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marmar
marmar's Journal
marmar's Journal
May 13, 2020
(Detroit Metro Times) For seven straight weeks, Michigan has been under a stay-at-home order to combat the coronavirus.
By all measures, it has worked.
The number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths has fallen for three consecutive weeks. For 26 straight days, the number of coronavirus-related hospitalizations has declined. And over the past 20 days, number of patients on a ventilator has been cut in half.
Michigan is also getting closer to its goal of administering 15,000 tests a day. In the past week, the state averaged 11,500 tests per day, compared to an average of 5,700 a day in April. ........(more)
https://m.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2020/05/12/whitmer-is-right-the-stay-at-home-order-is-working-as-cases-and-deaths-plummet
Whitmer is right, the stay-at-home order is working as cases and deaths plummet
(Detroit Metro Times) For seven straight weeks, Michigan has been under a stay-at-home order to combat the coronavirus.
By all measures, it has worked.
The number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths has fallen for three consecutive weeks. For 26 straight days, the number of coronavirus-related hospitalizations has declined. And over the past 20 days, number of patients on a ventilator has been cut in half.
Michigan is also getting closer to its goal of administering 15,000 tests a day. In the past week, the state averaged 11,500 tests per day, compared to an average of 5,700 a day in April. ........(more)
https://m.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2020/05/12/whitmer-is-right-the-stay-at-home-order-is-working-as-cases-and-deaths-plummet
May 12, 2020
US Commercial Real Estate Prices Plunged in April, Mall Prices Collapsed
by Wolf Richter • May 11, 2020 •
Tenants’ collapsing one after the other without replacement has a pernicious impact on property prices.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Before the coronavirus, some segments of commercial real estate (CRE) were red hot, others were hanging in there or declining, and one sector, malls, has been in deep trouble since 2016, with prices plunging. Then came the lockdowns. Property prices in every CRE segment fell in April, even those that were red hot. And prices of mall properties got crushed.
The overall Commercial Property Price Index (CPPI) by Green Street Advisors had peaked in the period of November 2019 through January 2020. In February and March, it ticked down. In April it plunged 9.4% from March, the second largest percent-drop in the data going back to the 1990s. The largest drop was 10.9% in October 2008, following the Lehman bankruptcy. Since the peak in January, the index has dropped 10.7% and is back where it had first been in May 2015:
There is sudden chaos in the industry, and the index designed to capture movements in near-real time has trouble capturing the massive month-to-month upheaval.
“The exact numbers are debatable, but property pricing is down about 10%,” said Peter Rothemund, Managing Director at Green Street Advisors, in the report. “Some property types, industrial for example, are probably faring better than that. Retail and lodging values are most likely doing worse.” ...............(more)
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/11/us-commercial-real-estate-prices-plunged-in-april-mall-prices-collapsed/
US Commercial Real Estate Prices Plunged in April, Mall Prices Collapsed
US Commercial Real Estate Prices Plunged in April, Mall Prices Collapsed
by Wolf Richter • May 11, 2020 •
Tenants’ collapsing one after the other without replacement has a pernicious impact on property prices.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Before the coronavirus, some segments of commercial real estate (CRE) were red hot, others were hanging in there or declining, and one sector, malls, has been in deep trouble since 2016, with prices plunging. Then came the lockdowns. Property prices in every CRE segment fell in April, even those that were red hot. And prices of mall properties got crushed.
The overall Commercial Property Price Index (CPPI) by Green Street Advisors had peaked in the period of November 2019 through January 2020. In February and March, it ticked down. In April it plunged 9.4% from March, the second largest percent-drop in the data going back to the 1990s. The largest drop was 10.9% in October 2008, following the Lehman bankruptcy. Since the peak in January, the index has dropped 10.7% and is back where it had first been in May 2015:
There is sudden chaos in the industry, and the index designed to capture movements in near-real time has trouble capturing the massive month-to-month upheaval.
“The exact numbers are debatable, but property pricing is down about 10%,” said Peter Rothemund, Managing Director at Green Street Advisors, in the report. “Some property types, industrial for example, are probably faring better than that. Retail and lodging values are most likely doing worse.” ...............(more)
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/11/us-commercial-real-estate-prices-plunged-in-april-mall-prices-collapsed/
May 12, 2020
(Rolling Stone) There’s a refrigerator in the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park designed specifically for ducks. They hang in rows, hooks through their heads, ready to be rubbed down with honey and lavender, and plated like pieces of modernist art. The dish is a specialty of chef Daniel Humm, who took over the Manhattan brasserie in 2006 and turned it into one of the world’s most renowned fine-dining establishments. It’s the type of place where meals last three hours and reservations must be bought, like concert tickets.
"A lot of photographers want this shot,” Humm says, standing next to the duck refrigerator one afternoon in early April. He’s speaking about a previous life, one that ended only weeks earlier, when Eleven Madison Park and every other restaurant and bar in New York suspended dine-in service indefinitely, and the glass-paneled case in front of him was still stocked with succulent fowl. Now, it’s filled with towers of cardboard to-go boxes, the kind you might fill up at one of midtown’s countless pay-by-the-pound hot bars. The meals inside of them — today it’s pasta Bolognese, roasted broccoli, and house focaccia — cost around $5 to produce, including labor. A 12-person skeleton crew, drawn mostly from the 300 employees Humm was forced to furlough, hopes to assemble up to 3,000 of them before the day ends. The effort is a collaboration with the nonprofit Rethink Food, which is delivering the meals to hospital workers and others in need as the city combats the coronavirus. When the partnership began on April 1st, Eleven Madison Park almost certainly became the most expensive commissary kitchen in the history of food service.
It is one of the more surreal examples of how the pandemic has thoroughly upended New York’s storied culinary scene, where some 26,000 restaurants and their 350,000 workers are scrambling to pay rent, feed their families, and figure out whether there will be a job for them to come back to — and to what extent the industry will resemble the one the virus swept away, like a natural disaster, in March. Even Humm, who ran one of the most successful restaurants in the world, has acknowledged that there may not be a place for Eleven Madison Park in whatever culinary scene emerges from the pandemic. This doesn’t mean he’s any less determined to play a role in shaping the future of food service. “The world has changed,” Humm says in a soft Swiss accent. “If anyone is out there and hasn’t seen that yet, I hate to break it to them, but it’s changed. This is also exciting. There was a model that we were kind of stuck in. Now we have the blankest canvas you can imagine.” ..........(more)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/can-the-restaurant-industry-be-saved-995037/
Can the Restaurant Industry Be Saved?
(Rolling Stone) There’s a refrigerator in the kitchen of Eleven Madison Park designed specifically for ducks. They hang in rows, hooks through their heads, ready to be rubbed down with honey and lavender, and plated like pieces of modernist art. The dish is a specialty of chef Daniel Humm, who took over the Manhattan brasserie in 2006 and turned it into one of the world’s most renowned fine-dining establishments. It’s the type of place where meals last three hours and reservations must be bought, like concert tickets.
"A lot of photographers want this shot,” Humm says, standing next to the duck refrigerator one afternoon in early April. He’s speaking about a previous life, one that ended only weeks earlier, when Eleven Madison Park and every other restaurant and bar in New York suspended dine-in service indefinitely, and the glass-paneled case in front of him was still stocked with succulent fowl. Now, it’s filled with towers of cardboard to-go boxes, the kind you might fill up at one of midtown’s countless pay-by-the-pound hot bars. The meals inside of them — today it’s pasta Bolognese, roasted broccoli, and house focaccia — cost around $5 to produce, including labor. A 12-person skeleton crew, drawn mostly from the 300 employees Humm was forced to furlough, hopes to assemble up to 3,000 of them before the day ends. The effort is a collaboration with the nonprofit Rethink Food, which is delivering the meals to hospital workers and others in need as the city combats the coronavirus. When the partnership began on April 1st, Eleven Madison Park almost certainly became the most expensive commissary kitchen in the history of food service.
It is one of the more surreal examples of how the pandemic has thoroughly upended New York’s storied culinary scene, where some 26,000 restaurants and their 350,000 workers are scrambling to pay rent, feed their families, and figure out whether there will be a job for them to come back to — and to what extent the industry will resemble the one the virus swept away, like a natural disaster, in March. Even Humm, who ran one of the most successful restaurants in the world, has acknowledged that there may not be a place for Eleven Madison Park in whatever culinary scene emerges from the pandemic. This doesn’t mean he’s any less determined to play a role in shaping the future of food service. “The world has changed,” Humm says in a soft Swiss accent. “If anyone is out there and hasn’t seen that yet, I hate to break it to them, but it’s changed. This is also exciting. There was a model that we were kind of stuck in. Now we have the blankest canvas you can imagine.” ..........(more)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/can-the-restaurant-industry-be-saved-995037/
May 12, 2020
(NBC) Six people, including a 5-year-old girl, were shot on Mother's Day when men from two families in Texas started firing in the culmination of what police believe was an ongoing feud.
One Katy man armed with a handgun and another armed with a shotgun exchanged gunfire and "ended up striking a number of individuals," Harris County Sheriff's Office Capt. Joe Ambriz told reporters late Sunday. The four victims who were hit were all female, one of whom is 5 years old. The men also struck each other, Ambriz said.
