality of the coronavirus and ignored the alarms being sounded.  We witnessed 70 days of denial, dysfunction and delay that allowed the virus to spread.  Trump had time to golf, hold rallies and tweet - all the while he did no advance planning or preparation.  His willful blindness magnified the severity of the economic carnage and the resulting death toll.  The breathtaking number of my countrymen who have died and the severity of the economic tragedy is Trump’s fault.  

He failed to manage the crisis.  

I understand that Trump supporters will deny all of this.  Which is fine - everyone is entitled to an opinion.  Yet there is no denying the fact that after distributing defective testing kits the administration made the decision to decline the offer of perfectly reliable kits from the World Health Organization.  The administration also blocked local governments from outsourcing testing to private labs. 

This nation did not reach the minuscule number of 10,000 people tested until the middle of March.    

As I have said all along - it's all about a robust testing program.  Including contact tracing and quarantine of the sick and exposed. This is the path to economic recovery and eventually something close to normalcy.   

I read of a good analogy to this shit show some time ago and it goes something along these lines:   

Imagine you are the CEO of a manufacturer blindsided by a safety recall of a product. This crisis has caused the price of the company’s stock to drop precipitously.  

Executive management have two choices to make with regard to mastering the situation at hand. 

The first option is to concentrate on fixing the problem and demonstrating to the public that the product is safe and reliable.  By doing this the company's stock may eventually recover.  It may take a while - yet this choice sets the table for corporate stability and a resurgence. This is what wise and prudent fiduciaries do on behalf of both employees and shareholders. 

Alternatively, management could elect to piss and moan, blame-shift and tweet about the falling stock price only. That the company might simply go out of business this option is done at great peril.        

Ponder that.