| |
FOLLOW US   | GET THE NEWSLETTER |
Have thoughts or feedback? Anything I missed this week? Email me at bsutherland7@bloomberg.net Programming Note: Given the holiday next Friday, the newsletter will publish on Thursday afternoon so look out for it then. Have a good weekend! With about 10 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the past two weeks, restaurants and gyms now shuttered and more than half of the world’s aircraft fleet parked, it feels like the economy as we know it has come to a complete stop. But the underlying plumbing is largely still operational. While delivery drivers and grocery-store clerks have been appropriately lionized, much of the country’s factory workforce is also still reporting for duty. In the age of the coronavirus, wide swathes of the U.S. manufacturing sector fall under the umbrella of “critical infrastructure,” meaning facilities can stay open even in the face of restrictive shelter-in-place orders. I’ve talked a lot recently about the ways in which manufacturers are stepping up to make products outside their normal purview to help the nation combat the coronavirus, whether that’s LVMH’s hand-sanitizer production, clothing companies’ pivot to face masks or General Motors Co.’s foray into ventilators. The White House continues to needlessly point fingers at corporations that are trying to help, with 3M Co. becoming the latest to earn President Donald Trump’s Twitter ire despite having aggressively stepped up face-mask production. The administration finally took on some responsibility for orchestrating the production push for key medical gear: it invoked the Defense Production Act this week to help ventilator manufacturers procure needed supplies and to prioritize the U.S. for shipments of 3M’s N95 respirators. This remains a slipshod effort and there are risks of more protectionist attitudes backfiring. But those ventilator supplies have to come from somewhere, as do the raw materials for the respirators. Another company has to make sure those products get from point A to point B. |
...there is “a surprisingly limited degree of business disruptions across the multi-industry universe, with plant shutdowns generally isolated and sporadic,” Wolfe Research analyst Nigel Coe wrote in a report this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment