The market overall has an awful lot of stress trying to drag it down further - uncertainty breeds panic and unfortunately the month of April looks like nothing but uncertainty from a business standpoint right now. Last week's rally sure looks like one of those dead cat bounces temporarily propping stocks up by Washington printing $, but my gut tells me it's going to drop further back to reach lows from a couple weeks ago and likely fall further down to find a true bottom. 6.6 million+ new unemployment claims over the last week reinforces that, unfortunately.

The rebound isn't going to be instant, either. The only way out of this economically without facing crippling permanent job losses and business closures is to take the next couple of weeks to develop a risk-based set of criteria that local communities can use to assess how quickly they can reopen business. That includes expanded testing programs and continued hot spot area management. The country is too large to continue with a one size fits all approach indefinitely until New York is able to reopen, for example. Hot spots will undoubtedly pop up here and there in other parts of the country, which will need to be managed as best they can - but maintaining this current strategy across the country is going to lead to much larger longterm financial and health problems than the risk this virus presents to the population.

I'm not saying to greenlight MLB Opening Day for May 1 and start packing stadiums/conference centers/concert halls right away - but there's got to be an end to this current wet blanket approach to manage social interactions by restricting businesses being open. Give people some benefit of the doubt for making good decisions in the workplace and out in public in general - after all, the people that are fools about this have continued to act as fools and make bad decisions even during the past few months.

Virtually everyone is preparing for massive budget cuts. This is happening at my university, it is happening behind the scenes at every corporation in America.

That's going to be the driver that opens everything back up - when entire hospital systems are on the verge of collapse due to an economic shutdown originally enacted as a way to try and protect hospital systems and public health, the writing is on the wall that it isn't sustainable no matter what the health risk is. Nonexistent tax revenues emptying coffers of state and local units of government, regardless of regional political leaning, will drive economic reopening, and I think it will happen at a faster pace than even currently rosy economic predictions lay out. I think we'll avoid a depression but have a bad recession, and the rebound will be hampered by dealing with this disease and prolonged public fears of returning to some societal norms - but that will be far better than stretching shutdowns into summer and leaving the economy to start so far down that it leaves scores more people in generational poverty.

Doom and gloom longterm economic forecasts are being put together much the same way initial Covid-19 modeling was done forecasting millions of dead - depicting worse than worst case scenarios and assuming no societal/economic changes would be made during an extended period of time. Those models will be shown to the same government officials who were largely responsible for driving the economic shutdown along with what projected budget shortfalls will be if these actions remain in effect, and there will be a sobering realization that this just can't continue.

As for public sentiment, look what is happening in Michigan today - despite it being a midwest state that is pretty hardhit by Covid-19, especially in the Detroit area...a rapidly growing contingent of people have had enough and the fear of indefinite economic collapse on a nationwide scale outweighs the fear of a disease - no matter how infectious or potentially harmful it is to the elderly and medically vulnerable. The market is still propped up because corporations "got theirs" in terms of recent stimulus/printed assistance dollars - small businesses and hourly workers are totally skewered by the shutdown.