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​​As Omicron Spreads, New York City Mandates Vaccination For All Private Firms

​​As Omicron Spreads, New York City Mandates Vaccination For All Private Firms

By Peter Szekely and Brendan O'Brien

NEW YORK (Reuters) -New York City declared on Monday that all private-sector employers must implement COVID-19 vaccine mandates for their workers, as the highly transmissible Omicron variant has spread to at least one-third of U.S. states.

The biggest U.S. city set a December 27 deadline for all 184,000 businesses within its limits to make their employees show proof that they have been vaccinated.

In addition, children 5 to 11 years old must get at least one vaccine dose by Dec. 14 to enter restaurants and to participate in extracurricular school activities, such as sports, band, orchestra and dance, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

"Vaccination is the way out of this pandemic, and these are bold, first-in-the-nation measures to encourage New Yorkers to keep themselves and their communities safe,” de Blasio, who leaves office next month, said in a statement.

De Blasio's successor, Eric Adams, “will evaluate this mandate and other COVID strategies when he is in office and make determinations based on science, efficacy and the advice of health professionals,” said his spokesperson Evan Thies.

About 27 percent of children ages five to 12 have gotten at least one dose and 15 percent are fully vaccinated, according to the city's website.

The Greater New York Chamber of Commerce said it supported the expanded mandate.

The requirements come at a time when new coronavirus infections are accelerating nationwide https://tmsnrt.rs/2WTOZDR, especially in northern states, as colder weather has encouraged more mingling and socializing indoors.

Over the last week, the country has averaged more than 120,000 new infections a day, up 64% from the prior week, according to a Reuters tally.

Deaths, which lag infections, have averaged 1,300 a day over the last seven days, up from an average of 800 a day a week ago, according to Reuters data.

The Delta variant still accounts for 99.9 percent of new COVID cases in the United States, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told ABC News on Sunday.

Omicron, first detected last month in southern Africa, has spread around the globe and shows signs of being more contagious than the Delta variant.

A total of several dozen Omicron cases have been found in 18 out of 50 U.S. states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin, according to a Reuters tally.

Louisiana has also reported a probable Omicron case in a crew member on a cruise ship that disembarked in New Orleans over the weekend. At least 17 COVID-19 cases were detected on the ship and more testing is underway, state health officials said.

Several Wall Street banks headquartered in New York, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, already require vaccines for anyone coming into their offices. JPMorgan Chase & Co, the largest U.S. bank, has so far allowed unvaccinated employees to come to work in offices if they submit to twice-weekly COVID-19 tests.

Alphabet Inc's Google and Meta's Facebook, which also have operations in New York City, also already require all U.S. employees to be vaccinated to enter buildings.

A nationwide vaccine mandate issued earlier this year by President Joe Biden for companies with 100 workers or more has been tied up in litigation. In November, a U.S. appeals court upheld its decision to put on hold the order.

De Blasio, noting that the city has already issued mandates covering several other sets of municipal workers, expressed confidence that his latest order would withstand legal scrutiny.

"We are confident because it's universal," he said on MSNBC.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York and Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Dilts in New York, Susan Heavey in Washington and Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Lisa Shumaker)

Wall Street Watches As Senate Haggles Over Debt Ceiling 'Truce'

Wall Street Watches As Senate Haggles Over Debt Ceiling 'Truce'

(Reuters) - An apparent truce in the U.S. debt-ceiling standoff in Congress has offered some relief to Wall Street investors on edge about a possible debt default, but analysts are left assessing the risk of a repeat crisis as the year closes out.

The heads of major banks and financial institutions warned lawmakers of catastrophe if the debt ceiling was not raised before Oct. 18, the date the government expects to run out of cash, leading to a default on its debt.

A plan floated by U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday would extend the borrowing limit into December -- providing respite but no long-term solution.

"There will be many proposals, trial balloons and negotiations going on to resolve this issue," said S&P Global Ratings' lead U.S. sovereign credit analyst Joydeep Mukherji in an email on Wednesday, adding that S&P's view on the U.S. underlying credit rating has not changed.

Mukherji in a recent interview said the scenario of the AA-plus U.S. credit rating plummeting to D due to a default was "crazy, almost difficult, impossible to imagine it."

Markets reacted positively to news of a potential, though temporary solution on Wednesday, with stocks rising and Treasury yields falling.

"Two months seems like plenty of time and (we) think the debt ceiling would be raised through reconciliation by then and do not expect to experience the past week come December," NatWest analysts wrote in a research note on Wednesday.

Republicans said Democrats could use the intervening weeks to pass a longer debt-ceiling extension through a complex process called reconciliation, which would allow Democrats to marshal their razor-thin majority in the Senate to approve the measure without any Republican support.

