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After Jerome arrived, Napoleon appointed an ambassador to Warsaw, and sponsored the re-establishment of the Polish Confederation. All signs seemed to point to the resurrection of the Kingdom of Poland, with Jerome on the throne. In mid-June, while his army moved forward roughly on schedule, Jerome remained in Warsaw to confer with Prince Adam Czartoryski,1 head of the Confederation

Napoleon had planned all along that the experienced and skilful Marshal would command the right wing

Napoleon intended Westphalia to be a model state, one that the other members of the Rheinbund might admire and copy. In many respects it so became, and perhaps would have fully become, had not Napoleon himself wrecked its finances

For a country with a basically agricultural economy, and a population of only two million, this was a heavy burden. To make matters worse, Napoleon established tax-free Imperial fiefs within the Kingdom, and demanded extraordinary contributions from time to time

With most of his troops serving Napoleon in Austria, he found himself faced by what might have become a serious uprising, led by Colonel Dornberg, late of the King’s own Guard. Five thousand men marched on Cassel, where Jerome had only fifteen hundred Guardsmen, almost all Westphalians

Napoleon gave him minor commands during the 1806-1807 campaign in Germany and Poland, from which he emerged a Major-General. Then, in July 1807, the Tilsit treaties recognized the new Kingdom of Westphalia; and Jerome, duly married to Catherine of Württemberg in August, entered Cassel in December

Your Kingdom is without police, without finances, without organization,” wrote the Emperor in April 1809

Though Napoleon refused Jerome any important command, some Westphalians fought with the Emperor to the end

A good part of Jerome’s Guard voluntarily saw him safely across the Rhine. Jerome returned to fight at Waterloo, and lived to see his nephew, Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The descendants of his son by Elizabeth Patterson were prominent in the United States until the line became extinct in 1945. is perhaps just that the great-great-grandson of Jerome and his sturdy, gentle Catherine is the Bonapartist pretender in 1964.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, also pushed back against the President's claim on Sunday when asked about it, telling ABC News that "the deaths are real deaths.

Trump and Fauci have had an at-times rocky relationship during the pandemic, with the top infectious disease expert occasionally criticizing the President's actions related to the crisis and Trump openly trashing Fauci and suggesting in early November that he might fire him after the election.

Cases have skyrocketed after the Thanksgiving holiday, and while impacts from Christmas and New Year's celebrations are still unfolding, at least 123,639 people nationwide were in the hospital with the virus on Saturday, marking 32 consecutive days that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

Adams, when pressed Sunday about his projection in December that there would be 20 million Americans vaccinated by the end of 2020, defended the administration's handling of the rollout, even as just 4 million people in the US have been given a shot.

“If the world is to cope with climate change, policymakers will need to pull every lever at their disposal,” he writes. “Faced with this threat, to indulge in the idea that central banks, as key agencies of the state, can limit themselves to worrying about financial stability … is its own form of denial.”

In England, by contrast, Carney has convened 33 central banks to investigate how to “green the financial system.” According to Axios, every powerful central bank is working with him—except for Banco do Brasil and the Fed.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, in 2015, in a speech which has subsequently received massive coverage—and he is a man, after all, absolutely of the global financial establishment—coined the idea of a climate Minsky moment. [Editor’s note: A Minsky moment is when an asset’s price suddenly collapses after a long period of growth.]

We would need [fossil-fuel assets] to be on the balance sheet of actors who were under huge pressure in a fire-sale situation and who couldn’t deal with a sudden revaluation. We would need an entire network of causation to be there, which is what produced the unique crisis of 2007 to 2008.

So imagine that we stay on our current path, and we’re headed toward 3 or 4 degrees’ [Celsius] temperature change. And then imagine some of the nonlinearities kick in, which the climate scientists tell us about, and we face a Fukushima-style event.

What happens next? You then get nervous democratic politicians—and not necessarily those who are known for their populism, but just nervous democratic politicians—suddenly deciding that we have to stop doing one or another part of our carbon-based economy. It has to stop, and it has to stop immediately. And then you get big shocks. Then you get sudden revaluations.

In other words, the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock

“One-third of equity and fixed income assets issued in global financial markets can be classified as belonging to the natural resource and extraction sectors, as well as carbon-intensive power utilities, chemicals, construction, and industrial goods firms.”

Whether that will, in fact, ease the formation of majorities in Congress is another question. Because, after all, it does somehow have to get through the Senate, you know.

Germany is far, far more exposed. A huge slice of their economy is basically all about internal combustion engines, and so that number includes all of those stocks, for sure.

If we saw a huge shock to, say, European equity [exchange-traded funds], which were heavily in German automotive, that’s the sort of trigger that we might be looking at.

