tv Squawk Box CNBC April 9, 2020 6:00am-9:00am EDT
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maybe it boept won't be like this forever >> subscribers for disney plus have doubled it is thursday, tgit, thursday april 9, 2020. "squawk box" begins right now. >> good morning. i'm becky quick along with joe kernen and andrew ross sorkin. in just a few moments, we'll bring you a special conversation with bill gates. he'll tell us his concerns and what he sees ahead bernie sanders announced he was dropping out of the presidential race yesterday, the dow climbed by
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780 points s&p also up 3.4% the nasdaq up by 2.5%. this morning, you do see some red arrows right now, the dow is down by 111 points the nasdaq down by 65 points jobless claims number that people will be watching so closely. keeping an eye on trezy yields, it looked like the yell was trading at 3.7%. >> thank you, we have an update now and numbers. confirmed cases in the united states is now more than 432,000. more than infections in italy, spain and germany combined new york state has 151,000 and 6,200 deaths trump administration is
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saying they are seeing real evidence that the measures being taken are working. a battle is brewing on capitol hill over new outbreak funding demanding $250 billion in new funding. house speaker and senate minority leader saying any new package would need to include more for additional money for hospitals, state and local governments. the senate is expected to bring competing measures to the floor today. neither are expected to pass fed chair jay powell is said to give an update on the economy this morning he will speak at 10:00 a.m. as part of a webcast and virtual q
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and a session to discuss the measures we'll get a key read today on how many more americans are not working. these have gotten interesting. another 5 million workers are expected to file unemployment in addition to the 10 million in the previous two weeks we'll bring you the claims number we'll have a full on jobs panel. that is the number that gives us some insight and a snapshot. others we'll have to wait for. but watching these happen are right to the moment. hopefully temporary but we'll get you that number today. becky.
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i think some of the concerns are that maybe it is not -- some could be more permanent cuts than we've seen in the past. eye popping numbers. 10 million already and 5 million more expected today. far more than the jobs number we got last week for the monthly number that didn't show any of the real impact we had seen. listening to the number, you start hearing the coronavirus cases. 400,000 was the number yesterday and already jumped to more than 430,000 today? march 5, we were talking about 11 cases in this country it shows you, if you follow money, you know the law of compound interest. it shows you how this builds with bigger, bigger numbers. >> shares of disney rising
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the subscription service now has over 50 million customers. richard greenfield will talk about what he's seeing with disney and disney plus starbucks expects second quarter earnings to be cut in half as the shutdowns impacted them comp store sales declined 60 to 70% in the last week of march. telling you about shares of costco under prayer after the company's sales rose in march as people stocked up they weren't as high as expected but in places like jewelry and apparel that people are just not buying down more than 11% than the prior year when we come back, a
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conversation with bill gates with his warning and what the country could look like after covid-19 futures a little weaker. dow right now about 40 points below market we'll be right back. i am totally blind. and non-24 can throw my days and nights out of sync, keeping me from the things i love to do. talk to your doctor, and call 844-214-2424.
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conversation with bill gates a cochair. he delivered a ted talk in 2015 that predicted the world would be unprepared for the epidemic i asked him if the coronavirus was the pandemic he had warned about. >> any time you get a human-to-human transmitted virus, it could always be the one. with the flu or any virus, once it is transmissionable, because of awful the travel we do, it is likely to go completely global because it is quite fatal and quite transmissible. it is the nightmare we've been talking about a long time. sadly, a few things like this
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coalition for a vaccine were done after 2015. a very small percentage. what we should have done is have dying not tic diagnostics and drugs more quickly and a vaccine more rapidly. >> walk us around the globe right now. we are hearing things may be improving in china there is a talk of a second wave of transmissions taking place. what is your view of who is happening in china and europe and united states and other places >> china took the situation in wuhan which was quite traumatic, with extreme interventions, they were able to crush the epidemic. those hospitals are gone look at commerce stores are open now in china and
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nowhere else whereas before, it was the opposite it is a real thing that they took si significant number of cases. as they opened up, it is a slight rebound all the countries that have the substantial epidemic before having a vaccine, what type of activities should be engage in. hopefully with the young people, with education, we'll have this interim period of opening up it won't be normal until we get
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an amazing vaccine to the entire world. >> you talk about these intermediate steps the president tweeted he wants to get us reopen sooner rather than later when the time line you have in mind of when we can get back to business and head more towards normal >> unfortunately, the u.s. isn't uniformly shut down. you'll see a lot of increase in various communities. even though our testing numbers are going up, the days to get a testing response should be under 24 hours the things taking longer than that there is no system of prioritization still needs to be fixed. if we get our act together and that testing including
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innovations like a swab, if those get into place by early june, we'll be looking at some kind of opening up the definition of that is what we need to be working on now, studying what has been done in south korea, what has been done in china and various parts of europe including sweden who at least has chosen not to go for a full shutdown like many other countries. >> where do you think things stand in america it is different in different pockets as you pointed out in seattle, you were in the forefront of it. in new york, we are looking towards that peak now. the number of cases and how quickly they've multiplied have been stunning. where do we stand with places like new york, new orleans, chicago and beyond
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>> if you go to health data.org, they take localities around the u.s. and look at predictions of when cases will peek and how much capacity and ventilators will be needed they assume a pretty good compliance you see a lot of counties will have this growth you have cases and mixing around it is great that seattle and the doubling rate is coming down here we are the first community with the seattle coronavirus assessment network we are doing surveillance to see what cases were missed and age structure and data that was missing. that will be key input to deciding those opening up
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policies and what should be done there. so seattle is leading in some ways sadly, we had the first reported case and the effort of the seattle flu network i ran was the first to see communities spread we were doing testing even when you weren't supposed to test people that had gone outside the country. so, yes, some cases are near their peak but just because cases come down doesn't mean it is time to open up you have to have a testing in place that sees any new cases that the asian countries are great examples of doing that in a very strong national level approach >> bill, we have guests that come on our program frequency that say maybe the cure is worst
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than the disease what is your response to that? >> i think it is very difficult when you have a lot of people dying of the disease that even if the government says, okay, let's keep the gdp production down, the behavior of people in terms of wanting to travel, go to events or even wanting to go to a restaurant, it has been utterly changed by the concerns about this disease until we can say to people that we are tracking this thing so well that going out to a job, to a car factory, a construction site, that those are safe enough that we feel confident we can do those things until we get there, no one can think the government can wave a
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wond and then suddenly the economy is anything like it was before that awaits a therapeutic with over a 95% cure rate or a broad vaccine. we've had a demand side chalk and supply side chalk. that demand side is remediated by the fear of infection and wealth affects of many losing their jobs and industries operating at a far lower level than in a normal economy >> let's talk a little about what the gates foundation is doing. how much information you are getting, where you are getting that information i have a feeling you know more than any place else. you agreed you you are spending omt $100 million
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what will help us in this situation? >> the area we have the deepest expertise in is how you do testing, how you find drugs that will save lives and how you get a vaccine that making 7 billion of those is going to be an incredible challenge we've taken our normal work on polio irrad indication, hiv, tb work and we've had to redirect that to make sure we understand which therapeutics are promising. picking which of the many vaccine efforts it is worth putting a lot of money behind and building that network which is very difficult to do. probably will take about 18 months before we can get to
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significant level. therapeutics could come a lot sooner things like manufacturing antibodies and using the blood of recovered patient yernts. those are enough of them that i think it is likely we'll have those interventions in the four to six month time frame. how much that will cut the death rate in these overloads is still uncertain. that comes quicker than the large-scale vaccine availability >> you are thinking 18 months, even with all the work already done and planning you are taking with lots of different potential vaccinations >> there is an approach called rna vaccine that people like
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moderna and others are using in 2015, we identified that as very promising for pandemics as well if everything goes appropriately, we can make the 18 months. vaccines in older people is a huge challenge it turns out the flu vaccine isn't much of a benefit for older people younger people getting it so they don't spread it to the elderly so they benefit. clearly, we need a vaccine that works at that age range because they are more at risk. you want to ramp it up but we don't want side effects.
