The world battles coronavirus as the United States enters near total lockdown.
The Trump administration lays out what the future holds, and Bernie and Biden hit each other with their walkers.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN Podcasts.
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Well, we're all still here.
Guys, it's going to be okay.
As I said last Friday, it's going to be okay.
We just have to do what we have to do, and that mainly means stay at home, make sure that your family is taken care of.
Here's a few things for you to do today.
Here's what I'm going to try and do today anyway, if I'm a good person.
What I'm going to try and do today, a few things.
First, call five friends, find out how they're doing.
Social distancing means that we are not allowed as human beings to do all the things that we actually Usually do in times of crisis.
Usually when there's a time of crisis you get together with friends.
Usually get together with your religious community.
Now we have this very odd circumstance where we're being encouraged to stay away from all of our friends and family and from our local community.
This does increase loneliness.
It does increase feelings of angst.
Obviously everybody's very nervous.
This is obviously at the back of everybody's mind.
But here are a few things that we can do.
First, call five friends.
You got a phone.
Call a friend.
Use... use...
FaceTime.
Do something to reach out to five people.
Just find out how they're doing today.
Find out if an elderly neighbor or relative needs any grocery or pharmacy goods and bring them over.
Have you got somebody in your family who's over the age of 65?
Make sure that they're actually stocked up.
If they're not stocked up and you are young, go buy the groceries for them.
Bring them to them.
The supply lines are still in place.
There may be some temporary shortages of some goods that will alleviate as time goes on.
Also, Go out to a local store or call a local store would be even better.
Call a local store and buy a gift card.
You know that you're going to use that gift card later and right now everybody's in a cash crunch.
So many stores are shutting down.
I personally know people who run small businesses and they are seeing their business basically be destroyed by coronavirus because they're operating on slim margins.
They're trying to keep people paid.
Well, if you know you're going to buy from the store later, And you just can't go to the store right now because the store is closed.
Instead, buy a gift card.
Give gift cards to your friends if you've got the expendable cash to do so.
And just make clear to those businesses that you are going to keep patronizing the business and give them the temporary float of basically paying them up front.
Buy a gift card from a local store for later use.
It'll help tie them over.
And finally, go for a walk.
Like, seriously, turn off the news.
Turn off Twitter.
Go for a walk.
Don't hang out with people who are walking with you.
You know, social distancing and all that.
But get outside.
Look at the sky.
It still exists.
Look at the sun.
It still exists.
The temptation is, obviously, to be sort of stuck in your house.
Just because we are supposed to self-isolate, sort of, does not mean that we can't engage with the world around us.
And there is something inherently optimistic about going outside for a walk.
Here are a few tips for today.
Now, I want to start off today by giving some actual information on coronavirus.
We're all going to always, we do this on the show always anyway.
We start off with information and then we get to the opinion of it all.
Some useful information for you about coronavirus.
So right now, one of the biggest problems with coronavirus is we actually don't know all that much about it.
Most people don't know the symptoms.
They feel like, okay, if my nose starts to run, if I have a dry cough, does this mean that I have coronavirus?
The answer is, in all likelihood, no.
You probably just have allergies, right?
It's the middle of March.
The chances are very high that you just have a normal cold or you have allergies.
So there's a good article in the New York Times today by a woman named Nouval Shaikh.
Talking about the differences between coronavirus and allergies and what you should be looking for.
And this is good to know, because honestly, it's hard not to go to the most paranoid place.
You start feeling a little bit ill, and you're like, oh my god, I've got coronavirus, and now I've infected the entire planet.
My entire family is at risk.
Here are the symptoms that you should be looking for.
You have to consider the time of year.
According to the New York Times, allergies and influenza tend to be seasonal.
If you have a runny nose in the spring, and this happens every year, allergies are the likeliest culprit.
You may have noticed last week that I had a bit of a cough.
I know it wasn't coronavirus because I get a cough literally this time every single year, plus I had fasted, plus I'm not sleeping because of the new baby.
If it's winter and flu is raging in your community, then that is the probable explanation.
The flu is far more widespread than coronavirus.
If you have flu-like symptoms in warming weather, in a place with documented coronavirus transmission, then maybe it's not.
The flu influenza does tend to tie back in the summer.
We don't know yet whether coronavirus is going to do the same thing, especially because, as The Times points out, there have been coronavirus infections spreading in places like Singapore and in the Southern Hemisphere, which are currently experiencing summer temperatures.
Also, consider where the symptoms first started appearing According to one doctor, it's usually your nose and eyes where you develop symptoms of seasonal allergies.
The seasonal flu is more likely to affect your whole body, as is the case for many other respiratory viruses, including coronavirus.
So, if you have a fever, headache, muscle aches, then you should be considering whether it's flu or coronavirus.
If, instead, you're just getting, you know, runny nose, itchy eyes, then in all likelihood, you just have allergies or maybe you just have a cold.
It's hard to tell the difference between flu and coronavirus, but the difference between a cold and a flu, we all know.
And so if it feels more like a cold than it feels like the flu, the chances that you actually have coronavirus, really, really slim.
So, there's a little bit of information for you.
Also, not very many people are experiencing nausea or vomiting.
About 5% of patients with coronavirus, only 4% are developing diarrhea.
Those are symptoms of sort of more typical flu.
So fever would be the first one, right?
This is why everybody is being tested for fever, body aches, fever, chills, right?
That would be the stuff where you start to worry.
Even then, only if it starts to get bad enough that you're starting to have shortness of breath should you really consider going in for a test.
According to the New York Times, Pay close attention to whether your symptoms worsen over time.
Discomfort due to allergy remains consistent until you treat it or the allergen goes away.
Symptoms of the flu tend to resolve in about a week, but the new coronavirus seems to cause more severe symptoms than the average seasonal flu.
Seems to have a higher fatality rate if you're elderly, you have other health conditions, then obviously you gotta be quicker to get a test.
If you are younger and you're experiencing this sort of stuff, then you're probably supposed to stay home unless it gets a little bit more severe.
