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From Torsten Slok's excellent email links: Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman: The places hardest hit by the virus are also the places where most jobs can be done at home. Also the highest wage occupations are easiest to do at home. Good for GDP, bad for people with low wages. New York Fed Weekly Economic Index But it's not just a fall, it's also a radical shift in demand. A list oflots and lots of job openings, in all the places you'd guess. The instinct to just pay people to sit at home has downsides. LA times viaMarginal Revolution They were ready to roll whenever disaster struck California: three 200-bed mobile hospitals that could be deployed to the scene of a crisis on flatbed trucks and provide advanced medical care to the injured and sick within 72 hours. Each hospital would be the size of a football field, with a surgery ward, intensive care unit and X-ray equipment. Medical response teams would also have access to a massive stockpile of emergency supplies: 50 million N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators  and kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed. ...in 2011, the administration of a fiscally minded Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who came into office facing a $26-billion deficit. And so, that year, the state cut off the money to store and maintain the stockpile of supplies and the mobile hospitals. ... The annual savings for eliminating both programs? No more than $5.8 million per year, according to state budget records, a tiny fraction of the 2011 budget, which totaled $129 billion. My emphasis. 50 million is a lot. A lesson in what government can do, and I hope will do next time. Not to rub it in, but Gov. Brown did want to spend $80,000 million on a high speed train, all to lower the average global temperature by about 0.0001 (?) degree in the year 2100. Which is not a personal observation so much as an observation about the probabilities of various events that all of our elite intelligentsia assumed. Amit Seru and Luigi Zingales want to save capitalism from the cares act. Besides the prospect of direct bailouts to big business, the Fed's actions are truly gargantuan and under reported. Vastly oversimplifying,  the Fed is prepared to lend about $4 trillion dollars of newly printed money (really newly printed government debt) directly to businesses, and to backstop the entire non-bank financial system. Good or bad? Let us hope it doesn't come to that.
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