Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with showers and a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 39m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 51% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred eighty-third day.
On this day in 1973, Skylab, America’s first space station, is launched.
Recommended for reading in full —
Laura Hazard Owen reports Americans say there are two main sources of COVID-19 misinformation: social media and Donald Trump:
A majority of U.S. adults think that misinformation about the the COVID-19 pandemic is a problem, according to survey results released Monday by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. And who are its sources?
Asked to identify the two most common sources of misinformation, a combined 68 percent name social media and 54 percent the Trump administration, though more give the Trump administration as their first response (47 percent) than social media (15 percent).
“82% of Democrats, 79% of independents and 73% of Republicans” think coronavirus misinformation is a major problem — but, not surprisingly, Democrats were vastly more likely to identify the Trump administration as a major source of misinformation (85 percent) than Republicans (4 percent). Meanwhile, 75 percent of Republicans identified mainstream news organizations as the main source of false or misleading coronavirus information, compared to just 2 percent of Democrats. So what you’d expect.
Kiera Butler reports What negative interest rates would mean for your wallet:
Up until this point, the Federal Reserve has never brought its benchmark rate into negative territory and, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, the Fed is not considering going to negative interest rates now.
“The committee’s view on negative rates really has not changed,” Powell said Wednesday. “This is not something that we’re looking at.”
Yet, “on some level, negative interest rates are inevitable in the U.S.,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com. “It’s just a matter of when.”
President Donald Trump was advocating for negative interest rates well before the coronavirus pandemic brought the economy to a standstill, arguing that erasing borrowing costs would spur economic growth.
“Negative interest rates sound like fun but it’s nothing to wish for,” McBride said.
“It hasn’t even proven to be effective,” he added. “Parts of Europe have had negative interest rates for seven years and it hasn’t done anything — their economies were reeling then, they’re reeling now.”
And even if the federal funds rate, which is what banks charge one another for short-term borrowing, fell below zero, that is not the rate that consumers pay.The prime rate, which is the rate that banks extend to their most creditworthy customers, is typically 3 percentage points higher than the federal funds rate.