Sat. 5/16: COVID-19 Daily Update
NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
CEOs are cutting millions of jobs yet keep their lofty bonuses – Bloomberg News.
Excerpt: “In the past decade, public-company executives have reaped billions of dollars in gains from stock-based awards, some of which were granted at the depths of the Great Recession, while millions of people have struggled for years to regain their footing.”
Excerpt: “It’s part of a longer-term trend. Chief executives at the largest U.S. companies saw their pay skyrocket 940% between 1978 and 2018, a study showed last year, largely helped by stock gains. Worker wages, meanwhile, increased by just 12%.”
Wealthy Mainland homebuyers see Hawaii as safe place to invest – Pacific Business News.
This is part of the reason why buying a house continues to be out of reach for many working families living in Hawaii, even during a recession.
$36M approved for Hawaii airport public health screening system – Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Legislators are proposing taking thermal photographs of arriving passengers but not actually testing them. They are also proposing instituting a color-coding system to represent the level of danger, kind of like what the federal government did in the years after 9/11 (which was first used as a propaganda tool, then as a punch line to a lot of jokes, and ultimately just ignored as useless).
CLOs: Ground zero for the next stage of the financial crisis? – Financial Times.
This article explains how all of the major factors that caused the last recession are in place once again today in a slightly different form. Even though some minimal protections were put in place to prevent this from happening, those protections have been weakened and rolled back as lobbyists for investment firms and banks have successfully pushed the government to let them do increasingly risky things over the past 10 years.
World: Cases: 4.6M (+100k). Deaths: 311k (+4k).
USA: Cases: 1.46M (+20k). Deaths: 88.7k (+1.2k). Total Tested: 11M (+300k).
Hawaii: Cases: 639 (+1). Deaths: 17 (+0). Hospitalized: 82 (+1). Recovered: 572 (+7).
