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President Trump is failing because he has abandoned our commitments to favoring problem-solving over ideological posturing and to acting nationally in the face of looming catastrophe.

Instead of rallying the resources required for a nationally organized testing program, Trump told the nation’s governors that the federal government will “be standing alongside of you.”

Having thrown the burden of resolving the crisis on those governors, Trump might at least have encouraged his own supporters to back off their reflexive opposition to a gradual and considered approach to economic recovery

it’s no accident that one of the United States’ great contributions to philosophy is William James’s theory of pragmatism. Our bias is toward ideas that work and innovation by way of trial and error.

Why? “They seem to be protesters that like me,” he said gleefully.

Considering this lack of leadership, what would a William James pragmatist do?

Virtually everyone except for Trump and his apologists understands the obvious: Reopening the economy requires, first, a national commitment to a robust testing program fully backed by the federal government

“Even if the government-imposed social distancing rules are relaxed to encourage economic activity, risk-averse Americans will persist in social distancing, and that behavior, too, will restrain the hoped-for economic rebound,

Those who shout for opening the economy in the name of freedom don’t think much about the freedom of workers to protect themselves from a potentially deadly disease. And employers do not want to find themselves facing legal liabilities for infected employees.

If the economy is substantially reopened without adequate testing, said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, the most vulnerable would include “low-wage workers, women, people of color, immigrants, and the elderly.” They are “concentrated in the riskiest jobs, with the least financial cushion, and the least likely to have employer-provided benefits or protections,”

It helps, a little, to think in meteorological terms. View it as a major hurricane — one that still appears to be gathering force.

With a decline in American stocks of more than 20 percent from their peak, the 11-year American bull market died on Wednesday.

All on its own, that would be monumental. So would the virtual halt of major sporting events, the cancellation of conferences and the banning of flights, to say nothing of the great diaspora of office workers who have been sent home

Yet even these developments seem trivial in the face of the rising death toll, with mind-boggling predictions of millions of additional infections

There is no shortage of solid suggestions. Providing paid sick leave and medical coverage to those who don’t have it, strengthening unemployment insurance “and generally repairing the frayed social safety net in the United States” are useful options,

Professor Rogoff estimates that a global recession is “at least 80 percent likely,” with China bearing much of the brunt and other emerging-market countries likely to be severely pounded.

“the financial power of the United States has grown in stature since the 2007-2009 financial crisis.”

That power would be wasted, Professor Rogoff said, if the United States did not use its resources both to aid other nations and provide succor to the impoverished people within its own borders.

some officials and scholars are contemplating even more radical experiments than the banks have engaged in over the last decade, like buying corporate debt in the United States or even issuing digital money that would pay variable interest rates, targeted to the borrower.

Whether this event really turns out to be a storm from which the economy rebounds, or a cataclysm that wreaks far more consequential changes, cannot be easily answered.

the most important boon to the economy might come from something simpler: a general conviction that government, businesses, nonprofits and individuals are responding effectively, and that a semblance of normal life will soon resume.

But the epidemic’s relentless math, and the bumbling start to the recovery effort in the United States, suggest that we won’t be close to that moment for many weeks.

All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.

The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin

o state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.

The alternative to mass surveillance is mass testing. Romer’s proposal is to deploy testing on a scale no one else is contemplating — 22 million tests per day — so that the entire country is being tested every 14 days, and anyone who tests positive can be quickly quarantined

The AEI proposal is the closest thing to a middle path between these plans. It’s more testing, but nothing approaching Romer’s hopes. It’s more contact tracing, but it doesn’t envision an IT-driven panopticon. But precisely for that reason, what it’s really describing is a yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.

This, too, requires some imagination. Will governors who’ve finally, at great effort, reopened parts of their economies really keep throwing them back into lockdown every time ICUs begin to fill? Will Trump have the stomach to push the country back into quarantine after he’s lifted social distancing guidelines?

even if the political hurdles could be cleared, it’s obvious, reading the AEI proposal, that there’ll be no “V-shaped recovery” of the economy. Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner who helped craft the plan, says he thinks something like 80 percent of the economy will return — that may sound like a lot, but it’s an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.

