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Rosenberg assumes stocks sink 30% in the coming months, then spend most of the next 18 months grinding higher to valuations about 10% lower than today’s levels.

Rosenberg also lays out a “best case,” which depends on a vaccine or treatment emerging in the next six to 12 months. That outlook includes an unemployment rate averaging about 9% for the next two years, a stock-market bottom of 2,500 for the S&P 500 in Q2, and a cyclical low of 29 basis points for the 10-year note in 2021.

The “worst-case” scenario is grim. It involves no vaccine, no treatment, and a second wave coronavirus outbreak next winter that severely saps business and household confidence. In this outlook, the jobless rate hits 20% — and averages 17.5% through 2021.

Outright deflation takes hold. “Think about what years of no pricing power is going to do to those corporate cash flows in the future,” Rosenberg writes. “Even government intervention is capable of suffering from the laws of diminishing demand. Japan is a classic template.”

But there’s a lot more damage done to the stock market. The S&P 500 bottoms at 1,800 in the second quarter and averages only 2,200 throughout 2021.

Trump's increasing association with and dependence on this milieu is a strong explanation of his persistent and difficult to explain embrace of Putin, Russia and Russia's geopolitical interests in Europe. This is what I described in my "innocent explanation" post from earlier this month.

We can also see the impact of the Crimea crisis of 2014 - which is the fulcrum of so much of the Trump/Russia story. If Trump had been getting a substantial amount of his buyers and investors from Russia, the imposition of sanctions in 2014 created a major obstacle to his way of doing business

Steven Rattner, the former auto czar under President Obama who now oversees Michael R. Bloomberg’s wealth and was on the steering committee of the Fix the Debt campaign, said he was no fan of the current tax plan. But he said he understood why some executives who once placed so much emphasis on the mounting debt problem would now focus on tax cuts — and how many of them feel that the two positions did not contradict each other.

In fairness, the position of Mr. Dimon and others may not be completely at odds with their previous views. Despite the stated goal of the Fix the Debt campaign five years ago, insiders say it was as much a rallying cry for Washington to come together on financial policy as it was about immediately addressing the debt. And much of the campaign was predicated on meaningful corporate tax reform and spending.

Chief executives like Mr. Dimon and Mr. Cote offered to pay higher individual tax rates — which the Simpson-Bowles plan called for — but significantly cutting corporate taxes was always a central tenet of the “fix the debt” effort. And with the current tax plan, Mr. Dimon and others have not taken a public position on anything but the corporate tax reduction element; they have not spoken out about the individual rate or other elements.

managed to fend off both the French and the British through skillful diplomacy. He adopted many European customs and was intensely interested in European technologies. He also played the British and French off of one another, preserving most of Siam's territory and its independence.

The Ottoman Empire was too large, powerful, and complex for any one European power to simply annex it outright.

the European powers peeled off its territories in northern Africa and southeast Europe by seizing them directly or by encouraging and supplying local independence movements.

the Ottoman government or Sublime Porte had to borrow money from European banks to finance its operations. When it was unable to repay the money it owed to the London and Paris-based banks, they took control of the Ottoman revenue system, seriously infringing on the Porte's sovereignty. Foreign interests also invested heavily in railroad, port, and infrastructure projects, giving them ever more power within the tottering empire. The Ottoman Empire remained self-governing until it fell after World War I, but foreign banks and investors wielded an inordinate amount of power there.

Like the Ottoman Empire, Qing China was too large for any single European power to simply grab. Instead, Britain and France got a foothold through trade

Both Great Britain and Russia hoped to seize Afghanistan as part of their "Great Game" - a competition for land and influence in Central Asia. However, the Afghans had other ideas; they famously "don't like foreigners with guns in their country,

They slaughtered or captured an entire British army

, that gave Britain control of Afghanistan's foreign relations,

This shielded British India from Russian expansionism while leaving Afghanistan more or less independent.

