You’re almost certainly familiar with Monument Valley, which for years was a mainstay of John Ford westerns. It was on my must-see list of things to photograph during my Arizona trip, but unfortunately I badly misgauged how far away it was. For some reason I thought it was about an hour from my hotel, but it was actually more like two-and-a-half hours away.

Luckily, I was determined to get there early, so I left two-and-a-half hours before sunset and got there literally in the nick of time. The pictures below were taken not from the usual vantage point to the north, but from the south so I could capture them with the reddest possible sunlight illuminating the already red rocks. The top picture shows the three rocks that are most commonly considered “Monument Valley.” The middle picture is a wider view that shows the entire outcropping. And the bottom picture is my favorite, a ruddy red shot with a beat-up house in the foreground. All of them were taken 3-7 minutes before sundown.

There’s been heavy coverage of the problems we’ve had rolling out the coronavirus rescue programs. Unemployment offices are swamped. Conditions are too onerous for the small business loan program. The $1,200 checks won’t go out until late summer for some people.

This was pretty much inevitable. Standing up programs like this in a matter of weeks was never going to be easy. But the very fact that they’re running into problems is evidence of just how popular they are. Take the small business loan program, for example. It has already approved $50 billion in loans in just three days and looks like it will be oversubscribed within weeks:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday asked congressional leaders to swiftly commit another $250 billion to replenish a new small business coronavirus program that is being overwhelmed by surging demand….Democrats haven’t rejected the proposal but they have said they want to prioritize other assistance, such as hazard pay for workers.

There are two things going on here. First, the demand for small business loans—despite the well-known issues with bank restrictions—is sky high. Since our goal is to keep as many as possible of these businesses solvent, adding more money to the fund makes sense.

However, there’s also a problem: in order for the loans to be forgiven, they have to be used mostly for payroll. But a lot of small-business workers have already been laid off and have applied for unemployment benefits. Thanks to the rescue bill, these benefits are, in most case, considerably more than they were paid for working. So why would they go back?

One answer could come from Chuck Schumer’s proposal to offer “hazard pay” to essential front-line workers so they don’t feel cheated by making less than they would if they were laid off. Perhaps this could be extended to workers who are rehired by shuttered businesses? If so, it would eliminate the motivation to stay on unemployment. More details to come, I’m sure.

From the Guardian:

Cases of Covid-19 in Africa have now topped 10,000, though most experts believe the real number of infections is considerably higher.

….Aid organisations continue to raise deep concern about parts of the continent where health systems are most fragile….There are also growing calls for dramatic measures to cushion the massive blow delivered by the pandemic to African economies, possibly through widespread cancellation of the massive debts run up by many countries over recent decades. This is more complicated than it sounds however. Once, it was just wealthy western countries and international institutions that were creditors. Now China’s government, banks and companies are owed as much as $160bn while African governments have raised over $55bn on international debt markets in the past two years alone.

As it happens, $55 billion is not really that much. It’s about a quarter of a percent of the international debt market of $20 trillion. So even if all these loans go completely belly up it probably won’t do a lot of damage to the economy of the rest of the world.

Of course, that’s just Africa. The bad news in this report isn’t so much the 10,000 number per se, it’s that COVID-19 has obviously spread far beyond the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere and there’s no reason to think it won’t explode just like it did here. Now add in South America, India, southeast Asia, and a few other places and things start to look pretty dicey, both for countries in the southern hemisphere and for the rest of us.

Glenn Fine in a 2007 file photo.Mark Murrmann/ZUMA

Large corporations were the recipients of $500 billion in the coronavirus rescue bill. However, only about $50 billion of this is for actual loans. The other $450 billion comes in the form of loan guarantees: that is, it’s a capital cushion earmarked to pay for potential losses in lending facilities from the Fed. Roughly speaking, then, the bill really authorizes about $4.5 trillion in loans under the assumption that $450 billion represents the maximum loss the Fed is likely to suffer.