As unlikely as these futures may be, I think the do-nothing argument is even less plausible: It imagines that we simply let a highly lethal virus kill perhaps millions of Americans, hospitalize tens of millions more, and crush the health system, while the rest of us go about our daily economic and social business.

That is, in my view, far less likely than the construction of a huge digital surveillance state. I care about my privacy, but not nearly so much as I care about my mother.

My point isn’t to criticize these plans when I have nothing better to offer. Indeed, my point isn’t to criticize them at all. It’s simply to note that these aren’t plans for returning to anything even approaching normal

They either envision life under a surveillance and testing state of dystopian (but perhaps necessary!) proportions, or they envision a long period of economic and public health pain, as we wrestle the disease down only to see it roar back, as seems to be happening in Singapore.

As of now, the White House has neither chosen nor begun executing on a plan of its own. That’s a terrible abdication of leadership, but reading through the various proposals, you can see why it’s happened. Imagine you’re the president of the United States in an election year. Which of these futures, with all its costs and risks and pain, would you want to try and sell to the American people?

• Testing. The CDC develops tests for its own internal use. The Food and Drug Administration requires that tests offered to the public be proved safe and effective. Government might have said “have at it, boys” and allowed anyone to make and sell anything and call it a Covid-19 test. This wouldn’t have been government.

• Testing, again. A MacGuffin that many countries, including the U.S., are converging on is constant and widespread testing to quarantine new cases. Testing will allow us to “flatten the curve” while lifting the stay-at-home orders and permit commerce to revive.

• The lockdowns. Imagine a problem that can be solved by holding your head underwater but stops being solved when you lift your head out. This is no solution. How can any society lift its stay-at-home order if there’s no vaccine and most people remain uninfected? Not even the Chinese, as we are about to learn, really have an answer

By now even the most tunnel-visioned epidemiologist must admit the lockdown cure will soon be worse than the disease, imposing social destruction beyond imagining.

Though the Trump administration is guilty of testing stumbles, unrealistic is the notion that enough testing could have been made available to contain a novel flu-like virus once it was widely established.

This probably is a polite fiction but it will let us get the economy mostly open. In reality, we will end up throwing a variety of strategies at a persistent epidemic (testing, treatments, voluntary social distancing) and accept what nature gives us.

And government will keep pouring resources into health care so we can at least believe every victim is getting a fair shot at survival.

• The death rate. Given asymptomatic cases and many mild cases that are indistinguishable from the cold or flu, experts have long suspected Covid-19 is more widespread than we know. At the same time, the fatality rate is affected by both undercounts and overcounts

The most up-to-date estimate by the Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine suspects the death rate is a flu-like 0.1% to 0.39%.

• Herd immunity. Levels of honesty vary, but a fair approximation is that most countries expect the initial epidemic to burn itself out before a vaccine is available

• Value proposition. Getting back to the death rate, the average risk for each of us may be small but when an entire population is subjected to the same newly emergent small risk at the same time, it can overwhelm emergency rooms

The panicked governmental responses and clampdowns we’ve seen are best understood in this vein: A very low risk of death for a very large number of people has created a global crisis.

Not helping is the reality described in detail by the world’s newspapers: Recovery of the most severely affected patients on ventilators is rare and involves a great deal of personal suffering.

Up until this past January, 70,000 people got off an airplane in Las Vegas every single day, mostly to take in the city’s charms. On these flights, passenger seats are roughly 17 inches wide with 31 inches of pitch.

Getting on an airplane to fly to a city so that you can stay in a hotel, eat in crowded dining rooms, and stand elbow-to-elbow with strangers around a craps table will be far, far down the list of behaviors on which most people are open to taking a risk.

If the tourism industry were to only decline by 30 percent in Las Vegas, it would be an utter catastrophe

Dinner and a Movie Consider the movie theater.

