4,070,034.
That's how many Americans have gotten Covid-19 in the past 28 days. Aside from being 1.3% of our population in less than a month, it's even more impressive when you compare it to India, which has 4 times the number of people we do and just 1/4 the number of cases – and India is considered a Global catastrophe! How do we do it? How do we manage to ignore this crisis?
Are we bored with it? Is it just background noise now? This week, the rest of the kids will be going back to school and we already know school openings led to a massive surge in infections in the South – so we're going ahead and opening them in the North as well. Clearly the Government has decided that we're all going to get infected anyway and they've just thrown up their hands (in the air like they just don't care) at this point.
On the bright side, only a little over 1,000 people a day are actually dying of Covid – so there's no sense in dwelling on it, is there?
Unfortunately it's a slow data week, so there won't be much else to focus on. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel on earnings reports and the most exciting bit of Economic Data we have coming out this week is the Beige Book tomorrow. Loretta Mester is spaking for the Fed on Friday morning but nothing else is even scheduled so we are pretty much on our in in what's bound to be a very low-volume trading week.
In more exciting news, today is be the day that Fiat Currency dies as El Salvador officially maks BitCoin its National Currency. The tiny and impoverished Central American nation became the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday, allowing Salvadorans to use the cryptocurrency to buy a cup of coffee, get a haircut or even pay taxes and home loans. The government is rolling out a network of 200 bitcoin ATMs and building a chain of stylish, Chivo (wallet)-brand kiosks with staff who will introduce consumers to bitcoin at plazas around…