All six people suffered non-life threatening injuries and were brought to area hospitals. ........(more)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-feuding-texas-families-shoot-each-other-leaving-six-wounded-n1204251
Hatfields v McCoys, 2020 version
(NBC) Six people, including a 5-year-old girl, were shot on Mother's Day when men from two families in Texas started firing in the culmination of what police believe was an ongoing feud.
One Katy man armed with a handgun and another armed with a shotgun exchanged gunfire and "ended up striking a number of individuals," Harris County Sheriff's Office Capt. Joe Ambriz told reporters late Sunday. The four victims who were hit were all female, one of whom is 5 years old. The men also struck each other, Ambriz said.
All six people suffered non-life threatening injuries and were brought to area hospitals. ........(more)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-feuding-texas-families-shoot-each-other-leaving-six-wounded-n1204251
May 10, 2020
The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q1 2020
by Wolf Richter • May 9, 2020
How are consumers positioned going into the crisis?
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Most of the first quarter was still the Good Times, but in later February and early March it hit the fan, as markets were crashing. In mid-March lockdowns started to roll across the country, and the layoffs by the tens of millions commenced. So how were consumers positioned going into this crisis? Many of them, up to their eyeballs in debt.
Consumer debt – student loans, auto loans, and revolving credit such as credit cards and personal loans but excluding housing-related debts such as mortgages and HELOCs – jumped by $153 billion at the end of the first quarter, compared to Q1 a year earlier, or by 3.8%, to $4.15 trillion (not seasonally adjusted), according to Federal Reserve data:
In March, the problems already became apparent. On a seasonally adjusted basis (the above is not seasonally adjusted), consumer credit fell 0.3% in March from February, and except for December 2015, when a large statistical adjustment was made, this was the first month-to-month decline since the Great Recession. ..........(more)
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/09/the-state-of-the-american-debt-slaves-q1-2020/
The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q1 2020
The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q1 2020
by Wolf Richter • May 9, 2020
How are consumers positioned going into the crisis?
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Most of the first quarter was still the Good Times, but in later February and early March it hit the fan, as markets were crashing. In mid-March lockdowns started to roll across the country, and the layoffs by the tens of millions commenced. So how were consumers positioned going into this crisis? Many of them, up to their eyeballs in debt.
Consumer debt – student loans, auto loans, and revolving credit such as credit cards and personal loans but excluding housing-related debts such as mortgages and HELOCs – jumped by $153 billion at the end of the first quarter, compared to Q1 a year earlier, or by 3.8%, to $4.15 trillion (not seasonally adjusted), according to Federal Reserve data:
In March, the problems already became apparent. On a seasonally adjusted basis (the above is not seasonally adjusted), consumer credit fell 0.3% in March from February, and except for December 2015, when a large statistical adjustment was made, this was the first month-to-month decline since the Great Recession. ..........(more)
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/05/09/the-state-of-the-american-debt-slaves-q1-2020/
May 10, 2020
https://m.&t=4s
A Florida man hit reverse and used a couple of parked cars to get a much better view.
Tampa-area TV station WTSP reported the incident happened in Citrus County in a bank parking lot when the driver backed a Cadillac into and up on top of two cars, according to the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office. ..........(more)
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/florida/os-ne-florida-man-backs-cadillac-on-top-of-two-cars-20200506-xlqqx6ncq5cinhjiibx7flouey-story.html
In any other state this might seem strange.....
https://m.&t=4s
A Florida man hit reverse and used a couple of parked cars to get a much better view.
Tampa-area TV station WTSP reported the incident happened in Citrus County in a bank parking lot when the driver backed a Cadillac into and up on top of two cars, according to the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office. ..........(more)
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/florida/os-ne-florida-man-backs-cadillac-on-top-of-two-cars-20200506-xlqqx6ncq5cinhjiibx7flouey-story.html
May 9, 2020
Almost half of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Michigan considered recovered
BETH LEBLANC | THE DETROIT NEWS
Updated 1 hour ago
Nearly 49% of those who contracted the coronavirus in Michigan are considered recovered as of Friday.
The state released its weekly recovery tally Saturday. In total, 22,686 individuals are now considered recovered because they are still alive 30 days after the onset of symptoms.
The state also announced 133 additional deaths due to the virus, 67 of which occurred days or weeks prior to Friday's daily tally and were added after a review of death certificates where COVID-19 was identified as a contributing factor.
The state also reported 430 new confirmed coronavirus cases.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/05/09/almost-half-confirmed-covid-19-cases-michigan-considered-recovered/3102285001/
Almost half of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Michigan considered recovered
Almost half of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Michigan considered recovered
BETH LEBLANC | THE DETROIT NEWS
Updated 1 hour ago
Nearly 49% of those who contracted the coronavirus in Michigan are considered recovered as of Friday.
