No Return to Normal
US states are slowly lifting lockdown restrictions now,
Countries in Europe are doing the same, with France lifting restrictions on May 11..
But then what?
In a May Day address, French president Emmanuel Macron warned that Life Won’t Return to ‘Normal’ After Lockdown Ends
“May 11 will not be the passage to normal life. There will be a recovery that will need to be reorganised,” Macron said in a speech at the presidential palace after a meeting with horticulturists.
French President Emmanuel Macron warned on Friday that the end of the national lockdown on May 11 would only be a first step as France looks to pull out of the crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic.
In a controversial move, Macron’s government has decided that schools will gradually reopen from May 11, despite the reservations expressed by its scientific advisors.
The US should hear a similar from president Trump, but I doubt we do.
Back in France …
Emergency Travel Quarantine Until July 24
Health Minister Olivier Véran announced France would extend its Covid-19 “state of health emergency” through July 24.
Kiss the French Travel industry goodbye until August as Travelers Face Quarantine for 12 more weeks.
A bill to be put to parliament on Monday says plans this month to lift the public health emergency, which began on March 24, would “be premature” and “could see a risk of the outbreak” intensifying.
“We are going to have to perform a long-distance run,” Véran told a news conference, saying he was aware that the French people had already been asked for “colossal efforts” in the fight against the virus.
Travelers to France, including French citizens returning home, will face a compulsory two-week quarantine and possible isolation when they arrive in the country to help slow the spread of coronavirus, the health minister told a news conference.
French Tourism
Daniel Lacalle commented on Twitter: “Tourism in France represents 9.7% of GDP and supports 2.9 million jobs (10.9% of employment)”
Rebounds Slow Everywhere
Rebounds will be slow across Europe and in the US as well.
The finances of too many individuals and corporations have been wrecked.
Many Scars
Bankruptcies and the drain on savings will leave permanent scars everywhere, even if there was an across-the-board lifting of all the lockdowns,
Don’t Expect “Normal” for Years
- Those struggling to make rent or payments will have had the scare of their lives. Attitudes about the need to save will change. More savings means less spending and lower profits for businesses.
- Car buying, travel, dining out, etc. will not return to normal this year or next after this kind of economic hit. The wealth impact alone will take years if ever, given boomer retirement needs.
- On the corporate side, kiss goodbye just-in-time production strategies with dependencies on China and no inventories. This will lower corporate earnings.
- To reduce expenses, frequent business travel will give way to more teleconferencing. This mean lower hotel bills and less air travel.
- More people will work at home permanently. This will lower gasoline usage and dining out.
- Even boomers who did not do much online shopping had to learn new tricks. Many will now be hooked on the convenience of Amazon and will not go back to their old ways. This is another kick in the teeth to struggling malls.
Slow, Choppy Rebound
All of these things point to a very slow, choppy rebound with many struggling restaurants and businesses not surviving.
If the initial rebound is too fast, it won’t hold.
A double-dip recession may very well be in the cards.
Normal is not the way things were two months ago.
Mish
For perspective, people who lived through the 29′ crash didn’t have life return to normal until the early 50’s. Though WWII might have been a factor. 😉
I expect a positive GDP in Q4. We will get back to 1/1/1 (GDP/FFR/inflation) by Q1 2021. People will wonder what happen to Covid-19 and how it disappeared so quickly. The situation will improve vastly after September 24.
Expect some “revenge shopping”.
The level of household debt in South Korea is one of the highest in the world, so they are profligate spenders just like us.
Where we were before the virus was not exactly normal. Normal is not spending more than you earn, or paying half your life’s earnings for a roof over your head.
1932, anyone? Is no one seeing the magnitude of this? Stop the foolishness now and things might recover. Continue, and it will be a decade or more to get back, with some terrible years in the middle.
Confidence and perception are both keys to our recovery. We are definitely entering new and uncharted territory and the companies that survive (and thrive) will be the ones that adapt.
I’m calling for a new all time high in stocks by year end. Economy is dead, but who cares about that anyway? It has been on life support since forever.
No mention of a get out of Jail card if you’ve had it and presumably are no danger to others or the health care system.