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if we have 1 in 10,000 side effects, that's way more like 700,000 people who will suffer from it. male, female, under nourished, comorbidities. it is hard to give this vaccine to the entire world. governments will have to be involved because there will be spl risk needed before that can be decided on. >> we'll bring you more of this interview with bill gates in the next hour. i talked to him about his thoughts on hydroxychloroquine, if he thinks that worth testing out. i asked if this is changing his
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investment strategy too. we'll get to that. >> great conversation. really fascinating in the meantime, i want to bring in our resident doctor who has been listening in and some of his thoughts. former fda commissioner, dr. scott gottlieb we get our daily check in with the doctor it is nice to see you. listening to bill gates. bill, to me, at least, seemed optimistic but also maybe a realist in terms of how long it is going to take to get the world back to some sense of normal are you more optimistic or pessimistic right now? >> i think what he said is fairly on target i think things will continue on in the fall but there will be a
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surge on economy and activity. one of the things gates is doing is focusing on the manufacturing. we may have an effective drug in the fall i talked about that only the show but we are not going to have the capacity to produce it on scale. gates has been focused on that issue. his foundation is doing work on that, on how do we produce this in the quantity required not just here in the u.s. but for the global benefit >> with sars, we never found a vaccine. why are we more confident we'll be able to find a vaccine this time around? >> we didn't try very long to make a sars vaccine. sars went away same with mers people are optimistic that this
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is a pathogen we can make a vaccine against. but we have never made a vaccine against a coronavirus. it is not going to give an enduring immunity. you may need a booster annually. when we make a flu vaccine, we have a tried and true platform we know well here, the platform is very novel. you are stacking risk and uncertainty. you are developing a vaccine against a target you have never used before. you are using platforms never used before to make a vaccine. i think this will take longer than a year. as a base case, i think it will take more than two years we need to figure out how do he we get through with coronavirus circulating before we can get to
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a jack seen. in terms of when we are ready to mass inoculate the population, it will be a while >> how much optimism should we have around that if you see where the stock market is today, there is a big bet that the world is back to normal in the fall there is an anxiety among people to get back to some sense of normal >> right bill talked about having an anti-viral or a drug that is effective. i think if we have a couple of drugs that are effective but maybe not a home run cure, that
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will be enough and reduce a lot of anxiety and concern and maybe morbidity and mortality of this disease. you need to look at what will be available in the fall. there are a lot of drugs they are a longer way off. in terms of what is available coming, anti-virals will be top of the list. >> in terms of how quickly that could get rolled out in some semblance of scale so that populations that are more susceptible to have access, what is your expect lags. i understand we want august but is that the time line it looks like all of these drugs are on to be tested and ready
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>> no. that's what we need. it won't be available in the next four weeks for the people dying now. when it comes to september and kids go back to school and college campuses restart and people go back to indoor spaces come july and august the risk is going to explode in terms of this virus having a risk of creating another outbreak or epidemic in the country. i would say we could get to a million doses a month. it is not a lot. if it could be used prophylactically or used in everyone it will be used for people who are high risk or people that
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come in to the emergency room with the virus you give them a dose early on. for other people, it is frobly not going to be available. >> less related to what bill said, more with regard to what our viewers say, they say, i live in a place, not new york city, i live in the midwest, maybe, saying, i can go to work and stay six-feet away from people, why can't i just do that speak to that issue and how you think about that >> i think it is eminently reasonable different places take a different look a dense urban area is a lot different risk than a rural environment. what i say about that right now,
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we don't know where the risk is. if we had a good surveillance system and we were testing different parts of the country could take different measures and relax some of these based on the assumption that the virus isn't spreading in the community. people saying well it is not spreading in my community probably don't know. >> final question. the ufc is planning to hold a match on an indian reservation to get around laws in california keeping people at home later this month it will be run by espn, owned by disney ufc owned by eyend every do you think this is a wise decision they say they can test everybody
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and no fans in the audience. >> it is unfortunate that some people have to circumvent what we have in place the indian reservations have been hit hard, particularly in the southwest. we have to be careful, we don't pull back some of these measures too soon we are going to pull out of this in april and come back to things in may i think they should be careful with regard to the time line here >> thank you so much >> thank you andrew, coming up, we'll talk about the balance of safety and performance on wall street a recording revealing the internal conversation at one bank as the virus ban spreading through the city here are some images of the pandemic impact from yesterday
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welcome back to "squawk box" this morning in today's executive edge, wall street's struggle and pressure to perform many of us have had the pressure in certain parts of the country. audio of a march 25 conference call at bank of america was obtained by cnbc where the global head laid out stakes for those considering staying at home a bit of a pressure issue, especially if the crisis lasts for a long tiemg he said, quote, at some point
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people have to make a decision the reason it is called a critical function is because we have a critical position we cannot provide proper and orderly markets. you cannot trust the firm and on the oernl hand get the money from the firm if you are in a critical function. if people decide they don't want to be in a critical function, we can have that conversation too of course, we'll entertain specific cases but not the i don't feel comfortable, sorry. j jpmorgan's plan also and traders were told to show up to work
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they did show up one emploey was sick and showed up for work, a large percent on that floor showed up testing positive a conversation that has been happening among employers. it will be interesting over the next weeks and months and as we are reorienting. as people start to open up and ask employees to come back to work and those that are working remotely and when they say what happens and they say, i'm not ready, i'm not comfortable. when we return, a lot more disney shares are rising on some
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down about 20 and a solid session yesterday. oil recovered with a continuation of positive numbers on the virus this morning at one point we were up quite a bit pre-market we were unchanged for a while. now we are down triple digits. it is early. big oil meeting today. and oil is almost back to some of those highs we saw. intermediate near term highs when we return, we'll talk about disney disney plus subscriber growth soaring and so is the stock in pre-market trading we'll talk about the company and video streaming. take a look at the biggest winners this week led by capri holdings a reminder can you watch or
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good morning if you've been watching futures, they've been under a little bit of pressure. right now, it looks like the dow would open down about 100 points we have a lot ways to go before we get earnings reports starting at 8:30 eastern time andrew, over to you. we are going to come on back in just a bit and get rich greenfield on the line to talk about media and the world of disney before we do that, looking at the futures big move up. right now, it looks like we'll start in the red the dow looks like it would open down by 100 points
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welcome back to "squawk box. take a look at futures right now, it looks like the dow would open in the red down about 122 points -- >> i think we lost some audio, i believe. we'll see where we started day starting down today but who knows? disney announcing disney plus service has 50 million subscribers. the stock jumping more than 6% in pre-market trading at this point. joining us now, rich greenfield.
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you were aggressive at 50 million by the end of the year, rich we are already there it is kind of a duh. i've been wondering, what do people with young children and they are everywhere. i can't imagine having three or four little ones and trying to figure out what the heck to do we have enough trouble with a 20 yooerl a -year-old and 18-year-old. we should not be surprised people got disney plus to stream it >> i think what got lost yesterday from dez any they were doing really well even before the coronavirus pandemic set in they got to 30 million in
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january. that was already mind numbing to wall street. they couldn't believe how big and fast that was growing. then they launched in europe europe has been saddled with the pandemic then they several million, maybe even upwards of 5 to 8 million subscribers got this at no incremental cost it's a huge number but i think what you already saw was disney was already doing much better than expected with this product. there's just a tremendous consumer demand globally to stream premium content that's really what disney and your parent with peacock is going to launch soon everyone is playing into it. consumers want to stream lots of content and the pandemic is accelerating that. >> you remember when disney announced this, it was a little bit confounding to see the stock move when iger first announced
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it it finally broke out of that trading range down in the 100 and teens, and then 140 or so, and a lot of it based on this. so now we're up today. we're up 6% but we're down -- we're barely getting back to even before, lower than it was then, and is this compared to having theme parks close down, is this incremental to what the stock should be doing? would you be buying the stock based on that? >> look, i think there's a lot that disney could do with this i think a lot is going to come down to they have a brand-new ceo. been on the job in all of five weeks now in bob chapick there is a real question of what does he do with this you have a much bigger base. do you use it and take advantage of it meaning do you look at the situation and go, god, movie theaters -- maybe they reopen sometime this summer, maybe even in the fall, but with social distancing and even, you know, i hate to say it, but what if the
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virus comes back in any form, you know, come the fall, you know, you look that the and you go, okay, can you wait if you're the ceo of disney, can you wait for movie theaters so you can do 1 billion to $2 billion with a movie like mulan. or we have a base of 50 million subs maybe we'll be at 70 or 80 milli million? do you say, we have to change the model and use disney+ far more aggressively to get new movies out to consumers? it's going to be interesting to see whether chapick has the guts and the boldness to shift disney's business model or this is just, hey, we have a lot more subs but it's still a very small part of our overall business model. >> rich, one of the things i keep hearing among some media executives of the past week is the idea in the film business of actually going to almost a pay per view model, layering on top, for example, with disney+
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saying, okay, you're subscribed to disney+ we're going to release x movie you can only get it if you're a subscriber you're going to pay $25 for your family to get it to try to mitigate some of the lost revenue that would have otherwise come in directly off of the theater what do you make of that idea? >> well, look, there's two models, right? maybe you have the model where it never goes to theaters. so if you look at what nbc universal is going to break new ground tomorrow. it's a pretty monumental day in the film industry where a mainstream consumer movie in trolls is going to skip the theaters i think this plan was going to give jeff shell and the team at universal pictures a lot of credit for being willing to try this it's a unique circumstance a lot of the marketing dollars set in motion for "trolls. you have kids and family stuck $20 direct to consumer tomorrow is interesting
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i'm certainly rooting for them to do well i think this is an important model for the industry but, andrew, you asked the question of, okay, when theaters reopen and people don't want to go to them, is there a model where you say, okay, if you're a disney+ subscriber or you're a peacock subscriber or an hbo max subscriber, do you try to market movies at 20 or $30 premium? you think about it like sunday ticket you had to have directv to subscribe to sunday ticket you think of ufc you can't get ufc matches on streaming unless you're an espn subscriber it's possible you move to that the pay per view model is a possibility. anybody can see a movie in a movie theater. anybody can download "trolls." if you limit the universe to people who are disney+ subscribers, you do run the risk of not being able to reach as many people as you otherwise
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would have reached it's an idea all the studios are trying to figure out our core business of putting movies in theaters, which is where everything started for this industry for decades. it's not clear when hundreds of people are going to feel comfortable in a movie theater we ran the math. if you look at a movie theater that has 300 seats generically if you took out every other row or seat, 300 assets drops to se. if you believe in this for a while, your capacity that you could do in terms of bodies in theaters is going to drop substantially for a while now. >> so the stock, you see it, based on this news, rich it was $150 at one point, got down in the 90s. given everything you're saying, a multi-faceted business what's it worth? i don't want to use new normal whattest -- what's it look when
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this is all said and done? what would you pay for this stock? is it warranted today? >> joe, you need to answer three questions. one, when do you think 150,000 people will be allowed into disney world when bob iger throated tfloateda of taking people's temperatures. maybe it's partof the solution when people say half the people are asymptomatic, i have no idea how taking thermometers is going to play out. imagine a scenario where you fly in to disney world from california, and one of your kids has a 99 degree fever, does the whole family go home do they refund the trip? how does that work it sounds very hard to work on a family destination but for a vacation destination, that sounds a little challenging to say the least. then you have college sports when do college sports or do sports come back, let alone all sports are colleges going to be in
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session in the fall? is there an sec football season? is there an acc football season? these are big questions that are going to impact the profitability of espn. i think we have a better shot of pro football but college football will be at risk if they're not on campus in august and september are they willing to take evasive action on the movie theater side films are the life blood of disney >> all right, rich i think you should be cautious right now. >> you have to get back to fo t fortni fortnite how many guys are playing with you? are you doing -- >> we're just trying to keep the audio quality high for cnbc. >> oh, okay. i'm not judging. we're all trying to figure out something to do right now, rich. dead red redemption --
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>> red dead redemption. >> whatever. whatever that shows you -- >> i'm going back to mine craft, joe. >> mine craft, baby. all right. thanks looking good nailed it. well done, joe that's what i was thinking the whole time, too. when we come back, much more of our interview with microsoft co-founder bill gates. he's been worried about a pandemic for yrsea we'll talk more about what he thinks of covid-19 and ready to help you find opportunity. so. let's talk. edward jones. it's time for investing to feel individual.
