DealBook: Cheering for Higher Oil Prices

“It’s the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make”

Two weeks ago, President Trump said he wanted the U.S. economy “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” But infections and deaths have yet to peak, and that deadline was scrapped. But deciding when the country will reopen will be the most pivotal decision of his presidency, Mr. Trump has said.

The president is getting conflicting advice, according to in-depth reports from The Times. Peter Baker, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Alan Rappeport set the scene:

“The phone calls from his business friends compete against the television images of overwhelmed hospitals. The public health experts tell him what he is doing is working, so he should not let up yet. The economic advisers and others in his White House tell him what he has done has worked, so he should begin to figure out how to ease up. Tens of thousands more could die. Millions more could lose their jobs.”

• Those “business friends” include Michael Corbat of Citigroup, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone and the investors Paul Tudor Jones and Nelson Peltz.

Medical experts are pushing back on a quick reopening of the economy, according to Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes. (That’s a lot of bylines, which means this deeply researched report is well worth your time.)

• Emails from public health professionals both inside and outside the government reveal unheeded calls for aggressive action to slow the spread of the virus weeks before lockdowns were announced. (The group called itself “Red Dawn,” a reference to the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion.)

How will we know when it’s safe to reopen? The New York Times Magazine convened a panel of five experts from different fields to discuss.

Joe Biden weighs in. “An effective plan to beat the virus is the ultimate answer to how we get our economy back on track,” the likely Democratic presidential candidate writes in an Op-Ed for The Times. “So we should stop thinking of the health and economic responses as separate.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/dealbook/oil-price-opec-deal.html