If we had a get out of Jail card, presumably a large part of the population would go to Corona parties so they can get it over with and get on with life.
Yes, France as an example – one elderly person has died per every 2500 total population. No friggin way can tourists be allowed to go near that hell hole,
Why don’t we just send all covid patients to Antarctica?
After all, noone have died of covid there….
Thanks Mish. Very thoughtful analysis. I wonder if we may not also face headwinds in the market in the future as the natural constituency (boomers) for the reduced government and tax minimization policies since the Reagan/Thatcher years give way to a new, younger, constituency. This generation has now watched many of their parents lose their retirement benefits, unable to pay the cost of healthcare and perhaps now lose their jobs prior to their self funded retirement. Having needed the government to save the economy in 2008 and now again in 2020 might there now be a natural shift to acceptance of higher personal taxes and increased capital gains rates. As investors we’ve had the best of times for the past 40 years (reduced personal taxes, reduced corporate taxes,reduced capital gains, reduced tariffs, more individual responsibility)..and unfortunately, for many and for a multitude of reasons, it didn’t work out. Perhaps the pendulum may start to swing the other way for a time. There seems to be a natural sympathy for an increased role of government by the next generation of student loan and healthcare burdened voters.
If the main narrative holds (that this is an unfortunate medical event that won’t be going away completely any time soon), then I think Mish is calling this one right.
If the main narrative gets replaced somehow, then this could be a game changer heralding in some sort of major new (and probably positive) shift.
Both things are quite possible. It’s like the Russia collusion story. Although it has been well and truly debunked – quite some time ago, but again recently in a more definitive fashion – most of the country believes it because of where they get their data. So the facts don’t matter all that much (which has been true for decades now, but is of late becoming more obvious perhaps). Interestingly, the fact that it hasn’t been debunked in the national consciousness also implies that most of the country hasn’t stopped to consider the implications of such a huge whopper having been promulgated and accepted as gospel for so long. How can such huge lies take hold? What other huge lies are out there all the time? Enquiring minds want to know. Luckily (for the bad guys), there aren’t many enquiring minds out there (mainly because of the media’s success at distracting).
It will be the same with Covid19. If too much of the curtain is pulled back, the implications could shatter many of the core columns and pillars of the current regime (which is not run out of the WH or by elections, btw). If the narrative structure holds, then things are going to get far worse before they get better.
How did COVID-19 disrupt the market for U.S. Treasury debt? https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/01/how-did-covid-19-disrupt-the-market-for-u-s-treasury-debt/?preview_id=803134
I believe there’s also a big change coming with automation, and not just because my wife works for a huge automation supplier.
A lot of jobs are on the verge of disappearing and this virus will be a catalyst in making that happen. It will push businesses decisions towards investing in replacing workers.
This virus has shown the fragility of humans in an outbreak.
Don’t worry … Stuki says that automation doesn’t eliminate jobs … those meat cutters can always find work as Wall Street analcysts.
And you are saying what???? That all those automated out of a job by the mechanized harvester and running water, are still unemployed?
How much someone is paid in a free market, is competitively determined by how much value he is able to add. If A can add X value, competition will see his wage bid up to X-d. I’d like for you to explain why someone free to do so, would choose to forego that d worth of added earnings, by electing not to hire him away profitably.
Then, explain how “automation” will somehow be adopted unless it makes people more efficient. As in, increasing X; the value people, on average, are able to add.
It’s not just happenstance that the jobs; which all those farm hands displaced by harvesters and their descendants now hold; pay (who would have thought….) more than being a farmhand did back when. It’s not because of Jimmy Hoffa. Nor because “The Fed made my home go up, up, up”. Instead, it’s a direct consequence of automation increasing the amount of output, hence value add, per worker. Which allowed prospective employers to profitably bid more for them, than they could earlier. Which, since there are more than one employer of a resource as adaptable as a human, forces them to bid his salary up.
RE: “And you are saying what???? That all those automated out of a job by the mechanized harvester and running water, are still unemployed?”
