And say the market is reaching extremes of being oversold theres been signs of internal panic and we were set up for at least some kind of snapback. A couple caveats there, we did have a couple tuesday rallies of 5 and 6 the past couple weeks that did not arrest the downtrend. One thing you can hang a little bit of weight on right now is the fact that over the past several days youve been able to look below the surface of the indexes and see more differentiation, separating winners from losers and a little more stock picking and less indiscriminate selling all sets us up for a good bounce on obviously expectations of policy traction that were getting from the fed and congress likely. All that seems to say its a bounce, a very strong one, its an overdue one will it carry on to anything i dont know that we can say for sure, but i like to say every bottom start with a bounce, not every bounce becomes a bottom. In the meantime just i think to put your point into one phrase, its turnaround tuesday today. Bob pisani, we want to bring you into this conversation as well how much of this, this move were seeing to the upside right now, is hinging on the fact that we are potentially finally close to some sort of coronavirus stimulus bill moving through congress, versus Something Like short selling, which art cashin has pointed out . Short covering, excuse me. Yeah. I dont think Short Covering is a pretty modest part of it so far because the amount of shorting going on has been fairly modest in the last week or so. A lot of that has already been dealt with i think the coronavirus issues and whats going on with the stimulus plan is the primary mover of the markets right now, what im a little concerned about is a lot of attempts to call bottoms and i dont think thats going to be very successful. Its remarkable, were entering earnings season and very few companies have withdrawn their guidance weve heard of a few, twitter just did recently, but not many. In the next two weeks as we get into earnings season you will see companies coming out saying were not providing any guidance at all its remarkable how few. Joseph over at johnson johnson, the cfo my favorite quote, he was asked by the journal how do you feel about guidance he will provide in april, one thing i know for certain were going to be 100 precisely wrong. Thats a great quote any attempts to figure out earnings estimates will be difficult. Thats one of the reasons the market is gyrating so much we need a little more time and information. Yeah. Certainly in the next couple weeks and some of those numbers and reports that we do get help to hopefully flush out some of the picture. Mike santoli, the fact that gold continues to rally, a big move this morning, the best day since be 2009, even as equities move higher and treasury yields tick up here, how to think about that well, everything was for sale a week or two ago, including gold and stock and treasuries when you had the liquidity issue. The fed announcements have been overwhelming in what theyre going to do to i guess just liquify the system, arguably at least down the road, make real yields a little less negative. Its really unclear what it means long term for gold, but i do think the reflex of openended quantitative easing coincides with that impulse to buy gold i think again, go back to kaum weeks ago where it was just this rush for lateral cash, lateral government money market funds and treasury bills, not even bond funds or other safe assets thats somewhat reversed i see those two things more or less kind of being in tandem were seeing a relaxation or an unwind of that sell everything for cash type mode the cover story of the feds buying up everything, i think contributes to that impulse to get exposure to gold one thing i think very important is the vix at 55 today, so its been coming steadily down in the last several days, despite a couple of days of volatility. If we can go into the 40s, most of the vix futures contracts going out two or three months have the vix below 50 and into the low 40s now, and theyve been dropping a lot in the last few days that will calm a lot of nerves down just looking at the vix curve, when you had june contract at 50, a few days ago, lower than that now, thats going to be its going to do to a lot to sort of calm peoples nerves down if we can get that down and keep it down for the next few days yeah, bob i was about to ask you about the vix and volume based on how much it is coming down from those 80 levels that we saw a few days ago, does that tell you something about at least without other extreme bad news about virus spread or lack of ability to come together on fiscal policy, does that tell you something about stabilization and to some degree i think you just answered that yeah. Well yes, it does. Talk about what the vix means when at 80 effectively vix at 80 means investors, who are out there in the markets think the s p could move on a 5 daily move for the next month thats an awfully big number those are off the chart numbers. Going down into the 40s would mean they would still be high, they would estimate the s p would be moving 2. 5 on a daily basis, thats still extraordinary but a lot lower. The vix is a real number its an expectation of market volatility in the next 30 days and 5 moves every day the market is expecting thats off the charts you can get it down into the 40s and youre talking about 3 , somewhere around there, 3. 