Market Update

On any objective scale, the United States has handled the Coronavirus pandemic abysmally. For just a very basic illustration, according to the most recent estimates, the United States has had 554 Coronavirus-related deaths per million people and has yet to peak.1 In countries that have already peaked and largely handled the pandemic, the numbers are drastically different. Germany sits at 112 per million (nearly 5 times lower) and Japan is at 10 per million (nearly 60 times lower).2

On any objective scale, the United States has handled the Coronavirus pandemic abysmally. For just a very basic illustration, according to the most recent estimates, the United States has had 554 Coronavirus-related deaths per million people and has yet to peak.1 In countries that have already peaked and largely handled the pandemic, the numbers are drastically different. Germany sits at 112 per million (nearly 5 times lower) and Japan is at 10 per million (nearly 60 times lower).2

First of all, we hope that you all are staying safe in these unprecedented times. We wanted to send out a few updates that have happened over the last few weeks with an eye towards the future. Given the many developments that we have had during these times, this Update is longer than usual, so please take some time to read the following carefully as there is plenty of pertinent information here.

Since the Chinese government put the city of Wuhan on lockdown in early January, the Dow has fallen over 1,000 points. There have been 9,809 confirmed cases that have resulted in 213 deaths so far.

After a successful career in the 1980s and 1990s as the head of Salomon Brother’s fixed-income arbitrage group, in 1993, John Meriwether founded his own hedge fund to profit in the financial derivatives market using similar arbitrage methods. On the board of directors of this hedge fund were economic luminaries…