Nope .. straw man … depending on many factors, including aptitude, motivation, determination, location, family situation etc., etc. some might have found jobs as Wall Street analcysts, some might have found jobs at McDonalds, some might have ended up in prison, some might have committed suicide in despair for not finding another job, some might have gone on welfare rolls, etc.
RE: “Then, explain how “automation” will somehow be adopted unless it makes people more efficient.”
Some automation makes people more efficient … some automation completely eliminates the need for people in those stages of the production chain where automation has been inserted. Nearly all automation is undertaken by employers to cut costs … to invest in capital (automation equipment) rather than pay expenses (employee salaries).
I think your notion that automation doesn’t eliminate jobs is absurd. New kinds of jobs may very well crop up in other areas for other reasons but eventually automation outpaces other forms of job creation, relegating people to the fewer and fewer jobs that machines either can’t do or are not cost effective to do.
Simply think of the situation “in the limit” where every single function that a human can perform there is a computer / machine /robot that can perform it faster, better, and more cost effectively … good luck finding a job …
“Nope .. straw man … depending on many factors, including aptitude, motivation, determination, location, family situation etc., etc. “
Has there ever been a period in history when increased automation have not led to ultimately more labor demand? Or are “thiiingz diiiifereeeet thiiiiiz tiiiime?”, just like they never turned out to be any other time?
“Some automation makes people more efficient “
Pray tell why someone, in a free and competitive world, would invest in automation to make people less efficient…. Instead of investing in mechanized harvesters, why didn’t farmers instead invest in lead ingots to be placed around farm hands’ ankles?
“I think your notion that automation doesn’t eliminate jobs is absurd.”
Automation may well eliminate some jobs. Like water carrier. But in aggregate, improved efficiency cannot but lead to more outputs being created for the same inputs. And those additional outputs will then, in turn, inevitably result in increased demand for stuff. And that newly demanded stuff, takes labor to produce. So you cannot avoid an increased capital stock (which is what automation really is) flowing through to increased labor demand.
“Simply think of the situation “in the limit” where every single function that a human can perform there is a computer / machine /robot that can perform it faster, better, and more cost effectively … good luck finding a job …”
Then humans will find new tasks to perform, which machines cannot yet do, with all the newfound spare time and sheer mountain of capital such a machine park have granted them. Just like water carriers did, once they no longer had to spend six hours a day schlepping it to some river and back.
Yes, things are ultimately DIFFERENT in the limit.
The failure to recognize this, the belief that things always remain essentially the same or repeat in never-ending cycles, the idea that “history might not always repeat but it always rhymes” might be as big a failure as the inability to understand the exponential function.
One example … regardless of whether climate change is primarily caused by human activity or merely the result of natural phenomena (I believe human activity is not the major factor but is a minor contributing factor) unless we consider the possibility that even if we can do nothing about it, it might have a major impact on our planet and civilization, could eventually leave us as unprepared as we were for SARS-COV-2.
SARS-COV-2 is another example, or could just be a warning shot of another example, i.e. the stuff of numerous horror/apocalyptic novels and movies, the world-wide contagion that brings civilization to its knees of flat on its face.
“The Black Swan”? Not really … because in both cases we know of the possible risks, we are just choosing to pretend they don’t exist because it’s more agreeable to just “party on!” It’s not as though either possibility is something we have just never considered.
Now to some more of your fallacious argumentation …
MG: “Some automation makes people more efficient “
Stuki: “Pray tell why someone, in a free and competitive world, would invest in automation to make people less efficient….”
Yet another straw-man … my entire statement was “Some automation makes people more efficient … some automation completely eliminates the need for people in those stages of the production chain where automation has been inserted. Nearly all automation is undertaken by employers to cut costs … to invest in capital (automation equipment) rather than pay expenses (employee salaries).”
Then you acknowledge “Automation may well eliminate some jobs.” … Great! Finally! You acknowledge that after originally insisting that it does not!
Then the rest of your paragraph is pure theoretical claptrap e.g. “inevitably result in increased demand for stuff. And that newly demanded stuff, takes labor to produce. ” … NOT “in the limit” where every single function that a human can perform there is a computer / machine /robot that can perform it faster, better, and more cost effectively … good luck finding a job …
Your reply to that is “Then humans will find new tasks to perform, which machines cannot yet do”.