Like Afghanistan, the British and Russians considered Persia an important piece in the Great Game

Russia nibbled away at northern Persian territory

Britain extended its influence into the eastern Persian Balochistan region

Like the Ottomans, the Qajar rulers of Persia had borrowed money from European banks for projects like railroads and other infrastructure improvements, and could not pay back the money.  Britain and Russia agreed without consulting the Persian government that they would split the revenues from Persian customs, fisheries, and other industries to amortize the debts. Persia never became a formal colony, but it temporarily lost control of its revenue stream and much of its territory - a source of bitterness to this

Nepal, Bhutan, Korea, Mongolia, and the Middle Eastern protectorates:

Nepal lost about one-third of its territory to the British East India Company's

However, the Gurkhas fought so well and the land was so rugged that the British decided to leave Nepal alone as a buffer state for British India. The British also began to recruit Gurkhas for their colonial army.

Bhutan, another Himalayan kingdom, also faced invasion by the British East India Company but managed to retain its sovereignty.

they relinquished the land in return for a tribute of five horses and the right to harvest timber on Bhutanese soil. Bhutan and Britain regularly squabbled over their borders until 1947, when the British pulled out of India, but Bhutan's sovereignty was never seriously threatened.

When demand for goods and services expands faster than the supply of them, consumers simply bid up the price of finite goods, and businesses bid up wages to try to keep up. This begins a cycle of higher wages fueling higher prices, which in turn fuels higher wages.Such a process began in the mid-1960s and culminated in double-digit inflation in the 1970s. But there are important differences between then and now. For one thing, unions then were more powerful and demanded steep wage increases. For another, a series of one-off events made inflation worse, including the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international currency arrangements and oil embargoes that sent fuel prices soaring.

He now assigns roughly equal odds to three possibilities: that everything goes according to plan, with inflation returning to normal after a one-time surge; that a cycle of ever-rising inflation develops; or that the Fed ultimately causes a steep downturn to prevent that inflationary cycle.

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute also emphasized these inflation “break-evens,” which capture bond investors’ views of future inflation based on the gap between inflation-protected and regular securities. Like Mr. Mankiw, he said that break-evens suggesting 3 percent or higher annual inflation over the next five years would be worrying, as would 2.5 percent or higher inflation expected for the period five to 10 years from now.

The canal, originally owned by French investors, was conceived when Egypt was under the control of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century. Construction began at the Port Said end in early 1859, the excavation took 10 years, and the project required an estimated 1.5 million workers.

According to the Suez Canal Authority, the Egyptian government agency that operates the waterway, 20,000 peasants were drafted every 10 months to help construct the project with “excruciating and poorly compensated labor.” Many workers died of cholera and other diseases.

A few accidental groundings of vessels have closed the canal since then. The most notable, until this week, was a three-day shutdown in 2004 when a Russian oil tanker ran aground.

The British powers that controlled the canal through the first two world wars withdrew forces there in 1956 after years of negotiations with Egypt, effectively relinquishing authority to the Egyptian government led by President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Poor visibility and high winds, which made the Ever Given’s stacked containers act like sails, are believed to have pushed it off course and led to its grounding.

pulling it with tugboats, dredging underneath the hull and using a front-end loader to excavate the eastern embankment, where the bow is stuck. But the vessel’s size and weight, 200,000 metric tons, had frustrated salvagers as of Thursday night.

A prolonged closure could be hugely expensive for the owners of ships waiting to transit the canal. Some may decide to cut their losses and reroute their vessels around Africa.

Asian nations are also wary of getting caught in the middle of a battle between China, a major investor and market for their goods, and the U.S., for whom they rely on for security. The U.S., for instance, has offered rhetorical support for Australia, which has seen China cut off imports of Australian coal, wine and other goods over Canberra’s call for an independent investigation of how China handled the emergence of the coronavirus.

The cabinet secretaries’ visits next week will be their first trips overseas since taking office and, the State Department said, are meant to underscore the U.S. commitment to these alliances and the region’s security.

On Friday, Mr. Biden will host a virtual summit with other leaders of the so-called Quad, a strategic group seen as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism that includes Australia, Japan and India.

