Here's the full dataset of 1363 mid cap + stocks that traded during the 2008 recession, and their performances: https://shan.io/writing/learnings-from-the-2008-great-recess...
They said 2008 was a once in a lifetime event, too. So what’s the next black swan that will unsettle the market in 2032? The Big One finally hits California? Mount Rainier erupts? The Yellowstone Caldera?
> The markets are being, and will continue to be, affected by these sorts of market players getting squeezed and forced to make market moves because of cash-flow issues rather than because of thoughtful fundamental analysis.
So it sounds like we didn’t learn much from 2008. Will we learn from 2020?
China has provided roughly a month's advance warning on how this virus plays out in terms of infectivity and severity (~20% of cases are serious / require medical attention, ~5% are critical, and ~2% are fatal).
People prefer to believe that media coverage of the effects in China are fearmongering or even a political "hoax"[1], that it will peter out with warmer weather (it's spread quite quickly in Singapore which is hot and humid at the moment), and that because it's possible to misuse masks and because they don't provide complete protection by themselves they're useless and should be left for healthcare workers[2].
The kind of critical thinking that helps you prepare for things like this seems to be in short supply. Last week people thought I was silly for stocking up on dried goods and essentials, this week every store around me is sold out of hand sanitizer, clorox wipes, and isopropanol.
[0]: Wikipedia, right now
[1]: The US president, at a rally a couple of days ago
[2]: The US surgeon general's twitter page, a couple of days ago
We have a total of 2263 currently infected people of which 1000 with few symptoms, 1034 hospitalized and another 229 under emergency treatments [0]
If the number of infected keeps growing (+400 today) and the percentage of hospitalized remains the same, hospitals will have serious problems very soon
[0] https://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/cronaca/2020/03/03/coronavi...
I keep seeing statements to the effect of "a mask only helps if you're already sick", but we don't know who's sick and who isn't! The only way to ensure all the sick people are wearing masks is to get everyone wearing masks. But perhaps it isn't possible to ramp up production fast enough to make this realistic?
It is still silly to stock up things you will most probably not need, and if you do, can still get if people like you would not unnecessarily stock up on them.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re...
We learned a lot from 2008.
This is a different ball game. There is plenty of credit today. This is a supply shock. There are not applicable lessons from a credit crunch to a panic/virus induced supply shortage.
Edit: on #2, it is 'cheaper' to print money to prop pensions up than to have millions of retirees eating dog food
We will learn from 2020 too.
I am busy, right now I am trying to learn that humans will never learn from history. I vaguely remember somebody mentioning that to me in the past, but I dismissed it as a nonsense.
(But I am not really that pessimistic. Somebody mentioned that the Spanish flu was a big impulse for providing national health care services. I think it can have a similar effect, somewhere.)
There are ways to go about this and wipe out investors without causing complete economic collapse (e.g. nationalization and orderly dismantling) but "we've" already decided not to go that route.
Perhaps it was in reference to the famous Aldous Huxley quote:
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
Now that wars are mechanized and we have nuclear weapons this is less of an impetus.
There might be a different effect here as preditary health care in the US is unpalatable in the best of times.
Given that the default assumption should be the COVID-19 will follow the flu pattern of diminishing rapidly in March up to barely any case in April [2]. This by no means try to diminish actions to be cautious, or the risk it imposes. However, if you are asked to put money on a certain direction, betting on warming up weather reducing the R value of the virus enough to stop it is what I would do.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (Sort by new cases) [2] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
In that case, rather than diminishing rapidly in March, it diminished in May. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
In either case, any step at delaying the spread of the virus will have a dramatic effect on the ultimate death toll.
COVID19 is likely very similar.
See Deadly second wave section in the Spanish Flu [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/...
I've heard mixed things about China's reporting on it. It's more difficult to trust authoritarian regimes by default, but even good preparation can falter if there isn't honest information. Everything sort of followed China's information in the initial stages.
Everyday citizen preparation could be affected by social media manipulation (political manipulation tactics repurposed), but democratic government agencies wouldn't likely trust those sources, although they have to make sure their voice is the authority for citizens and not social media.
So can you effectively prepare for an outbreak when communication is deceptive/less effective/manipulated? I think it's very difficult.
By getting enough testing kits ready so you are not in a situation where hundreds/thousands of possible infections have occurred in Washington state while you've only diagnosed ~100 people.
Did they stop protesting? Going into protest (crowded spaces, close contact with others) seems like a bad idea during a pandemic.
Coverage of that was already dwindling as the months went by and there was no major action by the PRC. In addition, the more extreme protestor actions, like destroying the subway and other infrastructure, made it harder to write about.
I think once some of the protesters became violent, such as setting a bystander on fire, and killing that janitor by throwing a brick at him, coverage decreased significantly.
One thing interesting about the coverage of the Hong Kong protests is it overshadowed the protests in other regions, like Kashmir, Iraq, Venezuela, Indonesia, France, and a bunch of other places.
The world was a vastly different place when the Spanish Flu happened. Think of all the things we have today that we depend on to operate flawlessly that didn't exist back in 1918.
I guess the comparison I would make might be an airplane that is largely analog and manual back then vs. now stuffed with electronics. Take away those electronics and it can't fly manually. So much of our life depends on people to keep the electronics working that any impact to those and their functions (say the electric grid) would cause an immense amount of interconnected havoc.