Goldman Sachs analysts wrote on Wednesday that the ultimate outcome may be "what had seemed like the most likely outcome all along, which is that Democrats use the reconciliation process to increase the debt limit just before the deadline" after exhausting all other options.

Even so, there are serious risks for President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Under the temporary extension plan, Democrats would have to address the debt ceiling issue again in December, just as another federal government shutdown looms. That could complicate their efforts to pass two massive spending bills that make up much of Biden's domestic agenda.

Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading, wrote in a note to clients that he expected McConnell to "continue to grant limited debt limit extensions right through the (2022) mid-term elections if the lack of urgency continues to slow the Democrats' reconciliation spending bill.

The stakes are high if a solution is not reached.

Financial risk firm Moody's Analytics, which is a separate entity from Moody's Investors Service, said a default would be a "catastrophic blow" to the U.S. economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and upend global financial markets.

Moody's Analytics noted that an inadvertent missed Treasury bill payment in 1979 caused bill yields to spike 60 basis points and remain elevated for several months at the cost of tens of billions of dollars. The 1979 technical default https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-debt-default/factbox-the-day-the-u-s-defaulted-idUSN1E76A0XA20110711 was blamed on check-processing glitches.

The major credit rating agencies do not expect the U.S. will default. Still, Mukherji and his counterpart at Fitch Ratings in recent research and interviews said a default, including a temporary or so-called technical one, on any Treasury bill, note or bond payment would push the country's respective ratings of AA-plus and AAA down to D.

Moody's Investors Service, which rates the U.S. Aaa with a stable outlook, said it saw a "limited" impact on the country's rating in the case of a default and would likely downgrade the rating for all U.S. Treasury securities and keep it on review until it was clear "a cure would happen."

Even without a default, if a solution is not in hand to avoid a cash crunch the United States risks losing another of its triple-A ratings. S&P famously cut the rating a notch to AA-plus on Aug. 5, 2011, in the wake of a round of political wrangling over the country's debt.

Major financial institutions have considered the United States an AA-plus-rated credit since October 2020, down from AAA where it stood since 2017, according to David Carruthers, head of research at Credit Benchmark, a financial data and analytics company that collates the internal credit risk views of more than 40 institutions around the world, including 15 global systemically important banks.

Mukherji in an interview last week said that a U.S. default on a debt payment would be highly unusual as it would be a result of politics and not economic woes. Still, at the end of the day it's the same thing.

"If you don't pay, it really doesn't matter what the reason was -- you are in default."

(Reporting by Karen Pierog; editing by Megan Davies and Leslie Adler)

JPMorgan Chase Tower

Banker Robbery And Corporate Mediocrity Add Up To Grand Larceny

Exciting news from Wall Street: Our wealth markets are booming!

For the 15th month in a row, everything from the Dow Jones Average to gold prices to bank stocks are rocketing to new records, showering us with wealth from above. Oh ... wait. Maybe you're one of the majority of workaday Americans who don't own stocks or gold, so maybe you're not celebrating Wall Street's big boom. But just chill, because conventional corporate wisdom assures us that the wealthy will invest their good fortunes in enterprises that someday, somewhere will create jobs and eventually will produce trickle-down gains for everyone.

Excuse me for rudeness, but let's take a peek at how those who're reaping today's big-buck bonanza are actually investing that wealth. Surprise — they're largely putting the increase into schemes that further benefit them ... not you!

Consider Wall Streeters themselves. While workers, Main Street businesses, poverty groups, et al. have been knocked down during the past several months, the big banks have been making money like ... well, like bankers. Just since this January, their stock prices have zoomed up by 28 percent. So, how are these moneyed elites spending this windfall? Not by making job-creating investments, but by simply giving the money to their own shareholders, including their own top executives — nearly all of whom are already among the richest people on Earth.

The main way they do this is through a sleight of hand called a "stock buyback." The honchos simply cash out the bulk of that 28 percent increase in the value of the banks' stock price, using that money to repurchase their banks' own stock from lesser shareholders. Hocus-pocus, this manipulation artificially pumps up the value of the stock these insider shareholders already own — making each of them even richer than rich, although they've done absolutely nothing to earn this increased wealth.

It's not a small scam. JPMorgan Chase is now sinking $30 billion into buying its own stock. Wells Fargo is shifting $18 billion into the scheme, and Bank of America is throwing $25 billion into its buyback. Hello — Wall Street bankers are the biggest robbers in America.

Most people believe the American economy is being rigged by and for big bankers, CEOs, and other superrich elites, because ... well, because it is!

