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Interview with Ambassador Richard Haass; Molson Coors Employee Killed Five Yesterday; Joe Biden Leads South Carolina Polls. Aired 10:30-11a ET
Aired February 27, 2020 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
10:31:23]
POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: Breaking news, look at the Dow, off 830 points right now. It is officially in correction territory. What you need to know is that means it's down 10 percent from the highs.
Goldman Sachs with a stark warning this morning that U.S. companies will likely see no earnings growth this year due to the coronavirus outbreak. They do say a rebound is going to come after that, in the following year.
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: CNN's Christine Romans joins us now, she's been following the news. Now, Christine, markets fall for a lot of reasons --
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF CORRESPONDENT: Sure.
SCIUTTO: -- sometimes they fall just for sentiment --
ROMANS: Right.
SCIUTTO: -- something gets in their head, right?
ROMANS: Yes.
SCIUTTO: And worry -- and worry, you know, feeds more worry. In this case, this appears to be a reaction to hard numbers --
ROMANS: Yes.
SCIUTTO: -- does it not? Lower corporate earnings and economic growth?
ROMANS: And momentum. Look, the market, investors were blase, too sanguine for too long about the threat of coronavirus. And now that you see a community-spread illness in the United States, you see new cases outside of China that are now moving more quickly than new cases in China.
That shows you that there are real reasons why investors are so concerned. They just had not really factored in the possibility of an epidemic or even a pandemic. I want to give you some numbers. The worst week since the financial
crisis percentage-wise, for the Dow and the S&P 500. In six days, more than 10 percent down for the Dow, that is officially a correction. Very rare to have it happen so quickly --
HARLOW: Yes.
ROMANS: -- six days, 10 percent down for the S&P 500. You rarely, rarely see that. The last time we saw something like that was in October of 2008, which I remember very clearly, it was a very bad time.
Now --
SCIUTTO: Yes.
ROMANS: -- markets also overreact. That's really important here to remember, that sometimes markets overreact. But in the past few days, I have not seen that dipping in from people trying to find a bargain. There's a momentum thing happening here, and it's not just in the stock market.
The entire kind of financial asset mix is telling you that they're worried about something. The bond market, record low in the 10-year note yield, below 1.31 percent. That is remarkable. Oil stocks, oil shares, oil prices, down on the worry that you're going to need less oil if the global economy slows. Gold prices at seven- or eight-year highs as investors are pushing money into what they perceive to be safer alternatives.
HARLOW: Just one thing, not to be too alarmist, and this is a huge --
ROMANS: Sure.
HARLOW: -- deal, the market off this much this quickly, as you point out. But just reading through the entirety of Goldman Sachs' warning this morning, at the end, they say, we also assume the economic weakness will be short-lived --
ROMANS: Yes.
HARLOW: -- and most of that lost activity recouped by late-2020.
ROMANS: I think that's a really important point. In this note -- and we've been mentioning this all morning -- you know, they say that if this becomes worse, you could see another seven percent off on the S&P 500. But they expect the market to be higher by the end of the year because the U.S. economy fundamentally is strong.
The American consumer is strong, very low unemployment rate, wages, if they tick up this year, mean the consumer still has a lot of buying power. Companies are nervous, supply chains are strained but the consumer remains strong in this country.
HARLOW: Yes.
SCIUTTO: (INAUDIBLE) the big number to watch is Chinese economic growth. Because --
ROMANS: Yes.
SCIUTTO: -- that would be a real thing. And, listen, we've seen the empty streets in China, we've seen the empty factories. And that translates into real effects. Christine Romans, always good to have you on.
(CROSSTALK)
HARLOW: Great to have you. Thank you.
We're now learning that there are at least 82,000 coronavirus cases around the world. The virus, killing nearly 3,000 people mainly in China. In Japan, the government there, overnight, asking all schools, all the public schools there to shut down until the end of March, so that's for an entire month.
In Europe, at least 11 countries have confirmed cases.