This is not simply a zero-sum game; this is a structural transformation that has many very attractive properties. There’s loads of excellent jobs that could be created in this kind of transition.There’s no reason why, even by conventional GDP-type metrics, it need even be associated with the kind of feel-bad factor of slow GDP growth. Then [you could] also link it to a revival of social democracy for the United States. From a progressive political point of view, that’s obviously extremely attractive.

there’s also a deeper view: that climate change is the situation within which all other politics will happen for the next several generations, at least.

ever since the 1990s that’s been the logjam on any serious American commitment.

When you look at a third of securities tied up in the carbon economy and the evidence for decoupling GDP growth from carbon emissions maybe not being as strong as we’d like, do you think the change that needs to happen is realistic?

Tooze: Realistic? No. I mean, depends what you mean by realism. The scale of the challenge requires a boldness of action for which there is no precedent. That’s the only good purpose that the war analogies serve

Meyer: In your piece, you write: “Those in the United States who call for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan are, if anything, understating the scale of what is needed.”

Do you think climate action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World War II?

Tooze: Well, less large in absolute terms. Because even the U.S. was spending almost 40 percent of GDP on World War II. And if you’re the Soviet Union, you’re spending 55 to 60 percent in 1940. We don’t need to do anything like that. It needs to be much bigger than the New Deal, which in fiscal-policy terms was really quite trivial.

Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there’s no happy end. There’s no moment where you win and then everything goes back to the way it was before, but just better. That’s a misunderstanding

This isn’t crash dieting; this is a permanent change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans.

It isn’t just the oil and gas majors, because they wouldn’t get you to 30 percent. Exxon isn’t big enough to get you to that kind of percentage. It’s Exxon, and [the major automakers] Daimler and BMW, and the entire carbon-exposed complex.

all the really hard choices need to be made by people like China and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indonesia

You don’t have that very much in Germany. There isn’t anyone in Germany saying, “Which bit of mid-20th-century history is this most like?,” mercifully. The one analogy that has popped up in Germany is reunification, which I actually think is quite a good one, because that’s still an ongoing problem

in the American case, it would be civil rights and Reconstruction, which isn’t a particularly optimistic comparison to draw. It’s an ongoing problem, it’s a deep historic problem, it only happened once, we still haven’t fixed it, and we’re not at peace.

Meyer: There’s a kind of shallow view of climate change: that it is something we need to avert or stop. And that’s somewhat true

furthermore—and much more fundamentally than any of those things—this isn’t really about America. I mean, America can be an obstacle and get in the way, but none of the really hard choices needs to be made by Americ

like Reconstruction or the civil-rights movement, it needs to be something that people take on like a moral commitment, in the same way they take on genocide prevention as a moral commitment

problems that we thought we’d fixed, like the Green Revolution and the feeding of the world population, for instance—totally not obvious that those fixes cope with the next 20 years of what’s ahead of us. The food problem that was such an oppressive issue globally in the 1970s may resurge in an absolutely dramatic way.

Meyer: Given all that, if Jerome Powell decided that he wanted to intervene on the side of climate action, what could he do? What could the Fed do?

Tooze: What I think the Fed should announce is that it enthusiastically supports the idea of a bipartisan infrastructure push focused on the American electrical network, first and foremost, so that we can actually hook up the renewable-generating capacity—which is now eminently, you know, realistic in economic terms. Setting a backstop to a a fiscal-side-led investment push is the obvious thing.

It is indeed a highly appropriate response to an environment of extremely low interest rates, and [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers & Co. would argue that it might help, as it were, to suck us out of the state of secular stagnation that we’re in.

another avenue to go down—for the Fed to take a role in helping develop a classification of green bonds, of green financing, with a view also to rolling out comprehensive demands for disclosure on the part of American firms, for climate risks to be fully declared on balance sheets, and for due recognition to be given to firms that are in the business of proactively preparing themselves for decarbonization.

You could, for instance, declare that the Fed views with disfavor the role of several large American banks in continuing to fund coal investment. Some of the carbon-tracking NGOs have done very good work showing and exposing the way in which some of the largest, the most reputable American banks are still in the business of lending to Big Coal. Banking regulation could be tweaked in a way that would produce a tilt against that.

the classic role of the Fed is to support government-issued debt. Insofar as the Green New Deal is a government-issued business, the Fed has just an absolutely historical warrant for supporting fiscal action.

with regards to the broader economy, the entire federal-government apparatus essentially stood behind the spread of home ownership in the United States and the promotion of suburbanization through the credit system. And kind of what we need is a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the energy transition.

if the question is, Is there historical warrant for the financial agencies of government in the United States biasing the property structure in the economy in a certain way?, the answer is emphatically yes—all the way down to the grotesque role of the New Deal financial apparatus in enshrining the racial segregation of the American urban space, with massive effects from the 1930s onward.