By any measure, $4.5 trillion is a whole lot of money, and it was the last sticking point in the rescue bill. Initially Trump said that he himself would provide all the oversight that was needed, but unsurprisingly that didn’t go down well with Democrats. The bill was passed only after Donald Trump finally agreed to appoint a special inspector in the Treasury Department to provide oversight. But as soon as the ink was dry, he appointed Brian Miller, a White House lawyer, for the job. This was not an auspicious start.

Now there’s more:

President Donald Trump has upended the panel of federal watchdogs overseeing implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus law, tapping a replacement for the Pentagon official who was supposed to lead the effort. A panel of inspectors general had named Glenn Fine — the acting Pentagon watchdog — to lead the group charged with monitoring the coronavirus relief effort. But Trump on Monday removed Fine from his post, instead naming the EPA inspector general to serve as the temporary Pentagon watchdog in addition to his other responsibilities.

At least we still have the House oversight committee, formed by Nancy Pelosi and headed by Jim Clyburn. Unless, of course, Trump simply refuses to allow anyone in his admistration to respond to its subpoenas. But he wouldn’t do that, would he?

Ringo Chiu/ZUMA

This morning brings some Kevin bait:

@kdrum @Noahpinion
Its a great time to do full lead abatement across the entire country for $50bn

— Traders Crucible (@traderscrucible) April 7, 2020

I think that any time is a good time to spend a big chunk of money on lead abatement. Future generations will thank us. Unfortunately, if there’s a worst time to do it, now is it.

The COVID-19 pandemic is throwing us into a recession, but it’s a purely technical, man-made recession. It’s not due to an oil spike or a dotcom bust or a housing bubble or even just a cyclical reduction in savings that causes households to cut back on spending. It’s due to specific government mandates that can be lifted at any time.

What this means is that we don’t need any kind of general economic stimulus. Household savings are high, consumer demand is fine, and there should even be pent-up demand working in our favor by summer. Instead, we need to specifically help the people and businesses who have been affected by the government mandates so that they can stay afloat until the emergency is over. This means:

• Workers who are laid off thanks to coronavirus restrictions.
• Small businesses that are shuttered for the duration.
• Large businesses facing revenue shortfalls.
• State and local governments who are losing revenue and facing higher expenditures.
• Hospitals and other health care providers.

Any follow-up rescue package—which we’ll probably need—needs to be directed toward these victims of the coronavirus lockdowns. A small amount of generalized stimulus—the $1,200 checks, for example—doesn’t hurt since any targeted program is bound to miss some people, but it shouldn’t be large and it shouldn’t be the focus of congressional action.

The exception to this might come later in the year. If the pandemic starts taking off in the global south just as the north is recovering, we might suffer a classic recession due to trade losses, supply chain disruptions, loan forfeitures, and so forth. If that happens, we might need a classic stimulus package to get us back on track. That would be the time for infrastructure projects and lead abatement. There’s no telling if we’ll need this, but it would certainly be wise to plan for the possibility by spending a few billion dollars now to identify and and do prep work for a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure.¹ When the time comes, it would be nice to have plenty of shovel-ready plans on the shelf ready to go if we need them.

¹Including lead abatement!

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 6. Italy is solidly past their peak and declining at a good clip. Germany had a bad day and now looks a little farther away from their peak than I thought yesterday. The data from France is so weird that I can’t make sense of it:

There’s an almost perfect linear increase for two weeks, followed by a sudden explosion, with deaths doubling over the course of three days. Unless I did my arithmetic wrong, this looks like some kind of reporting error from the French authorities.

How to read the charts: Let’s use France as an example. For them, Day 0 was March 5, when they surpassed one death per 10 million by recording their sixth death. They are currently at Day 32; total deaths are at 1,488x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 133.2 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is above where Italy was on their Day 32.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This is just idle curiosity based on a Twitter conversation earlier tonight, but here are the per-capita COVID-19 mortality statistics for California’s biggest urban counties:

This is a surprisingly wide spread, from 4.4 in Orange County to 21.7 up in Santa Clara. Is this due to population density? Here’s a look:

Even if you remove San Francisco as a super-high-density outlier, as I did here, there’s still no positive trend associated with population density. If you remove Riverside and San Bernardino as super-low density outliers, you get a negative trend. So I dunno. Anyone got any ideas?