Mild cases of the flu resolve by themselves within a few days.
Coronavirus tends to last a little bit longer, but most people with mild cases tend to get better in about two weeks.
So there's a little bit of information for you.
If you're not feeling great today, then think about that description of symptoms and see sort of which one it fits.
Okay, in just a second.
I'm going to give you some information on where we currently stand in terms of the total number of case counts, and it's kind of fascinating to see how this thing has leveled off in China while it continues to grow fairly exponentially in Italy.
Also, we're going to talk about the different strategies the countries have been using to deal with coronavirus because there's a sort of fascinating, from a data perspective, social experiment currently taking place between the United States and the UK.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so here are the total number of coronavirus cases by country right now.
This is according to the Johns Hopkins study.
Now, Johns Hopkins has a really good chart of all of this.
China's basically leveled off.
They've 81,000 cases in China.
They've had 81,000 cases in China for the last several weeks.
That is because they locked down basically 700 million people.
One of the benefits of being an authoritarian country is you can do that sort of thing.
One of the downsides of being an authoritarian country is you wait two months to do it and then try to shoot everybody who talks about it.
So that's the downside.
The upside is that eventually you go full authoritarian and lock the thing down.
Italy is the country that is experiencing significant problems.
Italy obviously now has 24,747 documented cases with 1,809 documented deaths.
Now again, it's very difficult to tell what the actual death rates here are because it is all reliant on who exactly is getting tested.
And if only the most severe people are getting tested because you have a shortage of tests, right?
Only the most severe are encouraged to go get tested.
Obviously, that's going to be elevated death rates.
So there have only been 25,000 actual confirmed cases in Italy.
The chances are very high that a lot more people than that have actually obtained coronavirus in Italy.
But they had 368 people die of coronavirus just yesterday.
So obviously, they have exponential growth in Italy.
Iran, we have no idea what the actual numbers are.
They're not going to be They're saying 15,000 infected in Iran with nearly a thousand deaths, 853 total deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
But the numbers are likely to be much higher because, again, repressive dictatorships have an incentive to lie about their actual numbers.
Spain is seeing exponential death.
Spain has 9,407 documented cases with 335 total deaths.
There are 530 people recovered.
Now, as time goes on, the numbers of recovered are going to increase pretty radically too because the number of people in hospitals who are finally being released, it takes a little while for people who even enter a hospital to be released.
South Korea has really leveled this thing off.
They've only had 75 total deaths in South Korea, and the total number of documented cases is 8,236.
That is because South Korea took significant social distancing measures.
They really cracked down.
They shut down large places of business very early on.
Germany is seeing a rapid increase in the number of actual cases, but very few actual deaths.
So Germany has 6,672 actual cases, only 14 deaths.
So far, which is kind of fascinating.
There have been some theories as to why things are going so wrong in Italy, but so right in Germany.
And one of the theories is that there is a lot of cross-generational pollination in Italy.
People tend to hang out with older relatives in Italy a lot more often than they do in Germany.
And this does lead to some serious questions about the measures that are being taken in the West right now.
By the way, France has about 5,400 cases, 127 total deaths.
The United States right now has 69 total deaths and 3,800 documented cases.
So that is where things stand on a country-by-country level.
The fascinating thing is seeing how different countries respond to all of this.
So obviously Italy has locked everything down, but they did it late.
The United States is currently locking everything down.
In my home city of Los Angeles, everything has basically been locked down.
Mayor Eric Garcetti, who couldn't lock down 65,000 homeless people in the city.
So presumably those people who are wandering around and are absolutely risk factors for coronavirus.
You have a bunch of people who are living on the streets, who are in no sense clean.
I mean, Homeless people are not famous for showering very often or upkeeping with the sort of personal... How are they washing their hands?
A lot of hand-washing going on in the homeless community here in Los Angeles, living in areas that are extremely dirty.
You have 65,000 homeless people in L.A.
County alone.
That has not been locked down for years and was basically facilitated by the L.A.
City government.
People were being told their stuff couldn't be moved.
People were being told it was fine for them to sleep on the street.
So all of that is fine, but Mayor Eric Garcetti is locking down the entire city of Los Angeles.
He announced this last night.
I've signed an order tonight that will do the following.
It prevents people from gathering in close proximity by banning and closing our bars and nightclubs.
Second, restaurants and retail facilities, we will now have prohibited on-site food but permitted for delivery, takeout, and drive-through.
Groceries, pharmacies, and food banks are, of course, exempt from this order of closure.
Movie theaters, though, performance venues, bowling alleys, arcades, gyms, and fitness centers will be closed to the public.
Okay, so there is no end date on all of this as far as Garcetti is concerned.
In reality, I can't see this thing lasting for weeks on end.
And the idea that you're going to shut down the entire American economy, and this is happening in New York too, they're going to see a shutdown of the entire American economy for months on end.
I mean, I honestly don't know how people of the West are going to respond to that sort of thing, particularly if the data coming out from the UK is wildly different.
First of all, I'm not sure how any of this is enforceable.
I mean, what are you going to station a cop at every bowling alley in the United States?
You're going to station a cop at every restaurant?
Okay, the fact is that right now people are going to deal with it because these restaurants will still have heavy levels of takeout orders, and my family is still going to get takeout for sure, but How exactly do you police that?
I mean, if the local restaurant has people who are coming in and picking up food, how are you gonna stop somebody from sitting down at a table and eating?
Is there gonna be a cop there who's just gonna haul everybody off to jail?
How exactly is that going to work?
We've seen something similar happen in New York City, where Bill de Blasio went to the gym this morning, went to the YMCA this morning, because the man is a moron.
He's shutting down all of these restaurants in the same way that Garcetti is.
By the way, people in the United States, some are taking this seriously, some people really are not.
There were pictures from Disney World last night where it was completely packed.
Now Disneyland and Disney World, I believe, are shutting down, but completely packed.
Bourbon Street, there were cops out in the streets last night having to remind people, guys, like, there's a pandemic on.
Go home.
