White House prepares plan to reopen the economy, EU finance chiefs fail to reach agreement, and grim coronavirus forecasts. A planThe Trump administration is developing a plan to get the U.S. economy back on track based on more widespread testing of Americans. The idea would be to test, and then open, smaller cities and towns that have not already been badly hit by the coronavirus. President Donald Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the hope was to have the economy fully open in the next four to eight weeks. Democratic presidential nomination front-runner Joe Biden said the damage to the economy could eclipse that caused by the Great Depression. No dealWhile the U.S. is making plans to get the economy back to full activity, in Europe finance ministers failed to reach agreement on a 500 billion-euro ($543 billion) package to mitigate the impact of the outbreak. A marathon 16-hour teleconference only led to a promise of more talks tomorrow as Italy and the Netherlands stood their ground on opposite sides of the argument for so-called coronabonds. German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said an agreement is close, and he hoped one would be reached before April 12. The ECB may have taken some of the immediate pressure for action away yesterday after it announced a further package of measures to ease market stress. Increase in casesWhile the economic cost of the shutdown is rising, the human cost continues to increase, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. The United Kingdom yesterday reported its highest number of deaths yet as Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains in intensive care where his condition is described as "stable." Hopes of a peak in cases in Spain took a blow this morning with the country reporting 6,180 new infections and 757 deaths in the past 24 hours, the highest total in four days. A forecast by Imperial College London sees a spike in the number of deaths reported in Britain, the U.S. and Italy in the coming week. Markets slipMonday's massive rally in U.S. stocks lost steam yesterday, with markets this morning again failing to move meaningfully higher. Overnight, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index eked out a 0.1% gain, while Japan's Topix index closed 1.6% higher as investors looked for bargains there. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index was down 1.2% at 5:50 a.m. Eastern Time as data pointed to a grim outlook for some of the region's biggest economies. S&P 500 futures were broadly unchanged, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 0.725% and gold was slightly higher. Coming up...While there's already an awful lot going on in the oil market at the moment, investors will be watching today's U.S. crude oil inventories number at 10:30 a.m. with interest after the EIA cut the country's output forecast for 2020 by 1.2 million barrels per day. The minutes of the most recent Federal Reserve meeting will be published at 2:00 p.m. PriceSmart Inc. and Trulieve Cannabis Corp. are among the companies reporting earnings. What we've been readingThis is what's caught our eye over the last 24 hours. And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morningAnytime a central bank does anything out of the ordinary, or a government announces a spending program, the cry rings out: "Looks like we're embarking on a CRAZY MMT experiment!" These comments are completely uninformed 99.9% of the time, and the person is using "MMT" as a label for policies they don't like. But these days they're slightly more correct than normal. Modern Monetary Theory gets talked about a lot, but there's ton of ignorance about what it is, so here's my simple definition. MMT has descriptive and prescriptive components. The descriptive component simply states that a government spending in its own currency faces no credit or financing constraint. Instead, the only limit on a government's ability to spend its currency is shortages of real resources, which would manifest in inflation. The prescriptive component argues that instead of having governments leaning on inflation-fighting central banks for macro-economic stabilization, that task should fall to fiscal authorities, and instead of prioritizing stable prices, the main priority should be full employment. This is a major oversimplification, but it's close enough. It's easy to argue governments around the developed world are taking a backdoor toward something resembling MMT right now. Major central bankers have been indicating that only fiscal policy can fix the economy, and a key component of the CARES act was about the government financing employment via loans to small businesses that keep workers on the payroll. Other countries are doing aggressive payroll protection as well. None of it's been enough yet in size or speed, as evidenced by how much devastation we've already seen, but it has MMT-ish contours. The macro-economic baton is being handed from central banks to fiscal authorities, with an eye towards job preservation, as opposed to "stimulus" more broadly.  Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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