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A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

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Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#301

Post by perl4ever »

CydeWeys wrote: post #272
david_w wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah those three nations are not that different from each other relative to the spread that exists between them and other nations. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-daily-cases-traject... If you look at who has the LEAST per million (absolute number of cases are worse than useless and what most statisitic sites are showing) it's not nations usually associated with good governance, ahem... So what's going on. I…

It's not some foreign virus anymore. It's endemic everywhere. How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there. You can't keep blaming this on China. Even places that have very tenuous connections to China are now experiencing massive death rates, because they aren't handling it well.

"How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there"

Without supporting an alternative theory, this sounds doubtful to me. Do you think, for instance, that the difference between West Virginia and New York is a result of the superior containment measures in the former? WV has a lower death rate so far than even South Korea.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#302

Post by brankoB »

malandrew wrote: post #203
ttul wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for pointing this out. Secondly, just what the hell is the central bank supposed to do? Had they not intervened hard in debt markets, we would have seen bank runs and mass chaos in financial markets, making things we take for granted (such as paying for stuff at the grocery store) totally fail over night. I am wayyyy less worried about the magnitude of the Fed’s intervention than I am about what might have…

Lately, I've been amazed at the number of people that have been arguing in favor of allowing "otherwise" to happen.

Beats continuing to bailout the corporations instead of the people.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#303

Post by Jommi »

BubRoss wrote: post #278
malandrew wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of that $30,000 is loans that will have to be paid back. Comparing their $1200 checks with no strings attached to other money in the stimulus being lent is apples and oranges.

To who and at what interest rate?

You can Google this stuff man. It's quite complicated.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#304

Post by twelve40 »

kazen44 wrote: post #212
twelve40 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changes how? I'd say being in WWI was much much worse, no? And yet you still don't hear about a great 1919 depression.

depression of what? The end of world war 1 had an enourmous impact on continental europe, with many nations simply ceasing to exist at the end of the war. Germany for instance, had a state of near constant poltical and economic anarchy during the weimar republic. And the austrian-hungarian empire ceased to exist. Many people seem to forget that world war 1 was suchs a massive shift in terms of the geopolitical landsc…

If I have to clarify down to the last word, I'm talking about the total implosion of US economy, which is what a lot of people are currently hyping up and clickbaiting on. You don't hear about a great 1919 economic disaster in the USA despite a much more vicious illness and no modern tech (no antibiotics, no concept of a ventilator, etc etc etc). I can't answer for Austria, Hungary, Germany or any other collapsed empires past or present, I don't have any data on that.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#305

Post by bigfudge »

david_w wrote: post #286
CydeWeys wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not some foreign virus anymore. It's endemic everywhere. How many people die in any given place is now directly a result of the containment measures put into place there. You can't keep blaming this on China. Even places that have very tenuous connections to China are now experiencing massive death rates, because they aren't handling it well.

You're conflating ideas. The virus started in China. The virus spread from China because of of the Communist Chinese Party's denial and lack of response. Those are, in turn intimately connected to the fact that China is a one-party dictatorship that murdered the doctors who first tried to bring their attention to COVID-19 in the early days of the virus, lest the world forget. Currently, Chinese epidemological numbers…

We didn’t need different CCP numbers to have taken more effective action in the UK, we just needed to listen to public health experts rather than statistical epidemiologists and motivated thinkers in government. Germany, Austria, S Korea are all just as, if not more, connected to China than the UK and Spain but are faring much better because they have competent govt, distributed and robustly funded public health systems. This is not a black swan event because it has long been predicted by mainstream epidemiologists.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#306

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

snovv_crash wrote: post #240
PKop wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>don't realize how much $6T is This would be more relevant is we tallied how much actual credit "money" is getting into the hands of average people. Divide 6 trillion per every person and if that was the extent of the calculation and legislation, we'd be better off. But it's not, the same financial beneficiaries in good times are the ones getting the bailout money in bad times. >being injected into the economy Except…

Of course, if it was actually distributed to people who needed it to spend, it would cause massive inflation. This way most of the money never gets spent, and demand never goes up. Not that it's a good thing, just saying.

