I’m less and less convinced that we’ll be getting back to anything remotely resembling “normal” any time soon. All the brouhaha about “re-opening the economy” is missing the point. Where stay-at-home orders have already been lifted, people are not rushing out to restaurants, bars, and other entertainment venues. In part because many are doing their best to avoid contracting Covid-19. But that’s only a piece of the puzzle. As James Carville’s quip goes, it’s the economy, stupid. People aren’t going to rush out because their own personal finances are in trouble. Millions have lost their jobs. Many of those jobs are not coming back. Even those still working aren’t rushing out to spend; savings rates have risen significantly. For an economy built around consuming, consumption of anything but necessities has fallen off a cliff. I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!
The Everything Bubble has been getting bigger and bigger, ever since the financial sector’s flaws were papered over in the wake of the 2007–2009 crisis. Covid-19 is just the pin that popped the bubble. If the coronavirus hadn’t spread, some other Black Swan would have been the pin.
Even before Covid-19, the U.S. was flirting with disaster by running a trillion dollar annual deficit. That was playing with matches in a room full of gasoline. But now, we’re running deficits like that in a month. And that’s just the Treasury, not even counting the trillions in QE coming from the Federal Reserve or the fact that, for the first time ever, the Fed is adding junk corporate debt to its balance sheet by the boatload. This will not end well.
I believe that many are gripped by normalcy bias, and think that we’ll get back to something approximating the old normal soonish. For what it’s worth, I think that we are instead in the still-early stages of something on the order of The Great Depression.
A City in Oklahoma Ends Face Mask Requirement After Store Employees Were Threatened
Police probe shooting of Flint security guard in confrontation over mask at Family Dollar
Witnesses can confirm what’s being posted on social media?
Michigan State Police investigators are looking into reports that a Flint dollar store security guard was fatally shot Friday after an argument with a customer who refused to wear a mask in the store.
Game Over for Oil, The Economy is Next
Most people, policy makers and economists are energy blind and cannot, therefore, fully grasp the gravity or the consequences of what is happening.
Energy is the economy and oil is the most important and productive portion of energy. U.S. oil consumption is at its lowest level since 1971 when production was only about 78% of what it was in 2019. As goes oil, so goes the economy…down.
Most U.S. refineries require intermediate and heavy crude oil that must be imported. Few U.S. grades of oil can be used to produce diesel without blending them with imported oil. That is because they are too light to contain the organic compounds need to make diesel. Redesigning refineries will not change this.
The world’s natural resource extraction, shipping and distribution system relies on diesel. As refineries close and less diesel is produced, there will be lower levels of natural resource extraction, less manufacturing and less buying of goods.
Trump responds to Bush’s call for bipartisan unity with tweets attacking his enemies
He also sent out a bizarre tweet talking about coronavirus like it was a biblical plague.
Coronavirus: 'Covid toe' and other rashes puzzle doctors
Inside the Dystopian, Post-Lockdown World of Wuhan
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could have been prevented
After SARS-CoV, a number of laboratories continued their research on the virus, but big Pharma lost interest in the virus – because it had disappeared from the face of the Earth. There was no money to be made in SARS-CoV antivirals or vaccines, so none were made. As a result, when SARS-CoV-2 emerged in late 2019, humanity was completely unable to stop its inexorable spread around the globe.
What could have been done? To start, we should have made antiviral drugs that inhibit a broad range of bat SARS-like CoVs. One protein encoded in the genome of these viruses – the RNA dependent RNA polymerase, essential for the synthesis of all viral RNAs – is the most highly conserved protein among all of these viruses. It would have been straightforward to take a sample of these RdRps from bat CoVs, produce them in cell culture, and find small molecule compounds that inhibit all of them. A pan-CoV antiviral drug could have been developed through human phase I trials, and stockpiled for the next pandemic. But there was no money to support such work – neither in the halls of big Pharma or forthcoming from the under-funded NIH.
Irish dig deep to support virus-hit native Americans, repaying 150-year-old debt
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