Relations, strained for years, pitched down last year as the Trump administration ramped up its drive to roll back China’s global influence, bolster support for partners such as Taiwan and confront Beijing over alleged espionage, its crackdowns on Hong Kong and in the Muslim-region of Xinjiang, and other policies seen as inimical to U.S. interests.

The U.S. hasn’t named its representative but for the Chinese it will be Ma Jun, a World Bank veteran and former chief economist at the People’s Bank of China who is an expert on environmentally sustainable finance.

“I told him I will work with China when it benefits the American people,” Mr. Biden tweeted afterward. Mr. Xi also pledged cooperation and told his counterpart a confrontation between the two powers would be a disaster, according to Chinese media.

The survey, which was conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw and Company Research, also found that 28% of Americans believe the U.S. should prioritize its military resources toward Asia, compared with the Middle East, which was second at 21%.

has faced almost universal criticism from opposition legislators, environmentalists, industry analysts, Mexican and international business groups and even Mexico’s antitrust watchdog.

“I think the impact of this reform is a major reversal,” said Lourdes Melgar, who was a top energy official in the administration of Mr. López Obrador’s predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican president, she said, “has had a very nationalistic view of how to utilize resources.”

But the new legislation effectively restores preferences for state-run, fossil-fuel-driven plants that generate power at higher costs and produce greater carbon emissions.

Gas-fired plants generate more than half of Mexico’s power; the vast majority of the natural gas is imported, with most of it coming from the United States, according to the Mexican government.

“This doesn’t have any economic logic,” said Víctor Ramírez Cabrera, spokesman for the Mexico, Climate and Energy Platform, a research group in Mexico City. He called the new model for power sourcing “absurd.”

“There is no way to comply with the Paris Agreement under these conditions,” Mr. Ramírez said. “Just give it up for dead.”

“Investment levels are dropping, and nobody wants to invest here,” said Israel Tello, a legal analyst at Integralia, a Mexico City-based consultancy group. “Legal uncertainty is the most lethal weapon against investment.”

But environmentalists say that mining is still a cause for concern particularly because miners will go wherever electricity is cheapest and that may mean places that use coal. According to Cambridge, China has the most bitcoin mining of any country by far. While the country has been slowly moving toward renewable energy, about two-thirds of its electricity comes from coal.

A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.

“Computers and smartphones have much larger carbon footprints than typewriters and telegraphs. Sometimes a technology is so revolutionary and important for humanity that society accepts the tradeoffs,” wrote investor Tyler Winklevoss on Twitter.

Vitalik Buterin, the computer scientist who invited ethereum, told IEEE Spectrum that mining cryptocurrency can be “a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue”, Buterin said. “There are real consumers – real people – whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff.”

Yet despite this persistent inability to mobilize resources, the U.S. government proved reasonably adept at summoning and allocating money.

Congress salvaged thousands of small businesses with its $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program, while preserving the finances of millions of Americans by boosting unemployment benefits and writing checks to households.

Of course, expanded unemployment aid should have kept flowing through the final five months of last year. And aid to state and local governments to fight the pandemic was insufficient. But where the problem was a shortage of money, the government delivered. Cash constraints have not hindered its rescue efforts, at $5 trillion and counting. Even the loudest moderates of Joe Biden’s Democratic Party did not balk at the $1.9 trillion cost of the Covid-19 relief bill he signed into law Wednesday night.

But after weeks of work, administration officials have closed in on the final version of what will be the second half of Mr. Biden’s sweeping economic agenda, which also includes the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan the president described last month.

It also seeks to extend through 2025 an expanded tax credit for parents — which is essentially a monthly payment from the government for most families — that was created on a temporary basis by the $1.9 trillion economic aid package Mr. Biden signed into law last month.

“Expansion of the child tax credit is the most significant policy to come out of Washington in generations, and Congress has an historic opportunity to provide a lifeline to the middle class and to cut child poverty in half on a permanent basis,” the lawmakers said this week in a joint statement.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have urged Mr. Biden to instead make permanent that credit, which analysts say will drastically cut child poverty this year.

The president will also propose eliminating a provision of the tax code that reduces taxes for wealthy heirs who sell assets they inherit, like art or property, that have gained value over time.