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fighting the coronavirus microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist bill gates tells us about his efforts, where america stands in the battle against the pandemic and what the economy will look like months and years from now that full conversation just minutes away. the most important report of the week futures are bouncing around this morning ahead of jobless claims data due at 8:30 a.m 5 million workers expected to have filed last week. small business shutdown. how a blossoming flower business shriveled up we'll talk about the path forward and the second hour of "squawk box" begins right now.
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good morning and welcome back to "squawk box. right here on cnbc i'm andrew ross sorkin along with joe kernen and becky quick. take a look at u.s. equity futures this morning we are in the red. the market looks like it would open up -- or open down, rather, about 60 points. it's a bit better than where we were just in the last ten minutes but nonetheless we'll see where we head. we do get jobless claims in a moment nasdaq down 48 points. the s&p 500 looking to open down about 12 points. oil prices are rising this morning amid an owe picks meeting hoping to open with supply cuts. you can buy it by the barrel at $26.85 becky? >> andrew, thanks. let's get to the latest on the pandemic right now the coronavirusdeath toll in the united states is approaching 15,000 people while the number of cases has now surpassed
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430,000. trump administration officials are saying they are seeing real evidence that efforts to curb the outbreak are working the white house wants $250 billion in new funding for small businesses house speaker nancy pelosi and senate minority leader chuck schumer say any new package would need to include more than $250 billion in extra money for hospitals, state and local governments. also social service programs as well and fed chairman jay powell is said to give an update on the economy this morning he will be speaking at 10 a.m. this morning as part of a webcast and virtual question and answer session joe, i'll send it over to you. >> thank you, becky. we're going to chat with ruchir sharm a. he's head of emerging markets at morgan stanley and author of "the 10 rules of successful
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nations. what caught my mind recently, h ruchir was "the comeback nation." was that written about now the u.s. usually leads the way and will probably lead the way out of this. when was that written? in response to this or even before the current pandemic? >> hi, joe i wrote that piece in fact in february and then as it was going to press we got this massive outbreak and i dated it a bit to incorporate what happened, but i find that the conclusions that i came up with in that piece, which was supposed to be a very long look at the last few decades, i found
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myself even more convinced about the fact that we need to have a piece out there that argues against the declinist mind set the last decade was america's decade the facts are mentioned in that piece. america's share of the global economy went up from 20 to 25% america as a financial super power was dominant if you look at the share of market cap and global transactions conducted in u.s. dollars. this was an unprecedented decade for american dominance and supremacy. the narrative continues to be how america is in decline and how it needs to cede more space to china, russia, other powers this was meant to do that. now we have the outbreak of the crisis and there's a lot of focus on america and how america is at the epicenter of this
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crisis and what does this really mean does this sort of mean that americans -- there's so much negative press about how america has handled this pandemic. it was so late in terms of controlling it i don't want to get into that. it was early for me to get into that what i do argue, there is zero evidence that this coronavirus is disproportionately hitting america or that america is going to comeout of this looking any weaker if anything, it has once again shown how dye pendent the world is on the dollar standard where the u.s. dollar is so dominant and also that this is hitting all economies almost equally the american economy is going to decline more than other economies. that's not the evidence i have so far >> there's reason to believe you made other good points that a lot of the areas, sectors, parts of the world that you thought were under valued to start before the pandemic are
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even more under valued so that makes you bullish on some of those areas but you are also seeing a bounce in some of the leading sectors which makes you think they may lead afterwards i guess the simplest way to ask my question, ruchir, is when we do get back to some sense of normalcy, will the united states be the best house in a bad neighborhood because we're all dealing with a different world at that point or will we be a really nice house in a pretty nice neighborhood? >> right yeah so i do see that whenever the global market begins, the leadership changes this has been the history of investing for the last century or so. so i do think that a new bull market, the leaders will be different and america's had a fantastic decade and american outperformance with the rest of the world is still at 100 year high the american stock market in both price terms and valuation
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terms has never been this expensively valued compared to the rest of the world. so i do think coming out of this america will do fine, but the rest of the world in terms of the stock market will possibly do better. look at emerging markets today emerging markets today are about more than 40% below their long-term trend and from these kind of depressed levels, you always end up getting a pretty powerful bull market over a three to five year time. last time we were this depressed was 2001, 2002 and you got this sort of very strong bull market. history will repeat itself, but here's a very simple calculation. if emerging markets over the next three to five years, we've gone back to the trend line. what we can expect over the next three years is 20% if a trend continues over the five-year horizon, it will be 12 to 13% the american stock market is 15
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to 20% below long-term trend it will allow the american stock market to compound it at 7% a year 15% or so roughly below that yes, we are below the long-term trend. so for the next three to five years you do expect these kind of markets to outperform even america should stage a comeback for the next three to five years >> great ruchir, now the dow's up what a guy anyway, thank you. we appreciate that and the optimism as well i always sort of feel that way but i'm so old-fashioned it's so '80s ruchir sharma, we appreciate it. becky. joe, thanks. when we come back, the bill and melinda gates foundation is spending more than $100 million
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of its money to fight the coronavirus. i spoke to bill gates, the microsoft co-founder and philanthropist yesterday about the battle ahead for the nation and the economy. that is next as we head to break, let's do a check on the futures this morning. as joe mentioned, the dow is positive, negative, positive it's right around the flat line. we have a big number coming up at 8:30 eastern time that's the jobless number. the market will be cuing off of that "squawk box" will be right back. don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. you'll get interviews, original content and behind-the-scenes access look for us on apple podcasts or on your favorite podcast app and subscribe to "squawk pod" today.
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welcome back to "squawk box. bill gates is speaking out in the fight against coronavirus. the microsoft co-founder is no stranger to public health and vaccine development thanks to his multi-billion dollar philanthropic work at the gates foundation he's been warning that a worldwide pandemic is something we could be seeing he first predicted this at a ted talk back in 2015. >> back in 2015 you gave a ted talk that was unfortunately pretty prophetic you said that it was not missiles but microbes we had to worry about. you said the world community wasn't ready for another pandemic like we had seen in
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1918 when did you start to think covid-19 was it? >> any time you get a human-to-human transmissible respiratory virus it could be the one. you're always watching whether it's a variant of the flu or any other respiratory virus because once it's transmissible at a certain level, because of all the travel we do, it's likely to go completely global and then the only thing that can drown it is if it's not very fatal. here with coronavirus, it's quite fatal and quite transmissible. so it's the nightmare that we've been talking about for a long time, and sadly although a few things like this coalition for vaccines, cepi were done after 2015, a very small percentage of what we should have done where
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we would have diagnostics very quickly, drugs very quickly and a vaccine far more rapidly. >> why don't you walk us around the globe right now. we're hearing things that maybe things are improving in china, maybe they're coming out the other side of things although there is some talk of potentially a second wave of transmissions that's taking place. with all of the information that you're getting right now, what's the best you have of what's happening in china, europe and here in the united states and other places >> well, china took the situation in wuhan, which was quite dramatic, and by extreme interventions by restricting movement, they were able to crush that epidemic. those hospitals are gone you know, look at the commerce stores are open now in china whereas nowhere else wrags before it was the opposite it's a real thing that they took a significant number of cases,
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not only flattened it but brought it down to very smal levels now as they open up, there will be slight rebounds it's very valuable for them to share where that's happening because all the countries that have substantial epidemics now have to think, okay, once you get down to the flu level, before having a sack seen, what kind of activities should we re-engage in probably manufacturing we can do public construction. we can do hopefully because of the number of young people involved, we can do education but we're going to have this intermediate period of opening up and it won't be normal until we get an amazing vaccine to the entire world >> you talk about these intermediate steps the president tweeted earlier today just a few hours ago that he wants to get us re-opened
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sooner rather than later what's the time line that you kind of have in mind of when we might be able to get back to business, when we might be able to open the economy when things start heading more towards a path towards normal? >> unfortunately the u.s. citizen uniformly shut down so what you're going to see is lots of exponential increase in various communities. also, even though our testing numbers are going up, the number of days to get a response should be under 24 hours. even for priority things, it's taking longer than that. so that -- you know, there's no system of prioritization that still needs to be fixed if we get our act together countrywide and if the compliance is very high and that testing, including some innovations like the self-swab that our foundation has driven, if those get into place by early june, we'll be looking at some type of opening up
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now the definition of that is what we need to be working on now. studying what's been done in south korea, what's being done in china and various parts of europe, including sweden who at least as of yet has chosen not to go for a full shutdown like many other countries >> where do you think they stand in america it's different in different pockets as you've pointed out. in seattle you guys were on the forefront. here in the new york area looking towards that peak right now, that the number of cases and how quickly it multiplied has been kind of stunning. where do we stand around the country as you hear about outbreaks in other places like new orleans, chicago and beyond? >> yeah. our partner, ihme, you go to healthdata.org, you can find, they take localities around the u. sm u.s. and look at their
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prediction for where cases will peak, how much icu capacity and ventilators will be needed they assume a pretty good compliance what you see is that a lot of counties have this exponential growth wherever you have cases and people still mixing around, that is what's going to happen. and so it's great that seattle, the doubling rate is down pretty dramatically here. we're the first community with a thing called the seattle corona assessment network we're doing the surveillance to see what cases were missed, what's the age structure of understanding that transmission and the data back from that will be a key input to designing those opening up policies, what should be done there so seattle is leading in some ways sadly we had the first imported case and a previous network, the
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seattle food network that i ran, actually was the first to see community spread because we were doing testing even when you weren't supposed to test people who hadn't actually gone outside the country. so, yes, some places are near their peak just because things start to come down, that's not the time for opening up they have to be low. you have to have a new testing system contact. very strong national level approach >> maybe the cure is worse than the disease. what's your response to that
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keep the gdp reduction down. the behavior in people in terms of wanting to travel even go to a restaurant, it's been utterly changed by the concerns about this disease. so until we can say to people that we're tracking this thing so well that actually going out to your job, you know, to a car factory, to a construction site, that those are safe enough that we feel confident, no one should think the government can wave a wand that is a miracle therapeutic.