Forgetting for the moment that you were replying to “every single function that a human can perform there is a computer / machine /robot that can perform it faster, better, and more cost effective” you are describing “tasks to perform” not necessarily jobs to produce income to live.
You are effectively describing the plot of one of the episodes of the original Star Trek TV series, where some modern day individuals end up on board the Enterprise (by time travel or suspended animation, I can’t recall) and the “capitalist” of the group just cannot adjust to the world where nobody has a job to produce product or earn an income any longer but rather devote all their energies to otherwise productive endeavors.
Of course other sci-fi stories have humanity evolving into “all brain no body” beings once they have no need to work to produce product or earn income to survive.
But the one factor you seem to be missing is that even before we reach some “limit”, the jobs that people can do to earn their living, tend to “migrate to the poles” just as is occurring with the wealth gap. IOW, the available jobs tend toward the more menial and lower-paying or toward the more skilled/technical and higher-paying … because automation is carving out many of the jobs in the middle. With the problem being that human capabilities don’t follow the same distribution curve resulting in a lack of people to do the most skilled/technical jobs and too many people available for the available menial jobs.
automation will replace most workers and we will not need nearly as much human labor. When I started in automotive batteries in the 90s it took 5 people to assemble 400 batteries when I left a 3 person line could make 2000 batteries. that shut down the 4 other lines. so 20 people per shift. gone. When they have automatic cars and trucks the unemployment will be horrendous. Covid will drive us more quickly to that
Mish, to add a #7 to your list, what about real estate? How do you think people will approach buying a home vs renting (asset, risk)? And living in urban areas?
Telecommuting means living where you want. VERY deflationary. And long overdue.
a lot of this discussion is speculative… at this point i only care about the market and my life savings. little as it is… 30 million not working… will not be adding to 401ks, but will be taking out what they have to muddle through… stocks are heading down… can’t say how far… but in CASH…now… till after november!!
Don’t forget the sharing economy companies. They are probably mostly toast. AirBnb, Lyft, etc. Uber supposedly will fire a ton of engineers.
There is an old saying that nothing matters until it does. And then it matters a lot.
There is only so much debt a system can tolerate, before debt service and loss of productivity cause it to implode.
There is only so much you can inflate asset values beyond wages before people can no longer afford them.
There is only so far you can dumb down the population until they can no longer make rational decisions.
So now all these factors are converging to make a situation where debt is defaulting, assets are depreciating, people are confused, going broke, and they are beginning to revolt.
Even though they are not really smart enough to understand the problem, they do on a gut level know something is very wrong. The wheels are coming off the bus and no one knows how to avoid the inevitable crash.
The Ant and the Grasshopper on YouTube. Not just for children:
Unfortunately grasshoppers are often smarter than ants. They had the wisdom to become bankers and control the purse strings directly. Things are so bad that many ants support the grasshoppers in their quest to print ever larger amounts of money to give their friends, simply because the ants can’t stand the thought of their entire society collapsing.
“simply because the ants can’t stand the thought of their entire society collapsing.”
Anyone too dumb to realize it really is better to die on one’s feet, than to live on one’s knees, will forever remain nothing more than a slave.
my wife’s company (and mine) was essential because we work with the post office. I am able to work remotely in my DOD programmer job. There has been no change. The biggest impact is the service industry. Our favorite restaurant closed. My hair cutter of 15 years is out of work. It is a tremendously orthogonal impact. Recovery? I have no clue and neither do you. This is a human interest story. The whole macro thing means little at this point.
True, but the whole concept of saying “I don’t know” is anathema to our entire political culture. It’s taboo to admit not knowing anything, which is why so many message boards are unintentionally humorous with wild guesses being presented as unshakable fact.
The nice thing about this virus is that we will eventually know how serious it and its economic side effects are. That doesn’t sound like much, but in a world where the Fed has outlawed genuine feedback, it’s strangely refreshing.
“All of these things point to a very slow, choppy rebound with many struggling restaurants and businesses not surviving.”
