I don't expect a bottom any time soon. Corporate debt is at record highs. Imports are dropping which is going to have serious knock-on effects. As earnings fall, the only way to balance the books will be to lay people off, and the end of a credit cycle really begins.
The world is about to do a nasty dance wherein we all subconsciously (oops) calculate whether or not the lives of perhaps tens of millions of senior citizens around the world are worth an economic crisis. Millions of younger lives, too. The senior citizens are in charge of pretty much everything here in America, so I think the response will become increasingly aggressive. Our only hope is if we can slow the spread with societal awareness and accurate tracking of the virus while we develop a vaccine. All seem a long way from materialization. I had hoped for containment of this virus until about 2 or 3 weeks ago. Wish I had a better outlook. It's just too contagious. Hey mk, how much does covid-19 resemble an only moderately-potent influenza introduced into a population that had never seen it before? That's consistent with the idea that annual-scale mutations concerns are now bacterial "cold", influenza "flu", and coronavirus. It's crazy how complicated transmissivity is. Trump's grandfather was killed by the 1918 influenza pandemic, btw.
Personally I don't see that we have any agency in this. We're bound by the protocols and equipment we had, not the protocols and equipment we will have. That calculation has been made. "The difference between a crisis and a tragedy is... a crisis affects the elites."The world is about to do a nasty dance wherein we all subconsciously (oops) calculate whether or not the lives of perhaps tens of millions of senior citizens around the world are worth an economic crisis.
The senior citizens are in charge of pretty much everything here in America, so I think the response will become increasingly aggressive.
I once thought we had reached the point where societal or cultural fitness would be self-enforced, with collective introspection, our system of justice, etc., keeping us on a path of decency. But nope, turns out we're still just monkeys that require bouts of crises to right the course. Watching Trump still continue to insert himself in front of the experts is so pathetic. Local news outlets reliably parrot his false statements. This statement alone... (source): ...should enrage each and every American. It isn't up for debate whether or not this administration missed a great opportunity to massively impede the spread of covid-19 early on. What I'm most worried about is that Trump is guaranteed to be working behind the scenes to find a way to leverage all this in favor of even more consolidated executive power. Feels like Jar-Jar Binks is about to make an announcement on the floor of the Senate any minute now.From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth.
Individual states are demonstrating themselves to be vastly more agile than the CDC (probably because they haven't been hollowed out by 3 years of toadyism). That tilts the balance in favor of local control. Republicans are definitely the principle advocates of States Rights but every local official out there is looking at their own community, their own infrastructure, their own resources and their own chain of culpability and recognizing that regardless of what happens in Washington, the people they're dealing with locally are going to be the people they're going to continue to deal with locally so long as nobody screws up. The general state response to the Feds on this one has been on a spectrum between "quit fucking up" and "fuck up less". I can think of no examples where anyone's situation would be improved by inviting the Feds to run things. As a consequence, any attempt by the Feds to run things is going to continue to be met with scorn and derision.
Yeah, but it doesn't necessarily mean Trump won't try. You're right though, the self-interest of businesses and local communities/governments can drive some good decisions. This would've been in my backyard if I hadn't moved away (exactly zero regrets, to date). But there's been a very well-coordinated response by the university, frequent updates, additional quarantining, intense sterilization procedures, etc.... any attempt by the Feds to run things is going to continue to be met with scorn and derision.
Not just disease, but natural disaster in general? Isn't that the argument for better state funds for response over federal, for like hurricanes and floods and all? Just for familiarity of the area and people and all alone, I'm more confident in my local disaster response team than any team the federal government would send over. Edit: And I can imagine, in general, smaller teams and organizations and specialized are more agile and responsive than larger teams.Individual states are demonstrating themselves to be vastly more agile than the CDC (probably because they haven't been hollowed out by 3 years of toadyism).
I don't know why, but I honestly laughed out loud reading this. It might be panic. I worry, in my gut, that if we do go into a crash, it'll be worse than 2008, because market values have felt extra fake these past three or five years. Times are hard for a lot of people, and if this is worse than 2008? Man. I dunno what to expect for the next few years.