All of the tax provisions would keep with Mr. Biden’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on individuals or households earning less than $400,000 a year.

Mr. Biden’s team was under pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and the chairman of the Budget Committee, to instead focus his health care efforts on a plan to expand Medicare.

Mr. Sanders has pushed the administration to lower Medicare’s eligibility age and expand it to cover vision, dental and hearing services.

The answer comes in a second report, which is set to be released on Wednesday by the International Federation of Journalists, a Brussels-based union of journalism unions whose mission gives it a global bird's-eye view into news media almost everywhere. The group, which shared a copy with me, hired an author of the first report, Louisa Lim, to canvass journalists in 54 countries

The interviews “reveal an activation of the existing media infrastructure China has put in place globally,” Ms. Lim, a former NPR bureau chief in Beijing who is now a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, wrote in the report. “As the pandemic started to spread, Beijing used its media infrastructure globally to seed positive narratives about China in national media, as well as mobilizing more novel tactics such as disinformation.”

Both the media and vaccine campaigns are intertwined with China’s “Belt and Road” global investment campaign, in which Chinese support comes with strings attached, including debt and expectations of support in key votes at the United Nations.

“The accusation on China is what the U.S. has been doing all along,”

The report found that a new media push accompanied the intense round of Chinese diplomacy in the pandemic, providing protective equipment initially and then vaccines to countries around the world, all the while scrambling to ensure that things as varied as the pandemic’s origin and China’s diplomacy was portrayed in the best possible light.

China is fighting what is in some ways an uphill battle

Instead, the cultural power represented by companies like Netflix and Disney — vastly more powerful and better funded than any government effort — has been doing the work.

Its growing authoritarianism, its treatment of the Uyghurs and its crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong damaged global views of China, according to other surveys, even before the pandemic began in Wuhan.

much of China’s diplomacy is focused on places that, while they may not have the cultural or financial power of European countries, do have a vote at the U.N. And while they appear often to be improvisational and run out of local embassies, China’s efforts are having a global impact.

I spoke to journalists on five continents who participated in the report. Their attitudes ranged from alarm at overt Chinese government pressure to confidence that they could handle what amounted to one more interest group in a messy and complex media landscape.

the general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, Anthony Bellanger, said in an email that his view of the report is that while “China is a growing force in the information war, it is also vital to resist such pressures exerted by the U.S., Russia and other governments around the world.”

there’s little question of which government is more committed to this campaign right now. A report last year by Sarah Cook for the Freedom House, an American nonprofit group that advocates political freedom, found that Beijing was spending “hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread their messages to audiences around the world.”

The United States may have pioneered the tools of covert and overt influence during the Cold War, but the government’s official channels have withered

Trump sought to turn those outlets into blunter propaganda tools, and Democrats and their own journalists resisted. That lack of an American domestic consensus on how to use its own media outlets has left the American government unable to project much of anything.

it is less the exposure of a secret plot than it is documentation of a continuing global power shift. China’s media strategy is no secret, and the Chinese government says its campaign is no different from what powerful global players have done for more than a century.

Erin Baggott Carter, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern California, said her research has found that American news organizations whose journalists accepted official trips to China subsequently “made a pivot from covering military competition to covering economic cooperation.”

In talking to journalists around the world last week about Chinese influence, I was also struck by what they didn’t talk about: the United States. Here, when we write and talk about Chinese influence, it’s often in the context of an imagined titanic global struggle between two great nations and two systems of government

from Indonesia to Peru to Kenya, journalists described something much more one-sided: a determined Chinese effort to build influence and tell China’s story.

“Americans are quite insular and always think everything is about the U.S.,” Ms. Lim said. “Americans and the Western world are often not looking at what is happening in other languages outside English, and tend to believe that these Western-centric values apply everywhere.”

The Moderna results, which the company announced in a statement, are based on a clinical trial that enrolled 3,732 people ages 12 to 17, two-thirds of whom received two vaccine doses. There were no cases of symptomatic Covid-19 in fully vaccinated adolescents, the company reported. That translates to an efficacy of 100 percent, the same figure that Pfizer and BioNTech reported in a trial of their vaccine in 12- to 15-year-olds.