…
Yes.
The impact on local and state government revenue (since they can’t “print”) will be dreadful. Dare anyone mention the P* word re civil service workers?
*Pensions
the pensions must be in terrible shape, all kinds of investments going bad at the same time with improvement ‘hopefully’ 18 months away at best.
equities, commodities, commercial real estate, tax revenues of all sorts….
calpers wisely changed they’re investment “blend” to lean towards equities about a year ago. really “smart” people over there.
The really “smart” people are not limited to Calpers; this is a trend for all pension funds, as the central banking cabal is pushing them in that direction. Now, the cretins that caused this must keep yet another ball in the air: the stock market.
If Covid follows the Spainish flu model, there may be a second, even more deadly recurrence next year. Welcome to the new normal. The old days of globalism and money printing are over. There’s a new day dawning of personal responsibility and self sufficiency.
Personally, I don’t see the slightest hint of a dawning of personal responsibility. Money is being printed to bail out basically everyone. Particularly, the rich. “Personal responsibility” somehow always seems to fall on the poor.
That’s right … the wealthy decry socialism but not only gladly accept it but beg for it for themselves! It’s the same old “Privatize my profits/assets but socialize my losses/debts” … Because of the Crony Capitalists’ (eventually, always, there is no other kind, because of human nature) Fool’s Golden Rule “we have the gold, so we make the rules”.
I really hope you are wrong about a second wave, because if you look back to 1918, the ferocity of the second Spanish flu wave made the first wave look like child’s play. John Barry’s book The Great Influenza details what happened in 1918, and it is beyond frightening.
“In a controversial move, Macron’s government has decided that schools will gradually reopen from May 11, despite the reservations expressed by its scientific advisors.
The US should hear a similar from president Trump, but I doubt we do.”
One of the silver linings of the virus is the closing of public ‘schools’. A child’s education should be the responsibility of his parents (who freely choose to have children), and not of their neighbors’.
Education is practically free on the internet; all it needs is accreditation. And there are already programs like Kumon and Sylvan (the latter sucks, IMHO) that assist children in and out of school, to learn.
Piano teachers often do it in their own home and there is no reason math or reading teachers couldn’t do the same thing.
And there is homeschooling which requires a lot of work on the part of parents but which allows them to control what kind of things their children learn. Much of the HS movement is Christian-oriented, or ‘Fonicks’-oriented, but it doesn’t have to be. The fact that Harvard education professors are worried about homeschooling is a good reason to look into it.
You have no idea what you speak of. Child’s education is a shared responsibility with the parents, of course. I would say that schools cannot accomplish anything without parent support. However, you cannot expect parents to do as good of a job as the teachers. The school setting, structure and social interactions are crucial to development up until, or even in, college. There are a lot of things wrong with education, including unqualified teachers, excessive capital spend for the enjoyment of students, grade inflation, etc. But schools and education play an important role in a healthy society. Your comment regarding education not being responsibility of neighbors is interesting, because a lot of institutions rely on cooperation via taxes: armed forces, all of the federal, state and local government services and so on. It’s ignorant to pretend neighborly cooperation isn’t necessary. Take a guess why humans organized into tribes and how that evolved ever since.
What do you do though if your criteria for education are not met, as the conversation at base is of enforcing those criteria ? That is to say if a parent refuses them.
I would appreciate you reply.
Unfortunately, if parent’s won’t or can’t (if they work 60 jobs both of them) then the responsibility lies with the societal institutions. Having a wholly uneducated populace is a recipe for trouble.
No, you did not answer the question.
What would you do, that is to say what real action would you undertake, to enforce your criteria ?
What do you think MericanPatriot’s criteria are? Reading the comments I’m not sure I understand your question.
The question and the criteria are very simple.
If you have an “otherwise normal” family, but they are homeschooling, and the criteria in question is obligation to public or public registered schooling, what would MericanPatriot do, what would he have done, to make sure that obligation was enforced.