SCIUTTO: Joining us now is the ambassador, Richard Haass. He's the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He's also the author of a forthcoming book you might want to read, in light of everything, "The World: A Brief Introduction." We look forward to it.
Ambassador Haass, great to have you on this morning.
[10:35:00]
RICHARD HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: Thank you, Jim.
SCIUTTO: Let me begin with your assessment of the seriousness of this from you perch there at the Council on Foreign Relations, your past in government. You're in touch with a lot of folks around the world -- economists, government officials, et cetera -- how serious is this in your view? And are governments around the world, including here in the U.S., do they have a handle on this?
HAASS: Look, it's the right question. It's obviously serious economically. China will have considerable negative economic growth for the first quarter. I think it's a question of when and not if the world recovers. It could be late this year, early next.
The one uncertainty there is whether there's subsequent waves of this virus. That's often the history of influenza-like outbreaks, so this is the initial wave. But we have to see what happens with subsequent waves.
I think there's questions about what implications this could have for political leadership. In China, conceivably, it'll affect the election here in the -- in the United States, and obviously there's the human factor. We've lost around 3,000 lives.
The only good news -- and let me sort of -- there's not a lot -- is that the contagion seems to be greater -- I think the number's far higher than 80,000, so the ratio of those who have it with or without symptoms to those who are dying from it, suggests that the lethality is probably lower than we are currently estimating.
HARLOW: It's a great point. If only we -- you know, we could fully trust the numbers out of China, right? Because that's key to knowing the lethality of all of it.
SCIUTTO: Yes.
HARLOW: Richard, one sort of economic thought I had -- and I hesitate to mention that because the human toll is so much more important, and lives lost -- but I wonder if you think that this really accelerates decoupling, if this is such an important reminder of just how much the world economy relies on China.
HAASS: It's a great question. Certain things, possibly for example, countries will look at their production of protective gear -- gowns, masks and all that -- and they may say, no matter what, we don't want to be dependent upon imports. And same thing for certain types of medicines.
So you may have a degree of decoupling, but you can't decouple by definition tourism, you can't decouple most of merchandise trade, you don't need to decouple services. So I think the long-term implications of that are probably modest.
SCIUTTO: The president in his press conference yesterday and other public comments, has contradicted some of the country's own senior health officials on the seriousness of this, or even how quickly the country will be able to develop a vaccine.
And of course, it's not the first time we've seen the president color the facts, you might say to his advantage, whether it's on Russian election interference, who pays for tariffs resulting from the trade war. I just wonder, from your view, how damaging is that? And there's a very basic question here, who should Americans trust for the most accurate assessment of this? And information about this.
HAASS: Yes, the president did downplay things a bit. He talked about the vaccine as if it were going to be available soon, and then you had Dr. Fauci come out and say it's going to take a year or 18 months. And we don't even know if the vaccine is going to be effective at that time.
I think the president's taking a risk here. You always want to under- promise and overdeliver. And in some ways, he's overpromising and potentially underdelivering. So it may help him a little bit in the short run, though today's market reaction suggests he didn't reassure anybody yesterday.
HARLOW: Yes.
HAASS: And more important is, he prepares people psychologically and physically for what is to come.
HARLOW: What are the lessons learned here? Or, you know, are some of these moves reversible, that this administration has taken, just in terms of cutting funding to the CDC, cutting the jobs of people within CDC that work overseas in other countries to curb, you know, the spread of things like this, the fact that the NSC, that is coordinating all of this, doesn't have someone on it right now that oversees global health issues. I mean, is that stuff reversible in your mind at this point?
HAASS: Well, it's reversible but it's too little, too late.
HARLOW: Yes.
HAASS: In some ways, a lot is already baked into the cakes. And one of these, it's like an insurance policy. We've got to pay our insurance policies, you never know when the fire's going to come. So it's just foolish, not to have all the precautions in place, not to have, for example, kept funding up for the World Health Organization.
