In other news, sources within OPEC who spoke to Reuters say Saudi Arabia and Russia are prepared to agree cut output at their upcoming meeting on Thursday, but only if Americans agree to cut output as well.
I suppose it could happen, but I'm very skeptical.
Meanwhile, the mortgage industry is warning that the system could collapse if the government doesn't provide more liquid funding to support the program for delaying mortgage payments. This feels like a ticking time bomb.
The Cares Act, which seeks to limit the economic damage from COVID-19, mandates that all borrowers with government-backed mortgages — about 62% of all first lien mortgages according to Urban Institute — be allowed to delay at least 90 days of monthly payments and possibly up to a year’s worth.
Those payments would then have to be made at a later time through a payment plan. Servicers are granting the payment deferrals to borrowers with no questions asked, as is required by the law, but the servicers still have to pay mortgage bond holders.
Finally, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp bizarrely claimed that no one knew the virus could be spread by people without symptoms when he ordered a stay-wide shutdown last week, but his own department of health said as much over a month ago.
An email obtained by progressive watchdog Accountable.US via a public records request and shared with CNN showed that the head of the state's Department of Public Health, Dr. Kathleen Toomey, was advised in early March to inform the public that people who didn't display symptoms of the virus could still spread it to others.
"Note that this encourages staying away from others even if a person may not me [sic] experiencing symptoms themselves, but a family member does. Why? Because there is a strong chance that a person could be infected but asymptomatic, but could still infect others," Pinar Keskinocak, the director of Georgia Tech's Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems, wrote in the email sent to Toomey and other state officials on March 2. The message was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The CDC, which is literally based in the same city as the Georgia governor's mansion, said asymptomatic carriers could spread the virus in mid February. Kemp obviously wasn't paying attention to that, but he also wasn't paying attention to his own health department which said the same thing a couple weeks later.