Moderna also reported that a single dose of its vaccine had 93 percent efficacy against symptomatic disease.

The results were announced in a news release that did not contain detailed data from the clinical trial. And Dr. Rasmussen said that the vaccines’ efficacy can be trickier to evaluate in children, who are less likely to develop symptomatic disease than adults.

Based on the investor revolt this week, Wall Street clearly thinks that a substantial shift away from oil and gas is possible.

A massive shift away from fossil fuels is a prospect that Big Oil can no longer rule out.

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.

"Tulsa attracted these kind of dynamic, independent-thinking, strong-willed leaders, who were not going to sit idly by and be dictated to, but were going to push back," Rogers says.

"This was absolutely brutal what happened," he tells NPR. "I think what's very important to understand is the fear that Blacks had, that anything they had was fragile, because it could be taken away from them."

Insurers denied survivors' claims, and so did the government, which contributed to an erosion of trust by Blacks in the financial system. Duckett says that distrust has compounded over the last century.

When Black Wall Street burned, Stradford couldn't save his businesses. He was taken into custody, and charged with rioting. But he escaped, first to Kansas, then to Illinois.

Miami Beach is spending millions elevating roads, upgrading pumps and changing building codes to allow residents to raise their mansions by five feet. But in working-class, immigrant neighborhoods like Little Haiti, year-to-year sea level rise gets lost in the day-to-day struggle, and most had no idea that they live a lofty three feet higher than the wealthy folks on Miami Beach.

They found out when developers started calling, from everywhere.

“We used to think that the allure of Little Haiti was the fact that it’s close to downtown, close to both airports and close to the beach. Unbeknownst to us, it’s because we are positioned at a higher altitude.”

After her community center and day school were priced out of three different buildings, she caught wind of plans to build the sprawling $1 billion Magic City development on the edge of Little Haiti, featuring a promenade, high-end retail stores, high rise apartments and imagined by a consortium of local investors, including the founder of Cirque du Soleil.

They promised to preserve the soul of Little Haiti and give $31 million to the community for affordable housing and other programs, but it wasn’t enough for Bastien. “This is a plan to actually erase Little Haiti,” she says. “Because this is the one place where immigration and climate gentrification collide.”

What’s happening in Little Haiti could be just one example of a “climate apartheid” that the United Nations warns is ahead, where there will be a gulf between the rich who can protect themselves from the impact of climate change and the poor who are left behind.

it has invested in more than 800 companies, including a 12 percent stake in Snap and 5 percent in Tesla. By comparison, GV, formerly Google Ventures and the most active corporate venture capital arm in the United States, has invested in more than 500 companies.

Most important, Tencent is a platform operator. It runs WeChat, a mobile messaging app with social media and financial services abilities.

WeChat needs other companies to keep its one billion users glued to the app. An operating system and an app store in its own right, WeChat allows users to run miniprograms created and run by other companie

Those users can make purchases using WeChat’s payment system. Tesla, Airbnb and Starbucks all have their own WeChat miniprograms. So do most of major Chinese websites — barring those that WeChat forbids.

Friendly companies build miniprograms for WeChat. Tencent invested in China’s ride-sharing and bike-sharing companies because their users pay frequently, and Tencent wanted them to use WeChat Pay.

No matter how decent or humble Tencent may act, it’s a giant conglomerate with $24 billion in profit last year and spends much of it on investment. It picks winners and losers, but the winners won’t always be the best out there, thus harming innovation and efficiency.

It limits user access to other products and services. Its WeChat app doesn’t allow users to share links for merchandise on Alibaba’s Taobao online marketplace or for short videos on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister company.

Tencent doesn’t just court the industry. It has also long tried to get close to the government. Compared with the sometimes defiant Alibaba, Tencent has long publicly underscored its willingness to comply fully with rules and regulations.

In April, the company said it would spend $7.8 billion on green energy, education, village revitalization and other pet topics of President Xi Jinping. In the view of Hong Bo, an internet commentator, Tencent is acting for self-preservation.