(1) If every theater in America opened tomorrow, what percentage of normal attendance would you see? 70 percent? 50 percent? 30 percent? What would that translate into as a percentage of total revenue decline, once you factor in concession sales? (2) The theatrical exhibition business is such a low-margin industry that even a 30 percent decline in revenues would be enough to push just about every operator in America into bankruptcy.

Let’s say you are Disney and you made Black Widow expecting it to open to $130 million dollars, pre-pandemic. Now you think that, at some point in the undetermined future, maybe it will open $70 million. Or possibly $30 million. Are you going to take that sort of chance with this asset? Or would you rather bootstrap the part of your business that looks like the future—meaning, your streaming service—and eschew the theatrical release altogether?

we could scan the economic landscape and find existential dislocations pretty much everywhere.

How will the airline industry “come back” when people decide to take flights only for travel that cannot be avoided—and international travel is severely restricted?

How will professional sports—which require thousands of people to be packed into small spaces—play in front of live crowds again? The sports leagues may be able to limp along with only broadcast revenues, but the micro-economies built around stadiums and arenas will not.

As teleworking becomes increasingly accepted—or even preferred—the physical office will wane. What happens to commercial real estate?

The Long War

the American economy is a tightly integrated system where disruption in one sector can cascade into failures everywhere else. In the last 50 years we’ve seen how shocks to finance or energy were sufficient to throw the entire country into deep recessions.

Exactly what sort of recession should we be expecting when several sectors are pushed toward extinction, all at once?

Here in the United States, we watch, week by week, as highly regarded financial analysts from Wall Street and economists from the academy misestimate the depths of the damage we can expect—always erring on the side of optimism.

After the March lockdown of the country to “flatten the curve,” the boldest voices dared to venture that the United States might hit 10% unemployment before the worst was over

our weekly jobless claims reports and 22 million unemployment insurance applications later, U.S. unemployment is already above the 15% mark: north of 1931 levels, in other words. By the end of April, we could well reach or break the 20% threshold, bringing us to 1935 levels, and 1933 levels (25%) no longer sound fantastical

Even so, political and financial leaders talk of a rapid “V-shaped recovery” commencing in the summer, bringing us back to economic normalcy within months. This is prewar thinking, and it is looking increasingly like the economic equivalent of talk in earlier times about how “the boys will be home by Christmas.” . . .

not just a single national lockdown of a country’s population and economy is in store to fend off mass contagion but rather quite possibly a succession of them—not just one mother-of-all-economic-shocks but an ongoing crisis that presses economic performance severely in countries all around the world simultaneously.

yes, there will eventually be creative destruction that spurs innovation and increasing economic activity. But that is in the long run.

The reality of our near- and medium-term future is something very different. And whatever the government orders people to do, that reality will look more like our “stay-at-home” present than the pre-virus past.

he movement to “reopen” America is a fallacy based on a fantasy. The fallacy is the notion that lifting stay-at-home orders will result in people going back to their normal routines. This is false.

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the sooner people grasp how completely and fundamentally the world has changed, the faster we’ll be able to adapt to this new reality. Let’s take a close look at just a couple of examples.

“We haven’t seen travel demand for Hawaii this strong for over a year,” Richards said. “I thought we would have a U-shaped recovery; it’s V-shaped. January and February were terrible, but we’ve gone from zero to 150 mph in two weeks.”

Visitors said rules in their home states are different than those in place in Hawaii.“We carry our masks around and if we walk into an establishment we’ll wear one, and if people look like they’re uncomfortable with us around, we’ll put one on. But otherwise, like I said where we come from, people are really not required to wear them,” Wisconsin visitor Larry Dopke said.

Some lawmakers expressed concern about a possible backlash from residents.“I think we’re all going to have to be prepared for a potential surge in tourism,” said Hawaii state Rep. Scott Saiki, a Democrat. “I think we have to be prepared because the public may have a response to a sudden surge.”

“Pushing back against tourism is the same thing as telling your neighbor they shouldn’t have a job,” said Carl Bonham, executive director of the University of Hawaii’s Economic Research Organization.

The island of Kauai has additional measures that will be in place until April 5. All visitors to Kauai must either spend three days on another island or quarantine at a county-approved resort for three days and then get second, post-arrival tests.