The other big lesson is cover-ups by governments fail. Look what happened in China, look what happened in Iran. The delay that causes turns out to be extraordinarily expensive for life and economics.
SCIUTTO: Absolutely.
HARLOW: Great points. Thank you, Ambassador Haass. We look forward to reading your new book, especially at a time like this. Appreciate it.
SCIUTTO: Yes.
HAAS: Thanks, Poppy.
SCIUTTO: And the market (ph) --
HARLOW: Sure.
SCIUTTO: -- well, I was watching it during the interview, it's, well, still down about 800 points here.
HARLOW: Remarkable few days.
[10:39:33]
A 51-year-old man, opening fire on his coworkers. This all happened late yesterday at a brewery in Milwaukee. Well, this morning, five people are dead. Investigators are trying to figure out why this all happened.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCIUTTO: Just moments ago, the governor of Wisconsin, ordering flags to be flown at half-staff for victims of a mass shooting. This one, at the Molson Coors Brewery in Milwaukee, a scene we've seen in so many communities around the country.
Yesterday, a gunman opened fire there on his coworkers. Five people were killed before the gunman took his own life. Police say the victims may not be publicly identified until tomorrow.
HARLOW: A local clothing company, already selling Miller Strong T- shirts -- look at that -- to honor the victims lost from the Molson Coors Beverage Company, and to raise money for the families they have left behind.
Let's go back to our Omar Jimenez. He joins us outside of just that historic plant in the middle of Milwaukee. It seems like there's a lot, Omar, that we don't know from police at this point.
[10:45:04]
OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Poppy. Police are being very cautious in the information they are giving out, and the timing of that information. I mean, for starters, when (ph) you talk about the victims killed in this, five people killed, five people who went to work, thinking this was an ordinary day and that they would be able to go back to their families at the end of the day.
And the reason police are being cautious in those names is they say a lot of family members are coming from out of town to try and get here first and have that face-to-face conversation with some of these police officers and go through that identification process, so they are waiting for that to go through.
And then on the shooter side, we do know a few details, that this was a 51-year-old active employee, as we learned from the employer here, at the time of this shooting. But they had been cautious releasing the name officially, though we have been monitoring police activity going in and out of a home here in the area as well.
This all started Wednesday afternoon. It was just after 2:00 in the afternoon here that police got reports of a shooting happening at the Molson Coors complex here. And it was minutes after that that the over 1,000 employees that were working that day got text messages, telling them to find a safe place because there was a gunman on the campus.
Now, when first responders actually arrived, they described what they saw as a war zone. The gunman, already dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound of course, not before taking five coworkers with him on the way -- Poppy, Jim.
SCIUTTO: Sad and familiar story. Omar Jimenez, thanks very much.
HARLOW: Thank you.
SCIUTTO: There is a reason to smile for Joe Biden this morning. A new poll out in South Carolina, what it signals about his chances for victory in that primary this weekend, less than 48 hours away.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:51:12]
HARLOW: Two days away until the South Carolina primary, Joe Biden got some good news. SCIUTTO: Yes, a couple bits of good news in the last couple days, so
let's get right to CNN senior political writer and analyst, Harry Enten.
Biden, of course, got that endorsement from James Clyburn yesterday. Now, a poll that looks good for him.
HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER AND ANALYST: Yes. I mean, Monmouth University just came out with numbers in the last hour, and it shows Biden with a 20-point advantage. And obviously, you look at that screen right here, the other thing I'll note out is Bernie Sanders at 16, Tom Steyer at 15.
Why is it important? They're hovering right around that 15 percent threshold, right? So if they fall below that, Joe Biden would not only with the state, but he would get the vast majority of the delegates from that state.
SCIUTTO; Good point, great point.
HARLOW: What we have seen in the national polling is that Biden has suffered, in the last few weeks, a decline in support of African- American voters. Does that hold true in the state of South Carolina?
