Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 560 posts

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#281

Post by K0SM0S »

xorfish wrote: post #71
londons_explore wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd even happily travel to china. My worry would be the risk of being stuck somewhere when my planned transport is cancelled rather than being infected and dying. 300 deaths out of over a billion people is nothing.

A virus with R0 of 2 and a mortality rate of 2% would kill 1% of the world population if no containment measures are taken. That would be 75 million people.

Thanks, TIL. For those like me who paused at R₀ (r-naught), quote from wiki[1]:

> R-naught is the average number of people infected from one other person, for example, Ebola has an r-naught of two, so on average, a person who has Ebola will pass it on to two other people.

See “Limitations of R₀” too: when solely derived from math models, “values [of R₀] should be used with caution” and “this severely limits its usefulness.”.

As I understand, take it for what it is: model not gospel.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#282

Post by himinlomax »

stone-monkey wrote: post #87
adnzzzzZ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first comment I've made on this forum about China, so whoever you're speaking to is clearly not me but a collective "you" instead. Responding as myself, I simply added balance to the comment above me. Many people are making the exact same argument the person I responded to is making, and while that argument isn't false, it's clearly misleading. China does get credit for responding to the situation as they…

> However, we must remember that the situation would likely not have occurred in the first place if the people speaking out about it early on weren't punished, which wouldn't happen in most western countries as local governments have way less power and way less incentives to make that kind of thing happen. I'm not saying the Chinese government doesn't have problems, nor am I saying free speech is bad, but I have no i…

> I'm not saying the Chinese government doesn't have problems, nor am I saying free speech is bad, but I have no idea how you could come to this conclusion that free speech would somehow limit the spread of this disease.

In this particular instance, early warning would have gained precious days if not weeks to study and respond to the disease. In an emergency, every second counts, but the saving face mentality of the Communist Party cost weeks.

> We have free speech in the US and that's literally led to the rise of anti inoculation advocacy.

Even if you were right, that would have absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#283

Post by unishark »

jariel wrote: post #243
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Katrina was when I realized how silly it is to think our government would ever deal effectively with a major disaster and how vulnerable we are.

"Katrina was when I realized how silly it is to think our government would ever deal effectively with a major disaster" It's funny because the very idea that 'the government will save us from a big disaster' is a fairly new concept. Some governments are 'kind of' prepared for some kinds of problems - i.e. the Swiss are prepared for some kinds of invasions, surely the Dutch have preparations for floods. But for unfore…

In fact the levees were designed to survive a Katrina-sized storm, but of course never had to prove they could, until they failed. What's also funny is for a bunch of engineers and software developers to expect the govt to enact a system that is impossible to really test, and just have it work smoothly when needed.

Rich cities in california were also a dysfunctional mess dealing with fires. It was only when the same problem happened in the same places in subsequent years that they had a reasonably solid plan together and working.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#284

Post by pmohun »

microcolonel wrote: post #194
microcolonel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daily reminder that the confirmed cases are limited by the capacity to confirm cases , not by the actual contagion .

The estimate of likely infected people in China was somewhere between 37k and 130k as of January 25, and it is expected that the number of infected people will double roughly every six days, so assuming there has been no appreciable change to the pattern of spread, we can maybe back-of-the-napkin that somewhere around 75,000-280,000 people are probably infected.

This website provides daily updates on the spread of the virus: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#285

Post by himinlomax »

TheNorthman wrote: post #108
totalZero wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that the Chinese government didn't act swiftly, arrested people who initially spread information about the disease in Wuhan, failed to contain the situation, and has now allowed it to become a global problem. Due to the way China's government has lied in the past, I am hesitant to believe their numbers or their narrative until it can be confirmed by outside parties.

Are there any government whose narrative you trust? It seems to me that never trusting anything a governments because they have once [0] lied is a little extreme. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a country whose government hasn't lied in recent times. This would then extend to academia as well, since most research is in some way funded by the state. [0]: I know they have lied more than once. I'm not sure what a more…

> Are there any government whose narrative you trust?

I can only speak for my country (France), but the precedent of the AIDS epidemic and particularly that of contaminated blood transfusion makes it pretty clear that any government official caught having lied in such a situation would be in deep trouble. And I'm pretty sure they're all keenly aware of that.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#286

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

pdonis wrote: post #179
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Katrina was when I realized how silly it is to think our government would ever deal effectively with a major disaster and how vulnerable we are.

By "our government" do you just mean the Federal government? Or do you mean all levels of government? The mayor of New Orleans had parking lots full of empty school buses and claimed he had no way to evacuate citizens. The governor of Louisiana whined and wrung her hands instead of doing anything. The Federal response was far from perfect but it was much more effective than the state or local response.

I’m specifically talking about when it was obvious that state and local authorities had failed/were overwhelmed, the days and days and weeks before a useful federal response came. I’m imagining how it would go down if not one city but dozens to hundreds were affected by an asteroid or nuclear attack. I imagine total chaos.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#287

Post by bra4you »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #266
bra4you wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I wish western world central banks were as competent." Well... "Western world central banks tend to pressure prices down during economic shocks by withholding liquidity." Well, we have seen gigantic quantitative easing in the US and the EU and also in China. Inflation - I assume that is what you mean by "pressure prices down" - keeps elusive. Japan has tried for decades to create inflation. The only thing that the c…

The poor are much much more hurt by overly tight money. I tried to explain why here: https://medium.com/@b.essiambre/the-world-deserves-a-pay-rai...

"I tried to explain why here"

Well, you failed. Interest rates are historically low. We have seen a gigantic amount of liquidity injected over the last decades.

"The poor are much much more hurt by overly tight money."

What is the most expensive acquisition in their life for the majority of the people? Real Estate. Prices are through the roof thanks to the central banks. Young people are just getting priced out of the market.

Real helicopter money has not been tried yet.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#288

Post by koheripbal »

Aperocky wrote: post #106
jmnicolas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to your link the survivability rate is almost 98% (305 deaths for 14628 cases). (I'm trying to inject a bit of optimism here, people are so gloomy).

Now, it's too early to say if survivability rate is as high, but here's an observation: In the rest of China, D/C count is 40/10000, however, in Wuhan, it is 240/4000. Which essentially means Wuhan patients are 12 times as likely to die. A simpler explanation would be Wuhan hospitals has been overwhelmed and there are actually ~12 times as many patients there.

It takes time to die. The patients in Wuhan have been sick for longer.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#289

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

koheripbal wrote: post #273
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Bernanke himself has estimated that interest rates should have been as low as -4% during the period from 2009 to 2015 ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2015/04/28/the-t... ). They kept them super high at 0%, up to 4% higher than the equilibrium estimate, which caused inflation to perpetually undershoot and people's careers to be stunted. On top of that, they started giving out interest o…

Negative interest rates have other major problems - that are worse than a liquidity shortage.

For a large part of history, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.

The government creating paper assets that have an above market return, puts a gridlock in the private markets and destroys people's lives.

Re: China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen

#290

Post by himinlomax »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #222

My wife asked me at breakfast why the new virus is such a big deal: hundreds dying vs. the 5K to 10K babies and infants who die everyday in the world from dehydration and/or starvation. My response was exponential growth of viruses and mutation into something very deadly. China is taking the outbreak seriously, locking down large and high population regions. I wondered if some of that is PR since after a previous out…

The problem is that the numbers we have are those published by the Communist Party of China. They're taking the outbreak seriously ... now ... but they were putting whistleblowers in jail at the start of the epidemic.
Post reply on HN