It did cause massive inflation - in asset prices.

But when property prices, rents, and stocks go up, that's labelled a good thing, even though it's just as much inflation as a hike in the price of bread.

2008 was basically a hand-out to the 1% who caused the crisis in the first place. [1] There was a bit of political nudging and winking about how it would trickle down to ordinary workers, but what it actually did was keep wages low and create an even bigger shitpile of unserviceable debt at virtually all economic levels - which was just starting to fall over before CV-19 happened.

Our economic system is perfectly capable of imploding and destroying trillions in value on its own, and does so regularly. CV-19 showed that it's also fundamentally unable to deal with any kind of significant external shock.

With any luck this may raise questions about whether the system really is fit for purpose.

It may finally become clear that you can't solve a problem that requires cooperation and solid support for key front line staff with economic dogma based on cut-throat piratical competition and contempt for "disposable and low-value" front line workers.

CV-19 may not be enough to make the point, but there are other threats coming down the road - expected and not - and the choice is rapidly going to become evolve-or-die, in very stark terms.

[1] And some economic commentators had the gall to call the bail-out Keynesian, when in fact it was plain old corporate welfare which did nothing to repair crumbling infrastructure or provide key services or any form of social investment.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#307

Post by bigfudge »

maxerickson wrote: post #95
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC had a pandemic team, they were let go. California had a reserve of ventilators, which were liquidated due to “budget reasons”. The problem isn’t risk experts; the problem is that government representatives elected have no domain expertise nor leadership fortitude to put domain experts into the driver’s seat when the situation dictates. China, for all its failings, gets this right. Their leadership is more STE…

China spent 3-4 weeks covering up evidence of human to human transmission of the virus (Singapore started screening travelers Jan 3 due to a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan; China started acting Jan 22...). That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.

Something doesn’t stack up here. If China’s response is such a shit show why don’t they have widespread transmission around the country? The US and Europe have had more warning than Chinese regions, but have been far less effective at managing the disease.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#308

Post by maxerickson »

bigfudge wrote: post #307
maxerickson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China spent 3-4 weeks covering up evidence of human to human transmission of the virus (Singapore started screening travelers Jan 3 due to a pneumonia cluster in Wuhan; China started acting Jan 22...). That's not getting it right, it's a different type of shit show.

Something doesn’t stack up here. If China’s response is such a shit show why don’t they have widespread transmission around the country? The US and Europe have had more warning than Chinese regions, but have been far less effective at managing the disease.

Their reaction to the massive outbreak has been effective.

My point is that they reacted the second half of January, after trying to cover up the outbreak for weeks/months. If the local and regional officials had acted effectively in late December, there might not be a global pandemic.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#309

Post by xwdv »

CydeWeys wrote: post #264
lostapathy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivor bias. New restaurants open and close within a few months all the time. You aren't looking for them now because they weren't there long to begin with.

Not relevant though, because the coronavirus is going to be killing many of even the previously long-established, previously profitable, well-run restaurants. It's a difference in kind. It doesn't matter so much when new restaurants churn (because that's the established order of things), but when all restaurants churn, now you've got a huge problem.

No you don’t, the restaurant industry isn’t “too big to fail”, people can still eat food. And new restaurants will absolutely pop up to replace the ones that were gone, especially if they are lured in with discounts due to the excess supply of restaurant real estate.

Only the best restaurants with strong support for takeouts and deliveries will survive, and that’s a good thing.

Re: A Long Time Until the Economic New Normal

#310

Post by sails »

lend000 wrote: post #235

If you're in the fortunate position to have some capital during this crisis, this is an ideal time to start a soft-tech or low cost R&D intensive startup that can be seeded remotely. Competition will be largely wiped out relative to supply of dollars and plenty of market share will be there for the taking when the world opens back up for business. I imagine there will be a disproportionate number of big winners that…

> to start a soft-tech or low cost R&D intensive startup that can be seeded remotely

Can you unpack what you mean by that? I get the general gist of investing in the future, but think those are some interesting thoughts to explore.

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