With their hired armies of lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers and the like, they fix the economic rules so ever more of society's money and power flow uphill, from us to them. Take corporate CEOs. While 2020 was somewhere between a downer and devastating for most people, the CEO class made out like bandits. Indeed, last year, the three top paid corporate honchos in America pocketed personal paychecks of $211 million, $414 million, and $1.1 billion.

Are they geniuses, superproducers or what? What. All three of their corporations ended 2020 with big financial losses and declining value, so how can such mediocrity produce such lavish rewards? Simple — rig the pay machine.

Today's corporate system of setting compensation for top executives is a flimflam disguised as a model of management rectitude. On its face, the system ties the chief's pay to the success of the business. "Pay for performance," it's called — the CEO does well if the company does well. Good theory!

But their trick is in narrowly defining "doing well" to exclude doing good — i.e., treating workers, consumers, the environment, et al. fairly. Thus, rewarding the Big Boss is rooted in nothing more substantial or productive than the sterile ethics of monetary selfishness.

Even implementing that shriveled ethical standard is a scam at most major corporations, because the standard of financial performance that the chief must meet to quality for a huge payday is set by each corporation's board of directors. Guess who they are? Commonly, board members are the CEO's hand-picked brothers-in-law, golfing buddies, and corporate cronies. So, they set the bar for winning multimillion-dollar executive paychecks so low that a sack of concrete could jump over it.

Well, insist these flimflammers, it's the corporate shareholders who are the ultimate stopgap against CEO greed. These "owners" can just vote "no" on any executive pay they consider excessive. Nice try, but even "shareholder democracy" is rigged — corporate rules decree that votes by shareholders are merely "advisory," meaning top executives can simply ignore them, grab the money and run. The system is fixed ... and we need to break it!

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com

New York Stock Exchange

Not Getting Your Shot May Cost You Your Job

The CEO of Morgan Stanley wants all the boys and girls back in the financial giant's Times Square office by Labor Day. "If you can go to a restaurant in New York City," James Gorman told them, "you can come into the office. And we want you in the office."

Gorman added: "If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York. None of this 'I'm in Colorado ... and getting paid like I'm sitting in New York City." Clearly, the time employees may happily Zoom in from a lakeside cabin or suburban sunroom is drawing to a close.

This is a sentiment less colorfully shared by other captains of Wall Street finance, where group effort is often required.

"Having worked in the industry for 25 years," James Davies, a top Deutsche Bank executive said, "it was somewhat strange to walk onto the trading floor ... and see, you know, I guess six to 10 people here, versus the hundreds we would normally have." He wants them back, too.

Say what you want about Wall Street bosses, they're refreshingly uninterested in indulging the preferences or prejudices of their high-paid workers. It should thus surprise no one that they'd insist that the returnees are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

They're not heartless. Gorman says those who don't want the vaccine for genuine health or religious reasons will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Arguing that you don't want the shot because Tucker Carlson says it is dangerous, however, will not work.

It takes less of a mental leap to understand why hospital staff would also be told, no jab, no job. That didn't stop a nurse from becoming lead plaintiff in an unsuccessful suit against her employer, Houston Methodist Hospital, for firing workers who refuse to be vaccinated. Jennifer Bridges claimed she was being asked to become a "human guinea pig."

The Texas federal judge who rejected her case stated the obvious: "Methodist is trying to do their business of saving lives without giving them the COVID-19 virus. It is a choice made to keep staff, patients, and their families safer."

A medical assistant seeking to stop a similar mandate at Indiana University Health contended that these medical institutions would "lose a lot of employees" as a result. Well, some people should not work in health care, particularly those who would expose vulnerable patients to a deadly disease.

Do note that most of these workers are already required to get an annual flu shot and to be immunized against measles, mumps, chickenpox, and other infectious diseases. Suits to stop these mandates have also gone nowhere.

Experts at Johns Hopkins Medicine say all three vaccines authorized for emergency use are highly effective in preventing a serious disease, and their benefits greatly outweigh the rare risks. They would know.

The issue of liability is not insignificant. Hospitals could face serious legal consequences if an unvaccinated worker infects a patient, James Hodge Jr., a law professor at Arizona State University, told Stateline.

The mayor of a city near Los Angeles, meanwhile, says that city employees who work with the public must get vaccinated. If you won't, Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris told them, "we'll help you find another job in the city to do until this crisis is over." But you could also be suspended without pay.

For the record, Parris is a Republican. And one can assume that the Wall Street executives who won't let returning workers spread pestilence on their premises are fairly conservative. They all have businesses to run.

No one has to get the shot, but no one should have to employ those who won't. Playtime is over.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.