Consider that career expert epidemiologists are predicting billions infected and millions if not tens of millions of deaths worldwide, unless something dramatically changes to deflect the current course or some of their assumptions turn out to be substantially wrong. That’s more infected and 1–2 orders of magnitude more deaths than the 2009 swine flu.
The fear in the markets is due to the long systemic propping up of asset values. COVID19 is the pin pricking the balloon. Fundamentally, COVID isn't the problem, it's the Fed. My favorite analogy is forest fires: they're healthy for the environment on occasion. When you stop them from happening indefinitely, bad things happen. In terms of markets, that means people taking on debts when they should not do so. People getting funded for fundamentally unprofitable business ventures. It is healthy for an economy to clean house on economically inefficient ventures from time to time.
The problem is that they are measuring inflation of things like consumer goods, but where inflation ended up occurring was in the stock market - it costs substantially more to buy a given percentage of a companies stock now than it did 5 or 10 years ago.
Plus, some common expenses like health care, college education, and housing have been increasing by way more than the Fed's target as well, and credible arguments have been made that the official inflation numbers don't take this into effect appropriately.
Yes! I've been saying this for years, so nice to see it just pop up here as a matter of fact statement.
Central banking is central planning. Central planning has a bad name because it's so hard for planners to pick the right targets, fully understand the economy and not create side-effects worse than whatever problem they're trying to solve.
Economists have been penning articles for years about the 'mystery' of why inflation remains low despite high rates of money printing, whilst mortgages bonds and stocks soar around them. Well, CPI/RPI aren't complete measures of prices. They are excluding prices that matter a lot to companies, like the prices of financial instruments.
CPI does take into account healthcare and education costs, however. And some countries try to include house prices, albeit sometimes via indirect proxies of questionable utility like modelled "rent levels we think would be charged if people were renting instead of buying".
I think there's a lot of great economics journalism to be done on the exact nature of the inflation time series, because so many things are tied to it and there's just so much largely unexamined complexity sitting behind it.
Instead of the fed injecting money to stimulate loans, government should spend money on necessary future investments and fund it with issue of a ratio of treasury bond and direct monetary creation
Then what would you do when you needed to reduce inflation? The Fed can sell of the assets it's bought, but the government can't sell the roads it's built.
You change the ratio independently of the budget timeline just like the fed adjusts the it's rates.
BTW you seem scared of inflation, inflation has been running low except the upper areas of the economy where the Fed has over low rates - so stock prices are inflated. What is really needed is injection of easier flowing money from below the economy.
If you invest in good programs then they deliver a positive benefit to the economy over time. Like more roads means easier connectivity, less time spent in traffic, or increased network flow. I'd suggest the biggest bang for the buck is universal healthcare and paying public college for all.
You have seen the pictures of the streets in Italy, right ? This is decidedly not a stimulus. It could have been, true, but because of decisions made too late and with money clearly at front of mind it very, very much is a financial disaster.
At the risk of sounding worse, the younger folks who inherit that bequeathed wealth might actually spend it, rather than tying it up in markets. Putting the money to work in the "real economy".
There are some scientists that have models like this, but keep in mind that a lot of the people that come up with these are not peer reviewed estimates, and some of them just want the publicity. The media obviously goes for it, because if it bleeds it leads.
“Is 60-80% of the world’s population going to get infected? Maybe not. Maybe this will come in waves. Maybe the virus is going to attenuate its lethality because it certainly doesn’t help it if it kills everybody in its path, because it will get killed as well,” he said.
I think you're putting words in his mouth.
Lipsitch's comment in your own link begins with "if a pandemic happens", which is not the same as saying he's "predicting billions infected", so, again, you put words in his mouth as well.
Meanwhile, WHO estimates that only 0.5% of those exposed will develop any symptom at all... and not everyone will even be exposed.
> I think you're putting words in his mouth... again, you put words in his mouth as well.
FYI I am totally different person to jacobolus, who made the original post you responded to. I'm not the one putting words in people's mouth. I don't totally agree with jacobolus's statement, I think the final numbers will be lower [0], but I do believe there's merit to his claim and am more than happy to respond and provide sources.
“Everybody is susceptible. If you assume that everybody randomly mix with each other, then eventually you will see 40, 50, 60 per cent of the population get infected.”
> Lipsitch's comment in your own link begins with "if a pandemic happens"
I think you'd have a better line of argument if you pointed out that neither of the two explicitly stated "millions if not tens of millions" of people will die. I'll conceded that's true, I haven't yet seen a top epidemiologist explicitly state so. However if you take one of the lower estimates of the death rate (0.5%), and apply it to their infection estimates, you'll get millions dead. If the WHO's official 3.4% CFR announced a couple days ago holds or increases, we'll see tens of millions dead.
[0] Once enough people have died (tens of thousands), countries will get their act together and start doing proper quarantines, social distancing, and hygienic controls.
But "everybody randomly mix with each other" means everybody within an infected locale, not everyone on the planet.
As far as we know, it can only be transmitted by contact (including surfaces), only while the virus is active, and only from an infected person while communicable.
A huge portion of world population outside of the First World won't even be "in range." Its spread has been very constrained given that it was in the wild for months with most people taking no special precautions whatsoever.
Look how ridiculously transmissible measles is, yet it took centuries to get to some highly populated regions.
All of the factors you mentioned play into its R0, and yet it is still orders of magnitude more infectious and deadly than SARS was this number of days after outbreak.
Also, centuries ago this global phenomenon wasn’t a thing:
I've heard it may be airborn --i.e. be able to survive minutes or longer free-floating in the air after someone coughs.
It also can survive pretty long on surfaces, I heard > 9 hours even. So you touch a pole on a subway car, and for 9 hours others are sharing the infection with you.
No professional epidemiologist is going to announce a prophecy about exactly what's going to happen, but they can all run the same numbers, and those numbers point to a global pandemic. There's some hedging in their statements, but they're both saying this is serious and the numbers are pointing in that direction.
Nobody wants it to turn out that way, but failing to prepare for that possibility would be a grave error.