After reading a lot of information, my bet is that the virus itself is in the same league as a bad seasonal flu (I heard that from at least two experts, and from my MD), and we'll suffer more from our bad handling of the situation, rather than from the virus itself. We should deal with this virus exactly how we deal with seasonal flu. Stay home and wear a surgical mask when we're sick, go to see our MD (wearing a mask) if we have mild symptoms, and go to hospital if we have severe symptoms. Generally, avoid close contacts, don't shake hands and so on.
That being said, better be safe than sorry. I personally will work remotely and avoid public transportations for the following month until we have more information.
"This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387
Also there were 3000 death in China, and new cases are declining. In France alone (20 times less people), it's common to have 10000 death annually from the flu. Of course, China enforced strict containment measures and we don't know the exact numbers, but overall the death toll seem rather small. Why should we expect much worse in the West? And finally, it's not sure, but some experts expect the virus to decline with warmer temperatures. So overall, I'd say there's room for optimism.
Actually, very few people have reasons to think they have the coronavirus now. Of course, if you come back from an infected area, you should be extra careful and follow standard procedures defined by your local government. Right now most people with flu symptoms simply have a cold or the flu, and not the wuhan virus.
I've just listened to an interview of a French doctor and what is happening now is that hospitals are getting overwhelmed with regular people who want to be tested for the coronavirus.
The coronavirus isn't that different from a regular flu virus in terms of care. Mostly, you just need to stay home waiting for it to pass (and of course avoid infecting others). Only people with severe symptoms should go to the hospital.
The CDC has said the exact opposite of this. The WHO estimated an initial mortality rate of 3.4%, whereas the flu is well below 1%.
Your GP and some unnamed internet "expert" sources are wrong.
There isn't enough world production and stock for the average joe to panic stockpile N95 masks.
The likely reason for this walking back in the recommendation is that 1) most people don't know mask sizes and how to fit a mask 2) if we have a limited stock then priority should be given to health workers who have to handle infected patients on a daily basis.
If there's one thing a technologically advanced dictatorship like the CCP should excel at, it's this.
In another two weeks they might have less cases than other regions!
I'm more curious about how this will affect India, where the population situation is more similar to China's. I haven't seen any mention of the virus there in the news, yet.
https://www.click2houston.com/weather/2020/02/26/will-housto...
Sounds like you have your conclusion without needing to wait for the results.
China's government is more technocratic, more pragmatic, and also more authoritarian than the US. All of those are very useful characteristics when dealing with a pandemic.
So I would expect the Western approach to result in exponentially faster infection rates, and significantly more resource shortages hindering the "on the ground" response.
I would expect that baseline levels of wellness, demographics, and tangentially related factors like climate will have a larger impact on the outcome than governance, so the US might get lucky in one or more of these areas.
- They're often very corrupt
- It's commonly believed that Nazi Germany relieved the crisis of the 1930s, but that is propaganda and Hitler probably made it worse.
- The propaganda also paints a picture of a strictly organized state, but nothing is further from the truth. Nazi Germany consisted of cogs that didn't work together so much as against each other (the army against the party, the SS against the SA, etc.). Coordinated chaos.
- One man can impossibly oversee everything, he can't enforce his vision in all these different places, resulting in a lot of different "clans" that have power in the name of Hitler.
- Our democracy is a lot of talk and little action, lots of checks and balances, where the public can check what the government does and can remove them from power. That sounds inefficient, but the decisions are carried by the population and let's keep it like that.
Source (in Dutch) with a timestamp where he gets more on-topic (before that is more background info): https://youtu.be/_866RrJJy6A?t=600
I don't say I find it super convincing by the way, certainly points like "one man can't oversee it all" doesn't rule out the option of a group of supposedly smart people that oversee it all (much like today) and make the rules for everyone. No argument is made for democracy, the main argument is against dictatorships with weasel words like "often very corrupt" and against Hitler's dictatorship specifically (when there are more current, seemingly better-functioning and longer-lasting examples like, indeed, in China).
Of course, that I don't find the arguments made very convincing also doesn't mean that I'm in favor of a group of smart people ruling over everyone or against democracy or something.
I just don't know, but this is a datapoint where someone claims that this thought "a dictator should excel at this" may not be right. The podcast typically invites researchers in the field that are often very knowledgeable and give much more convincing presentations; this person is a historian so presumably also knows a thing or two about the topic, even if I still have some questions.
more bailouts? how about letting them take the consequences of their actions? they would have taken the upside so should accept the downside too instead of shifting it to taxpayers. how else will markets stay healthy if evolution is thwarted
maybe
I was stocking up on dry goods and such like everybody else. After the past few days I feel like a panicked fool. Almost every single death report: "Had underlying health conditions."
As far as stocking up, my understanding was that the reason for picking up an extra couple items each time you go to the store was in case eventually certain areas are rec'd to work from home and such. Maybe that won't happen, but it's not like that stuff would go to waste.
We may be close to the point of saying "fuck it. False alarm this is just a cold. Carry on". Hard to know for sure though until a couple weeks go by
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22476675
I did not check their source. Just saying that "we may be close to saying `false alarm`" seems almost certainly ill-informed.
There is no difference.