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it's curatable or broad usage of the vaccine. so, you know, we've had a demand side shock and a supply side shock. that demand side is remediated by fear of infection and the overall wealth effects of people losing their jobs and entire industries will be operating at a far lower level than in a normal economy >> let's talk a little bit about what the gates foundation is doing. first of all, how much information you're getting and where you're getting that information. i have a feeling that you know more than just about anyplace else you agreed you're going to spend more than $100 million on this where is that money being spent? what do you think is most hopeful and what might help us in this situation? >> well, the areas that we have the deepest expertise in is how you do testing, how you find
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drugs that will save lives and how you get a vaccine that making 7 billion of those is going to be an incredible challenge. so, you know, we've taken our normal work on polio eradication, some of our hiv, tb work and we've had to redirect that to making sure we understand which of the therapeutics really are promising with actual data picking which of the many vaccine efforts is worth putting a lot of money behind and building that manufacturing in parallel with the safety and efficacy work which is very difficult to do. it will probably take about 18 months before we can get to a significant level. so therapeutics could come a lot sooner, things like manufactured
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antibodies, using the blood of recovered patients in order to treat people who are just getting sick those, there's enough of those that in aggregate i would say it's very likely to have those interventions in the four to six-month time frame, but how much that will cut the death rate in these overloads, you know, is a still a bit uncertain. that comes much quicker than the large scale vaccine availability. >> you're thinking 18 months even with all the work that you've already done to this point and the planning that you are taking with lots of different potential vaccinations and building up for that now >> yes there's an approach called rna vaccine that people like maderna, curavac are using that in 2015 we had identified that as very promising for pandemics and for other applications as well, and so if everything goes
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perfectly with the rna approach, we could actually beat the 18 months we don't want to create unrealistic expectations the efficacy of vaccines in older people is always a huge challenge. turns out the flu vaccine isn't that effective in elderly people most of the benefit comes from younger people not spreading it because they're vaccinated and that benefits on a community basis the elderly. here we clearly need a vaccine that works in the upper age range because they're most at risk of that and doing that so you amp it up in older people and you don't have side effects, if we have one in 10,000 side effects, that's way more, 700,000 people who will suffer from that. so really understanding the
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safety at a gigantic scale across all age ranges, pregnant, male, female, under nourished, existing co-morbidities, it's very, very hard. that actual decision of, okay, let's go and give this vaccine to the entire world, governments will have to be involved because there will be some risk and indemnification needed before that can be decided on >> let me ask you to sort of wrap up a bunch of questions that we get different answers from depending on every person we ask i think you have better sources. what is the mortality rate how many people are affected. >> because you don't see all the cases, you know, you get the denominator wrong, it's clearly 1%, 1.2% germany is a great example where they got their testing act together and they have interventions, you know, there at about that rate
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the china data after the wuhan overload came in at about that rate places like spain and italy aren't testing broadly yet you know, their testing is even more limited than ours, which is still completely misprioritized. you know, it's not much more than 1.2 perce% if you have a f functioning health system to treat those that get serious respiratory problems. >> what about asymptomatic spread i've read anywhere from 10 to 25% of the spread could be coming from people who don't show symptoms. what do you think it is? >> yeah, that's -- we have the -- this seattle coronavirus assessment network that's really going to understand that i think it's very unlikely the numbers are anywhere that high i know there were studies, but the way they were done, chest, ct scans are going to show you other diseases it's very unlikely there's a lot
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of asymptomatics who never become symptomatic and yet they're infecting people the work, and there's many countries that the foundation has gathered together on this, including the u.k. and germany, and we're going to get some other sights in the u.s. on this we need to know that number because that deeply affects rebound when opening up and there is some data suggesting that but very, very important in that bounce. >> serological testing, the idea that you can test and see who has antibodies and say perhaps they have immune nate at thiimm where we should be going >> it's not very interesting because the extreme measures we're taking is to make sure the infection rate is a small number of the population. the u.s., we should end up with less than 10 million overall
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infections 10 million out of 330 million is not a meaningful amount. the most interesting thing about those people, maybe they could go do risky jobs, but the thing we're working on, we have a six company consortium is to look and see if the blood in two different forms from those recovered patients can be used as a prophylaxis or therapeutic in people who are getting sick that, you know, that's likely to be fairly promising all thee it will take us a few months to be sure of that the serological test is more about understanding the science. the pcr test, which is very sensitive, we need to prioritize, that is the key to tracing contacts and really getting people to go into serious quarantine serological only goes positive
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after you've infected most everyone you're going to infect. >> bill, let me ask you kind of a question, philosophical one. just looking at the inequality arguments and things that came out after 2008 and the financial setbacks then, you wonder what happens now. i saw something on twitter that said we have suddenly gone from unskilled labor to essential workers overnight. how do you think that plays out watching white collar workers who get to stay home versus blue collar workers on the front lines of this? >> it's very unfortunate that the job losses are concentrated in the part of the economies that don't have high incomes the service-related jobs are where we're shut down now, those will take time to come back. if you look at a country basis, although the developing countries don't have big numbers yet because the international
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travel into those countries isn't as large, over time the deaths, the overload of the medical system will be far worse in developing countries than it is in developed countries. so the fact that when things are bad and those who suffer the most, that's dramatically the case government policies have to look at that hard in terms of the unemployment insurance, which businesses employ lower income people some of these policies are very broad brush and not targeted as we tune them we need more data we're doing it to get an equity element to them. >> the foundation has spent a lot of time working on education
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and watching kids out of school, watching governors canceling school for the rest of the year, wondering what that means for the fall, i wonder that same question there there are kids who are able to get online, have school teachers and school systems set up online, have adults in the household help them out and push them on the way. that's another big area of inequality what should we do about that >> it's a big problem because if your school doesn't have that online capability, you've lost three months of learning i do think school will be able to resume in the fall but i don't think this school year there's going to be any significant attendance maybe in the summer people will do something special, but that would be very hard to do as you say, most of the private schools, they're used to online. they've made sure all of their students have the device and
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connectivity different school districts say it's unjust to do online learning because some don't have access there are philanthropists, ray dalio, jeff bezos, others trying to fill that gap, get devices and connectivity out there in the end, the low income students will be hurt the most by these school closures >> in terms of being an investor, obviously you're a well-known investor, not that you're spending that much time in thinking about that, but have you changed your investment strategy at all since this took place? >> no. i haven't put much thought into that i'm able to delegate a lot of th that there are whole industries that are going to have reduced demand even after supply comes back,
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and, you know, capital spending, cars, houses, all those things, you know, it's hard to think that the general animal spirits will be anywhere near what they were before this got started but i haven't mapped that into what it means for the market >> what does your day look like these days >> i'm on a lot of video calls you know, we're talking about, okay, how do you make 7 billion doses? how do you get these trials? there's over 20 compounds that look promising as therapeutic. some are highly tauted the data is not looking that good some are not talked about. for several months ahead.
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>> it's not going to work. -- >> people don't know about it yet, so we're not hoarding it. what do you think about hydroxychloroquine >> we really have to wait for the data to come in. we have seen why it looks good in the test tube and realized what makes it look good in the test tube doesn't map to the human model. that doesn't mean there's not some possibility there, but, you know, what's crazy is people latch on to remedies we'll have data and i believe
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some of them, you know, including recovered patient blood, body manufacturer, a few of the antivirals, some of them are likely to work >> in terms of testing, you say that's important in order to go back to business i know health care workers here in the new york area have been exposed but can't get tests. they may not have symptoms when do we get to the point where we have enough tests and can track this better? >> well, the access to the back end capacity of what's called the pcr machine is completely unmanaged so you can have somebody without symptoms who gets tested every day. any time the cue is over 24 hours, that's complete mismanagement. the value is far less worth
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while. . >> it's more symptomatic the online system. they haven't gotten any interest from the federal level the thinking is to create a website that you go in and enter your situation and it would give you a priority number. hopefully the people who control the capacity limit the priority level that they accept so they're giving these very quick results.
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as a percentage of 330 million, we're not able to test that many people even with the new machines and so-called script test. to see rebound it's going to be the exact right percent. >> do you think people will be going to stadiums, getting on airplanes? >> i need to kick off a discussion about this, what opening up looks like, which is at the earliest for the u.s. i would say at the end of may, but the discussion of which activities bring societal value and what brings rebound, that's something everybody should participate in
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i don't think going to big public sports types events that the economic benefit will work out until we're back in normal times. i do think manufacturing, construction, schools where you adopt protocols that are helpful there, you know, we see most businesses in china opening up we see places like south korea who have a medium size epidemic able to run things how do you draw that line for that period that's going to be longer than we want it to be that eventually the government will take all the expert input and create a new regime for what's going on that's extremely sensitive to the quick turn around prioritized testing >> bill, want to thank you very much for your time today really appreciate it. >> thank you, becky.
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again, that's our conversation with bill gates if you want to access any part of it you can go to cnbc.com and get the full viewing there joe, over to you >> okay, becky thanks still to come on "squawk box," the most important report probably of the week, futures bouncing around this morning ahead of the jobless claims data, which is due at 8:30 igstern. so rht around 45 minutes we're coming right back. yes. it's the first word of any new discovery. but when allergies attack, the excitement fades.
