A lot of people are staring at economic ruin. We are staring at potentially multiple quarters of negative GDP growth. I don't think this has happened for a long time. And money printing won't fix it like it usually does.
Yeah. China covered this up at first, but it responded dramatically and authoritatively once the threat was understood. Being an authoritarian state, their power structures allow them to effectively restrict movement and manage the entire economy to limit the spread, and where they sit now is very nearly a best case scenario for what a response could look like barring that initial delay. And yet, even so, it will still result in countless second/third/nth order effects that will cause devastating public health and financial ramifications (the extent of which will only be slowly realized over time).
In comparison, the US is incredibly poorly situated. This country is a mishmash of loosely coupled quazi-independent governments, and its public health apparatus is mostly just de-facto run by the "invisible hand" of the market. The Federal Government has no ability to respond in the way China did, even assuming the people in control of it understood the potential severity here (which as yet they have not.)
We need to seriously reconsider the incentives of those who even if tested positive for Coronavirus would still not be able to miss work.
This is coming from someone whose nominal 401k portfolio is going down a Tesla per day. Why am I not upset?? — the infrastructure is still there; iMessage still works, AWS still works, there are still oil rigs in operation, it is just the amount of money we are willing to pay for securities has changed.
Wish I could do a RemindMe!3months.
As for inflation, I think we are little too early to point to one outcome as the likely one. Right now my view is that I can either let my mind go into full freak out mode or I can think about the fact that I do have fairly extensive contacts of people who are first responders, healthcare workers, research scientists, policy makers, innovators and I trust them. If I can trust them, then I can trust that the overall system is going to work imperfect as it is.
1. https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-respons...
That response will probably not happen until the current system is somewhat strained. 6 days after that point, there will be twice the number of cases.
I have no doubt we could respond to this given more time, but it is simply moving to quickly.
We need national quarantines now.
Better that than to prolong things, like Italy did, and then make everyone stay home anyway.
But if we don't do it, the thing spreads, and we're forced to do it anyway a few weeks later, like Italy.
Korea seems to be the best example of what has worked well, but I don't know a lot of the details. Seems like a good example to follow, but we're falling down in the US - we can't even test people.
Everyone is going to be rocked by this at basically the same time.
There are a lot of advantages to spreading it out, by reducing the peak strain on our health care resources and possibly letting a vaccine or drug come about. But a vaccine is likely months off at best, and we can't shut down everything until then. So a two-week quarantine might reduce the death toll, but I'm not sure it will dramatically reduce the number of people infected.
The initial wave of cases in a community is going to be a sucker-punch to the hospital staff. They are going to need time to regain their footing. If we can buy them that time, then we will all be much better off.
I'd love to read an actual expert's advice on this. I'm just going by what I saw happen in Italy. By the time they shut things down hard, it was too late.