5 , a better deal. Yes, its in a way the vix is a temperature of the market in a very shortterm way. Traders dont really know whats going to happen in the future. Theyre guessing the vix is their way of making a guess on what the market may be doing and its temperature, high means really, really tough, lower is definitely better. And pretty incredible were having a conversation you want to look back i was going to say go ahead. The vix had the similar spike peak months before the ultimate low in the market. When the selling intensity peaks but not when the index is bottoming all the time. Talking about the vix coming down into the 40s as a positive. It really speaks to a difference what a month makes we might not all be together at post nine at the New York Stock Exchange but great to kick off the hour with you two. We want to get to seema moody in the meantime, though, who joins us with a special guest. Marriott Ceo Arne Sorenson arne, a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you for joining us during what is an incredibly difficult time fort the u. S. Hotel industry i want to start this conversation with you addressing your employees in the past week you announced a number of staff reductions, furloughs of tens of thousands of employees, what steps are you taking to help these employees make ends meet and find other opportunity as unemployment is certainly set to rise here yeah. This has been obviously an extraordinary decline in our business the last couple months, i suppose, if you look at where it started in china, but the way its moved around the rest of the world and shown up here in the last few weeks breathtaking in its decline. You know, i sat around the table after 9 11 in 2001 of course i was at the company in 2008 and 2009 when we went through the great recession. Both times thinking this was the worst we had ever seen and what were seeing today is dramatically worse than what we saw in those two prior crises the last two most recent ones and seeing revenue down 75 plus, probably i suspect nearing a 90 decline in the united states, and obviously at those levels there isnt any business in the hotels. The team that weve got of folks around the world, including in the united states, have no role to play and theres no revenue coming into those hotels we have started by going out to communicate with them to be transparent with them, to work our tools and to work the policy tools in order to make sure that they can navigate through this time, which is no fault of theirs, as well as possibly can be done, and so we focus on transparency, we focus on health care, we focus on sort of a furlough approach as opposed to a termination approach, but doing one that allows our folks to be eligible for the Unemployment Insurance and other tools out there and weve been advocating with the policymakers on the hill and in the white house, make sure these tools are set up so they are immediately available at probably more substantial support than is typically the case, and lets adopt policies that allow us to take care of these people. Arne, do we still have you . Im still here. Yeah. Great. Actually, on that point, this time last week, you were at the white house alongside other hotel ceos where you, together, asked for about 150 billion of Financial Relief for the Hotel Industry if youre not able to get that from the white house what happens to the Hotel Workers there were two buckets we talked about and i raised with President Trump and many folks on the hill. One bucket is to make sure were taking care of the employees, and thats the most profound and there it is about all the tools that ive just mentioned, Unemployment Insurance, health care, trying to carry our managed associates on Health Care Even through this crisis, and perhaps some direct distributions to folks and the like the second is a set of provisions to make sure that the businesses that are within our network, within marriott, but also within the industry as a whole, and remember we dont own the hotels that are in our system, they are owned by several real estate investors, often by separate operating businesses, that run a Hilton Garden Inn or a hyatt place, they tend to be locally focused, they have mortgages, capital they need to make sure they can tap in to survive this crisis and reopen when you talk about the 150 billion, were really talking about tools that might be available to both of those communities in order to support them as we go through it. You talked about a 75 decline in revenue the number of Hotel Closures continues to rise with record low occupancy across the u. S at what point do liquidity concerns start to be something you pay a lot of attention to, the strength of your Balance Sheet here marriott is in one place, weve been a solid Investment Grade for long time. When revenue and, therefore, ebitda disappears, there will be pressure on our debt to ebitda ratios and well have to make sure that we work our way through that and were doing that, of course. With we will make sure we take care of our own Balance Sheet. More than that is making sure the network of hotels, which is you know, has hundreds of thousands of people engaged when you include the Franchise Network in fulltime employment, we want to make sure that those Small Businesses have got the resources they need in order to be able to open when demand comes back now, the demand coming back is a key piece in all of this when states around the country are telling people to stay home and not gather, thats obviously not good for our business in the short term weve got to work our way through that and make sure were taking care of the health needs that are the most fundamental needs, but when those restrictions start to open up again we want to make sure people are Strong Enough to reopen arne, this is morgan, to that point how much of the canceled business weve seen, the vacancy rates, whats been lost in the near term is going to be recouped later, versus just lost well, obviously the business that we had expected last night will never reoccur, right. Those rooms went down dark last night. Think broadly about three different kinds of business. One is Group Business that would have been on the books and has been canceled. Most of those Group Customers are rebooking later this year or rebooking into next year we certainly believe that Group Business, when its safe to come back, will come back then youve got individual business travelers and individual leisure travelers, vacationers, and that business we think will come