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shbecause xfinity mobilehen ygives you more flexible data.. you can choose to share data between lines, mix with unlimited, or switch it up at any time. all on the most reliable wireless network. which means you can save money without compromising on coverage. get more flexible data, the most reliable network, and more savings. plus, get $200 off when you buy an eligible phone. that's simple, easy, awesome. go to xfinitymobile.com today. welcome back to "squawk box" this morning the dow is down 210. we were down 50 points literally within the last hour things have
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gotten worse since then. we do have the jobless claims coming up in just a little bit at 8:30. the s&p 500 opening down on tow mission as the opec plus meeting will result in a supply cut and then later this morning, don't miss our live interview with energy secretary dan brouillette. that will happen at 8:35 joe kernen over at casa kernen going coming up, a budding small business, budding small business hit by coronavirus we'll speak to the founder and ceo of farm girl flowers who must rethink oraonpetis in the wake of the pandemic that interview coming up next.
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welcome back to "squawk box" this morning as part of our ongoing series, the path forward, we are talking with independent business owners dealing with coronavirus challenges joining us right now this morning from san francisco is christina stem bl. she's founder and ceo of farm girl flowers she boot strapped and turned into an impressive enterprise with $32 million in revenue last year christina, good morning to you you had to shut down your distribution center. what other measures have you been forced to take? >> good morning, andrew. thanks for having me the biggest thing that we had to do was furlough about 200 team members. so now we're a team of about 20 instead of a little over 200 so that would be the biggest change
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we had to shut down our entire distribution center in san francisco in about 12 hours. we had to throw out about $150,000 of flowers which is just a drop in the bucket compared to what the flower farms across the globe are throwing away now due to this pandemic and a lot of shutdowns. >> so will you be able to make it through have you taken loans are you getting any kind of deferral payments for rent and things like that are people helping >> yeah, we've applied for all the same loans that everybody is applying for unfortunately, a lot of it won't be useful because we've had to rethink everything about how we do business. we're coming up on mother's day which is the super bowl of the flower industry. this happening before that is making us try to figure out how we can pivot quick enough in order to still be able to do business at mother's day just in a different way. as mother's day is the holiday that takes us through the summer months and gets us through fall where the summer months are
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extremely lean in the flower industry if we miss mother's day, just like almost everybody in this industry, we probably won't stay in business. spent the last few weeks pivoting as quickly as we can to change our distribution channels completely we've moved them to the farm level. while we won't be able to probably utilize as much of our team members as we'd like to right now, we can help the industry by utilizing their team members. so we can keep some people working, which is a great goal for us >> let me ask you about that you recently opened a second distribution center from what i understand in ecuador. tell us about that move. is that a good move or a bad move in terms of the timing for your business? maybe helpful ultimately >> yeah. i don't use the word luck very often with farm girl, because it's just all hard work what we do, but it's just complete luck. i came up with the idea at the end of last year we launched it incredibly
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quickly, in three months' time launched it january 5th. if we didn't launch that then, we would not be in business right now. we overnight had to shift what was about 10 to 15% of our orders to 100% of our orders coming from that location and then very quickly try to get another one set up at the farm level here in the united states as well. we're also launching a second distribution center in ecuador because they're on a curfew. shortened shifts we're launching a second one to utilize more people in shorter amounts of time to fulfill orders and opening up three fulfillment centers here in the united states as well at farms i've utilized their teams and products so they're not throwing away as many flowers we're doing all of that in a span of five weeks i thought three months was a short time to launch a distribution center and now i think it's a long time because we're launching one a week. >> assuming you do get the loans you've applied for you, how do
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you anticipate using that money? >> it will be a big bless to help us get through the summer months we won't be able to use as much for payroll because the distribution centers we're launching are much further away. our lease is up in may in san francisco, the timing is great, so also having to figure out where we're going to move this location and it probably won't be within the vicinity of easy access for team members. rent that we're paying, very high overhead in san francisco even though we're not there operating and in utility and some payroll as we've been able to bring back 20 team members in the last couple of weeks and hope to bring back more as we get these fulfillment centers back online. >> most of our conversation has been about supply. i'm curious what you think demand is going to be. you talked about mother's day. do you anticipate people ordering flowers en masse this mother's day >> the first week immediately
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following the shutdown our sales dropped 60%. we had the lowest growth rate we've ever had since i opened farm girl's doors ten years ago almost we had 90% year over year growth which was horrible for us. the very next week we really reached out and were very vulnerable with our customers and shared what was going on and it's blown me away the support that has come in from our customer base. it's been amazing. so we rebounded very quickly the very next week back to our regular numbers. i think that a lot of people will send flowers this mother's day, specifically because they can't be with their moms so my biggest goal is to get enough supply to meet the demand because i think the demand is going to be very high. i think after mother's day that might be a different story i'm following economists very closely, seeing what the economy is going to be like this summer and how that's going to shift. and doing a lot of research on what happened in 2008 and 9 in
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the flower space as well to see how we're going to be able to make it through because i think there will be a deep decline in our industry just like almost every industry after we come out of this or when we start to come out of this. i think the economy is going to suffer from that >> okay. well, look, we wish you lots of luck and we hope to catch up with you and see your progress in the next couple of weeks. thank you so much for joining us this morning good luck. >> thank you, andrew okay right now it's time for a quick break. we are getting ready for the big number of the day. the big number of the week those weekly jobless claims. that's coming up next. shouldn't you pay less when you use less data? now you can.
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just how deadly it is. and some of the world's biggest oil producers prepared to meet this morning, we're going to speak with u.s. energy secretary dan brouillette, where america fits in on cutting food production the final hour of "squawk box" begins right now good morning, everybody. i'm becky quick along with joe kernen and andrew ross sorkin. watching u.s. equity futures this morning we saw them in positive territory just barely. now it looks like the dow is indicated down by 176 points this is happening as we are getting closer to that important number of the morning. the jobless claims number that comes out in half an hour's time keeping an eye on treasury markets this morning the latest yield for the ten year looks like it's sitting at 0.733% joe? >> thanks, beck. we're just about a half hour from that jobless news data.
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the number to watch each week as we try to gauge the scope of the economic damage from the coronavirus. we're joined by cnbc senior markets commentator mike santoli. the last couple of times in the face of the horrible numbers, those were the great big market days on the up side as we shook off whatever -- i mean, it was double expectations. markets still closed higher. let me ask you this. it's the best week so far since 2009 this week, so that's a three-day total, too. >> reporter: yeah. >> and the best numbers since '09. we're at about the 50% retracement, are we not? just below 50% i was doing some math. we're up about 11% or so this week >> reporter: yes. >> do you feel more comfortable with your sloppy bottom, which is a disgusting term but with the sloppy bottom that was real?
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do you feel anymore confidence >> reporter: i think this rally has definitely over achieved at this point in terms of saying it's right on the border of saying, yes, this is the strong bounce you expect off of a very, very intense over sold low and you expect some kind of rally no matter what. it definitely is doing better. i think it's responded reasonably well to just these kind of incremental changes in the infection rates. you mentioned the two past thursdays when we did have the massive claims numbers you got the rallies both times you were rallying at $24.70 it's unclear if there's any type of pattern that says we rallied on really bad claims i doubt that's going to be a theme that continues because the field position of the market is different and anybody has seen the past two weeks to answer your question, i do think the market is making its case that it's trying to kind of wall off that over shoot down to the 2200 area on the s&p 500 and
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saying that was priced for something a lot worse than what we now are handy capping i think the credit markets are kind of giving a little bit of daylight to companies to kind of bridge this period it's almost like the number today, the depth of the shock is almost nearly not as important as whatever clues we get on the duration that is a complete opaque situation right now. we don't have a good clarity about that. >> mike, we are about where we were exactly a month ago >> reporter: exactly. >> we were at 23 and change. so we go through the typical hair on fire, everybody's panicked, everybody's totally throwing the worst case scenarios out and even worse than the worst case scenarios and the market, historically that's when things seem to happen now there have been coincident with this, i guess it was really over the weekend where some of the numbers started looking like
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they weren't deteriorating in terms of infections, hospitals >> reporter: yeah. >> we had people on our air that say ventilators -- we ran out of ventilators, people can't get them that was not the case. they were just saying that. >> reporter: right there's no doubt that we're under shooting maybe even the base case in terms of infection rates. the risk is the market gets a little bit ahead of itself, we're overextrapolating the new york city data saying that now that there's a national peak in sight. >> right >> reporter: everyone's impatient to be beyond this phase. that includes people who trade the markets. they want to look towards the next thing >> we're -- are we about 27% off the lows, i think, is that right? >> reporter: interday lows, like 21.90, something like that >> yeah. about -- so pretty good year >> reporter: yeah. >> if you miss that, once again, the market -- i don't know
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whether we can go back -- we could hit new lows if you weren't in for that or if you sold at the bottom, you're feeling -- you know what's next? next is the virus gets maybe less front and center and the closed economy and the ability to reopen it in any normal way, that's what the naysayers and pessimists are talking about there. >> reporter: no, that's exactly right. >> it's going to be very difficult. >> reporter: essentially are we going to look through one quarter, two quarters of essentially no business getting done that's the question. >> right right. all right. santoli, i know we did fine without steve. steve's got some bigger fish to fry. i'm not sure what he's got going on we'll hear from him later. we're already down 200 or so thank you, mike santoli. when we come back, more of becky's conversation with bill gates, including perhaps the key
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question, just how deadly is the coronavirus? bill gates talks about it. later, secretary of energy dan brouillette as saudi arabia, russia and other countries nser cutting worldwide oil production stay tuned, "squawk box" returns right after this i see best-in-class platforms and education. i see award-winning service, and a trade desk full of experts, available to answer your toughest questions. and i see it with zero commissions on online trades. i like what you're seeing. it's beautiful, isn't it? yeah. td ameritrade now offers zero commissions on online trades. ♪ i know that every time that i suit up, there is a chance that that's the last time. 300 miles an hour, thats where i feel normal. i might be crazy but i'm not stupid. having an annuity tells me that i'm protected.
