OPINION | The world is grinding to a halt in the face of COVID-19, and financial markets have been feeling that pain for some time now. The Dow Jones has been in a state of virtual free fall since late February, when fears about the virus spreading crept back into the news. Today, March 24, the Dow had its best day since 1933, as Congress neared a deal on its coronavirus relief package, but it was an anomaly; the larger trend says markets are on track to eliminate every single point the DJIA has gained since before President Trump took office, and every point the NASDAQ has gained in a year. Even the floor of the New York Stock Exchange has closed and moved to electronic-only trading for the first time in history, given social distancing and shelter-at-home rules in effect for New York City. On top of that, the S&P 500, one of the most well-known indicators of general market health to investors, has eliminated every gain since February of 2017.

Around the world, the situation looks just as dire. The Nikkei 225, Tokyo’s main index, just hit its five-year low. So has the FTSE 100, London’s main index. The Shanghai Composite Index is nearing that point as well.

The alarms that we ourselves as a nation have installed are currently firing. Domestically, any rapid decline in the S&P 500 triggers something called a “circuit breaker:” a temporarily halt on trading. Three levels of circuit breaker are set by the NYSE based on how much the S&P drops from previous day’s closing price: 7% (Level 1), 13% (Level 2), and 20% (Level 3). These are normal stopgaps meant to help investors understand the current situation, reconsider their trades, and think rationally. Last week, Level 1 was triggered three separate times — the first time such mechanisms have been fired off in years — and it’s not looking any more optimistic for this week. This morning, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo warned that the state was two weeks away from an apex of coronavirus cases that was being underestimated by at least 27% — providing a current estimate of 140,000 cases in the next 14–21 days, with a current shortage of nearly 83,000 hospital beds and nearly 30,000 ventilator machines.

With each passing day, hard-working Americans are under threat of losing their retirement funds in a massive market nosedive greater than or equal to that of 2008. Meanwhile, some of the nation’s top financial minds are predicting crisis scenarios like 30% unemployment and a 50% drop in GDP by the time Q2 is over. This will not get better until it gets far, far worse. It’s time to consider closing the stock market until we flatten the curve.

Days- and weeks-long closures of the markets are not new or unprecedented; they simply have not happened in a long time. The outbreak of World War I in Europe caused the NYSE to close for four months; since then it has closed only a handful of times, including after 9/11, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Hurricane Sandy. But now, more than ever, with millions furloughed, laid off, or under threat of unemployment, millions more working from home, and countless nonessential businesses mandated closed in states hit earliest and hardest, we must consider how it could possibly be rational to allow normal trading in a paradigm that is itself hardly believable. We cannot permit millions of retirement accounts to remain at risk of panic selloff when the owners of those accounts have been barred from being active participants in the economy. It is irresponsible to allow only those with the most disposable income to trade with a lower risk factor, while millions of Americans living near urban transit hubs sit at home in fear, and millions more in rural areas await the same fate. Hedge fun managers going to town on undervalued stock with spare cash do not represent a significant sliver of the nation; yet they are currently being given priority. If precedents exist for both circuit breakers and larger market shutdowns, is this not the perfect time to leverage them?

Maintaining a national charade for the sake of marginally inflating investor confidence is nothing short of sociopathic. When President Trump says “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” what he means, put simply, is that to him, any prolonged damage to financial markets as a byproduct of the quarantine (“the cure”) should not be allowed to be worse than the yet-untold losses of human life (“the disease”). Trump’s deadline for reevaluation is April 7, less than 15 days from now. But because we lack adequate numbers of test kits, we don’t know how many Americans are infected; because we don’t know how many Americans are infected, we cannot properly model a curve. So where, pray tell, did the arbitrary 15-day deadline come from, against the advice of Trump’s own health experts? He would rather act in a way which prematurely truncates a national quarantine (“WE WILL SEE WHAT HAPPENS,” “our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” “I’m not looking at months, I’ll tell you right now… we’re going to open up our country”) and has the potential to kill millions if it means that the flow of capital can continue as usual. But if done wrong, it will not.

Social distancing will have to practiced to some degree until a vaccine is developed, which could take up to 18 months, by some estimates, so any hard number on when things can just go back to normal is either a) delusional, b) ignorant of the enormous curve yet to be flattened, or c) a ploy to raise consumer confidence one last time for the savviest sellers to jump off before a recession — perhaps all three. This represents a flippant disregard for human life echoed more recently by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who argued on Tucker Carlson’s FOX primetime show that grandparents would be willing to die for their grandchildren in a heroic act of going shopping again if it meant restoring the economy to normal.

Pausing the stock market until the curve is flattened will allow the virus to properly run its course, for public health officials to evaluate and model the virus’s spread, and for the nation — and the world — to adhere to universally recommended public health guidelines without the pressure of helping a select few profit in a time of panic and widespread shutdown. When asked about this particular scenario, Trump unsurprisingly responded, “we don’t want to be doing that” — even though the economic calamity he seems to fear so much would instantly be averted if he decided to take this option. Maybe he, Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, and Larry Kudlow are content with the status quo — but at least 55% of America might have something else to say.

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OPINION | The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused fears about American emergency preparedness to spike, especially while citizens cautiously observe the virus’s spread in China, Italy, and South Korea. Meanwhile, the economy has come to a near-standstill. An increasing number of governors have implemented state executive orders to bar social gatherings, mandate sheltering in place, and require non-essential business closure; such policies are becoming more prevalent as the virus spreads from major hub cities into less populated rural areas. The stock boom has lurched to a halt, and even the major banks — usually the last-standing poker faces of market confidence — are predicting a major recession in the second quarter of the year. Some are even forecasting a cut of nearly 30% in GDP.

As we venture into uncharted territory together, we’re left to answer the question: what will a fundamentally capitalist nation do to take care of its citizens when their needs as people take priority over their value as consumers?

The new global paradigm has kicked off a partial, but rapid, economic and political realignment toward collectivist (a scary word, if you’re Ayn Rand) programs. Elected officials are now rushing to adopt unprecedented big-government, borderline-socialist measures including, but not limited to: leveraging the Defense Production Act to mandate “wartime” fabrication of goods (e.g. masks and ventilators); no-fee disease testing subsidized by the state; federal and state job programs aimed at the recently unemployed; direct, basic income-style emergency payments to individuals; moratoriums on mortgage payments, student loan payments, evictions, and utility shutoffs.

Federal-level Republicans, once a bulwark of by-the-bootstraps, free market, anti-deficit-spending ideology, now find themselves at the levers of power and at the whim of President Trump — and with that power, at that whim, they find themselves supporting baby versions of universal basic income (Mitt Romney, of all people!), debt cancellation, and universal healthcare, albeit still limited in scope and never without ruthless corporatist caveat. Federal Democrats, in control of only the House of Representatives, have been largely playing pro-worker watchdog, much like a Labour shadow government would be used to doing in the United Kingdom. They have been calling out their counterparts whenever they get the sense that bailouts are being crafted without provisions against stock buybacks, excessive executive pay, and other forms of revolving-door patronage, and are attempting to pass improved versions of relief under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

While the fine print gets hammered out and the late-night tension heats up, the American people are desperate for relief — and quick.

Radical acceptance of the current situation has exposed what many have long suspected: that the American population will accept politically-left, more socialist-leaning policies, also known using the means of production for the public benefit and under more public control, in times of hardship. The difference this time, though, is that the hardship is shared, immediate, and of unprecedented magnitude — and it has put our entire society on hold. This shared hardship has revealed the sheer number of Americans who need help in times of emergency, but the key is that for the first time, the scale and frequency of the problem is raising collective consciousness about what one’s neighbors go through every day.

The American people are seeing more than ever how their neighbors regularly grapple with pneumonia, the flu, a sinus infection, or the common cold — and understand the imperative of paid sick leave instead of going into public places, particularly those involved in food preparation, while sick. They see a $34,000 coronavirus medical bill and suddenly feel what it’s like to make a dollar too much to qualify for Medicaid. They are seeing financial markets collapsing — and know deep down that for the 45% of Americans who don’t report owning stocks and the 78% who live paycheck to paycheck (81% of women), their lives have teetered on edge of the same financial cliff for years while largely ignored by their government, the media, and often, those in closest proximity. The furloughed car salesperson or graphic designer is the new part-time server; new categories of worker are discovering what it means to not work, not earn, and find benefits in jeopardy. Americans unable to participate in the economy for the first time are becoming quickly and painfully aware that for those next door, this has been happening for decades.

So the nation will have to decide if it will take another disaster wiping out many thousands of lives, careers, and retirement accounts before it can truly reap the benefits of public assets; if America wants to avoid a repeat of the calamity unfolding before its very eyes, there are already plenty of great ideas on the table and in practice. We are seeing ideological seeds planted in the soil of reality, and the messy, pragmatic genesis of proposals like single-payer Medicare for All or the public option, universal basic income (UBI), mass debt cancellation, and federal and state jobs guarantees — all ideas that as recently as a few weeks ago were laughed off as “pie-in-the-sky.”

Such big-government policies are themselves popular with a majority of the American people — and would stimulate the economy with money velocity yet-unseen — but cultural and systemic barriers remain. The manufactured “American exceptionalist” attitude of entrepreneurial, pro-austerity individualism has caused these initiatives to fall by the wayside — particularly when coupled with Washington’s endless revolving door of pro-corporate legislative footsoldiers, private capital interests, and lobbyist armies to connect the two. When the global pandemic finally blows over, whether that comes in weeks or months, there will be a cultural vacuum left over and a mutually beneficial, easy-to-understand blueprint for the way forward; the only missing piece will be the political coalition that can bring a better future to fruition.

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