What is the police authority in this sort of situation?
Are they actually going to start arresting people en masse who don't have coronavirus?
We have not yet seen the consequences of that.
The truth is that voluntary civil society has done a fairly good job of locking this down so far.
Putting the prospect of government compulsion on the table in a way where the government can't actually enforce, that may carry some of its own consequences.
It's unclear exactly how Garcetti plans to enforce any of this at all.
Nonetheless, as we see, the measures that are being taken are wildly, wildly different across countries.
In the United States, the CDC is now recommending no gatherings of 50 people or more for eight weeks, for eight weeks, which Wow.
Wow.
I mean, I fail to see, honestly, how they don't start putting restrictions on air travel.
If that is the actual risk, if what we are being told is that gatherings of 50 people or more are basically verboten in the United States and that people should not gather in numbers.
And why 50?
Why not 15 or 20?
I mean, basically they're saying it shouldn't even be 15 or 20.
They're basically saying stay in your home.
How do you say to people, stay in your home for two months For two months.
I mean, based on the risk factors that we have seen thus far.
I understand exponential growth.
I explained it last week on the show.
I understand geometric growth, right?
We explained it last week on the show.
We understand the risk factors.
The question is, how long can a society afford to be in complete lockdown?
And how long can the U.S.
government take on debt without eventually people saying this is the new normal and the economy completely collapsing?
Right now, everybody is sort of assuming that this thing comes to an end in eight weeks or six weeks or 12 weeks or whenever it is.
As long as we know what the actual end time is, like when this thing actually comes to a stop, then we know when the recovery begins.
But if this becomes an indefinite suspension and we're all just supposed to stay home, how long can the government just continue to keep paying people based on what?
Based on the prospect of future growth, if there is no prospect of future growth.
That's why you said the markets tanked this morning.
We'll get to that in just a little while.
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So as I say, the CDC has now recommended that no gatherings with 50 people or more be held in the United States for the next eight weeks, which basically means the end of all sporting events, all movies, all entertainment industry events.
It means the end of going to church in any sort of large numbers or synagogue in any sort of large numbers.
The CDC does not apply this to the day-to-day operation of organizations like schools, institutes of higher learning, or businesses, and added it was not intended to supersede the advice of local health officials.
It's hard to see how the schools remain open under those circumstances.
I mean, schools everywhere are closing.
My kids were let off at the end of last week.
LAUSD was let off at the end of last week.
The New York school districts have now all been let off.
Schools across the country are being closed for this thing.
And that is, I would assume, all the way until the summer at this point.
It is March.
If you're assuming eight weeks, that takes you to the middle of May.
So at that point, there's no point, right?
I mean, now summer has happened.
So there's no reason to go back to school.
The CDC says the recommendation is made in an attempt to reduce introduction of the virus into new communities and to slow the spread of infection in communities already affected by the virus.
The CDC urged people to take care with even small gatherings.
They said events of any size should be continued only if they can be carried out with adherence to guidelines for protecting vulnerable populations, hand hygiene, and social distancing.
When feasible, organizers should modify events to be virtual as well.
So basically, the end of social life in America.
As we know, in California, the state has already told residents 65 and older to stay home completely.
They're now calling for everybody above the age of 65 to shelter in their homes.
Massachusetts is already moving to ban dining in bars and restaurants, beginning on Tuesday, effectively closing Boston's bars for St.
Patrick's Day.
Puerto Rico is setting some strict measures in the United States, imposing a 9 p.m.
to 5 a.m.
curfew and closing non-essential businesses.
Gavin Newsom said, we're calling for the home isolation of all seniors in California.
So really strict steps being taken.
Meanwhile, as I say, the fascinating sort of counterexample is what the UK is doing.
That's the fascinating counterexample.
And this is really the way that we're going to be able to tell whether all of this is an overreaction in terms of what we are doing about it, or whether the UK has just blatantly screwed this thing up and a lot of people are going to die because the UK is screwing this thing up.
According to the Financial Times, the UK is basically asking everybody over 70 to self-isolate for up to four months.
And then they're saying everybody else, go out and do what you want.
And the reason they're saying that is they're saying, listen, there is a vast difference in the vulnerability of older populations, people with pre-existing conditions, and people who are younger.
And it's actually not good to have people who are younger destroying the economy of your country by staying home in order to protect people who you can protect by simply having them basically self-quarantine, right?
Have everybody who's in the vulnerable population stay home, have everybody else go to work, And then, if all those people infect each other, and then if all those people experience mild symptoms, and then if they spend two weeks being a little bit sick, and they're saying, by the way, if you have a cough, or you have a fever, then go home and self-quarantine for a week, and you do all of that sort of stuff, then in a few months, there'll be herd immunity.
That's sort of the theory that is ongoing in the UK, and it'll be fascinating.
I mean, if they have the same death rates as the United States, or South Korea, or China, or even Italy, Then the question is going to be, did we just destroy the entire world economy for several months on end in order to protect a vulnerable population when the vulnerable population could have been protected simply by having them shelter in place?
According to the Financial Times, the UK government will ask everyone aged over 70 to self-isolate for up to four months, has called on manufacturers to increase production of ventilators.
Matt Hancock is the health secretary and said the elderly would be asked to take measures to protect themselves from the virus in the coming weeks.
He said that the coronavirus would disrupt the lives of almost everybody in the UK.
The question, and you're seeing kind of panicked messages coming out of companies and coming out of Public health officials.
The question is whether that is based on data or whether that is based on the sheer sense that if we don't do something and do something right now, that this thing could rage out of control.
So how much of that is realistic?
Again, we're now in the forecasting business because here's the thing.
If you take these really heavy measures and things don't get really bad, then you get to say it was the heavy measures that prevented things from getting really bad.
If you don't take the heavy measures and things get really bad, people go, why the hell didn't you take the heavy measures?
If you don't take the heavy measures and things end up being pretty good, then everybody says, why the hell did you take the really heavy measures in the first place?
So the sort of safest thing to do as a public leader, I've been saying this about President Trump for a while, the safest thing to do as a public leader is to overreact.
What's the worst that happens?
That you overreact, and then there's less death, and then you say, right, there was less death because I overreacted?
There's no counterfactual.
UK right now is providing a counterfactual, so it'll be fascinating to see whether that counterfactual actually results in the same sort of death rates as in the United States.
The number of people diagnosed with COVID-19 in the UK has now reached 1,372.
The number of deaths is at 35.
All of the deaths have been among those with underlying health conditions or aged over 60.
Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show on the BBC, Hancock said the government would introduce emergency legislation through the House of Commons next week to give the authorities the powers they need to force people to self-isolate.
Hancock also said he could not rule out closing non-essential businesses like restaurants and bars.
He said, we haven't ruled that out.
We'll do whatever is necessary.
But the sort of differentiation between the age groups here, again, it provides a fascinating counterfactual to the U.S.
reaction, which has basically been on the order of South Korea or China.
And yes, we are reacting faster than the Chinese did.
We are reacting much faster than the Italians did.
The Italians only started closing things down at day 15 since when this stuff started appearing in their country.
We've closed everything down day 10, day 11.
Now this is going to have significant ramifications for the economy, of course.
And that is why the Fed is now moving to lower the interest rates.
We'll get to the financial ramifications of this for just a second, but first, a note of optimism.
Everybody's kind of looking at the empty shelves right now and freaking out, but the supply chains will remain strong.
What's happening right now is that you're seeing the first wave of sort of panic buying, people going out there and trying to stock up.
Listen, I get it.
I've got a family.
I want to make sure...
I'll be honest with you.
I told my wife two weeks ago to go and stock up as soon as this stuff started hitting the United States.
I said, listen, I think this is going to be a problem.
Go and stock up.
So our fridge is full.
For people who are not, they're panic buying right now.
But don't worry, that stuff will be restocked.
All the idiots out there who are saying things like, this is what a capitalist economy looks like in times of crisis.
Yeah, and this is what a socialist economy looks like all the time.
The difference is that there's going to be milk on the shelves tomorrow morning thanks to capitalism.
There will be Purell back on the shelves this week, thanks to capitalism.
Thank God for capitalism.
Thank God for supply chains.
Thank God for free markets.
The New York Times is reporting the aisles and aisles of empty store shelves give the appearance the United States is running out of food, but the nation's biggest retailers, dairy farmers and meat producers say that isn't so.
The food supply chain they say remains intact, has been ramping up to meet the unprecedented stockpiling brought on by the coronavirus epidemic.
Even so, shoppers can most likely expect to see some empty shelves intermittently as the nation's networks of food producers, distributors, and retailers are stretched as never before.
Industries calibrated to supply consumers with just enough of what they need on a given day cannot keep up with a nationwide surge of relentless shoppers.
Basically, there's a rush on goods.
But folks, don't freak out.
Again, as long as you have enough food, Or enough resources to go get takeout for the next three, four days, then you will be fine, right?
You don't actually need to stock up as much as everybody.
People who are buying, like, water bottles and freaking out about, okay, the water supply's not getting shut off.
Guys, if you have to rely on your stock of water bottles, we are so screwed.
You ain't gonna live, right?
I mean, if they shut off the electricity and the water, that is a whole different sort of thing, and no one's talking about any of that.
If you're talking about stocking up, really you should be stocking up on meat, right?
Maybe some dairy products, like the stuff that has a shelf life.
But the sort of panic buying of things like water, like water is the number three panic buying item.
Don't be an idiot.
Okay?
Water is not running out, guys.
It comes right from your tap.
It's free!
Right?
Worst comes to worst, you're gonna be able to have water.
I understand buying rice and dried beans.
Right?
That makes some sense.
Buying pasta.
Right?
That makes some sense.
Although, again, that stuff is gonna last on the shelves for a long time.
But it's fascinating to watch as this sort of stuff happens.
It'll be okay, right?
All that's going to happen is going to be okay.
Now, it's not the grocery stores that are going to be in trouble.
We're going to get to the financial ramifications to all of this in just one second because the Dow Jones Industrial Average had to pause again this morning after the market dropped a thousand points.
So we're going to get to that momentarily.
But first, let's talk about keeping your home safe and secure.
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Okay, so as I say, obviously this is having significant financial ramifications for everybody, and you're going to see the entertainment industry hit really hard.
You're going to see the restaurant industry hit really hard right now.
That means jobs.
There are some economists who believe that we could lose hundreds of thousands of jobs in the month of March and in the month of April as people stop going out, as people stop purchasing, as people stop borrowing to start new businesses.
Basically, the only things that are open right now in a lot of major cities are banks, as well as groceries and pharmacies.
The domestic box office just saw a shellacking.
The domestic box office posted its worst weekend in nearly two decades amid calls to practice social distancing to slow the coronavirus pandemic.
The box office experienced its first weekend fully in the throes of the virus outbreak.
Grosses in the U.S.
and Canada totaled just $55.3 million, plus all the theaters in China are shut down.
And that is a major source of wealth for Hollywood, so Hollywood is just getting crushed Right now, Hollywood had anticipated weak ticket sales, but they had not really anticipated that all of the theaters would be shut down in major cities, which is what is currently happening.
So the dramatic reduction in ticket sales is obviously going to hurt Hollywood.
The question for sports is what's going to happen?
Will sports really ever recover from this hiatus?
We've already seen the NBA has basically suspended the season.
March Madness has been canceled.
The MLB is not even going to start its season.
The question is going to be, how do you even recover from this?
Because six months from now, is coronavirus really gone?
Is it still hanging around the fringes?
Are we going to want to get together in large crowds ever again?
Are the sports that are most likely to succeed going to be those that are basically made for TV?
All of the economic costs are going to be billions and billions of dollars.
And we had on my friend Clay Travis last week, sports broadcaster.
That dude has a three hour sports radio show to fill today.
Like I don't even know what he's going to talk about.
How much can you talk about who's the best center fielder of all time?