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germany is a great example where they got their testing act together and they have interventions. they're at about that rate the china data after the wuhan overload came in at that rate. places like spain and italy aren't testing broadly their testing is even more limited than ours, which is still completely misprioritized. it's not much more than 1.2% if you have a fully functioning health system to treat those who get serious respiratory problems. >> what about asymptomatic spread i've read 10 to 25% of the spread could be coming from those who don't get the symptoms what do you think it is? >> yeah. that's -- we have this seattle coronavirus assessment network that's really going to understand that. i think it's very unlikely the numbers are anywhere that high
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i know there were studies, but the way they were done, you know, chest ct scans are going to show you other diseases it's very unlikely there's a lot of asymptomatics who never become symptomatic and yet they're infecting people the work, and there's many countries that the foundation has gathered together on this, including the u.k., germany, we're going to get some other sites in germany on this we need to know the number that deeply affects rebounds when opening up. there is some data that suggests that's not important very, very important to pin that down. >> serological testing the idea that you could test and see who has antibodies in their blood and say perhaps they have immunity does that sound like a good plan or something we can be working towards? >> it's not very interesting the extreme measures we're taking are to try to make sure that the total infection rate is
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a small percentage of the population the u.s., we should end up with less than 10 million overall infections so that -- 10 million out of 330 million is not a meaningful amount for immunity. the most interesting thing about those people, maybe they could go to risky jobs, but the thing we're working on, we have a six company consortium is to look and see if the blood in two different torms from those recovered patients can be used as a prophylaxis or therapeutic in people who are getting sick that, you know, we're -- that's likely to be fairly promising, although it will take us a few months to be sure of that. the serological test is more about understanding the science than it being factual individually the pcr test, which is very sensitive that we need to
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prioritize, that is the key to tracing contacts and really getting people to go into serious quarantine serological only goes positive after you've infected most everyone you're going to infect. >> bill, let me ask you kind of a question -- philosophical one. just looking at the inequality arguments, things that came out after 2008, the financial setbacks we saw then you kind of wonder what happens now. i saw things on twitter that said we have suddenly gone from unskilled labor to essential workers overnight. how do you think that plays out watching white collar workers get to stay home versus blue collar workers on the front lines of this? >> it's very unfortunate that the job losses are concentrated in the part of the economy with households who don't have high incomes. these service-related jobs are
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where we're shut down and those will take time to come back. if you look at a country basis, although the developing countries don't have big numbers yet because the international travel into those countries isn't as large, over time the deaths, the overload of the medical system will be far worse in developing countries than it is in developed countries. so the fact that when things are bad, those who are worse off suffer the most, that's dramatically the case here so government policies really have to look at that hard in terms of the unemployment insurance, which businesses employ unemployed people these policies are very broad brushed and not that targeted. because we're in unchartered territory, that's okay as we tune them, the foundation is doing some work to gather data so that the policies can
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have an equity element to them >> the foundation has also spent a lot of time working on education and watching kids out of school right now, watching governors in some states canceling school wondering what that means for the fall. i wonder that same question there. there are kids who are able to get online, have school teachers and school systems set up online have adults in the house that can push them along the way. that's another big area of inequality what can we do about that? >> it's a big problem. if your school doesn't have that online capability, you've lost three months of learning i do think school will be able to resume in the fall but i don't think this school year is going to be any significant attendance this school year that would be
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very hard to do. as you say, most of the private schools, they're used to online. they've made sure all of their students have the device and connectivi connectivity different school districts, some don't do online learning because it would be unjust for the kids that don't have access that's really a dilemma. there are philanthropists, ray dalio, jeff bezos, others who are trying to fill that gap and get the devices and connectivity out there. in the end, the low income students will be hurt the most by these school closures >> in terms of being an investor, obviously you're a well-known investor, not that you're probably spending that much time thinking about that, but have you changed your investment strategy at all since this took place? >> no, i haven't put much thought into that. and i'm able to delegate a lot
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of that. there are whole industries that are going to have reduced demand even after supply comes back and, you know, capital spending, cars, houses, all those things, it's hard to think that the general animal spirits will be anywhere near what they were before this got started. but i haven't mapped that into, you know, what it means for the market >> what does your day look like these days >> i'm on a lot of video calls you know, we're talking about, okay, how do you make 7 billion doses? how do you get these trials -- there's over 20 compounds that look promising as therapeutic. some are highly taugouted, the t isn't looking that good. some aren't talked about so we won't have panic buying of those
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things, are starting to look good overall i'd say that's a hopeful area, you know, for several months ahead so lots of meetings. you know, political leaders, governors, heads of countries, head of the african union and south africa and talking about how you tailor policies for developing countries we're just mapping what we're able to do on to those countries is not going to work and, sadly, they won't be able to reduce the rate of spread like the rich countries that have taken this seriously. >> you mentioned potential therapeutics that are out there, and a lot that people don't know about yet so we're not hoarding them what do you think about hydroxychloroquine >> we really have to wait for the data to come in. we have seen why it looks good in the test tube and realize what makes it look good in the test tube doesn't map to the human model. that doesn't mean there's not
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some possibility there, but, you know, what's crazy is that, you know, people latch on to remedies we'll have data and i believe some ofthem, you know, including using recovered patient blood, some of them are likely to work >> in terms of testing, you say that's a really important thing in order for us to kind of get back to business i know health care workers here in the new york area who have been exposed but can't get tests, they may not have symptoms yet when do we get to the point where there are enough tests out there and are able to track this in a better situation? >> the access to the back end capacity of what's called the pcr machine is completely unmanaged so, you know, you can have somebody without symptoms who gets tested every day in some wealthy community and that definitely is going on you can have a health care
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worker, like you say, waiting three or four days any time the cue is over three or four hours, that's complete mismanagement because the value of the result is far legs worthwhile when you're not getting it very, very quickly. you know, the best case is the pcr test goes positive before you're symptomatic and infectio infectious, then you can act in such a way that you never infect anyone else. the natural thing would be to do like south korea did and create a unified system that we haven't gotten any interest from the federal level so the thinking is to create a website that you go in and enter your situation and it would give you a priority number and then hopefully all the people who control the capacity limit the priority level that they accept so they're getting these very quick results and to the right
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people and, you know, until we have that, we're in big trouble because as a percentage of 330 million, we're not going to be able to test many people, even with the capacity we'll have with the new machines, so-called script test. we won't ever week be able to test more than a few percent of the population so to see rebound, it's go the to be exactly the right few percent. >> and, bill, you mentioned that you think we will be going back to school in the fall. do you think people will be back in stadiums, getting on airplanes, maybe going on vacations too? >> i think to kick off the discussion about this what opening up looks like which is, you know, at the earliest for the u.s. i would say at the end of may but the discussion of which activities bring societal value and how much risk of rebound they bring, that's, you know,
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something everybody should participate in i'm starting to write my thoughts about that over the next week. i don't think going to big, say, public sports type events, the economic benefit relative to the risk will work out until we're back in normal times i do think manufacturing, construction, schools where you adopt protocols that are helpful there, you know, we see most businesses in china opening up we see places like south korea who have a medium sized epidemic able to run things how do you draw that line for that period that's going to be longer than we want it to be that eventually the government's going to have to take all the expert input and create a new regime for what's going on that's extremely sensitive for how well it's working for the
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quick turn around, prioritized testing. >> bill, want to thank you very much for your time today we truly appreciate it. >> thank you, becky. that conversation about how the economy opens from here is one that i imagine is going to be taking place all around the country but probably liert on our air as well. by the way, if you want to see more of that conversation check out the interview on cnbc.com. in the meantime, let's take a look at the u.s. equity futures. we are on the last trading day of the week. we're waiting on the jobs number that's going to be hitting that's jobless claims number andrew >> meantime, seattle's bill gates's neighbor, seattle's other -- well, one of the wealthiest people in the world, jeff bezos, amazon sharing a video of jeff bezos, ceo of amazon, touring a company warehouse near dallas. this happened yesterday.