The idea of neutrality should not even be allowed in the room in this argument. It’s a question of where we want to be biased. If you look at QE, especially in the U.K. and the EU, it was effectively fossil-biased.

monetary policy is not neutral with regards to the environment. There’s no safe space here. The only question is whether you’re going to lead in the right way

Meyer: Last question. With any of this, is there a role for interested Americans to play if they are not particularly tied to the financial- or monetary-policy elite?

Tooze: Support your congressperson in doing exactly what AOC did in the hearings with Powell a couple of weeks ago

[Editor’s Note: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Powell whether inflation and unemployment are still closely connected, as the Fed has long argued.]

Applaud, follow with interest, raise questions. That’s exactly what needs to be happening. The politicization of monetary policy is a fact.

If we don’t raise these questions, the de facto politics is, more often than not, conservative and status quo–oriented. So this, like any other area, is one where citizens—whether they’re educated and informed or not—need to wise up, get involved, and follow the arguments and develop positions.

So applaud your congresspeople when they do exactly what AOC was doing in that situation. In many ways, I thought it was one of the most hopeful scenes I’ve seen in that kind of hearing in a long time.

West Wing aides, shaken by polls showing the president badly trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr., worried that they were living through the final days of the Trump administration

Late in the day, the stock market collapsed when Mr. Trump abruptly called off talks for a congressional coronavirus relief bill after the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, said such a stimulus was badly needed.

Some White House staff members wondered whether Mr. Trump’s behavior was spurred by a cocktail of drugs he has been taking to treat the coronavirus, including dexamethasone, a steroid that can cause mood swings and can give a false level of energy and a sense of euphoria.

Prominent supporters of the administration said Mr. Trump should have stayed at the hospital until he was no longer infectious or should remain confined to his residence.

There were no answers, either, on when Mr. Trump last tested negative for the virus — a crucial piece of information that the White House and Dr. Conley have refused to answer and would establish the known state of Mr. Trump’s health before the presidential debate last Tuesday or before he attended a fund-raiser in New Jersey on Thursday. The White House first made public that Mr. Trump had tested positive early last Friday.

The 2018 PRRI American Values Survey offered respondents two definitions of socialism. One described it as “a system of government that provides citizens with health insurance, retirement support and access to free higher education,” essentially a description of social democracy. The other was the full Soviet dose: “a system where the government controls key parts of the economy, such as utilities, transportation and communications industries.”

You might say that socialism is winning the branding war: Fifty-four percent said socialism was about those public benefits, while just 43 percent picked the version that stressed government domination. Americans ages 18 to 29, for whom Cold War memories are dim to nonexistent, were even more inclined to define socialism as social democracy: Fifty-eight percent of them picked the soft option, 38 percent the hard one.

the Hapsburg Emperor, Francis II, had no choice but to accept after the French victories

German rulers who lost territory west of the Rhine to be compensated elsewhere in the empire at the expense of the ecclesiastical states

Napoleon to preside over a reorganisation

the effect was to cut the number of the imperial states from more than 300 to fewer than 100 and severely diminish the authority of the Hapsburgs

The larger German states were not at all unhappy to swallow their smaller neighbours. Both Austria and Prussia acquired some extra territory in the reorganization of 1803

Napoleon made sure that the main gains went to states like Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, which were not big enough to pose any threat to France

Napoleon smashed the Austrian and Russian armies in battle at Austerlitz

Sixteen German states joined the Confederation, which stretched from the Elbe to the Alps. It was a French vassal state and Napoleon announced that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation no longer existed.

the 6th the Emperor Francis bowed to the inevitable, renounced the imperial crown which his forebears had worn in virtually unbroken succession for almost four centuries since Albert II in 1438

The insatiable Bonaparte went on to create a new kingdom of Westphalia for his brother Jerome and coax or bully all the German states except Austria and Prussia to join the Confederation

The resulting intellectual battle over ‘what happened’ at this moment in time reflects developments in historical and memorial practice over the centuries

During the 1650s and especially on the occasion of Charles’ Restoration in 1660, the story was celebrated and narrated

The tree itself became a central part of a particular memorial culture. Pepys says that the king took a cutting from the tree and planted it in St James’s Park

The memory of the event became more and more suffused into English culture. Though abolished in 1859, there are still celebrations around the country relating to ‘Oak Apple Day’

The event has become a complex part of English memorial culture: as a historiographic debate, heritage, a site of tourism and memory, something to be owned, a place to drink, something to spend. Memory, heritage and history work in strange, fascinating, non-linear ways, through England into France, and tracing these various trajectories reveals to us the complexity of consumption of the past.