back as people get confident about the ability to safely go about living their lives in the case of vacations or doing their work in the case of business travel, and we think that will come back fairly quickly that doesnt mean, for example, that 2021 will be what we would have expected 2021 to be before the coronavirus. But we would guess that 2021 is going to look more like 2019 than it will look like what the coronavirus leaves for 2020. Got it. In the meantime are you or your franchisees having conversations, will you, are you repurposing some of the properties to help with the coronavirus efforts right now . Oh, absolutely. That started in the beginning with a few of our hotels in wuhan, china, where we quickly housed Health Care Workers we have a few hotels already in california that are serving duties like that weve been in touch with states and hospitals and the red cross and a number of different organizations to make sure that we are doing what we can to be helpful in a way that works for our folks. There are complexities to different uses some of those uses really cannot coexist with a Traditional Hotel use and its got to be one or the other. Weve got to make sure that the folks working in these facilities have the right kind of expertise or the kind of roles that theyve signed up to do and were working through all of those processes across the country. Lets talk china. There is a recovery under way . On a call with investors last week you said in certain provinces youve seen occupancy rise to around 20 has it increased further it is we are still encouraged. When you look across asia pacific, china, maybeland chi mainland china, hong kong, singapore, and south korea are the five markets you have some signs the transmission of the virus has been the curve has been flattened, i suppose to use the phrase that increasingly is used across the world, and that were seeing Business Activity begin to step back up. Its those five markets thats a little bit different i would taiwan is probably in the 35 occupancy range. China is climbing out of the Single Digits towards the 20 range and were seeing a number of cities which are building factory capacity and starting to build a bit of Domestic Travel it is not about International Travel at this point in time well continue to watch that as it goes forward. There is there are some signs of encouragement there. Back here in the u. S. , how reliant is occupancy here in the u. S. On the airlines returning to service well, it depends dramatically on the market and the hotel. There are some mid western markets that are much more drive to markets, but when you get to new york and San Francisco and some of the longer haul resort destinations those are going to be more drive dependent. That more fly dependent, excuse me, which varies by time of year as well. Until the Airlines Come back, some of those markets will have a hard time getting back to the levels they were at before arne, now we were talking about bailout prospects or relief packages and what that can mean from the government side as we see the stimulus bill move through congress, hopefully today. Could we see that type of situation happen within the private sector specifically as well as you have stock prices come off, as you have real estate values tumble could we see more consolidation or deal making happening well, thats certainly theoretically possible i think on some level you could say based on the markets reaction to the crisis everything is put on sale, but it means nobody would want to be a seller in this market unless they are somehow theres a desperation element there or there is some view that their business will not come back. You know, i think for most of us, there is tremendous nearterm uncertainty and tremendous pain that has to be shared by our group of associates and by other participants in the economy who are getting walloped by this there is also tremendous optimism before long were going to get out of this and it may take us a little while to get back to the kind of normal we were used to before, but we know that when the fear is behind us, when weve made progress with the transmission of this virus, which we will, people will get back and say im going to live my life and go back to work and do the things i want to do, im going to take care of myself, of course, but im going to be engaged in the things that i want to be engaged in and we believe that that includes travel, and so well get back there. I think as a consequence, you wont see the kind of Bargain Basement deals, i suppose that might have been the case even two or three crises ago. If you go back to the savings and loan crisis in the early 90s, in part because that uncertainty was not married with the kind of recovery we knew came afterwards the deals done in the depths of that crisis were the most attractive deals ever done. Yes, there were some deals but not as striking. Get to 2008 and 2009, relatively few deals done at the bottom of the crisis because people had the confidence that we would come back. I think here, too, because there will be confidence that business will come back, there will not be the kind of desperate bottom of the market deals somebody might have dreamed of 30 years ago. The Hospitality Industry has gone through a number of crises, but looking at your stock its down about 50 this year why should wall street buy your stock, hold your stock when its still uncertain when demand will return and occupancy will come back to better levels . Of course im not a stock trader and im not going to pretend to tell the market the way they should go about doing this i know business will come back and the values will be much more like the values we had before than the values we had today again, between now and then, i cant tell you with any precision how the markets are going to navigate through that there will be smart players who get in and have the capacity to ride this thing right back up to where it was before and then be