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he wore a mask and walked around the plants amazon workers and politicians recently complained about safety at the company's facilities amid the coronavirus outbreak and he's also visited a whole foods store. in a tweet the company said, quote, they're incredibly proud of the thousands of colleagues working on the front lines to get goods to people everywhere around the country joe? >> andrew, the global death toll from the coronavirus is nearing 90,000 nearly 15,000 of those deaths in the united states. according to johns hopkins, worldwide infections now total nearly 1.5 million more and more companies and individuals have been pledging support. just this hour video social media company tiktok announced $250 million in pledges to support medical workers, educators, local communities tiktok is committing $25 million worth of ad space to get health
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welcome back to "squawk box" this morning we are now seconds away -- i should say about a minute, minute nava wand a half away fre most important economic number jobless claims dow looks like it would open down 202 points. nasdaq off 91 points s&p 500 off 28 points. all of that has moved around this morning it's gotten a little bit worse as the morning has progressed. take a look at the ten-year
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note we'll flip the board around. show you where that stands ten-year note looks like it is -- there we have it .722 our good friend rick santelli is standing by at the cme in chicago. lots of different expectations of what this number could be jpmorgan saying it could be as bad as 7 million i don't know if it's as high as the 6s, others the 5s, where are you? >> reporter: it's impossible for me to give you a number. what i can tell you is that the all-time high for continuing claims was 2009 at 6 j. 635,000. so that's what many people are, of course, paying attention to in the back of their minds that's continuing claims as for initial, andrew, listen, for me it's more important to keep in mind the government, this administration, congress is doing their best, the fed's doing their best to kind of pay
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for people that are idling in place until the coronavirus threat passes. and i think that, the amount of money in liquidity, programs being tossed in is almost more important than trying to handicap a number that we know is going to be large but the street for the most part is right around 6 million. that's what they're expecting. we're only about five seconds away, folks. yes, probably the most real-time important fundamental economic release that's left considering the coronavirus. here we go, 6,606,000 are the initial claims continuing claims move to 7.455 million. 7,455,000 and of course that continuing claims number is already an all-time record now we have breaking news from the fed and of course for that we go to steve liesman >> reporter: thank you, rick in an historic, unprecedented move the federal reserve announcing at this time programs
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to pump about $2.3 trillion into the economy through a variety of lending programs i've never seen anything like this announced in a single day let me go through the details as we have these programs the fed will buy up to $600 billion in loans through its main street lending facility it's not ready to launch it just yet, but it is announcing the amount and some details of who can apply for it get to that in a second. it's expanding the corporate credit program and the talf. a total of $850 billion in credit outstanding it will be offering, never done this before, up to $500 billion in loans to states and municipalities that's right, the federal reserve will be financing municipal bonds, municipal notes. to support all of this and backstop the fed which is not supposed to take losses on its
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loans, the treasury will take about 450 billion -- 195 billion of the 450 billion it was given through the c.a.r.e.s. act to backstop the fed through this lending process. what does that mean? 195 of 450, not quite half that means there's probably more to come, but right now they're announcing 2.3 trillion. let me go now to the details on the main street lending facilities such as we have them. the federal reserve will offer four-year loans. it will be open to companies with 10,000 or fewer workers and revenue of less than 2.5 billion. this is not just mid size. i've been reporting this for a while. people have gotten this wrong. this is open to companies of all sizes, not 500, 10,000, but 10,000 is the cap. 2.5 billion is the cap on revenue. principal and interest will be deferred on the loans for one year banks will keep a 5% share that gives them a stake in these
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loans. and they'll sell the remaining 95% back to the fed. that's how the fed finances it that's another level of protection for the federal reserve. it's still going to be open to borrowers who have taken ppp loans. there are some other details i'm not sure they're ready yet let me just take a look. let me just read you a quote from fed chairman jerome powell who will be speaking, by the way, at 10:00. he says our country's highest priority must be to address the public health crisis, providing care for the ill and eliminating further spread of the virus. the federal reserve's role is to provide as much relief and security as we can and our actions today will help ensure the eventual recovery is as vigorous as possible the fed also launching, by the way, the other program that will -- in which it will purchase the sba loans under the paycheck protection program. so that's nother thing that it
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has already announced, that it's normally announcing that today i guess it's three programs, it might be four programs the fed counts the program as 2$2.3 trillion of credit. becky? >> hey, steve -- >> wow, steve, that's a lot. >> before you go -- >> reporter: sure. andrew >> steve, before we get to you, we have an expert panel. we were going to talk about the jobless claims numbers this news stepping in large part on that, you have to think a little bit about the timing so i was actually going to ask you about that do they get the jobless claims numbers in advance we're watching the futures obviously move on this news. we were about 200 points in the red on the dow things have now swung back and forth. we're now up about 35, now up to 50 points.
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it's been moving around there. in terms of what this means, how much bigger is this than what was -- oftentimes you've heard steven mnuchin talking about how the other program was going to be lev vered by the fed. how much is new? how much was built into the other program but not rolled out? >> reporter: i think a lot of this or most of this i -- fundamentally new. remember we talked about the idea that the fed could -- >> yes >> reporter: -- take that from the c.a.r.e.s. act i haven't done the math. 195 as a percentage of 2.3, i think they're close to that ten to one leverage ratio. >> that's exactly the point. >> reporter: maybe even 11 to 1. >> i think steve, the point i'm making, to some degree while this is new, no question it's
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new, i think the market was anticipating given that we've talked about the leverage issue and steve mnuchin talked about that issue of trying to have the fed lever it, some version of this -- the specifics we didn't know but i'm trying to understand sort of how much was baked into the cake by the markets in terms of, you know, you would have -- on a normal day given the kind of flower power we're talking about if it wasn't baked into the cake, you would have thought the market in terms of the futures would have rocketed on that maybe they will later in terms of opening up. that's why i'm trying to determine what's new and what isn't? >> i have no idea, andrew. i'm reporting the news as reported from the federal reserve. all of the details did not exist as of 8:29 they exist at 8:20 did the market bake the money in i don't know >> we will talk to our panel of experts on the jobless claims
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number and this new news rick santelli, of course, is with us. glen hubbard, economic advisers chair and austin goolsbee is with us. cea chair and tyler booth school of business and kate moore from black ro blackrock and our own mike santoli. professor hubbard, what's your sense of both the jobless claims number and the fire power we're now hearing from the fed >> well, i think we expected a high jobless claims number my own math was over 6 million. pretty close the question is not how bad it is, it's really bad, but how quickly it can turn around that's mainly about health policy, but it's also about economic policy and incomes. on the fed, the 2.3 trillion is about five times the total capital, ten times the partial capital. the fed has two questions though, one, the main street
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loans have to get made before the fed can buy them and, second, 10 to 1 leverage is going to be awfully high for the portfolio steve liesman talked about unless the fed plans to lose more of its capital. >> austin goolsbee, is the money we're seeing coming out of the fed and the government going to be enough given the jobless claims numbers that we're seeing >> i don't think so. this is a savage number and this ties effectively the biggest number of all times by a factor of 10. 1/10 of this number before two weeks ago would have been the worst jobless claims we ever had. and this is probably still an under estimate of what the unemployment situation is because in state after state you've completely overloaded the unemployment insurance system. you've got people lined up in the state of new york, for example, you have to physically talk to someone, you can't just do it online
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you have people reporting they've called 200 times to try to get through and file an application and they just get a busy signal. i think the fed is doing what they should do this was already baked in, i think. this is exactly what the men has to go towards. the whole monetary policy channel is so -- not antiquated but is not really directly appropriate to the nature of the shock that's happening here that i don't think it's going to end up being enough. >> kate, how's the investment community thinking about this number, the fed reaction specifically today >> reporter: yeah, i have to say, all of these waves of policy programs and support are really encouraging investors we've seen strong performance from the market in recent days a lot of this is based on better
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health news. also this promise of continued health policy support. what we've heard about is hearing something from joe what we don't expect them to give firm guidance for the second quarter or third quarter, we don't know what the path of the virus will look like, the tone from the companies and their experience in the first quarter will tell people a lot about what it's going to take to recover. that will make it a lot easier for investors to start pricing assets. >> you're optimistic it sounds like, kate >> i'm modestly optimistic we're still running a modest amount of cash we're looking for opportunities. every time we get a big bang policy, the market will react a little bit positively. it shortens the time it dampens the pain. it leads us to believe we can get back to something that is closer to normal activity over future quarters instead of
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future years >> mike santoli, here's the question that i -- and i've asked the question before, but i'll ask it to you now the stock market is off about 17% from its all-time highs. it is acting as if we are to the point of hospitalization and some of these other numbers we're seeing today would send you back, frankly -- well, the 2009 or '10. square that circle >> reporter: well, it doesn't send you back to 2009 and '10 in terms of the size of the economy, in terms of the earnings base of companies obviously we don't know exactly how far back in time fundamentally this is going to take us, but i can't necessarily draw it down to the penny as to how this makes sense, what the market is pricing in yes, we're down 17% from an all-time high, but if you look at the parts of the market that
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are most leveraged to the deeply affected areas of the economy, they're down a ton so i think there's a little bit of a kind of competency composition effect if i look at what the fed did today, just quickly in terms of how it might filter into markets, the state and local support is tremendous, i think, because it just removes another potential air pocket down the road in policy not waiting for congress to try and backstop that. what the fed has done along the way is say we're going to remove them. it creates more of a cushion for
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the economy. >> hey, rick, what's your take given that we just talked literally 12 minutes ago >> reporter: the news from steve is important the jobless claims are useless austan says it's 1,/10 so what. we shut all of the consolidating claims off for a number of weeks. that makes perfect sense there's no information there there's information to what steve is telling us because the amount of money that the government, the agencies, the fed are bringing to contrast the effects of the coronavirus in such a digital, real-time fashion is a good start and that's why the equity markets
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are pricing where they're pricing. and as far as the technology of monetary policy, you want to spend some money on infrastructure, i understand bridges and roads, but i'll tell you the infrastructure that needs to be fixed. states like new york need to be able to process these things faster if amazon can deliver anything under the sun in two days or less and is doing remarkable in challenged time, the challenge for states to improve their infrastructure online whether it's benefits or things that will get larger over time as the governments create bigger social nets for society is something we ought to spend a whole lot more money on >> andrew -- >> i want to jump in. >> reporter: i want to follow up on what rick was saying. i'm sure you've been following the reporting we've done over the last couple of weeks where there were substantial questions about the fed's ability to step into these markets in places where it has never done. it's never wanted to do
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municipal bonds. it doesn't want to get into the business of telling states to raise taxes. telling them to raise taxes or owning their debt. it doesn't want to be involved in credit markets and lending. the fed is supposed to be separate from all of that. the question all along would have been can it do it will it do it? how will it do it? what we've answered today is that it has -- it seems to have figured out -- i must say i haven't read the term sheet. we'll let people on wall street read the term sheet to see how this is going to really, really work the fact is the central bank has found a way to go into places it never would before in ways that protect itself getting back to something glen was saying glen, the 10% backstop from the treasury is not all there is i think what we can do is we can add up the 10% back stop, the 11% backstop from the treasury, the 5% share taken from the banks and there could yet be an additional haircut on the loans. you understand what a haircut
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is >> yeah. yeah >> reporter: you give $100 collateral, you give $90 worth of loans there could be as much as i don't know what you want to call it, a 20 or 30% protection the big news here is the central bank going to places where it's never gone before and seemingly figured out a way to do that in context of existing law governing our central bank. >> the only thing about that -- >> glen, i wanted to -- >> -- is they had already announced it they had already announced that they were going to move into municipal bonds. the thing new today is they're explaining in a little more detail exactly how that it's going to work, but i think the reason the market is not going crazy is because the target amount and the target areas were kind of already known.