At first, patients skewed toward the 70-plus age group, but in the past week or so there have been a number of patients younger than 50.

"Two weeks ago, life was completely different."

Public health experts, including US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, have warned the US could "become Italy," where doctors in hospitals filled with Covid-19 patients have been forced to ration care and choose who gets a ventilator.

"There is a very different air this week than there was last week."

There are simultaneous effort to procure ventilators for the most severe patients. According to Cuomo, New York has procured 7,000 ventilators in addition to 4,000 already on hand, and the White House said Tuesday that the state would receive two shipments of 2,000 machines this week from the national stockpile. But the state needs 30,000, Cuomo said.

Cuomo also described the extreme measures hospitals are planning to take to increase their capacity for patients who need intensive care.

It's not just New York that's feeling the pressure. Hospitals across the country are seeing a surge of patients, a shortage of personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns, and health care workers who feel that they, their families and their patients are being put at risk.

Several nurses around the country also spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, also fearing they could lose their jobs.

Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, an ER nurse at Montefiore Medical Center and president of the New York State Nurses Association, said that "everybody is terrified" about becoming infected because many lack the proper protective gear, and many are being told to reuse the same mask between multiple patients.

to become sick and we also don't want to become carriers," she said. "In my own hospital -- and I don't think it's unique -- we have a nurse who is on a ventilator right now who contracted the virus."

The goal: to prevent hospitals from seeing a massive spike of patients arriving around the same time.

"Obviously, no one is going to want to tone down things when you see things going on like in New York City," Fauci said Tuesday.

President Trump said Saturday that he might order a quarantine of New York, New Jersey and parts of Connecticut, a dramatic exercise of federal power that would impose restrictions on travel by millions of Americans in order to prevent them from carrying the coronavirus to other parts of the country.

Mr. Trump, who has lurched from one public message to another in the weeks since the coronavirus crisis began to consume the United States, said he could announce such a move later Saturday, signaling that he had not reached a final decision about a short-term order.

Mr. Trump — who first broached the idea of the quarantines as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York was giving a news conference — said he had talked with Mr. Cuomo just hours earlier.

“I spoke to the president about the ship coming up,” Mr. Cuomo said, referencing the U.S.N.S. Comfort,

the naval hospital ship now bound for New York. “I didn’t speak to him about any quarantine.”

Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut said that he had been in close communication with Mr. Cuomo and Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey.

Mr. Trump’s public airing of his deliberations came one day after he signed a $2 trillion economic stimulus package and as cases in the tristate area continued to climb

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has questioned the wisdom of such orders.

Cases have also been growing elsewhere across the country,

at least 17 states reporting tallies of at least 1,000 infections and the surgeon general, Jerome Adams, signaling that Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans were emerging as hot spots.

Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island said Friday that state troopers would begin stopping drivers with New York license plates so that National Guard officials could collect contact information and inform anyone coming from the state that they were subject to a mandatory, 14-day quarantine.

The National Guard had already been deployed to bus stations, train stations and the airport to enforce Ms. Raimondo’s order, which also applies to anyone who has been to New York in the past 14 days.

“Right now we have a pinpointed risk,’’ she added. “That risk is called New York City.”

New York reported 52,318 confirmed cases, as of Saturday morning, with 728 deaths statewide. In New Jersey, there were 8,825 cases and the death toll had risen to 108. Connecticut had nearly 1,300 cases, with 27 deaths.

New York State’s primary is delayed, and New York City may fine those who break social-distancing rules.

And New York City officials are expected to decide this weekend whether to impose $500 fines on residents flouting social-distancing rules during the coronavirus outbreak by gathering in large groups at parks and ignoring police orders to disperse.

The vast majority of New Yorkers have been respecting the rules, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday,

officials had observed some violations.

Asked Thursday during an appearance on CNBC whether he thought it was possible that the country could be open for business next month, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, said, “I do.

The White House cannot unilaterally reopen the country. Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued federal guidance advising people to avoid social gatherings, work from home and use pickup and delivery options for food, it is state officials who have put the force of law behind those suggestions.

The CDC guidance is set to expire April 30, but the states are free to choose their own paths. Already, the state directives have varied in timing and in severity, and that is certain to continue as they are rolled back.

Among those pushing to reopen the economy, according to senior administration officials, is Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff and a top adviser to Trump. Short has argued there will be fewer deaths than the models show and that the country has already overreacted, according to people with knowledge of his comments.

Health experts say that ending the shutdown prematurely would be disastrous because the restrictions have barely had time to work, and because U.S. leaders have not built up the capacity for alternatives to stay-at-home orders — such as the mass testing, large-scale contact tracing and targeted quarantines that have been used in other countries to suppress the virus.

