https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/trumps-chinese-virus-tweet/608263/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/shutting-markets-isnt-the-solution-to-whats-wrong-11584635925
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/doj-coronavirus-emergency-powers-140023
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/why-most-deadly-viruses-arise-in-africa-or-asia
https://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2020/03/coronavirus-getting-angry.html?spref=tw&m=1
“China has demonstrated this virus can be controlled. The town in Italy has demonstrated it can be controlled even where it is rife.
Life goes on in Singapore. Schools are open. Restaurants are open in Korea.
The right policy is not “herd immunity” or even “flattening the curve”. The right policy is to try to eliminate as many cases as possible and to strictly control and test to keep cases to a bare minimum for maybe 18 months while a vaccine is produced.
The alternative is literally millions of people dying completely unnecessarily.
What is required is a very sharp lockdown to get Ro well below one – and put the virus into exponential decay.
When the numbers are low enough – say six weeks – you let the quarantine off – but with Asian style monitoring. Everyone has their temperature measured regularly. Quarantine is rigid and enforced. You hand your phone over if you are infected and your travel routes and your contacts are bureaucratically reconstructed (as is done in Singapore). And we get through.
And in a while the scientists save us with a vaccine.
The economic costs will be much lower. Indeed life in three months will be approximately normal.
The social costs will be much lower.
Every crisis has its underlying source. And you want to throw as much resources (and then some) close to the source. Everything else is peripheral.
The last crisis was a monetary crisis and it had a monetary solution.
This is a virus crisis and it has a virology solution.
Asian Governments are not inherently superior to ours – but they have done a much better job of it than ours. The end death toll in China (probably much higher than stated) will wind up much smaller than the Western death tolls. I do not understand our idiocy.”
Exponentials: https://twitter.com/drg1985/status/1236653062225367041?s=20
“There is full health surveillance.
Everywhere he goes he must scan a QR code. The data gets sent to a central system that tracks all movement. If he has been nearby someone sick, he gets denied entry everywhere. 2/n
He also gets his temperature checked everywhere. When he leaves his apartment, there are forehead and QR scans. To enter any new block, forehead and QR scans. 3/n
When the crisis hit a peak, many areas went under extreme lockdown. Only one family member could leave home, every other day. And only to buy groceries. 5/n”
Podcasts:
https://www.financialsense.com/podcast/19537/coronavirus-week-changed-america-special-report
https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-the-covid-19-pandemic/
https://www.macrovoices.com/813-macrovoices-211-jim-bianco
-Also see the second interview, which had a bull
“Jim: Okay, I’ve got one about China. And I’m going to throw out a big number. And let me define it. China says that they’re 81,000 cases. I think that they’re off by orders of magnitude. And I think that they’re off by 1,000-X. Now let me explain that. I think there’s 81 million cases in China. Let me rephrase that. That’s 6% of the population, meaning 94% did not get this. That sounds entirely reasonable, that 6% of the population of China got this. Not 81,000 but 81 million. Remember, that’s a country of 1.4 billion people. They say that they had 3,400 deaths. I think that that’s off by 1,000-X. I think it’s more like
millions.
Erik, maybe you’ve seen the same thing I do. All my friends that offer their opinion about the market to me, almost 95% of them are trying to pick a low. I can’t find anybody at this point that still thinks that this market should still be sold. Everybody is still trying to pick a low right now. No one can conceive of this idea that, no, maybe it’s a new era. It’s a new post-virus era. And the post-virus era means that we are now in an era of lower prices.
The marketplace – we have to talk about that more later – but the market place right now is saying that the post-virus world is a completely different set of valuations. It’s going to be de-globalization, de-risking, higher inflation, lower multiples, restrictions on trade, restrictions on travel, and the whole nine yards along with that. So we’ve got to change the way that we are doing business. And that means all prices have to come down. Now that all prices are coming down, central banks are seeing what’s happening and they’re trying to stop it. And I don’t think they can. ”
ennlightenment 