Tim Sakahara, a spokesman for Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi, said in an email that the city recently put up banners throughout Waikiki reminding people to wear masks and remain socially distanced. “These banners provide a tool to help Honolulu Police officers do their jobs in gaining compliance with COVID-19 rules,” Sakahara said. “The majority of residents and visitors are compliant with the rule or are cooperative when informed of it.”

“I don’t know any reason for why you would go out to watch these Olympic Games,” said Hyoung Min Yoo, 29, who works in finance in Tokyo.

The president of the Tokyo organizing committee, Seiko Hashimoto, recently cited the “significant challenges” facing the world and the responsibility of the Olympics “to build a legacy for the future society.”

In an effort to give itself breathing space, the I.O.C. broke with tradition in 2017 by simultaneously announcing the hosts of the next two Summer Olympics — Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles four years later.

The seemingly unstoppable push toward the Olympics this time also reflects an often rigid Japanese bureaucracy, with some even drawing parallels to World War II, when the Japanese public did not want the conflict but no leader dared halt it.

“When they say ‘the five rings,’ or if they show up with an Olympic symbol, they think they can command or demand anything,” said Satoko Itani, an associate professor of sports, gender and sexuality at Kansai University. “But people are increasingly saying ‘no.’”

The organizers scrapped their first logo after plagiarism accusations. The president of Japan’s Olympic Committee was indicted on corruption charges related to the bidding process.

The organizers say that their focus is primarily on safety, and that they have earmarked $900 million in spending on measures to combat the virus.

The organizers say vaccination will not be mandatory, however, and many athletes, delegates and others will be coming from places where vaccines are unlikely to be fully available.

With more contagious and perhaps deadlier variants circulating around the globe, epidemiologists warn that the Tokyo Olympics have the potential to turbocharge the virus’s spread.

Nobuo Sato, 63, who owns a vegetable shop in Tokyo, said he feared that if the Olympics resulted in another coronavirus wave, it would further damage his business, which has suffered over the past year as orders from restaurants have declined sharply.

“I just don’t think they should risk the coronavirus spreading in any sense,” he said.

But if the Games do not go on, he said he did not regret the $50 million Airweave had invested in its new mattress design or the $9 million the company had reportedly contributed toward the Olympic budget each year since it signed on as a sponsor in 2016.

And on Monday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought that moment into clearer focus. The agency came out with its first set of guidance about what fully vaccinated people can now do.

My parents had a significant emotional burden lifted after they were vaccinated, because they are now approximately 95% protected against getting severely ill from Covid-19. But like the rest of the country, they are restless and want to do something with their newly vaccinated status. That is why they called me right after they saw the news report about new recommendations from the CDC to ask me what it all meant. I laid out the good news for them, and the caveats as well.

In a major step, the CDC said people who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 can safely visit with other fully vaccinated people in private settings without masks, without social distancing and without having to be outdoors.

Additionally, however, the CDC guidance now allows for fully vaccinated people to visit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease. That last part is important.

It's a theme I hear from CNN readers, viewers and listeners all the time: When am I going to be able to see my grandchildren, my elderly father, my sister and her family? Most everybody has somebody they long to hug, to hold close and see in person.

As I kept digging into the guidelines and speaking with members of the Biden administration's Covid-19 task force, it became increasingly clear that a visit was looking possible, but with a few strings attached.

And, perhaps most notably, fully vaccinated people are also still being discouraged from traveling, something that throws a monkey wrench into my fantasy of an imminent family reunion.

"I think the guidelines are in a good middle ground," she said. "We're starting to go back to normal now, but it's not going to be flipping a switch... We will make that journey towards normalcy, or at least a new normal, as more people get vaccinated."

At 10% vaccinations we have this guidance. At 20-30%, we will have new guidance," he said, noting that there's going to be a distinct shift in the messaging of what people can and cannot do -- moving away from more binary messaging to one that describes activities as a range of low, medium and high risk.