Even one of the most optimistic models, which has been used by the White House and governors, predicts a death toll of 60,400, but only if current drastic restrictions are kept in place until the end of May.

the growing recognition in the administration that the steps meant to stem the spread of coronavirus have inflicted economic pain that is likely to last for many months.

There have been nascent signs that the aggressive social-distancing measures imposed by state and city governments have slowed the spread of the infection, which has killed more than 16,000 Americans. Federal officials have noted that Washington state and California were among the first states to see cases of the virus but have not experienced the high levels of infection and death that others, such as New York and New Jersey, are enduring.

On Thursday — as the Labor Department tallied another 6.6 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said the U.S. economy was deteriorating “with alarming speed” and called for a national discussion about what will be required to reopen it.

Trump is preparing to announce this week the creation of a second, smaller coronavirus task force aimed specifically at combating the economic ramifications of the virus, according to people familiar with the plans.

The task force is expected to be led by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and include Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, and Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, along with outside business leaders. Others expected to play a role are Kevin Hassett, who has been advising Trump on economic models in recent weeks, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, administration officials say.

A 2007 study funded by the CDC examined the fate of several U.S. cities when they eased restrictions too soon during the 1918 flu pandemic. Those cities believed they were on the other side of the peak, and, like the United States today, had residents agitating about the economy and for relaxing restrictions.

Once they lifted the restrictions, however, the trajectory of those cities soon turned into a double-humped curve with two peaks instead of one. Two peaks means overwhelmed hospitals and many deaths, without the flattening benefit authorities were trying to achieve with arduous restrictions.

Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, notably did not advocate a May reopening, saying such steps were more likely after July. And even some close to Trump seemed wary of supporting an early date.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said an early reopening was “an aspirational goal.”“The real fear is that you do it too quickly and you create a spike in the disease, which is likely to come back in the fall,” Graham said. “It has to be a science-based assessment, and I don’t see a mass reopening of the economy coming anytime soon.”

“If restoring the economy means restoring transit systems back to full-throttle schedules, before covid-19 is defeated, it’s just going to expose more transit workers to harm’s way, and it’s something we would not be in favor of,” said John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union

“We’re still in a pandemic economy,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Federal Reserve economist. “Millions of people are looking for work and willing to work, but they are constrained from working.”

More than four million people have quit the labor force in the last year, including those sidelined because of child care and other family responsibilities or health concerns.

Most of the February gains came in the leisure and hospitality industries, including restaurant and bars, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. “There’s still a long way to go,” Ms. Pollak said

The labor market gained 379,000 jobs in February, yet unemployment rates for Black workers rose, underlining the uneven damage the pandemic continued to inflict.

Unemployment among Black women over 20 rose to 8.9 percent from 8.5 percent the prior month, while the rate for Black men older than 20 increased to 10.2 percent from 9.4 percent.

Black people hold 1.5 million fewer jobs than they did a year ago, down nearly 8 percent since the start of the pandemic. White workers, who make up a bigger share of the American population, have lost 6.3 million jobs — down 5 percent.

“Over the course of a long expansion, these persistent disparities can decline significantly,” Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said in a recent speech, though he added that “without policies to address their underlying causes, they may increase again when the economy ultimately turns down.”

The European Central Bank targets annual inflation of just below 2%, but has missed the mark for most of the past decade. It cut some of its projections at its last monetary policy meeting in December.

Another ECB official, Philip Lane, recently echoed the views of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who shifted to average inflation targeting in August, meaning inflation in the U.S. can rise above 2% without moves to immediately rein it back in

The U.S. 10-year rate has been above 2% since the start of 2021. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose above 1% on Jan. 6 for the first time since March.

On Wednesday, the Labor Department said the consumer-price index rose 1.4% in the year ended December, the smallest increase since 2015 due to the economic downturn.

Simply being in touch throughout the government’s planning was good for BlackRock, potentially burnishing its image over the longer run, Mr. Birdthistle said. BlackRock would have benefited through “tons of information, tons of secondary financial benefits,” he said.

Mr. Fink’s firm is a huge player across many stock and debt markets, and its advisory arm helped to execute some of the Fed’s crisis response during the 2008 financial meltdown. That market insight and experience got him a front-row seat at a pivotal moment, one that may have put him in a position to influence a rescue with huge ramifications for households, businesses and the entire U.S. economy.

They’re about as close to a government arm as you can be, without being the Federal Reserve,” said William Birdthistle, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and the author of a book on funds.

On March 24, 2020, the New York Fed announced that it had again hired BlackRock’s advisory arm, which operates separately from the company’s asset-management business but which Mr. Fink oversees, this time to carry out the Fed’s purchases of commercial mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds.

