The active outbreak list is intended to inform the public of the current COVID-19 outbreaks in Los Angeles County. Dec 2020 - Apr 20221 year 5 months. January 2022 was the month with the highest average cases, while November 2020 was the month with the highest . By Bethany McLean Coronavirus May Kill Our Fracking Fever Dream America's energy independence was an illusion created by cheap debt. 2023 Cond Nast. In the Season One finale of Making A Killing, Bethany brings back her friend, colleague and co-author Joe Nocera (Bloomberg Opinion columnist and creator of The Shrink Next Door podcast) to bookend the season with a lively analysis of the former head of Nissan Motor Co. and Renault S.A., Carlos Ghosn. Fracking, they said, was just manufacturing, in which process and human intelligence could reduce costs and conquer geology. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Blame Congress for the meltdown, not Goldman Sachs. All thats left to tally is the damage. COVID-19 Guidance for isolation and quarantine, COVID-19 Education and Outreach Materials Page. Private equity, of course, came of age in the 1980s, when greed was good and private-equity titans like KKRs Henry Kravis first burst into the limelight by taking over famed American manufacturers like RJR Nabisco. Moodys, the rating agency, said that in the third quarter of 2019, 91 percent of defaulted U.S. corporate debt was due to oil and gas companies. The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground (Bethany McLean, New York Times), Coronavirus May Kill Our Fracking Fever Dream (Bethany McLean, New York Times), Are Crude Oil & Natural Gas Prices Linked? Months into the outbreak, no one really knows how well many of the screening tests work, and experts at top medical centers say it is time to do the studies to find out. There were rumblings that shale companies would seek a federal lifeline. Unfortunately, there isnt really an alternative to providing private equity with federal funds. She is known for her writing on the Enron scandal and the 2008 financial crisis. Workers monitoring a hydraulic fracturing operation near Wink, Texas. How will the virus continue to change? Its a rich history of a company, and a case study in how a corporate culture can turn toxic. Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. We could go even further. Even so, he told me, a large number of private-equity firms ignored that guidance and decided to put very high levels of leverage on their portfolio companies. Maybe those firms should now be required to contribute more equity from their cash stockpiles, he suggests. I dont think any of us can really believe what we saw today, one industry analyst told AP. That, too, is ending, as investors in such funds have become disillusioned. McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and co-author of the Enron book The Smartest Guys in the Room. Otherwise, the ILPA warned in a previous letter, there would be significant harm not only to employees that see their hours reduced or jobs eliminated, but also significantly reduced returns to the institutions providing retirement security through pensions, insurance policies and other investments that serve hundreds of thousands of Americans. To make matters worse, ILPA added, provisions in many private-equity investments allow private-equity firms to make additional capital calls when times are tough. How concerning are things like long covid and reinfections? He and McLean previously worked together on All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, about the 2008 market crash. We asked three experts two immunologists and an epidemiologist to weigh in on this and some of the hundreds of other questions weve gathered from readers recently, including how to make sense of booster and test timing, recommendations for children, whether getting covid is just inevitable and other pressing queries. Bethany McLean. In 2019, Oxy, as its known, topped a competing bid from Chevron and paid $38 billion to take over Anadarko Petroleum, which is one of the major shale companies. Create a Website Account - Manage notification subscriptions, save form progress and more. You can see how all of this is playing out by looking at Occidental Petroleum. Because rules for access to this money werent specified in the CARES Act, as ILPA notes, the executive branch will have a fair amount of discretion over who gets access to the moneyand private-equity firms want to take full advantage of that opening. (Many of the companies owned by mammoth private-equity firms like Blackstone are too big on their own to qualify for this bucket of money.). She is the co-author of the 2003 book, "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron," which was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated documentary of the same name. Ad Choices. Her two books are the The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing. All rights reserved. The basic reason is that the amount of oil coming out of a fracked well declines steeply after the first year more than 50 percent in year two. Novavax Inc said on Thursday it would require six months to produce a COVID-19 vaccine designed to match whichever coronavirus variants are circulating for an annual immunization program each fall . Unlike venture capitalists, who provide start-up funds to new companies, private-equity firms generally take over existing businesses, usually by borrowing large sums of money. The reason is as simple as it is galling: while great private fortunes, such as that of Blackstones Stephen Schwarzman (net worth: $17.5 billion and Apollos Leon Black ($7.5 billion), have been made from private equitys march through the world, its losses, to a remarkable degree, will belong to all of us. Latest trends. COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a "Complex and Grave Situation" Inside a Wuhan Lab. Private equity has made multibillionaires of executives like Blackstones Steve Schwarzman (net worth: $17.5 billion) and Apollos Leon Black ($7.5 billion). Colombias Amazing Race to Build a $1,000 Ventilator Frontline Doctors Race to Learn the Mysteries of Coronavirus How Dr. Anthony Faucis Media Strategy Is Revolutionizing Coronavirus Messaging Can Americas Crowd-Driven Spectacles Return for the Fall Season? From the Archive: Following the Psychological Contagion That Fed the 2014 Ebola Outbreak. By Bethany McLean. The 42 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time, The 25 Best Shows on Netflix to Watch Right Now. Over the past 10 years, the entire energy industry has issued over $400 billion in high-yield debt. 2023 Cond Nast. All thats left to tally is the environmental and financial damage. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer), Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The big banks emerged from the financial crisis victorious, but also subject to a host of new regulations designed to reduce leverage and stabilize the economy. Given how much of the economy will rise and fall on the investments that private-equity funds manage, we may be forced to let them share the federal handout. The private-equity industry also wants the companies they have invested in to have access to the $454 billion being doled out through the Treasury, an amount that the Fed said could be leveraged into over $2 trillion. According to the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), a lobbying group which represents CalPERs and other public investors, businesses backed by private equity employ more than 8.8 million Americans at over 35,000 companies, accounting for a staggering 5% of the United States GDP. The fracking boom that drove a decade of record U.S. oil and gas production was never really profitable to begin with. Regarding another ongoing Covid danger, that of reinfections, a virologist sets the record straight: There has yet to be a variant that negates the benefits of vaccines.. She is known for her writing on the Enron scandal and the 2008 financial crisis. If you need help with the Public File, call 540-512-1558. Is there any chance this could lead to prison time? Even as the public equity and debt markets grew cautious, drilling continued. MCHD offers free COVID-19 (PCR) testing every Tuesday and Wednesday from 9am-12pm inside the McLean County Health Department building, 200 W. Front Street in downtown Bloomington, Room 400E. Paying members will get access to perks like a monthly happy hour with Kate, Daniel, and friends, a free ebook of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, and much more. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. More than 100,000 people already have died in this country from the virus. So the era of low interest rates, which began with former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and continues to this day, has been a huge boon to private-equity firms. In this episode, McLeanwho has tracked the industrys shaky footing for yearstraces the ups and downs of the industry from the 1970s to 2008 to today, and assesses whether a new recession will speed the transition away from fossil fuelsor hand oil barons a life raft. Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced Wednesday that the two had reached an agreement for a news-breaking, character-driven narrative revealing the forces that rendered critical American institutions ill-equipped to cope with the deadliest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu and the economic consequences of that failure.. COVID-19 in McLean County for the week ending 3-3-23 - New Cases (2-23-23 to 3-1-23):129; New Hospitalizations (2-22-23 to 2-28-23):10 ; McLean Countys COVID-19 Community Level is LOW: When Community Level is LOW: Stay up to date on vaccinations, Get tested if you have symptoms. The fracking boom that drove a decade of record U.S. oil and gas production was never really profitable to begin with. She has co-authored multiple bestselling books, including The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. As a result, private equity is now wound into the very fabric of our economy. . She is also a columnist at Yahoo Finance and a contributor to CNBC. Bethany McLean is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Get COVID-19 vaccine updates from the CDC. A college student in Indiana died in her dorm room after testing positive for the coronavirus, school officials and her family said. And President Trump reveled in the rhetoric: We hadnt merely achieved independence, his administration said, but rather energy dominance.. Never mind that they often overpaid for the companies they acquired, and loaded them up with so much debt that even a mild economic downturn could make it nearly impossible for those companies to repay their loans, as Fortune put it. This kind of rewrites the economics of oil trading.. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the cutting-edge biotech facility at the center of swirling suspicions about the pandemics onset, was far more troubled than previously known, explosive documents unearthed by a Senate research team reveal. Some of it has been packaged into so-called collateralized loan obligations, pieces of which are held by hedge funds. Driven partly by public pensions, the private-equity industry has mushroomed. McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and co-author of the Enron book "The Smartest Guys in the Room." Nocera. Traders last year at the New York Stock Exchange near the post that trades Anadarko Petroleum and Occidental Petroleum. Restaurants and hotels owned by big chains have already received exemptions granting them access to the relief funds, regardless of how many people their parent companies employ. Which explains why ILPA wrote to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell last week, arguing that companies backed by private equity should be allowed to access the relief funds provided in the CARES Act. As a result, the stocks that make up the S.&P. On Thursday's show: The job forecast for the region in 2022, lessons from the collapse of Enron, a conversation with the late Stephen Sondheim, and the best new restaurants from the past year. These firms not only have a record $1.5 trillion in cash on the sidelines, waiting to be invested, but their CEOs are among Americas richest executives. Previous assignments include editor-at-large, columnist for Fortune, and a contributor to Slate . Fueled by debt and years of easy credit, Americas energy boom is on shaky footing. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How Its Changing the World., stocks that make up the S.&P. Copyright 2023 Click2Houston.com is managed by Graham Digital and published by Graham Media Group, a division of Graham Holdings. But with super-low interest rates, investors in search of yield were still willing to buy debt. By early 2019, America was the worlds largest producer of crude oil, surpassing both Saudi Arabia and Russia. Smithfield Foods. Confirmed case data are from the Department of Public Health's communicable disease surveillance database. 1 FOR PHARMACISTS PRESCRIBING PAXLOVID: This service is available in all locations, with the exception of those in New Hampshire. And why not? (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer), (Rick Bowmer, Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. 2 FOR DRIVE-THRU TESTING RESULTS: Lab samples are sent to an off-site laboratory and results may take 1 to 2 days or even longer in some instances or in times of peak demand. Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds, A Moderate Proposal: Nationalize The Fossil Fuel Industry, https://media.blubrry.com/belabored/dissentmagazine.org/mp3/24HotBothered.mp3. Bethany McLean is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Like so many other facets of the COVID-19 crisis, however, this unprecedented crash exposed long-running cracks in the facade.

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