Even as Walensky delivered the hopeful new guidance, she also noted the country still stands at a seven-day average of about 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day -- a rate that has leveled off somewhat, instead of continuing to steadily decline. And there are close to 2,000 deaths per day. So, she and other experts warn, any easing of restrictions is going to have to be gradual.

So where does that leave my family reunion plan? Unless my parents make the long drive to see us, we are going to hold off on a visit for now. With more than 2 million people getting vaccinated a day, however, another 20% of the country could be vaccinated by the end of the month. And, that will probably lead to a further relaxing of CDC guidelines and maybe allow my parents a plane ride instead, which means a possible visit to celebrate their wedding anniversary this spring!

There has been nothing quite like the pandemic aid bill in recent American history. It's roughly the same size as the combined total of the three legislative efforts to address the impact of Covid-19 last year. It dwarfs the $831bn American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed to address the Great Recession in the early days of the Obama administration (thanks in no small part to then Vice-President Biden's lobbying efforts). It is well over half of the $3.5tn that the US government brought in as revenue in 2019.

If that turns out to be the case, Biden - who appears poised to reap the political benefits of a booming economy - could end up taking a beating, instead.

The deal is United’s latest attempt to position itself as a risk taker shaking up an industry that is just getting back on its feet after a devastating pandemic. The airline announced a $20 million investment in an electric air taxi start-up, Archer, in February, and it is working on a “steady drumbeat” of more such bets, said Michael Leskinen, who heads corporate development at United.

What is not clear is whether Boom has solved the problems that forced British Airways and Air France to stop using the Concorde on trans-Atlantic flights — high costs, safety concerns and flagging demand.

Boom, which is working with Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said its plane would be more efficient than the Concorde; United estimates it will be 75 percent more efficient.

Mr. Scholl said the engines on Boom’s planes would rely entirely on sustainable aviation fuel, which can be made from waste, plants and other organic matter. Experts say such fuel could reduce emissions, but its supply is limited, it is expensive and its use does not eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

But corporate and international travel is expected to rebound slowly from the pandemic, and some experts say it might not recover fully for years because companies have realized that they can be effective without as many in-person meetings.

The Treasury secretary described the job as more grueling than her previous role as chair of the Federal Reserve, pointing to the scale of the relief programs that she is overseeing and the department’s vast portfolio. An economist who has focused for years on monetary policy, Ms. Yellen is now in charge of sanctions policy, tax policy, overseeing regulators and dealing regularly with Congress.

To determine if inflation is more than a temporary matter, Ms. Yellen is monitoring two key metrics: inflation expectations and wage increases for low-paid workers. Rising pay for the lowest-wage workers could potentially lead to “an inflationary trend” if there is broad excess demand for workers in the labor market, she warned.

Critics have suggested that the Biden administration’s extension of pandemic unemployment insurance is fueling the labor shortage by encouraging workers to stay at home and collect generous benefits. At least 20 states have moved to cut off benefits early to encourage people to go back to work.

Ms. Yellen said the difference in how states were handling jobless benefits could shed new light on the dynamic, but that she still saw no evidence that the supplement was slowing job creation. She pointed to a lack of child care and positions that were permanently lost because of the pandemic as the more probable reason that employers in some sectors were struggling to find staff.

"The wave across the Southern states in the summer, that was due to premature lifting of restrictions and masks," said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. "It bears some resemblance to what we're seeing now."

Public mitigation measures are our best bet to beat another surge as we build up our vaccination numbers. With only about 25% of American adults fully vaccinated, experts say the US is nowhere near where it needs to be to control the virus from spreading.

"A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific, and frankly dangerous," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said during an interview with "Axios on HBO'' in February. "And I think you could make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."

"I really worry and I'm actually quite certain that we're not going to reach herd immunity because of it," Wen said. "At least we're not going to reach herd immunity in 2021. I can't see us getting to that point because of how vaccines have been so politicized." Experts including Fauci have estimated somewhere between 70% to 85% of Americans would need immunity -- either through a vaccine or from recovery after a Covid-19 infection -- to get control of the virus in the US.

There’s been a lot of cheap money floating around in the past decade, thanks to low interest rates and Federal Reserve policy. Much of that has gone into financial assets, jacking up the wealth of those who own them.

“Eighty percent of the stock is owned by 20% of the people,” he said. (The reality is actually more extreme than that, with the richest 10% holding 84% of equity wealth, according to economist Edward Wolff.)

one of many changes wrought by the pandemic is that it’s shown how aggressive government spending to put cash in ordinary Americans’ pockets can do a lot of good. What if there was an economy where households relied less on wealth trickling down from asset owners? That would be something for Wall Street to be nervous about.

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.”

We see an economic cycle with rising interest rates in the mid-2020s,” it said, posing a challenge for governments which have borrowed massively to fund their response to the COVID-19 crisis.

But the underlying trends that have been accelerated by this point to a greener and more tech-based world as we move into the 2030s

Some of the year's biggest winners are investors who closed their eyes and muffled their ears during the pandemic selloff and held onto their stocks. By the end of the year, their portfolio balances were looking pretty good

"This year was a year with a lot of reminders for investors: number one, don't overreact," Leo Grohowski, chief investment officer at BNY Wealth Management, told CNN Business.close dialogBefore Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets OpenStart your day smartGet essential news and analysis on global markets with CNN Business’ daily newsletter. Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Before Markets Open

The disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street will likely be a topic that follows us into the New Year.

The US economy is operating at 82% of where it was in early March, according to the Back-to-Normal Index from Moody's Analytics and CNN Business.

Goni was the 18th tropical cyclone to hit the country this year, which faces an average of 20 typhoons annually. And number 19 could come later this week: Tropical Storm Atsan, officials said, entered the Philippine Area of Responsibility early Sunday.

Citing local officials, Reuters reported that the 10 recorded fatalities and three people reported missing were all in the region of Bicol, which encompasses the southern part of Luzon. Nine of those deaths were in the province of Albay.

The AP reports that in one Albay community, the typhoon triggered volcanic mudflows that "engulfed" about 150 houses.

Philadelphia officials issued a citywide curfew on Wednesday after consecutive nights of protests — which at times turned violent — following the fatal police shooting of a 27-year-old Black man, Walter Wallace Jr. He was holding a knife when police shot him.

"By looting, people are not only hurting retail businesses that have struggled in the midst of the pandemic, but they're doing a great disservice to the many others who want to exercise their First Amendment rights by protesting,"

City officials said Wednesday afternoon that 81 people had been arrested during the previous night's demonstrations, including 53 for burglary, seven for disorderly conduct and eight accused of assaulting police.

Police will soon release 911 tapes, body camera footage

City officials urged residents in certain districts to remain indoors Tuesday night due to "widespread demonstrations that have turned violent with looting."

A racially diverse crowd came together Tuesday evening at Malcolm X Park, not far from the West Philadelphia neighborhood where Wallace was killed.

The gathering featured speeches and preceded a march, Philadelphia member station WHYY reported, adding that one speaker noted there were "far too many comfortable white people here tonight."

"Stop this looting and stop and stop burning our city down," the elder Wallace told CNN. "It's not going to solve anything," he said. "I don't want to leave a bad scar on my son and my family with this looting and chaos stuff." Wallace's killing was captured on cellphone video and posted to social media, where it went viral.

Family reportedly called for an ambulance, not police

A police spokesperson said Monday that officers were responding to a report of a man with a knife. They ordered Wallace to drop the weapon, saying that he "advanced towards officers." Both officers fired their guns at Wallace. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths.

Furthermore, local economies are struggling in places where more people can work from home.

In other words, redder places had milder job losses, and the relationship is strong.

Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic.

So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.

The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). All other recent recessions have hit goods-related industries worse, which tend to be more concentrated in Republican-leaning places.

China’s top-down, state-led political system allows the party to drive its vast bureaucracy in pursuit of a single target — an approach that would be nearly impossible anywhere else in the world.

In the United States, where the pandemic is still raging, discussions about how and when to resume in-person classes have been fraught.