CDC/Planet Pix via ZUMA

I just read the Supreme Court ruling on the Wisconsin primary and it’s disturbing. The facts of the case are fairly simple. Under existing rules, absentee ballots are counted as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day and received (in this case) by April 13. However, the COVID-19 lockdown overwhelmed the system: far more ballots were requested than usual, and the state was unable to get them all mailed out in time. What this means is that a large number of people who requested absentee ballots won’t get them before Election Day and therefore, through no fault of their own, won’t be able to cast a vote.

To remedy this, a district court ruled that absentee ballots should be accepted as long as they’re received by April 13, regardless of when they were postmarked. In practical terms, this provided three or four more days for voters to receive their ballots, which meant that many fewer would lose their vote.

It’s worth noting that this was not an easy case. In normal circumstances, it might have been correct to overturn the district court decision. But these aren’t normal circumstances, and what’s disturbing about the majority ruling from the Supreme Court’s Republicans is that it barely even mentions those circumstances. It says instead that the case hinges on a “narrow, technical” question about the absentee ballot process. At the very end of the opinion, here is the sole reference to the COVID-19 pandemic:

The Court’s decision on the narrow question before the Court should not be viewed as expressing an opinion on the broader question of whether to hold the election, or whether other reforms or modifications in election procedures in light of COVID–19 are appropriate. That point cannot be stressed enough.

That’s it. In the main body of the opinion, you would never learn that a deadly pandemic even existed, let alone that it was the driving motivation of the district court’s decision.

This is cowardly. If you want to make a case that the law is the law and it needs to be followed even in the middle of a destructive plague, then go ahead. But at the very least, you need to have the integrity to make the case. You need to be willing to say forthrightly that legal technicalities need to be followed even if they will either (a) deprive thousands of people of their votes or (b) drive them to the polls, where they run the risk of contracting a deadly disease. If you can’t quite find the words to say that out loud, then you need to rethink your reasoning.

The district court decision is, admittedly, sort of ad hoc. But at least it engages with the unique circumstances, essentially recognizing that state election law is not a suicide pact. The Supreme Court decision, by contrast, avoids the facts on the ground entirely. If this were nothing more than a snowstorm or a transit strike, maybe that would be OK. But when it’s the deadliest pandemic in over a hundred years? That’s a little different.

POSTSCRIPT: The best solution would have been to simply postpone the primary. However, the Wisconsin Supreme Court nixed that.

Hmmm:

Austria and Denmark on Monday became the first European countries to announce concrete plans to reopen their societies after coronavirus lockdowns, hoping they may have already weathered the worst of the first wave of the pandemic….In Austria, small shops are slated to reopen April 13, with larger stores to follow on May 1….In Denmark, the plan is for nursery and primary schools to reopen April 13, while companies will resume business gradually.

Both countries say that because they began lockdowns relatively early, they’ve avoided the worst of the pandemic. And that’s true: their per-capita death rate from COVID-19 is fairly low. Still, it’s only been three weeks since their first case and neither country looks like it’s definitively out of the woods:

Austria might be past its peak—though the sample size is too small to say for sure—but there’s certainly nothing in Denmark’s trendline that looks like they’re in any shape to start reopening soon.

Jumping the gun because the public is getting antsy is a blunder. A seductive blunder, but a blunder nonetheless since it opens us up to the possibility of wasting weeks of effort. I sure hope Austria and Denmark know what they’re doing.

JUST TO BE CLEAR: I have no problem with national governments making plans for reopening. They should! I’m just not sure that it’s time to be tossing out dates yet.

Spring has sprung, and even the coronavirus can’t keep our garden from bursting out in a patchwork of vivid color. Here’s a picture of our bearded iris taken on Wednesday, right at its peak. Within two days it was withering away, and today it’s completely gone. You have to catch ’em quick.