The question in fact is nothing to do with schooling per se, it is to do with state authority vs parental choice. To enforce an obligation against the will of another requires the use of force, something which denies the other means of defense, and that involves punishing them in some way. In this case I just wonder what line of action MericanPatriot recommends. I mean, we are sincere enough to speak clearly and openly I hope. That doesn’t mean excusing actions or delegating them, it means taking the responsibility for own point of view and the actions derived from it. Obviously I hold the opinion that it is a parental choice, and personally I am impartial to whatever that choice might be as long as a child is raised within the bounds of common decency. I have nothing at all against public or private schooling , we are just talking of the interaction between parent and authority, and therefore the limit of authority regarding family life, parents and their offspring.
I will probably have to reply for MericanPatriot, it is not hard because the coercive measures available are limited, and well known.
MericanPatriot will have to speak for himself and perhaps I misunderstood, but I didn’t read his comment that way. I read it to mean that society should provide access to education for all children, particularly because many parents can’t or won’t be able to provide an education themselves. I think society has an interest in setting up public schools and providing a basic level of education (though in practice I’ll admit schools are often poorly operated). However, providing a public school option doesn’t negate the parents right to educate their child in any manner they choose, whether it’s through public school, private school, or homeschooling. In California, where I live, all of those options are readily available to parents.
I have no argument with state provision of education, for all the various reasons both you and Merican explain. The choice Wootendw refers to is maybe based on a resentment of the direction and cost of public schooling, and possibly I misread Merican’s reply because in the country/ies where I live home schooling is not allowed, or is very restricted and replete with legal obstacles. So actually it is a funny combination which is making me think a lot, because it involves the basis of obligatory public education and its funding all without choice (say in a country I live) through to only the funding in the US. Somewhere between the two and fully private funded (or home schooling) , there seems a rift of understanding, or maybe some kind of transgression, possibly relic of the whole evolution. I expect the history of this is different for every country, but the same kinds of tensions exist in all of them, just in different proportions and varying degrees. Will keep me busy for a while mulling it all over 🙂 .
I know UK history better than that of the US , so for example there a pivotal moment was the Liberal introduction of the people’s budget very early in the 20th century. This was a welfare program that effectively removed a veto on spending held by the house of lords. A few years later we were into the first world war with the gold standard suspended, and never properly re-established. So you have there a basis of the move to the modern fiat system, maybe the most obvious after the main foundation of a central bank format the century before. This financed public spending and increased taxation is the accepted tool of state, along with associated errors and profit. So, it is just peculiar to see it all re-represented in terms of private education initiative of whatever kind vs state/public subsidy, sort of a reversal of previous popular demand by a sector of the public now.
“Having a wholly uneducated populace is a recipe for trouble.”
You are assuming that, if ‘free’ (taxpayer-funded) ‘education’ were unavailable, everyone would continue to have children, but not do anything about preparing them for adult life in a free society.
The fact is, people behave differently under different circumstances and if public schools were not available, most people would do what it takes to get their children (well) educated.
Also, private education wouldn’t cost much if teachers could do it in their homes.
We have a wholly uneducated populace now as we speak. Hence the mess we are in.
“…institutions rely on cooperation via taxes: armed forces, all of the federal, state and local government services and so on…”
I am for individual liberty and private property rights. That’s what free market capitalism is based on. Liberty means the right to do what you want, not what someone else, including government, tells you what to do.
By ‘cooperation’, you are euphemistically saying “do what the government says or else”. That’s unAmerican.
In tribes those who don’t adhere to the norms are left to the wolves. The modern equivalent is that people agreed/managed to obtain a representative government to codify and enforce the norms. So “the government” is your fellow Americans’ wishes – for better or worse depending on your individual point of view.
What a dumb post. People like this shouldn’t be allowed to live in civilization.
RE: “Piano teachers often do it in their own home and there is no reason math or reading teachers couldn’t do the same thing.”
They’re called tutors.
RE: “And there is homeschooling which requires a lot of work on the part of parents but which allows them to control what kind of things their children learn.”
And how are the vast majority of parents who actually have to work to support the family supposed to home-school their children?
RE: “A child’s education should be the responsibility of his parents (who freely choose to have children), and not of their neighbors’.”
