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• S. total retail sales turned in a shockingly bad performance in April. They were -15.1% month to month and -17.8% year over year. Among sub-categories, though, something happened that has been in the works for a while, but was remarkable to observe, nonetheless. ‘Nonstore retail sales’ (i.e., purchases made over the Internet and by way of e-auctions), for the first time in history, took over number one spot for share of total retail, at 21.1%. Second place went to ‘food and beverage stores’, 19.1%. Dropping to third, versus its usual frontrunner status, was the shopkeeper category, ‘motor vehicle and parts dealers’, 18.4%.
• Also, April’s grocery store sales were -13.1% month to month, after being +26.9% in March. A significant number of shoppers in March engaged in frenzied stockpiling. With the economy headed into a freeze, they were already seeing and anticipating further shortages – never mind that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Single seeds of hoarding can quickly grow to become pernicious weed patches of off-the-grid accumulations. April’s m/m decline in grocery store sales, though, suggests a dialed down urgency to build and maintain a home-inventory security blanket.

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• Matters pertaining to who is owed what due to the coronavirus crisis will soon fully engage the legal and insurance professions. But there is a segment of the business community, ‒ although more truly it’s off to the side, keeping an eye on things (i.e., companies and governments) ‒ that is about to step into the spotlight. The weight of the world, and I don’t say that lightly, is about to descend on debt rating agencies.

• Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s, Fitch Group and others will be tasked with hair-raising responsibility. Debt is skyrocketing throughout the private and public sectors. A corporation or government receives a ratings downgrade (i.e., starting from Triple A and descending from there) when it is judged to be at greater risk of defaulting on its debt obligations (loans or bonds). The greater risk assessment forces it to pay more in carrying costs, regardless of whether the central bank is managing to keep its official interest rate low and stable.

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• Canada has been announcing its economic support measures piecemeal. First up was the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) to provide income aid for individuals newly laid off or unable to find employment for a variety of reasons, including a need to stay home and look after children released from school attendance. Following in short order have been payroll supplements to help businesses survive, measures to assist students who won’t be able to find summer jobs, rent relief for commercial tenants in danger of defaulting and extra cash to be sent to seniors.

• Most recently, there has been the LEEFF (Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility) initiative, providing bridge financing for some of the nation’s largest corporations. To qualify, companies must agree to conditions placed on dividend payouts and executive compensation and to be on board with environmental cleanup goals. There’s also expansion of BCAP (the Business Credit Availability Program) to include more mid-sized firms. Canada’s fiscal deficit this year (April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021) is expected to be -$250 billion.

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• The U.S. seasonally adjusted (SA) unemployment rate in April was 14.7% and the not seasonally adjusted (NSA) figure was 14.4%. Both those numbers understate the true out-of-work situation in the country.

• Crucially, the labor force participation rate in the U.S. dropped from 62.6% in March to 60.0% in April (both NSA). When asked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in its ‘household’ survey if they were actively seeking work, 6.9 million individuals responded in the negative. They didn’t see any point. They didn’t believe they had any prospect, under coronavirus pandemic circumstances, of gaining a position at this time. Many of those respondents were young adults newly laid off in the hotel, restaurant and bar business. ‘Not seeking employment’ meant they were excluded from the labor pool. If the participation rate in April had stayed the same as in March, America’s NSA unemployment rate would have been 18.1%.

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• Apple and Google, through iOS and Android, operate the largest cell phone ‘ecosystems’ in North America. Those two firms are working jointly to further develop smart phone geo-locating technology to facilitate tracking the spread of COVID-19.

• Michael Bloomberg, of Bloomberg News and former-Mayor-of-New-York fame, has also committed his valuable time and considerable financial resources to developing a contact tracing program. A philanthropic arm of his business empire will be working closely with Johns Hopkins University and Medical Center.

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• Now you have an excuse to eat them. French fries should more accurately be called Belgian fries. They were given the wrong name by American soldiers in World War I who mistakenly thought they were in France when they came across the new tasty use for potatoes. Over the past many decades, Belgium has been a leading exporter of the kinds of potatoes that make the best fries. But restaurant and fast-food demand has fallen off a cliff coincident with coronavirus quarantining and there are storehouses full of spuds that are in danger of spoiling by the end of June. The message has gone out in Belgium, and it’s being picked up in other countries, that families should double their French fry intake from one meal per week to two.

• Speaking of Belgium, it has one of the worst COVID-19 mortality rates among countries in the world, according to the authoritative website on the progress of the disease being maintained by Johns Hopkins University. Deaths per capita is considered the best gauge of how brutally a country is being ravaged by the coronavirus. (Statistics on the infection rate can be wonky.) In Belgium, the number of deaths per 100,000 population is currently 74.6. The figures for some other developed nations, in descending order, are as follows: Spain, 56.3; Italy, 50.0; United Kingdom, 47.1; France, 39.2; Sweden, 31.2; United States, 23.6; Canada, 12.7; and Germany, 9.1.

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• Spoiler alert: Don’t read the following two bullet points unless you’re okay with learning the outcome. The Kentucky Derby race for three-year-old horses is always held on the first Saturday in May. Well, that’s not entirely correct. In 1945, in the final days of the war effort, it was delayed until June. Then in this year, 2020, it’s also been postponed, until September 5, for only the second time ever. In its time slot in early May, NBC Sports broadcast a virtual race between 13 former Triple Crown Winners.

• The ‘Run for the Roses’ at Churchill Downs is called the most exciting two minutes in sports. Did that still hold true this year, when there wasn’t really anything on the line and the finish was governed by a set of algorithms based on past performances? It’s your call. Perhaps you were watching on May 2nd. If not, you can catch a replay of the broadcast on YouTube. I’ve seen it and even as a CGI event, nothing’s quite as nail-biting as a ‘final stretch’ run, especially when it features win, place and show positions captured by Secretariat, Citation and Seattle Slew ‒ equine royalty.

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• Since the turn of this century in 2000, and excepting the latest six months of slower activity due to COVID-19 shutdowns, China has managed exceptional year-over-year gross domestic product growth (i.e., of +6% recently, but +10% or more earlier) due, in large part, to a string of major infrastructure spending programs. To make up for the nation’s Q1 2020 downturn in output, the government in Beijing is launching another wave of massive public investment. This time, though, the trillions of yuan will go into other areas of the economy. Instead of road, bridge, railway, train station, rapid transit and airport projects, the emphasis will be on securing China’s lead in such hot-prospect and high-tech sectors as telecommunications and biotechnology.

• In the past, when China embarked on an infrastructure building binge, the huge increase in demand for raw materials necessitated sourcing from multiple resource sites around the world, with extraction firms in Australia, Canada, South America and Africa all benefitting. Commodity prices soared and the owners of raw materials had a field day. A commonly quoted statistic is that nearly 50% of base metals, fossil fuels, steel and aluminum consumption worldwide has been in the People’s Republic. If there is to be an emphasis on different kinds of infrastructure works this time, though, the impacts for resource producers will be harder to assess, until the specs appear.

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