An absence of a national strategy has left school districts to craft their own approach. Coronavirus tests can be hard to come by. Parents have expressed misgivings about sending their children back to classrooms. Teachers’ unions have threatened to strike, while college students have flouted rules against gatherings.

In China, where the virus has largely been under control for months, there is no such debate.

The party controls the courts and the news media and quashes any perceived threats to its agenda. Local bureaucracies have little choice but to obey the orders of the all-powerful central government. Independent labor unions are banned and activism is discouraged, making it difficult for the country’s more than 12 million teachers to organize. Administrators have corralled college students inside campuses, forbidding them to leave school grounds to eat or meet friends.

Education officials have urged students to avoid “unnecessary outings” aside from going to school, though the rule is unlikely to be enforced. Students are also discouraged from speaking while eating or taking public transportation.

China still faces the possibility of fresh outbreaks, epidemiologists say, especially in the fall and winter months. But so far, the measures appear to be effective, with no outbreaks or school closures reported.

The opening of schools has given Mr. Xi a propaganda win in a time of slowing economic growth and international criticism over his government’s early cover-up and mishandling of the outbreak.

The state-run news media has closely covered America’s difficulties in resuming classes, while highlighting China’s progress in getting parents back to work — key to the country’s attempts to drive an economic recovery.

“When parents start a new day at work knowing that their children are well-protected at school,” read a recent commentary by Xinhua, the official news agency, “they will be filled with a sense of assurance living in this land where life is a top priority.”

Many schools are already short on staff and resources, and educators say they are struggling to keep up with long lists of virus-control tasks. Some teachers are rising at 4 a.m. just to review protocols.

At a time when the U.S. is engaged in another conversation about its foundational racial inequities, the rescue is amplifying those imbalances in places like Cleveland, where half the population is Black, and fueling the anger of a new generation in communities too used to being left out.

“I’m not going to play my people for a fool,” says Stephen Rowan, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church, pointing to what he sees as a pattern where wealthy institutions such as the nearby Cleveland Clinic receive $200 million in Cares Act help and increasingly frustrated members of his congregation miss out. “There comes a point in time when I cannot justify or say to them that ‘God will make a way’ despite what they are seeing right in front of their face.”

The virus has also reinforced the city’s long-standing gaping economic disparities between largely Black neighborhoods east of the Cuyahoga River and predominantly White ones to its west. At $21,769, the median income of Black households in the city in 2018 was about half the $40,485 of White ones. The legacies of decades of redlining and other discriminatory lending policies are plain to see. Roughly one-third of Black households own their homes; three-quarters of White ones do.

In the 44102 zip code between Cleveland’s downtown and the affluent suburb of Lakewood, where 47% of the population is White, small businesses received 343 loans of less than $150,000 each, for a total $11.9 million, or $260 per person. In the 44104 zip code, home to Scott’s church and a population that’s 96% Black, small businesses received just 83 loans of less than $150,000 each, for a total $2.8 million, the equivalent of $140 for each resident.

For those who live on the East Side, it’s a repeat of an economic pattern that last manifested itself in the foreclosures that accompanied the financial crisis more than a decade ago, but one with 400-year-old roots in slavery.

Loaded up is a video in which author Kimberly Jones (no relation) likens the economic travails of Black Americans to a centuries-old Monopoly game in which White players get a pile of cash to start and Black ones get nothing. Worse, whenever Black players build up a little wealth, the White players take it away. The protests that hit cities including Cleveland after George Floyd’s death, the video argues, are the equivalent of Black Americans upending the board in anger. “See,” the barber says. “It’s all about economics.”

The issue of criminal records has had other repercussions. The Small Business Administration, which administers the loan program, initially barred anyone with a criminal conviction within the past five years. The rule was changed after Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, intervened on behalf of a constituent with a conviction who ran a small business that hired other workers with criminal pasts.The criminal record exclusion was emblematic of the ways in which the Cares Act, assembled hastily over 10 days of bipartisan negotiations, inadvertently discriminated against the Black community, Portman says. “We just didn’t think through all this stuff, because it’s hard to.”