The state released its weekly recovery tally Saturday. In total, 22,686 individuals are now considered recovered because they are still alive 30 days after the onset of symptoms.
The state also announced 133 additional deaths due to the virus, 67 of which occurred days or weeks prior to Friday's daily tally and were added after a review of death certificates where COVID-19 was identified as a contributing factor.
The state also reported 430 new confirmed coronavirus cases.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/05/09/almost-half-confirmed-covid-19-cases-michigan-considered-recovered/3102285001/
May 9, 2020
https://m.&t=4s
A Florida man hit reverse and used a couple of parked cars to get a much better view.
Tampa-area TV station WTSP reported the incident happened in Citrus County in a bank parking lot when the driver backed a Cadillac into and up on top of two cars, according to the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office. ..........(more)
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/florida/os-ne-florida-man-backs-cadillac-on-top-of-two-cars-20200506-xlqqx6ncq5cinhjiibx7flouey-story.html
In any other state this might seem strange......
https://m.&t=4s
A Florida man hit reverse and used a couple of parked cars to get a much better view.
Tampa-area TV station WTSP reported the incident happened in Citrus County in a bank parking lot when the driver backed a Cadillac into and up on top of two cars, according to the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office. ..........(more)
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/florida/os-ne-florida-man-backs-cadillac-on-top-of-two-cars-20200506-xlqqx6ncq5cinhjiibx7flouey-story.html
May 9, 2020
(CNN) - The United States has scaled back its role on the world stage, taken actions that are undermining efforts to battle the coronavirus pandemic and left the international community without a traditional global leader, according to experts, diplomats and analysts.
The US -- usually at the head of the table helping to coordinate in global crises -- has declined to take a seat at virtual international meetings convened by the World Health Organization and the European Union to coordinate work on potentially lifesaving vaccines.
Former world leaders warn that the Trump administration risks alienating allies by politicizing the deadly pandemic with its push to punish China and have other nations choose sides.
The administration's decision to halt funding for the WHO, the world body best positioned to coordinate the global response to the raging pandemic, has appalled global health officials. .................(more)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/09/politics/us-leadership-coronavirus-intl/index.html
Allies despair as Trump abandons America's leadership role at a time of global crisis
(CNN) - The United States has scaled back its role on the world stage, taken actions that are undermining efforts to battle the coronavirus pandemic and left the international community without a traditional global leader, according to experts, diplomats and analysts.
The US -- usually at the head of the table helping to coordinate in global crises -- has declined to take a seat at virtual international meetings convened by the World Health Organization and the European Union to coordinate work on potentially lifesaving vaccines.
Former world leaders warn that the Trump administration risks alienating allies by politicizing the deadly pandemic with its push to punish China and have other nations choose sides.
The administration's decision to halt funding for the WHO, the world body best positioned to coordinate the global response to the raging pandemic, has appalled global health officials. .................(more)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/09/politics/us-leadership-coronavirus-intl/index.html
May 8, 2020
(MarketWatch) The Great Shutdown, which aptly describes the motivating force behind the current recession, ushered in what is probably the first downturn in history to be led by the services sector of the economy.
That in itself, if not the unique nature of the recession — workers ordered to stay home, businesses told to cease operations — poses distinct challenges to the recovery, arguing for a long, drawn out slog to regain lost output.
With the goods sector of the economy, a recession causes inventories to pile up. Deferred sales aren’t lost; just delayed.
With services, there is no backlog to sell at a later date. Vacations not taken, concerts and sporting events cancelled, restaurant meals forsaken: that business is gone for good. ............(more)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/services-led-us-into-the-recession-whats-going-to-lead-us-out-2020-05-07?mod=home-page
The economy can't really come back until consumers feel safe
(MarketWatch) The Great Shutdown, which aptly describes the motivating force behind the current recession, ushered in what is probably the first downturn in history to be led by the services sector of the economy.
That in itself, if not the unique nature of the recession — workers ordered to stay home, businesses told to cease operations — poses distinct challenges to the recovery, arguing for a long, drawn out slog to regain lost output.
With the goods sector of the economy, a recession causes inventories to pile up. Deferred sales aren’t lost; just delayed.
With services, there is no backlog to sell at a later date. Vacations not taken, concerts and sporting events cancelled, restaurant meals forsaken: that business is gone for good. ............(more)
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/services-led-us-into-the-recession-whats-going-to-lead-us-out-2020-05-07?mod=home-page
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Detroit, MI
Member since: Fri Oct 29, 2004, 12:18 AM
Number of posts: 77,080