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>> steve, do you want to respond to that? >> i was going to say i think one of the reasons it's not going crazy is because we have a lot of news flow to get through. again, i think the policy backstop and the unprecedented support is necessary but it's not going to be sufficient in us figuring out exactly what the path of earnings or health of companies is going to be without therapeutics and without a vaccine and without return to somewhat normal activity so it's hard to say that just policy alone will cause the equity market to surge past 2800 or the s&p or any sustainable period of time we need more fundamental grounding in order to get i think a strong leg and sustained leg up in the equity market. >> hey, glen, one of the questions i wanted to ask you if i could is you had written that paper i think early on in this talking about loan forgiveness
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and trying to keep people on board in terms of people getting paid throughout this process you know, one of the things that's happened now as this gets extended and becky talked to bill gates earlier today on the program and you really could hear just how extended this could get, the liquidity problem becomes a solvency problem i wondered how that gets dealt with by the fed in this kind of instance. >> that's the question this is a fiscal policy problem. austan got it right. the c.a.r.e.s. program was about grants it was about getting money to businesses that need it. the fed could buy up the ppp loans but it's not a lending market the true small business lending market being stood up by the fed is new territory for the fed that will have to still involve some measure of grants i don't think we're in any business where it's simply a lack of loans. i think there's a real solvency problem for a lot of small and
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mid-sized firms. >> okay. we've got to wrap it up. i want to thank our expert panel of guests during what has been the last 20 minutes of some crazy news and we appreciate all of them being with us and appreciate rick bringing us the number and steve of course bringing us that news. meantime, i want to hand it over to becky at casa quick. >> thanks. let's bring in jim cramer. jim, what did you think of the jobless claims number, 6.6 million? what did you think of the fed's moves to try and kind of up the amount of lending? >> reporter: i agree with santoli. we did not get a good number i am shocked that the fed is right there. you know right now, i have nancy -- i have speaker pelosi on tonight and a lot of the issue is what are we going to do for municipalities and states? bingo, you just got a huge backstop there has been some question about what's going to happen
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with ppp and the loans they just told us, don't worry about the loans. this is the fed working incredibly in tandem with the treasury secretary, steve mnuchin, who will be on at 9:20 today i think to talk about this look, i mean, they're giving it all she' if we got anything that was antiviral, anything that was test, test, test, then i think what you would see is you could reopen the economy now and that is very -- that's what's at stake. how quickly we can reopen it, because there's a lot of people in washington who feel if we have to wait two months then this is a depression if we have to wait one month, it's going to be a u recession, no one is thinking a v anymore i think jerome powell, being so ahead of the game versus what we saw in 20008, where there was just a lot of pickering. and when steve liesman announced it, it was like a holy cow moment when the treasury secretary went
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to come on, i think it verifies they're ahead of even what the democrats want right now on thabl. i think this is better >> i wonder -- >> it's just incredible what they want to do. incredible >> is this -- it sounded to me, jim, like this is instead of what the white house was talking about last night, how they want this additional money for small businesses and then the situation you get in with nancy pelosi and chuck schumer saying we're not giving more until we get more money for hospitals and for state and local municipalities along with that does this kind of remove the need for any of that to happen or go through congress, the fed step s in and does it themselve? >> i think if you're a municipal chain and what to come to the market, if i'm allowed to buy the paper, i would buy it if it's backstopped by the fed. we don't know exactly the terms or exactly what the fine print is, but wow. i mean, let's open for business. i think this was --i'm stunned
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at this. i have to tell you, this fed is the most aggressive fed. they do not want to be known as the reason why we went into a depression if we get the science to match what the government is doing here, and i know we all want the community banks to do faster, but remember, you have the sba, which is backlogged, community banks are baglocked, major banks are backlogged, and you hear this and say hold out, hold out, it's coming. it's coming. it really ishold, as i'm sure joe knows what i'm talking about. you have to stay in business, because if you do, there's a cavalry coming here. i'm very impressed the fed is just very -- the fed is on its game this is what is needed because we have to fight off a depression we have to get america open for business >> jim, i guess if it's all of these things, i'm surprised that the market reaction. we were down a couple hundred points, we have gone up a couple hundred points, but it seems like it's more important than the market is indicating at this
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point. >> i agree we need to hear something positive vaccine, something positive antiviral we have social distancing, but it does not eradicate. if we eradicated this thing, we would not be thinking china just passed us, we would not be thinking is there a chinese hegemony and they're able to spread all their wealth around the world and we're hobbled. it would be, you know what, this is the time to buy stocks. but unfortunately, we need the science, too and science is lagging the fed >> all right, kind of inevitably, it does take longer with the science to step up to the situation. >> it sure does. don't write them off there's too many people doing good things, whether it's pfizer, j & j, rejgeneron. when i look at social distancing, i say, you want to see social distancing, watch what happens with costco's earnings they're going to get crushed people are selling costco on social distancing. so we do have earnings coming
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up and earnings may not jive with what the s&p futures are going to do. but look, what can i tell you? what powell just said, listen, there's money. if you're in business, there's money. there's money for cruise ships we know that there's money for nordstrom got money. we know that slack got money there's money available. we're not going to have a credit crunch it's not going to be a credit crunch it will be a science crunch but not a credit crunch. >> jim, do you care about earnings i have been hearing about people kind of withdrawing guidance, no kidding. obviously, you have do that. earnings coming out, like okay, i'm not expecting anything out of the earnings season coming up show me forward. >> let's watch ge. ge's earnings were pitd fiful the fact isthey're not losing money, but no saving grace we have stocks like boeing who have just moved dramatically, and i don't know if that's sustainable. i think the hotels just moved up
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big, travel and leisure moved up big. i don't know if that's sustainable. at least it doesn't sound like they're going let these companies go out of business they want to keep big and small in business. it's very smart. i think the small and medium is what i care about because big always triumphs in the end, but small and medium, it's just a matter of paper backlog. i spoke with some major bankers last night, furious at them, saying what is it with you guys? they come back and say if you knew how many millions of loans we have to process, so we have to keep people in business we have to keep the states from running out of money because of covid. the fed just took care of this, i would like to hear what nancy pelosi says tonight, because if i were the speaker, i would say, you know what, we just got a real break here. and all we have to do now is just keep the economy, the small and medium sized business, have to get the loans faster, work this weekend i just feel better i just want to have something other than social distancing, because eradication is what
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makes it so that we have a great stock market, not social distancing >> yeah, the short term, it does not look great no matter what. this lockdown is going to continue we have to see the science catch up with it the medium term probably depends on what kind of industry you're in for restaurants and retail, i'd can see going back to those sooner for something like the cruise lines, before there's a demand for that, i think consumers themselves, americans themselves are going to think twice about which things they decide to go back to when >> i think it's airlines, they're at the cusp, and we have phil lebeau, because united airlines, if they can travel the traffic, i would feel better if people would be willing to fly, if people had masks, if everybody could take their temperature, all these things will be so much more positive. i say science, tests and masks, and recognize masks are good we got a bad call that masks weren't good if each side wears mask and osha gets involved, we would get
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people back into the stores, which does matter, and stores are going to stay open because there's all the credit in the world. i can't wait to see what secretary mnuchin says i think they're going to put together a plan with smart business people to get this economy open people that we respect, who come on our air so i see a lot of momentum, but we just need an antibody break, something. we know there's a lot of people saying they have it, but we know this turns out to be much easier to get and much harder to cure >> jim, thank you. we're going to see you in just a few minutes and we'll be watching for your interview with secretary mnuchin. >> watch ge, becky horrendous number. horrendous >> let's get -- let's get to -- we have the energy secretary waiting here the largest oil producing nations in the world are scheduled to meet virtually this morning. energy secretary dan broullette. what do you think will happen
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today? you will be there. can 10 million get done in terms of daily cuts? >> i'm optimistic. i won't be there, just to clarify. i won't be at the meeting itself but i will be watching the outcome. no, sir, i will not be there, but we're optimistic they'll reach agreement between the saudis and russians in an effort to stabilize the markets >> we have already -- the domestic cut already totals 2 million. can we go in and say we're down just because of demand or by 2 million, therefore you don't need additional cuts guaranteed domestically >> there's no question about that the market is off, as you have been talking about all morning, with demand being what it is gasoline sales are roughly 55%, 60% of what they were a year ago. that demand downturn has led to production cuts in the united states of about 2 million barrels a day throughout the remainder of 2020.
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>> when we heard 10 million and the president said maybe as much as 15 million, do you think that's a possibility >> yes, i do i think amongst the 22 or 23 opec or opec-plus companies, as they refer to themselves, i think they can easily get to 10 million. perhaps even higher. and certainly higher if you include the other nations who produce oil. nations like canada, brazil, others easily done. >> did you -- when you actually have had conversations, as i mentioned, last weekend, you spoke to mbs did he indicate to you that they were going to work in earnest with the russians about dealing with this glut >> yes, i think they're all working in very constructive way, in a good faith way i think, you know, it's important to remember that whether they reach a formal agreement or not, everyone is
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going to reduce production as long as we have this demand curve being what it is there is simply no other choice, when you produceoil, you have two options. you can either use it as part of the demand or you can store it and storage is running out i mean, at some point, everyone is going to cut production until we turn the economy back on. >> you're actually going to the g-20 meeting i know you're going to lead a discussion there we appreciate it and we'll be watching, and please come back we will check with you >> take care >> all right thank you. take care as well. tgit i worried that was spelling something bad. thank god it's thursday. happy passover happy easter markets are solid this morning becky and andrew, we'll see you on monday.
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