By The Hill. The number of coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. passed 2,000 Saturday, reflecting a death toll that has doubled in the span of two days.
On Thursday, the death toll in the U.S. reached 1,000, though it took nearly a month for the number of coronavirus-related deaths in the country to reach that high. This means that another 1,000 people died in a two-day reporting period in the country.
The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. now stands at more than 120,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Though the U.S. has more confirmed cases of the virus than any other country, Italy has the most reported deaths from the virus at more than 10,000. China, where the virus originated, has more than 80,000 reported cases and more than 3,000 reported deaths from the virus. (Read more from “Confirmed Coronavirus Deaths in U.S. Hit 2,000, Doubling in Two Days” HERE)
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Fauci: U.S. Could Have 100K to 200K Deaths From Coronavirus
By Breitbart. Sunday, during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the coronavirus pandemic could cause “between 100,000 and 200,000” deaths in the United States.
Fauci said, “You know, Jake, to be honest with you, we don’t really have any firm idea. There are things called models. When someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good or as accurate as your assumptions. Whenever the models come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario. Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I’ve never seen a model of the diseases that I’ve dealt with where the worst case came out. They always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, million and a half, 2 million, that almost certainly is off the chart. It’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely.” (Read more from “Fauci: U.S. Could Have 100K to 200K Deaths From Coronavirus” HERE)
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Mortgage Market on Verge of Collapse?
By Steve Liesman. The Mortgage Bankers Association in a dire letter to regulators Sunday warned that the U.S. housing market is “in danger of large-scale disruption,” due to efforts by the Federal Reserve that were intended to help rescue the mortgage market.
At issue are the Fed’s unprecedented $183 billion of purchases last week of mortgage-backed securities. The purchases were meant to drive down rates, and they did.
But together with the storm that gripped financial markets from the coronavirus, they also effectively blew up a widespread hedge that mortgage bankers use to protect themselves against rate increases. The hedge pays them if the prevailing rate in the market is higher than the rate than the mortgage rate they locked with the customer.
The system works well unless mortgage rates are highly volatile. It is generally considered to be a safe trade: the hedge simply protects the lender against higher rates until the mortgage closes. But compounding the problem, many customers couldn’t close on their loans because of quarantines, leaving the mortgage lenders with only the cost of the hedge and no off-setting loan. . .
Some of these mortgage bankers are now facing margin calls of tens of millions of dollars that could drive them out of business, according to Barry Habib, founder of MBS Highway, a leading industry advisor who was among the first to publicly sound the alarm bell last week. (Read more about how Coronavirus deaths are not the only worry HERE)
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