Can you do that for like three hours a day forever?
How exactly is that going to work?
So at some point, sports are going to return, but it's going to be a long road.
So in attempting to stop all of this, the Fed slashed its rates to near zero and unveiled a new sweeping program to aid the economy.
The central bank cut rates by a full percentage points and announced a giant bond buying campaign to insulate the economy against coronavirus.
Basically, the Federal Reserve is now saying they're going to buy up some debt.
They're going to buy up mortgage debt.
They're going to buy up student loan debt.
They're going to buy up a bunch of debt in order to prevent people from having those debts called in on them and prevent, for example, a real estate meltdown as banks losing money from businesses closing down start calling in mortgage debt.
Instead, the government's saying, listen, we'll back the mortgage debt.
You don't have to worry about it.
Let people, you know, let people survive right now.
Put everything on pause.
That makes some sense, right?
I mean, this is a global pandemic.
It will come to an end at some point.
People will go back to work.
There will be a recovery.
What doesn't make a ton of sense to me is the Fed dramatically lowering its rates as though this is going to solve the problem.
Like, they've now run out of bullets.
There are no more bullets.
The reason people aren't buying and borrowing right now has nothing, like literally nothing to do with the rates of borrowing.
It's not as though if you lower... There's the typical theory behind the Fed lowering interest rates.
Is that you want people to borrow, you want to jog the economy, so you lower the interest rates to get people to borrow.
But this is a misperception of why people are not borrowing right now.
Nobody is borrowing right now because who the hell is going to borrow into this economy?
You're going to borrow to start a business right now?
Nobody is going to do that.
You're going to borrow to buy a new house right now?
You can barely pay the mortgage on the house that you got.
Lowering the interest rate, now's a good time to refi your mortgage, but lowering your interest rate is not actually going to radically change the status of the economy because, again, there's an underlying issue here, and the underlying issue is fairly obvious.
It's called a global pandemic and nobody going to work ever again.
That would be the global underlying issue.
There's a big difference between that and, for example, the stock market crash of 1929.
That was not brought on by an actual real-world event that jogged everything to a complete and utter halt.
This is not even like 2007-2008 where the banks had basically bet big on the real estate market and then people started being unable to pay back their subprime mortgages and the real estate market collapsed in on itself.
That was just banks making bad bets and they should have been forced to eat the bad bets.
That's not what's happening right now.
What's happening right now is an external event.
And that external shock is destroying the capacity of businesses to operate.
So backing the capacity of businesses to operate, or at least not lose their shirt right now, that makes some sense.
But lowering the interest rates generally is not gonna cause an uptick in the economy.
It's not gonna cause people to borrow.
And that's why you're seeing the markets actually, it's got a major hit this morning.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down at an early hour, about 1,700 points, down over 7%.
The market opened and immediately had to shut for 15 minutes because of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
We're just going to be going up and down for a while here, guys.
Okay, bottom line is this is a yo-yo.
Nobody knows where to price the market.
Nobody even knows how bad this thing is going to get.
And so in the absence of knowing how bad this thing is going to get, it is very difficult to tell where the bottom is.
So I've been saying for a while, if you can afford to buy and hold for a long period of time, now is not a bad time to buy.
I'm not saying this is the bottom of the market.
I don't know where the bottom of the market is.
I know that in 10 years, this is not where the bottom of the market is going to be, even in five years, even in three years, even in two years, I think.
But with that said, I can't say that this is the very best time to buy.
Mohamed El-Erian, a friend of the program and the head of Allianz, he has suggested encouraging people to buy right now in this sort of volatility is probably a mistake.
Again, that's if you have to sell.
If you have extra for liquidity.
Now is actually a fairly good time to buy because if you can buy and hold, then you're never going to lose money on the market over broad periods of time.
In addition to cutting its benchmark interest rate by a full percentage point, returning it to a range of zero to 0.25%, the Fed said it would inject huge sums into the economy by snapping up at least $500 billion of treasury securities and at least $200 billion of mortgage-backed debt over the coming months.
That, again, makes perfect sense because if you're backing the debt of people so that the banks don't have to call in that debt and remove people from their homes, for example, foreclosure rates and people's house value dropping, that's a good thing for a short-term shock just to sort of insulate against that.
That's not bailing out the banks.
That is bailing out everybody.
If you're talking about spiking the economy by somehow lowering the interest rate, that doesn't make any sense.
President Trump praised the central bank move, sought to assure worried Americans that food supplies would not be disrupted.
President Trump has been stumping for a very long time about the lowering of the interest rates, but that is sort of a bizarre, again, a sort of bizarre reaction.
The problem here is not the interest rates.
People are not borrowing because they're not borrowing, and spiking interest rates to zero is not actually going to cause people, like, again, who's going to go out and take a loan in this economy?
Like anyone?
Okay, and lowering the interest rates to zero ain't gonna change a thing.
That does not solve the underlying economic problem, but here was President Trump praising the Fed for cutting interest rates to zero.
He's been calling, like, if Trump had had his way, by the way, worth noting, if Trump had had his way a year ago, this would have been at zero, the federal interest rate, and then we would have no bullets left in the chamber.
Now, we're out of bullets.
So, didn't really help very much.
By the way, worth noting, We are so irresponsible as a people.
We just are, in terms of our government.
We spend a trillion dollars a year more than we take in.
We spend trillions, we spend ourselves into insane debt.
What do you think happens when a crisis hits?
And now you actually have to take out debt.
We're like the morons who went out and bought a boat every single year.
And now, the wage earner in the family died.
And they're like, oh, you know what would have been smart?
Not buying a boat every single year.
Because now we actually have to take out some debt.
Idiotic.
Anyway, here's President Trump praising the Fed for cutting rates to zero.
I want to congratulate the Federal Reserve.
For starters, they've lowered the Fed rate from what it was, which was 1 to 1.25.
And it's been lowered down to 0 to 0.25.
That's really good news.
It's really great for our country.
It's something that we're very happy.
I have to say this.
I'm very happy.
