Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
Anyways you're changing the topic now. Glad I could help you understand how the ukraine war affected the US economy. Good day.
No, I'm not from the US, so the colloquial usage of "gas" as "fuel for cars" slipped my mind.
The US is also a net exporter of crude oil, so all I've said so far still applies.
How has the Ukraine war affected gasoline prices? Are you just talking about the state you live in, or US-wide?
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
Also, most forms of non-screen entertainment (bars, restaurants, sports, theaters, etc.)
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid.
>Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter.
The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.
Then, I checked Google. Yep, you are right: https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-production-by-country/
In my mind, I was mixed up with world's largest exporters. Last I knew, it was a race between Qatar and Australia. But wrong again! It is Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
Heck, it’s only four powerballs from last weekend.
¹2011 figure
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?) think doing nothing would have been much worse.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.