I can't remember who, but a columnist once wrote "I want you to imagine George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the oval office in October 1962." The Great Recession took the shape it did because Ben Bernanke was (and is) one of the leading scholars on the Great Depression. Therefore, his response to 2008 was to avoid the Great Depression at all costs. What he did was basically roll out a "new deal" for the investment class: banks got a giant bailout and Americans were told to go buy cars and refrigerators. FDR might well have taken a similar approach if he weren't dealing with an extremely real Socialist movement on his left flank; as it is, most of the ideas for the New Deal were a backstop against Huey Long. The result of Bernanke's programs were basically institutionalizing the inequality between the monied and the scrabblers. Had leftist organization been stronger, Occupy Wall Street might well have turned violent and accomplished something. As it was, it was a bunch of people with a grievance but no real recourse. Their situation has largely worsened. Meanwhile all the money the Fed has pumped into the economy has gone 100% into the stock market. It is now leaving the stock market. More than that, in the ten years since that money was pumped into the stock market, all the humans have been replaced with algorithms. All the funds have been replaced with ETFs. And everyone has been trained on a pavlovian response of "fed adds money, markets go up." If you've been a financial manager for ten years, you have never seen a recession. And if you're an ETF manager, you have zero incentive to buy the dip. Jerome Powell, upon taking office, said that recessions are the natural order of markets. Jerome Powell, upon meeting Trump, cuts rates whenever Trump Tweets. The repo crisis, which nobody outside of finance and only a splinter fraction of the financial markets are discussing, is a problem of the Fed not being able to keep rates at their target. The Fed not being able to control rates - the one thing they do - is an existential crisis minus all the rest of the BS. And there's a lot of BS now. You cannot eliminate volatility. You can only suppress it for a while. FUNDAMENTALLY: the Fed's massive cash injection from 2008-2011 did not fix the financial crisis. It postponed the financial crisis. The phrase used perennially back when people were still discussing it was "kicking the can down the road." The road has a pothole. The can has stopped. And here to save the day is Larry Kudlow. You know what caused the Great Depression? Fundamentally? This is one of those things that people wave their hands about and pretend they understand because when we're talking about money we have to speak in abstractions lest the proles realize how little we know. The Great Depression was caused by the conversion of the hopes that the Germans would pay for WWI transforming into the reality that nobody was going to pay for WWI. It ruined Germany first - the argument made by idiots is that war reparations destroyed the German economy but Germany fundamentally paid fuckall in part because as soon as they were forced to pay in foreign currency they printed however much money they needed to buy foreign currency. But the reality is, the Great Depression is what happens when unrealized gains become write-offs. There's a lot of IOU's out there. What happens next is anybody's guess. In the short-term, though? It's gonna be interesting.
Part of the problem is how the United States teaches the Great Depression and post WWI Germany. I can definitely recall being taught in, probably high school(?), that war reparations are what caused Germany to fall apart.
That's what everybody learns. Makes it nice and tidy. "We were too hard on Germany and drove them bankrupt and Hitler appeared and this is why we must always impose the Western liberal banking system across the world via our highly-tuned system of embassies and multinational corporations." I mean, i fuckin' grew up believing that what Iraq needed was more McDonald's. Germany spent themselves into oblivion thinking they could rape France. France and England spent themselves into oblivion thinking they could make their money back raping Germany. The United States piled in behind France and England because everyone was so fucking spent that all we had to do was pick a side and there would be a winner. Except there wasn't. There was a stalemate. A number of scholars have pointed out that WWII wouldn't have happened if Germany had actually lost WWI; they didn't, they "signed an armistice" which basically said we're done fighting not we lose but nobody had the appetite to fight trench warfare clear to Berlin. So now there's this big fuckin' hole that everyone piled all their money into. America expects France and England to pay America out of that hole. England and France expect Germany to pay them out of that hole. Germany doesn't see any reason why they owe England or France squat; after all, if they hadn't walled in German sovereignty we wouldn't be here in the first place and besides, there's no money anyway. You teach that lesson during Enduring Freedom? You're a leftist pinko. You teach that lesson during Desert Storm? You're a leftist pinko. You teach that lesson during Nicaragua? You're a leftist pinko. You teach that lesson during Vietnam? You're a leftist pinko. You teach that lesson during Korea? You're a traitor. One cannot ask "what price empire" when Empire is what we do.