And they did it in one step.
They didn't do it in four steps over a long period of time.
They did it in one step.
And I think that people in the market should be very thrilled.
I will say this.
President Trump's read on the market?
Not accurate, my friends.
Not accurate.
Over the last two weeks, he was like, the market's gonna be fine.
And now he's like, yeah, people in the market will be thrilled.
He said this yesterday.
There's only one problem.
The market immediately opened down 8%, had to shut for 15 minutes, and it's currently down almost 2,000 points.
So, yeah, no on that.
No on that.
It turns out that the president's read on the Fed is not an accurate read on the Fed.
Okay, we're gonna get to More on the global economy and the economic recovery that may follow after all of this, we can hope.
And then we'll get to more of President Trump's administration's policy.
We'll get to the debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders that no one cares about last night, but two oldies demonstrating that they should not be anywhere near the levers of power.
We'll get to all that in just a second.
First, Let's talk about people at your company who you may not need anymore.
Now, right now is an excellent time to make sure that your employees keep getting paid, frankly, right?
I mean, this is a great time to hunker down, make sure that the people who you love, the people who you need are still making a living, right?
If you can do that, that's great.
But if you are looking for somebody better than, say, a person who comes back to the office having been exposed to coronavirus and then just blithely waltzes into the office and just proceeds to take off his shirt, you know, like really enjoy himself, like a Michael Moles type, Well, then maybe you need to look at ZipRecruiter.com.
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Okay, other news.
While so many of us are driven to isolation right now, it is really important, more important than ever, I think, that we come together as a community, particularly online.
The good news is, we are an intranet company.
At The Daily Wire, we want to do everything we can to help our members through this difficult time.
We can hang out together.
In our reporting, we're making sure we bring you facts, and we always do so, so you can understand the situation, you can properly prepare.
In addition to keeping you informed, we also want to help our members take their minds off the stress of the situation.
And so we're launching something new.
We're accelerating the launch of a new show called All Access Live.
Jeremy Boring and I, we're going to host the first live episode tonight at 5 p.m.
Pacific, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
Don't worry, we're safe, both of us.
He's not going to give me corona.
I'm not going to give him corona.
We are neither of us experiencing symptoms.
We are working on additional programming for this week.
As I speak, we want to hang out with you.
I understand.
Listen, I remember being in law school at Harvard Law, and I remember It's been one of the long winters being alone in my dorm.
Basically, we are now all me in law school hanging out alone in our dorm and nothing is comforting as quite as being part of a community online.
We want this show to give you all a chance to hang out with us and each other.
We're going to discuss things outside of the current news.
We're going to talk like religion and movies.
And yes, we'll do the best center fielders ever every day.
We're just going to hang out because I know like now is a great time for us all that we can't hang out in person, but we can hang out online as we do anyway.
So why not expand that so that you can actually You know, get off the schneid a little bit and just spend some time with us.
The show is intended for all AXS members.
During the national emergency in time of isolation, we're opening up to all of our members.
We're going to get through this.
We're going to be stronger as a nation and as a community.
When we do, I really think that, you know, we have to socially, we have to physically distance, but we don't have to socially distance.
I hope that you can join me this evening at 5 p.m.
Pacific, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
Remember, all of our members are able to watch the live stream and join live chat.
We are a community.
We want to hang out with you.
It was actually my personal suggestion.
I think it's really important we all hang out together.
So let's do this thing tonight, 5 p.m.
Pacific, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
We'll see you then.
Go check us out at dailywire.com.
Become a member.
Remember, you don't have to be an All Access member right now.
You may have to later, but right now we're opening up to all of our members of all levels.
So go check us out right now over at dailywire.com.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So again, the Fed is a band-aid on a gaping wound.
The New York Times reports investors were confronted with weak economic readings out of China and the United States.
Chinese officials reported that retail sales, manufacturing activity, and investment in the first two months of the year had slumped even more than economists expected.
A gauge of manufacturing activity in New York State collapsed by the most ever in history in a month.
Economic analyst with the investment bank Jefferies in New York said, Unfortunately, this is the new reality.
This report is a harbinger of what is to come.
European markets also tanked on Monday, falling more than 6%.
France's main stock index fell briefly by 10%.
The moves were intended to ensure that credit flows freely, spurring businesses and households to continue borrowing and spending.
But again, that's idiotic.
Nobody's actually going to borrow and spend in this economy.
The notion that the Fed was going to solve this thing.
The Fed is firing bullets at a miasma.
That's not going to work.
That's not the way any of this works.
Meanwhile, the House has passed a sweeping coronavirus response package.
It's got some good stuff and some bad stuff, as per usual with our government, that included a bipartisan vote to expand access to free testing, which of course is good, providing a billion dollars in food aid, and extending sick leave benefits to vulnerable Americans.
One of the big problems with extending sick leave benefits to vulnerable Americans without government backing is that it's a pretty good way to bankrupt small businesses that are operating right at the margins.
It's easy to say that small businesses should basically keep taking the hit when they're not getting any income.
But what happens when all those small businesses have to declare bankruptcy?
I literally talked to a friend of mine who runs a business yesterday.
He does a major catering and event business.
And he said to me, like, I may have to declare bankruptcy.
I said to him, okay, well, if you do, and then everything gets back on track, I'm always here to give you a loan.
Like, really, I think that people should help each other out if they have the resources to do so.
But the, you know, legislation that forces small businesses to cover paid sick leave, that's all fun and games until it turns out that you're talking about small businesses that have like 75 employees, like more than 50, have 75 employees, and now they're expected to pay indefinite sick leave for people for, what, weeks at a time?
Even if the business has to shut down?
And by the way, I don't believe there's any time limit on that.
I think that the Democrats were able to pass this thing without a sunset provision, which means that even if coronavirus ends, that would still be the case.
Alongside Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he expected the House committees to be working through next week's recess on a new bill meant to address the economic damage wrought by coronavirus, which has devastated the airline hospitality and entertainment industries.
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, I think this is a very good sign of bipartisanship and working together that we can overcome the virus.