The company makes a profit by managing money for clients in an array of funds, generally charging a preset fee. It earns more when assets under its management grow. In the early days of the coronavirus crisis, as people converted financial holdings into cash, parts of its asset base were contracting and its business outlook hinged on what happened in certain markets.

Mr. Mnuchin held 60 recorded calls over the frantic Saturday and Sunday leading up to the Fed’s unveiling on Monday, March 23, of a policy package that included its first-ever program to buy corporate bonds, which were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash. Mr. Mnuchin spoke to Mr. Fink five times that weekend, more than anyone other than the Fed chair, whom he spoke with nine times. Mr. Fink joined Mr. Mnuchin, Mr. Powell and Larry Kudlow, who was the White House National Economic Council director, for a brief call at 7:25 the evening before the Fed’s big announcement, based on Mr. Mnuchin’s calendars.

BlackRock’s connections to Washington are not new. It was a critical player in the 2008 crisis response, when the New York Fed retained the firm’s advisory arm to manage the mortgage assets of the insurance giant American International Group and Bear Stearns.

Several former BlackRock employees have been named to top roles in President Biden’s administration, including Brian Deese, who heads the White House National Economic Council, and Wally Adeyemo, who was Mr. Fink’s chief of staff and is now the No. 2 official at the Treasury.

The firm has grown rapidly: Its assets under management swelled from $1.3 trillion in early 2009 to $7.4 trillion in 2019.

As it expanded, it has stepped up its lobbying. In 2004, BlackRock Inc. registered two lobbyists and spent less than $200,000 on its efforts. By 2019 it had 20 lobbyists and spent nearly $2.5 million, though that declined slightly last year, based on OpenSecrets data. Campaign contributions tied to the firm also jumped, touching $1.7 million in 2020 (80 percent to Democrats, 20 percent to Republicans) from next to nothing as recently as 2004.

People could still pull their money from E.T.F.s, which both the industry and several outside academics have heralded as a sign of their resiliency. But investors would have had to take a financial hit to do so, relative to the quoted value of the underlying bonds. That could have bruised the product’s reputation in the eyes of some retail savers.

The Fed’s programs helped to turn that around. The central bank supported the corporate bond market on March 23, 2020, by pledging to buy both already issued debt and new bonds. The program for existing bonds promised to also buy E.T.F.s, because they are a quick way to get access to a wide swath of the market. The bond market and fund recovery was nearly instant.

“We hired BlackRock for their expertise in these markets,” Mr. Powell has since said in defense of the rapid move. “It was done very quickly due to the urgency and need for their expertise.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was forced into quarantine after being exposed to someone who had tested positive for the coronavirus after hosting a string of large, indoor holiday parties at the State Department and attending a private party Saturday to watch the annual Army-Navy football game

The president, who recovered from his own bout with the virus after being treated with experimental drugs at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, is described by aides and allies as preoccupied with the election results he still refuses to accept, and has shown no interest in participating in any kind of public health message.

Instead, Mr. Trump has been focused on his efforts to overturn the election results and consumed by his anger at Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who this week finally congratulated Mr. Biden on his victory and said that “the Electoral College has spoken.”

After months of positioning himself in opposition to public health experts, people familiar with his thinking said, Mr. Trump feels on some level as if he does not want to be seen as caving in the end to the advice of the same people he has disparaged.

As Mr. Trump hesitates, lawmakers and Supreme Court justices are expected to begin receiving vaccines in the coming days, though the doses will be limited.

Notably absent from any planned public proceedings is President Trump, who has said relatively little about the vaccine that may be seen as a singular achievement and has made it clear that he is not scheduled to take it himself.

“The question is why don’t they do it together, six feet apart? It would be really powerful for the president, who has gotten exceptional treatment, to say that even in spite of getting the best care, it’s important that I get this vaccine.”

Mr. Trump’s decision, so far, to not get vaccinated, Dr. Gupta said, risked undermining any confidence that Mr. Pence might instill among skeptics who take their cues from the president alone.

“giving false reassurances to the American people that the vaccine is here and vigilance is no longer required.”

White House officials have said Mr. Trump does not need to get vaccinated because he still has the protective effects of the monoclonal antibody cocktail that was used to treat him for the virus in October. But Dr. Gupta said that was a misinterpretation of the results and that there was “no scientific reason not to get vaccinated.”

Mr. Trump said on Sunday that he would delay a plan for senior White House staff members to receive the coronavirus vaccine in the coming days

Doctors from Walter Reed this week set up vaccine stations inside the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. There, they began vaccinating staff considered critical to the functioning of government: That included Secret Service members, some medical staff and some other support staff who work near Mr. Trump.