ENTEN: No. And that is, I think, also very important, right? If you were to look at that poll, what you see is Joe Biden's support with African-Americans holding at 45 percent --
HARLOW: OK.
ENTEN: -- and Steyer and Sanders way, way back. And that is very different than the picture that we saw in Nevada, right? Where Biden got 38 percent, but Sanders was at 28 percent. That would be a good number for Sanders.
But if you look at this poll right here, Bernie Sander at just 13 percent among African-Americans. It suggests that, indeed, he may have a lot of work to do. And, remember, it's not just about South Carolina, it's about Alabama a week from now, it's about those southern primaries. And that is part of the reason why South Carolina's so important. It may be an indication of what may occur on Super Tuesday.
SCIUTTO: Well, that's -- my question was going to be, is South Carolina important just on the day -- because three days later --
HARLOW: Right.
SCIUTTO: -- is, of course, you have Super Tuesday.
ENTEN: Yes, exactly right. And one of the things that we know from the past is, if you look at South Carolina's results, look at 2008 for example, right? Remember Barack Obama won in South Carolina by this huge margin. Before South Carolina, he was trailing nationally to Hillary Clinton by 9 points. But then after Obama won South Carolina by -- HARLOW: Oh, wow.
ENTEN: -- a huge margin --
SCIUTTO: Wow.
ENTEN: -- he jumped in front nationally by three.
SCIUTTO: Interesting.
ENTEN: And, remember, Super Tuesday is largely indicative of the nation as a whole. So if Biden wins in South Carolina by a big margin, don't be surprised if the national picture begins to turn as well.
HARLOW: You mean South Carolina picks presidents?
ENTEN: Occasionally it does, that's what they tell us.
(LAUGHTER)
HARLOW: All right. Harry, thank you very much.
ENTEN: Thank you.
HARLOW: We appreciate it.
[10:53:18]
An alarming new development for the coronavirus. Here on U.S. soil, a new case with no known source. The president, trying to ease concerns about all of this. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SCIUTTO: Five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova is saying goodbye to tennis. The 32-year-old Russian, announcing her retirement in a column written for "Vanity Fair" magazine.
HARLOW: It is a love letter to the sport that made her one of the world's most famous female athletes. Sharapova burst onto the tennis scene in 2004 as a 17-year-old, beating Serena Williams in the Wimbledon final.
SCIUTTO: A teenage girl has made history of her own by becoming the first female to ever win an individual high school state wrestling championship in North Carolina.
HARLOW: Heaven --
SCIUTTO: Heaven Fitch --
HARLOW: -- that's a great name.
SCIUTTO: -- I love that name.
HARLOW: Heaven Fitch pinned her opponent and claimed the title in the 106-pound weight class, wrapping up a dominant season in which she won 54 matches and lost just four times.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HEAVEN FITCH, INDIVIDUAL WRESTLING CHAMPION IN NC: I just wrestled my best, and I just -- I kind of dominated the match, if I'm being honest.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCIUTTO: That's a great line, great line.
HARLOW: Good for her. The junior went into the tournament as the top seed in her weight class, and was later named the most outstanding wrestler in her division. Fitch says she's glad she can be a role model for other young women, and looks forward to defending her title next year.
SCIUTTO: Yes, here's to Heaven. Well done.
Coming up, Nancy Pelosi, House speaker, she's going to give a press conference. This, of course, amid disagreements among Democrats over who would be the best candidate to represent them in the fall in the general election against Donald Trump.
HARLOW: Yes, yes. That's exactly right. We'll have that for you, live. So stay right here. Thanks for being with us. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning. I'm Poppy Harlow.
[10:59:42]
SCIUTTO: And I'm Jim Sciutto. "AT THIS HOUR" with Kate Bolduan starts right now.
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR, AT THIS HOUR: Hello, everyone. I'm Kate Bolduan. Thank you so much for joining me. We start this hour with the very latest on the coronavirus outbreak, and there are a lot of new developments just today.
First, the financial fallout continues on --
[11:00:00]
