Fed’s coronavirus shock and awe lasts several whole minutes

Follow Us This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a coordinated stimulus response of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. Today's Opinion The Fed's rate cut can only do so much. We spend too much on tanks, not enough on virus testing. The Democratic race is suddenly less chaotic. Warren Buffett may see a buying opportunity. If you squint you can see Jerome Powell's brief effect on the stock market. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America Shock and Aw Shucks If you asked Jerome Powell right now if he'd rather keep running the Federal Reserve or babysit colicky quintuplets, you have to imagine he'd think long and hard about the babysitting. The Fed chairman, after several days of yowling from financial markets and the president of the United States, today delivered a big, emergency rate cut of the bigness and emergency-ness not seen since the financial crisis. The stock market, which had been falling at the open, immediately rallied and stayed in the green for almost 13 whole minutes before tumbling right back into the red. The 10-year Treasury yield dropped below 1% for the first time ever, possibly on the express track to zero, Brian Chappatta notes. The president tweet-yelled for "More easing and cutting!" The rate cut will soften the coronavirus's blow to the economy, but it won't stop markets from pricing in the tremendous disruption of a disease of still-unknown scope, writes Jim Bianco. The market's crash-y behavior over the past week is the sort of thing you see around huge secular shifts, Jim writes; the coronavirus could be such a shift if it hastens the retreat of globalization. It would be helpful, then, if the globe could get the gang back together to work on a plan for boosting the economy, writes Mohamed El-Erian. Coordinated efforts will do more good than everybody just freelancing in tandem, writes Dan Moss.  And the Fed's cut may partly be to give some cover to other central bankers to follow suit, writes Brian Chappatta. The ECB, for example, has an annoying tendency to be shy about aggressive action, writes Ferdinando Giugliano. But Powell also used a lot of ammo, Brian notes, on a shock-and-awe campaign that awed for less than half the run-time of an episode of Spongebob. Now it's on the fast track to the zero bound again. Karl Smith thinks it should already be there anyway, and Ramesh Ponnuru argues it will still have plenty of firepower to support the economy. But it won't slow down the virus, which remains the key to fixing the whole mess. Further Virus-and-Markets Reading: We're still not sure if the system can handle traders working from home en masse in a pandemic. — Elisa Martinuzzi  A rare winner is virus-tester Qiagen NV, which just got a pricey takeover offer from Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. — Chris Hughes  Pandemics Are the New Normal It can't help market confidence to watch governments around the world scramble to even identify, much less contain, the virus. Chalk it up to a lack of preparedness, writes Anjani Trivedi: Politicians from Beijing to D.C. prefer to spend trillions on military weapons that will probably never be used but relative pocket change defending against pandemics that are happening ever more frequently. Unfortunately, pandemics and political ineptitude often go hand-in-virus-covered-hand, writes Stephen Mihm, citing the nightmarish example of Philadelphia in 1918. And for evidence pandemics are becoming the Thing That Wouldn't Leave, just consider the Olympics. The Zika virus scared the 2016 Games in Rio, while SARS rattled Athens in 2004. Now coronavirus might cancel the 2020 Games in Tokyo, notes Adam Minter. It's a good time for a radical rethink of what has become a bloated, costly event. Maybe some good will come out of it all eventually. Maybe we'll figure out how to stop face-mask price-gouging, writes Stephen Carter. Maybe we'll simply remember to wash our hands more often, writes Virginia Postrel. Further Virus Reading: How fast will the virus spread? There are two camps, one scarier than the other. — Tyler Cowen What If Tuesday, But Super? Oh, meanwhile, we're still knee-deep in the process of picking the next president. Today is Super Tuesday in the Democratic nominating contest, with primaries in 14 states and American Samoa. About 24 hours ago, odds were high this would either be a Bernie Sanders coronation or a chaotic mess leaving the race undecided until the convention (which would actually be good news for Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, he admitted today). But in that time, the party establishment has quickly coalesced around Joe Biden as the anti-Bernie, making things much less chaotic, writes Jonathan Bernstein. Trump may still be the market favorite to win re-election, but the Democratic nominee will have a decent shot. The president's approval ratings remain trapped at sub-Jimmy Carter levels, and the coronavirus is doing him no favors, Jonathan Bernstein writes in a second column. The disease is raising questions about Trump's competence and hitting the economy at the worst possible time for his political standing. Avoiding short-term distractions and grievances would help, but then that would require some kind of Freaky Friday brain-swapping deal with a much calmer person. Buffett's Big Moment Folksy investment guru Warren Buffett is almost 90 and claims his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is more than ready for him to retire. So why doesn't he go off and spend more time playing ukulele and eating peanut brittle and whatever other folksy activities he enjoys, folksily? Nir Kaissar suggests it could be because the Oracle of Omaha sees stocks beginning to crumble from ludicrous highs and may smell one last chance to spend the $128 billion in cash Berkshire's been hatching for so long. Such opportunities don't come along very often. Unfortunately for the rest of us they usually involve crises. Telltale Charts To win investors, frackers must give away more money, writes Liam Denning. But first they must fix incentives that reward CEOs for poor performance, as this Elaine He chart demonstrates. Further Reading Five years after its last refugee crisis, Europe faces a new one. — Andreas Kluth  Trump's Taliban deal hurts everybody but the Taliban. — Mihir Sharma  The U.S. Supreme Court's eventual ruling on the fate of the CFPB will affect the structure of the government. — Cass Sunstein  Freeman Dyson wasn't even worried about the heat death of the universe, considering it an engineering problem. — Faye Flam  ICYMI Tennessee tornadoes killed more than 20 people. A Westchester man tested positive for coronavirus. What happens to your emails after you die. Kickers Pro tip: Locking your wife in the bathroom is not a coronavirus avoidance strategy. (h/t Tara Lachapelle) Area hacker sends mother to hack a prison warden's computer. (h/t Scott Kominers) Scientists find protein inside a meteorite. FINALLY, a huge asteroid is heading for Earth.  Note: Please send avoidance strategies and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. 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