“His priority is frontline workers, those in long-term care facilities, and he wants to make sure that the vulnerable get access first,” Ms. McEnany said this week. When it came to staff working in the West Wing, she added, “it will be a very limited group of people who have access to it, initially.”

Mr. Pence, people familiar with his thinking said, was concerned about the optics of jumping the line, when he wanted the administration to receive credit for the distribution of an effective vaccine to frontline medical workers without any distractions.

our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s

We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.

Too many police are instructed to believe that the 20th-century crime wave never ended.

Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in many U.S. cities rose “to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world,”

As American cities became perceived as war zones, police responded by adopting a “warrior” mentality.

Then violent crime plunged by more than 70 percent from 1993 to 2018, according to data maintained by the Department of Justice. Although officers routinely face threats that most white-collar workers never will, cops are safer now than at any point in nearly 50 years.

The U.S. has about the same number of police officers per capita as, say, Australia; but adjusted for population, U.S. law enforcement kills 10 times more people.

The message is clear: Be a warrior, because it’s a war out there.

The warrior mentality encourages an adversarial approach in which officers needlessly escalate encounters.

calls the idealization of the warrior “the most problematic aspect of modern [police] policy.”

the CDC had waited “its entire existence for this moment,” but it was so unprepared to deal with COVID-19 that the group initially in charge of the response, the Division of Viral Diseases, had to cede responsibilities to the Influenza Division, despite the fact that COVID-19 is not caused by any kind of influenza virus

Police aren’t just trained to feel like warriors; many are armed for war

Over time, SWAT itself served as a gateway drug for police militarization, as equipment once reserved for special teams, such as AR-15 rifles, were made available to ordinary officers.

the War on Drugs has been roundly discredited as a trillion-dollar failure that incurs thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it has bequeathed us a world where police bearing semiautomatics are armed with the wrong tools for the actual job

“The world has changed dramatically since the most violent years of the 1990s, but police training trails lived experience,”

the U.S. mental-health crisis has been effectively outsourced to the streets, where police who aren’t trained as social workers or behavioral therapists must perform the ad hoc duties of both.

Rather than respond to the drastically changing nature of American life, our cities and counties use police as a civic Swiss Army knife to solve problems such as homelessness and mental-health emergencies that have little to do with police training.

the failures of American police are not unique, but rather a symptom of a broader breakdown in high-quality governance.

Before it stood for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC was founded as the Communicable Disease Center in the 1940s. Its original mission was to stop an epidemic. The organization’s first 400, Atlanta-based employees were tasked with arresting an outbreak of malaria in the Southeast

Today, the center’s 14,000 employees work “at the speed of science”—that is, slowly and deliberately—to understand an array of health issues, including cancer, obesity, and vaping.

its mission creep has transformed what was once a narrowly focused agency into a kaleidoscopic bureaucracy with no fast-twitch instinct for achieving its founding mission to protect Americans from an epidemic.

The CDC’s recent failures are well known, but worth repeating. It failed to keep track of early COVID-19 cases in part because of a leaden-footed reliance on fax machines and other outdated record-keeping technology. It failed to compile accurate case counts, forcing private actors—such as The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project—to fill the void. It failed its most basic coordination functions as an agency

Violent crime plays a minuscule role in the day of a modern officer, who spends most of his or her time driving around, taking ho-hum radio calls, and performing the tertiary duties of traffic patroller and mental-health counselor.

Most important, the CDC failed to manufacture basic testing equipment. Its initial test kits were contaminated and unusable, which allowed the disease to spread undetected throughout the U.S. for weeks.

Compare the situation in the U.S. with the one in East Asia, where several countries have navigated the pandemic far more deftly. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam all updated their infectious-disease protocols based on what they learned from 21st-century epidemics: SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, and MERS in 2012. These countries quickly understood what artillery would be necessary to take on COVID-19, including masks, tests, tracing, and quarantine spaces. Yet the CDC—armed with an $8 billion budget and a global team of scientists and officials—was somehow unprepared to read from the playbook.

The FDA fumbled just as tragically. In January, Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington, was prepared to build an in-house coronavirus test

By the time Greninger was ready to set up his lab, the calendar had turned to March. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sick, and the outbreak was uncontrollable.

the White House cannot be entirely blamed for the ponderous incompetence of what ought to be the greatest public-health system in the world.