And President Trump's approval of the bill was forthcoming via Twitter.
Key Republicans cautioned there are still lingering issues related to a tax credit for paid family sick leave.
McCarthy wants small businesses to have a little bit more flexibility, because right now there is no flexibility in the rules.
One of the major obstacles involved the president's personal demand for a payroll tax cut in the package.
Democrats were not willing to go along with that.
Further actions are likely to be taken in the near future.
The legislation helps provide free food for children whose schools are closed during the crisis, as well as other initiatives to make sure that seniors and food banks get help as well.
One of the problems with the free school lunch program, of course, is that You might be better off just giving the families food directly, right?
Instead of extending the free school lunch programs, which, by the way, have been a fairly large-scale failure across the United States in terms of the amount of food that's been thrown away.
Maybe you'd be better off just giving the Andrew Yang $1,000 tax credit, right?
Just give everybody $1,000 for the moment in order to get through this crisis.
I mean, you're effectively doing that with businesses anyway.
The legislation included 14 paid sick days for employees, as well as three months of paid emergency leave.
Three months of paid emergency leave.
Like, I don't know how they expect Three months of paid emergency leave?
Who's gonna pay for that?
Okay, good luck with that.
At the GOP insistence, the emergency leave provision expires in a year.
The paid sick days do not expire in a year.
Very small businesses are being exempted from the requirements.
But if you've got 75 employees, that's not a massive business.
You're not being exempted from any of this.
So again, not a very good bill, but this is the way that we do legislation in the United States.
We don't actually tailor the remedy to the actual problem.
Meanwhile, the White House is praising the bill.
Mike Pence said this bipartisan deal is going to help take care of those who need it.
Here's the Vice President yesterday.
The deal that passed the House last night will head to the Senate early next week.
Next week delivers on the President's plan for strong health and economic support, particularly focused on those most impacted, including hard-working blue-collar Americans who may not currently have paid family leave today.
It provides free coronavirus testing for uninsured Americans, and it builds on the decisions that President Trump made expanding coverage For Medicare, Medicaid, and also getting a commitment from private health insurance companies to join with us to waive all copays on coronavirus testing.
Okay, so everybody's very happy about the bill.
We will see, you know, what the cost is.
But again, we could afford to be irresponsible with a bill like this if we had not spent the last, I don't know, 40 years building up a $22 trillion debt.
And meanwhile, Scott Gottlieb, who's been one of the kind of darker voices of doom, and that's not to say he's inaccurate.
It just means that he's got a pretty dark vision of what's going to happen here with coronavirus.
The former FDA head under President Trump, he says, the White House is on top of this.
The federal response is now appropriate to the situation.
I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to officials in the White House all through this.
Some of the calls that I was making to them, the conversations I was having go back to January.
They've been on top of this.
I mean, they've been concerned about this.
I've been talking to White House staff, and the staff's been concerned about this.
Okay, Deborah Birx is saying something similar, although she is saying that the cases are going to spike.
Now notice, when we follow the numbers, of course the cases are going to spike.
Part of the reason the cases are going to spike, some of that is going to have to do with, presumably, the exponential growth of a virus.
But part of that is going to have to do with increased testing.
So do not be alarmed by the mere spike in growth.
Note that the testing is lagging, it has been lagging.
So as the testing becomes more common, the feds are now saying there should be up to 4,000 tests a day.
It's going to quickly escalate from there.
With more tests come more positives.
And that means that you're going to see a spike in the number of cases in the United States.
Do not be surprised by that.
Do not necessarily be alarmed by that.
If it continues to be exponential after we've taken all of these measures, then we can start being like supremely alarmed.
But Deborah Burke says, yeah, there will be spikes in cases.
So you will notice as these tests roll out over this next week, we will have a spike in our curve.
For those of you who watched China and China reporting, remember when they changed their definition and all of a sudden there was a blip in their curve?
We are going to see that.
We are going to see a spike as more and more people have access.
Meanwhile, Anthony Fauci, he says, listen, possible hundreds of thousands or millions of people could die of coronavirus.
That sort of information is not supremely useful.
I mean, sure, that's possible.
What are the chances?
Can we get like a, can we get like some sort of bell curve on what are the chances of that?
Is that like an outlying estimate?
Is that an in-lying estimate?
What's the data based on?
I understand he's on TV and he's getting sound bites, and I understand he wants us all to take this seriously, but more information would be good, more transparency would be good.
Here's Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
There have been estimates of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.
who could die, or in the worst-case scenario, millions.
Can you tell the American people that that is possible?
You know, it's possible because when you do a model, you have a worst-case scenario, the best-case scenario, and the reality is how you react to that will depend where you're going to be on that curve.
So obviously, we are clearly going to have more infections.
There's going to be more problems with regard to morbidity and mortality.
Okay, so we really don't have the full information, but the point that Fauci is making is he's saying, listen, do everything that you can.
He says dramatic reduction in interactions would be what is called for here.
Basically, stop interacting with people for the foreseeable future.
Here's Fauci yesterday on the State of the Union.
Would you like to see a national lockdown?
Basically people, you can't go out to restaurants, bars, you need to stay home?
Well, I would like to see a dramatic diminution of the personal interaction that we see in restaurants and in bars.
Whatever it takes to do that, that's what I'd like to see.
Okay, he continues along these lines and he says that the travel bans were a good idea despite the media's hatred for the travel bans.
Here's Dr. Fauci again.
The president's decision to essentially have a major blocking of travel from China, that already had an effect Of not seeding the way in Europe.
Italy didn't do that, and I feel so badly because I have so many friends there.
They're getting hit hard.
What we're doing now with the other travel restrictions, so you block infections from coming in, and then within is when you have containment and mitigation.
And that's the reason why the kinds of things we're doing that may seem like an overreaction will keep us away from that worst case scenario.
Yeah, well, none of this has stopped all of this from becoming political.
Obviously, it was going to become political.
With Congress finally passing some bills, maybe they'll shut up for the moment.