When the vast majority of parents in a community who all have to work to support their families get together and decide that they can’t home-school their children they realize that they can pool some resources and have public or private schools to do the job.
“And how are the vast majority of parents who actually have to work to support the family supposed to home-school their children?”
Homeschooling is not for everyone which is why I mentioned other options.
When I was a kid, taxes were lower and mothers stayed home. Only rich people can do that now.
Another way is if one parent has the kind of job where they work a different schedule. E.g., my ex-wife is a pharmacist and she worked every other weekend and two nights a week whereas I worked 8-5 M-F. Homeschooling, which we did until our daughter was 12, was easy for US, especially with Kumon.
The alternatives to homeschooling you offered were private tutoring and online education. I seriously doubt that private tutoring can take up the slack for the vast majority of people who simply cannot homeschool because of work responsibilities. Online makes much more sense, but most people I talk to say that it has to be interactive with real teachers to be really effective … that “computerized training” is a poor substitute.
RE: “When I was a kid, taxes were lower and mothers stayed home.”
Been there … but I am pretty sure that my mother would have struggled with homeschooling curricula beyond 6th or 7th grade, at least in the STEM subjects.
I had “Modern Math” in the 7th grade where we studied things like set theory, number theory, group theory, graph theory, linear algebra and many other more advanced math topics, albeit at a fairly elementary level, and then elementary functions and basic calculus in the 8th grade, which awoke my lifelong interest/love after being bored silly by “math” (i.e. arithmetic!) for my first 6 years … leading to AP courses in all subjects all through High School and double major Math and Physics at UPenn.
In short, I am extremely thankful for my public school (K-12) education … but fully acknowledge that “those were different times” … there are very few, if any, public schools in the large city (that I live in the suburbs of) that I would have sent my children to.
2nd, 3rd and 4th order effects will be next to impossible to fully predict. Within those effects could be what you might call Black Swans, even only showing up after a few years.
Coronascam (TARP2.0) was simply cover,a convenient excuse to launch the largest bailout of world govt in history.Repo disaster was the first sign that BRICS and US banks were collapsing fast and had to be bailed out again,and CB’s needed a bag man to blame and wala……..CORONA BS!
Misdirection is a form of deception in which the performer draws audience attention to one thing to distract it from another.
The public will know for certain that the pandemic was the cause of this crisis and it will also be echoed in the history books.
Trump and Xi are probably calling one another every week or so. To laugh at us muppets, that is.
Trump: “What’s for next week?”
Xi: “How about you do another China bashing?”
Trump: “Sure!!!”
Yeah… The reptile aliens illuminati organized all of this to convince the sheeple to give money to their puppet masters everywhere.
Ignore the stories that some countries actually focused government investment onto average people and are seeking to optimize health while nobody benefits financially. Those are lies…
The reptile alien’s network is global and they control the minds of millions of scientists and press everwhere. None can avoid their insidious touch…
rolls eyes
Or how about coronavirus is a legit pandemic that the world collectively pulled back for which certain corrupt regimes used as an opportunity for mass theft from the government coffers while spreading narratives denying the pandemic in order to cover the tracks and get people to blame health authorities rather than the corrupt bastards stealing everyone blind?
Outsourcing, regardless of the trading partner is useless in a pandemic. We’ve learned that pandemics spread to different countries at different time. That gives countries where the virus did not originate time to close borders to prevent the virus’ spread. And leaders are going to be quicker to shut borders. More manufacturing at home will have to be done to reduce risks of supply chain shocks.
The economic damages of the lockdowns are irreversible.
Next leg down of the stockmarket is coming this week.
The COVID-19 pandemic might have (emphasis on might have) created what the business and investment community fears most … a prudent and responsible American consumer buying only what they can afford and really need, living within their means, and saving for that “rainy half-year” … rather than a profligate spend-thrift living high-on-the-hog on endless credit.
Nah … “go out and buy stuff!” … a blast from the past …
Ha, that was a good one. If the US populace didn’t sober up from their debt binge after 2009, it won’t now. Remember the three letters: FED. Soon, those who save would look like idiots to those who binge.