Not every American institution is trapped in amber. For a perhaps surprising example of one that has adapted to 21st-century needs, take the Federal Reserve.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair during the Great Recession, used his expertise about the 1930s economy to avoid a similar collapse in financial markets in 2008. Today’s Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has gone even further, urging Congress and the Treasury to “think big” and add to our already-historic deficits.

the Federal Reserve has junked old shibboleths about inflation and deficit spending and embraced a policy that might have scandalized mainstream economists in the 1990s. Rejecting the status-quo bias that plagues so many institutions, this 106-year-old is still changing with the world.

what strikes me is that America’s safekeeping institutions have forgotten how to properly see the threats of the 21st century and move quickly to respond to them. Those who deny history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed

the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way.

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property

The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them.

“The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence.

Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens.

Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy.

Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.

The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions.

In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty.

the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.

In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.”

That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.

That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.

The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,”

Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract.

majority-black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.” The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.

“Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.

In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.”

“We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.

the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth

The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home.

But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability

Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them.

Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization

But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.

Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing

the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.

Systemic racism created the health disparities that made black and brown Americans more vulnerable to dying from coronavirus, public health experts say; and now the same racism is also shaping, and undermining, the country’s political response to the pandemic.

It’s not a new idea that thousands of people must die to preserve America’s “business as usual”. It’s not a new assumption many of those people will be brown or black.

Americans don’t have much of a national vocabulary for talking about collective action and sacrifice

a gun rights activist from Austin, Texas, has strong opinions about tyranny and freedom. But he said he was frustrated that some of his usual allies did not seem to understand that dealing with a novel virus, in a country where no one has immunity, required a different kind of politics.

“Our rights are being violated. That is all actually real,” Stokes said. “But this is one of the few times when that’s OK. Pandemics – these call for a collectivist response. They don’t work without one.”

For some wealthy Americans eager to reopen the economy, the motivating fear may be the risk of social change, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said.

It’s not surprising that Americans, who are used to tackling every problem through the lens of “individual rights”, would struggle with how to respond to the collective demands of a pandemic. “It’s this mismatch in terms of a social problem, and the tools we have at our disposal to make sense of it,” the sociologist Jennifer Carlson said.

Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?” Blanchfield said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.”

European colonists established their settlements in the midst of the mass death of indigenous people and opened the American market for business “at gunpoint, in the wake of that epidemic”, said Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence. Enslaved black people died performing the essential labor that kept the economy running.

Early Puritan accounts of arriving in the New World and seeing indigenous people dying of illness are marked by a familiar self-righteousness. The Puritans look at an epidemic and “think it’s a divine dispensation”, Blanchfield said. “The very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities ... but also as a theological vindication of your own survivorship.”

Metzl argued in his book Dying of Whiteness that the way racism has shaped gun policy and healthcare choices in this country has led to outcomes that hurt black and brown Americans, but that also led to measurable increases in the deaths of white Americans. Today, he’s afraid that same dynamic is playing out again.

That Puritan instinct to see infection as a sign of guilt, and health as a kind of vindication, is currently playing out across the political spectrum.

American liberals sometimes treat their belief in science as a kind of religion, Blanchfield argued, fetishizing technocrats and rejoicing when conservatives who do not “believe in science” are punished.

This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear

“Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.

The victim-blaming on the left, though, has come from individuals’ Twitter accounts, not Democratic party leadership. The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.

Just days after national news outlets first reported the emerging racial disparities in coronavirus deaths, Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said at a White House briefing that communities of color needed to “step up” and advised them to “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs”.

Lecturing individual black Americans about smoking, rather than talking about African Americans’ increased environmental exposure to air pollution, a demonstrated coronavirus risk, was classic “victim-blaming”

Poll results from mid-March had shown black respondents were actually more likely than white respondents to see coronavirus as a serious threat to their own health, he said.

“It’s hard, when you have so many white people who are protesting and not social distancing, to argue that they are taking it more seriously and that’s why they are less likely to die,” he said.

But the same argument that black Americans were to blame for dying simply evolved, Kendi said, to focus more on their “pre-existing conditions”.

In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a white Republican and a medical doctor, had already cast doubt on whether inequities rooted in systemic racism were the reason so many black Louisiana citizens were dying of coronavirus. “That’s rhetoric,” he told NPR in early April. The real answer, the answer backed by science, was that “African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes” and that “we need to address the obesity epidemic”.

Blaming the victims of American racial disparities for what they suffer has a reliable outcome: nothing is done. The deaths mount.

Ronald Reagan attacked America’s post-war investment in social programs, Kotsko said, “by pointing out that the generosity is now extending to black people” and suggesting that “it’s better to tear down the system of solidarity than to allow the wrong people to get the benefits”.

The coronavirus culture war is “kind of a petri dish of all the psychoses of US history”, as Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, put it.

The Puritans had a form of torture called “pressing”, used during the Salem witch trials. They made the accused person lie on the ground, and then very slowly, over many days, placed one rock on their chest, and then another.