But the continuation of the Democratic presidential race means that this is going to continue being quite political.
The Democrat debate last night took place basically in an empty room between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
I'm sure the ratings were abysmal.
Nobody wants to watch a Democratic debate in the middle of this.
Watch two octogenarians going at it, clubbing each other with their walkers.
Honestly, Bernie Sanders has no more opportunity to win in this race.
They're canceling primaries as we speak, by the way.
So it's not even as though Bernie has the... Maybe Bernie gets lucky and, you know, Biden retires because he's obviously not fully functional.
But that is highly unlikely at this point.
Suffice it to say, it is not a great thing that all of the candidates for president of the United States are in the coronavirus' sweet spot.
Joe Biden is old with underlying health conditions.
Bernie Sanders is old with underlying health conditions.
Donald Trump is old with underlying None of this is a recipe for greatness here.
The Democratic debate last night began with elbow bumping and coughing, which is always a great sign to America.
Here are the two Democratic candidates last night.
Do they keep this social isolation thing?
There we go.
Was that an elbow thrown at the jaw of Bernie Sanders by Joe Biden?
What do you say to the American people who are confronting this new reality?
First of all, my heart goes out to those who have already lost someone or those who are suffering from the virus.
Okay, so that's always good news.
Joe Biden was coughing a fair bit last night.
Neither Bernie nor Biden, by the way, looked like they were fully functional mentally.
They're each making the kinds of mistakes you make when you're 80 years old.
I mean, that's not because they're dumb or anything, but that's just the way that it works.
With all that said, the politicization here is not going to stop.
The Trump Surgeon General, he told reporters yesterday, guys, like, for the moment, can we cut it with, like, the retrospective criticism?
Like, just for a moment.
You can always do this later.
Like, just wait two weeks.
If you're trying to solve a problem, like, in the here and now, that's one thing.
But if you're just bitching about something that happened seven weeks ago that Trump said, maybe you ought to put that aside for, like, the next five minutes while we try and get a response together.
I want you all to understand some straight talk from the nation's doctor.
We really need you all to lean into and prioritize the health and safety of the American people.
No more bickering.
No more partisanship.
No more criticism or finger pointing.
There'll be plenty of time for that.
But we all need to hit the reset button and lean into moving forward the health and safety of the American people as their top priority.
More stories on how people can protect themselves.
More people on how people can get the resources that they need that we've unleashed from the federal government and state and local governments.
Less stories looking at what happened in the past.
Again, there'll be time for that.
OK, that is Dr. Jerome Adams, and he is being ripped up and down by the media who are saying, well, we're going to cover this.
Of course, you're going to cover this any way you want.
The question is, are you keeping your eye on the ball, which is making the coverage, making the response better?
Or is this really more about political posturing?
And that remains an I would say it remains to be seen, except I think that the last few weeks have proved that it doesn't remain to be seen.
I think it's pretty obvious that the media do have a rooting interest in the screw-ups of the Trump administration.
That's not saying that they want to see something bad happen to the Americans, it's just saying they are not unhappy when Trump messes things up.
Alrighty, we're gonna get to some things that I like and some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
So, you're gonna have some time on your hands.
If you like sports, but all the sports are off the TV, let me just recommend the greatest baseball book ever in history.
It is the new Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.
It hasn't been updated for quite a while, but it is just fantastic.
Basically, he ranks every player pretty much ever.
He ranks like the top 100 players on each position.
So if you're a baseball fan, this thing is like the ultimate bathroom book.
It is just fantastic on every level.
Bill James, of course, revolutionized the game of baseball by focusing so much on statistics and looking for new statistical ways to measure exactly who was good and who was not.
It was Bill James who came up with a lot of the key statistics that we now use as opposed to the old-fashioned statistics.
Like we used to focus a lot on batting average.
Now everybody, of course, focuses on base percentage.
We used to focus a lot on batting average.
Now people focus on slugging percentage, right?
On base plus slugging is a better gauge of how good a player is than simple batting average because if you get a lot of hits but you don't walk ever, that may not actually be the best.
The new Bill James historical baseball abstract is just something you can get lost in for hours and you're gonna have some hours on your hands.
Unless you have kids.
Unless you have kids.
In which case, you're basically screwed.
Now let me just point out that all of my heart, my heart goes out to people who are single and stuck at home for this whole thing.
My heart also goes out as a parent.
My heart goes out to all the people who were just told that they now have to homeschool their kids for the next two months and suddenly have become teachers who cannot set up play dates with their kids and other kids, can't take their kids to play gyms, can't take their kids to the park because of all the equipment over there, and basically have now been relegated to a little house on the prairie style parenting for the foreseeable future.
So shout out to my wife, who is now dealing with this at home as we speak.
And good for all of you for doing what you can to make sure that your kids have a fulfilling experience during this time.
People have been asking me what I say to my kids in the middle of all of this.
And what I say to my kids is, listen, everything is going to be fine and basically you get early summer vacation.
The big problem, you just have to hang out with us.
So yeah, I think it'll be...
Honestly, my kids are kind of excited about it.
They're more excited about it than I think any parents are at this point.
But don't worry, we're all hanging in together.
Now, quick reminder, tonight we are going to be doing some extra programming just for our members over at dailywire.com.
Normally this would be all access kind of stuff, but any of our members now get access to it.
We're going to be broadcasting live at 5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern.
So that we can all get through this together.
We're going to try and do a little bit of extra programming in the evenings so you have something to do and a community to gather with online.
So go check us out over at Daily Wire.
Now, it's a great time to become a member.
Go check us out right now over at Daily Wire.
Otherwise, we'll be here for two hours later today and we'll be back here tomorrow to recap everything as it's going on.
Stay safe out there.
Take care of your family.
Go for a walk.
Make a call to a friend.
Make sure everybody's doing okay.
We're going to get through it together.
We're here with you every single day.
See you in a little bit.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Assistant director Pavel Lydowsky.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Playback and media operated by Nick Sheehan.
Associate producer Katie Swinnerton.
Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.