Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ Slams Virus Lockdown

Pursuing perpetual economic growth, combined with externalizing costs where possible, on a finite planet beats its devastation by far.

Among other things, that growth and externalizing costs led to factory farming and encroaching into wildlife territory that have caused pandemics to increase in recent decades. Not limiting that growth -- at least limiting the number of animals we pack together -- will create more pandemics. Limiting it won't solve everything but it will decrease a lot of problems, including pandemics.

Why pandemics will keep increasing: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

However, we could still be on course for a second wave, like 1919, then we are totally fucked.

But we don't know, and really didn't know when europe went into lockdown. It looked like the mortality was ~7% which would have been devastating.

I have yet to see any double blind study that suggests _any_ drug makes an impact. Barring vitamin D, but thats a metastudy, and also its too late for most people (you need a month.)

In short, he asking us to make a massive gamble.

Yes, the poor are suffering, but helicoptering money is a piece of piss compared to re-building a community. if the US had decent unemployment insurance, like germany, then unemployment would be 10% of what it is now.

I feel a lot of the scientific advisors to governments are "covid19 death minimisers", solely focusing on people dying from this virus at the expense of any other consideration, like the effect of elective procedures being postponed indefinitely, tens of millions of families in hardship, economic collapse, etc.

We are drowning in platitudes while people’s lives are being ruined. Entrepreneurs and small business owners are seeing their life’s work stripped from them by a policy choice served by ass covering politicians and a class of media elites ever willing to promote the post-modern illusion that death is subject to our whims and not the other way around.

(https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/arti...)

Two thoughts: Maybe bloomberg will interview him whenever they want a somewhat contrarian bearish view? If he made money from short positions now, could it have been for a reason completely unrelated to COVID?

However it seemed last month that the correct thing to do was to close down. At least so that hospitals were not overwhelmed, causing extra deaths beyond the "natural" amount for this disease and others that people use hospitals to treat. In other words, a non-linear effect on death rates caused by the sudden spike.

Now we're between a rock and a hard place, because while taking a week or two off would be tough but OK for most businesses, taking 4 weeks or 8 weeks off is not simply 4x or 8x as bad. Thus, another, competing, non-linear effect.

We also have the problem that the pandemic is not synchronized, so any area that does manage to keep it down is going to have to keep the border closed towards people from places where it's still going on.

The only solution that seems like a good compromise is to have lots of testing so that people who know they are infected, even ones who don't feel ill, can be quarantined. Also of course generally keep old people away from too much contact with everyone else. But somehow even months after the virus was discovered, the number of people tested anywhere is not really high. I would have thought we'd ramp up production of test kits massively so that everyone who's been near someone positive is tested, plus everyone else is randomly tested.

This sounds the ravings of someone who acted like they saw the hidden gears moving the economy. Now they’re frighteningly uncertain, and want to exert their influence to regain their sense of comfortable uncertainty. And in the trade-offs, he's revealing his biases, which is careful to limit to good luck:

> "Vaccines are not coming anytime soon, so natural immunity is the only way out for now."

But we've heard enough from other people stupid enough to say it out loud--we're going to lose some % people, but the damage to the economy will be worse--to know what he's alluding to.

Frighteningly uncertain, because if the absolute worst thing happens and everything goes MadMax, it's the wealthiest who will have targets on their backs--October Revolution.

See. I can sound like an A$$, too.

Gimme a break. He’s piping up because he bet on the Russell (which completely went against him earlier this year) and those companies will get punished disproportionately due to the lockdown.

There’s way too much emphasis on listening to financial figures when in fact they are just as clueless if not more. Money does not equate to intelligence and wisdom. Be wary of listening to people with a lot to lose.

By the way, his take on passive investing is only half right. There’s a reset every quarter. The way to play it is to short single name volatility at earnings.

Look at the minority of people protesting the lock down, a large majority are small business owners who want their employees to get back to work.

Corona virus has effectively been a government mandated strike for labor (save "essential workers" at Amazon and the like) the likes of which the capitalist class haven't yet seen.

In fact, I've been saying this for over a decade now... We should have a global holiday every ten years doing exactly this, as it would seriously decimate all contagious disease populations.

Really, this financial crisis was brewing and on its way, coronavirus or not, because we didn't take the lessons of the 2008 crash to heart. This pandemic was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, but it is very tempting for economists and politicians to place the blame squarely on this scapegoat, so they can continue the cycle of booms and busts, which benefits only those with enough capital to weather the risks and buy in at the bottom of the curve.

If we want to break this destructive cycle, we need to rethink our approach to economics and society: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980822