JasonC wrote:
Does t seem like an appropriate comment to me. Let’s not start religious or racial generalisations.I hope my comment is reasonable in trying to think why some areas seem to have faired worse than others, at least thus far. I’m not sure who is starting religious or racial generalisations.
Chinese people are neither a religion nor a race,
Iranian people are neither a religion nor a race,
Italian people are neither a religion or a race.
Saudi Arabia I understood banned pilgramages to their holy sites so I’m certainly not suggesting it’s a religious or racial generalisation.
Well…. the US declaring a national emergency certainly does help a lot to get over it. If the current lockdown / flatten the curve efforts work, as they did in China, there will be a general sigh of relief and things will get slowly back to normal (with special attention to protecting ourselves), and global delivery chains will be coming back. This is a recession though. The time frame for that comeback is still not possible to be known. Can be end of year, or well into the next. Companies which haven’t got sound business models, or which have been kept alive by low interest finance, may now face the music. Which, I think, is a good thing, overall. But that adds to the time element.
And: never look at the indices. They give a wrong picture. Asset selection worth its salt selects stock that’s better than the average in times of crisis. That’s the idea. So the bloodbath shouldn’t be as bad in your individual account as it looks in the news.
What about Germany promising unlimited loans for businesses (currently half a trillion € has been mentioned)? While individually that’s nice for companies is it reasonable over all? Who’s ever going to pay that back? Couldn’t this „overload“ the €uro and kill it? Maybe reduce cash and go 1/3 gold and 1/3 all world index fund?
And: never look at the indices. They give a wrong picture. Asset selection worth its salt selects stock that’s better than the average in times of crisis. That’s the idea. So the bloodbath shouldn’t be as bad in your individual account as it looks in the news.
A wrong picture in the sense of „it’s not as bad as it looks“? Apart from companies producing ffp3 masks and hand disinfectant who’s doing better than average currently? Ok, Supermarkets for now, due to people panic stocking.
I just read Delta is parking 300 airplanes (1/3 of the fleet). Crazy. And this is just the onset…
Was it mentioned in this thread yet that Lufthansa will ask for state aid? Can you imagine Lufthansa going bankrupt? Strange times…
kwlf wrote:
It seems we are stopping elective surgery next week in Wales. I haven’t heard specifically about cancer surgery and whether it is excluded from this.
Same as here then. We are also stopping all elective surgery in Germany, but I haven’t heard any details at work today. It is questionable if stopping surgery that doesn’t require postoperative intensive care or monitoring is really sensible. A lot of “elective” surgery (the usual definition being that it can be planned at least 24 hours in advance without the delay harming the patient) is still time sensitive. Cancer surgery is an excellent example, as it almost never needs to be performed in less than 24 hrs but patients will get worse if you delay for weeks or months even.
JasonC wrote:
Adam it is just not possible to know yet. I can come up with scenarios both ways. If this peaks by May we could come out fairly fast. Like most crises, if you know how it is going to end you can make a fortune. But no one does.
I hope you’re right, that things have turned by May.
A related question, perhaps more fundamentally important, is that of how the world will be remade when the crisis fades. Most people are continuing to go to work, and will do so over the course of the crisis. People will still need to farm and eat. There will be plenty to do in the public sector. And my house still needs some of its brickwork repointed. Economic activity will not grind to a complete stop. If I get paid overtime I intend to spend the money as soon and as widely as I can.
I think in the USA and the UK we’re seeing the denouement of conmen and a resurgence of respect for experts and public institutions. This is good. On the other hand China seems to be becoming ever more authoritarian, and this crisis seems to be facilitating that. And in the USA and the UK we have seen a resurgence of prejudice against people who are ethnically Chinese.
Who has heard what is happening in Yemen or Syria recently. Who is lobbying for the Russia report to be released? How much is happening whilst our backs are turned? Will China become rich on the sales of ventilators and masks, or will it become poorer as supply lines are shortened.
One thing I do hope is that it may also result in a resurgence of communal spirit, a bit like one of those team building exercises where you only succeed if you find some way of pulling together.
Nobody has cared about the plight of zero hours delivery people until now, when it was realised that if they were sick they would inevitably go to work and cough all over your parcel then put it through the letterbox, because they have no right to sick pay and are just one rent payment from destitution. Journals that have always been paywalled are making articles about the Coronavirus available for free (I believe strongly that companies have a right to profit from what they do, but the current publishing model is a big scam).
I can think of many epidemiological and practical questions about how to manage infections that I can’t answer, and if we co-operate internationally we may be able to treat people better and control the infection more quickly.
I suppose I am at risk of being labelled a socialist or a communist, but I don’t think I fall into any clear category in terms of my political beliefs. What I am getting at is the recognition that on personal, local, national and international levels we are all interdependent. In recent years our politics and economics has become more cut-throat ‘winner take all’, and life for those at the bottom or even the middle of the pile, has become pretty grim. It will be up to us how we reshape the world, and I hope that we will opt for a model that is more public spirited.
Was it mentioned in this thread yet that Lufthansa will ask for state aid? Can you imagine Lufthansa going bankrupt? Strange times…
It would be ironic that the UK let FlyBe go bust because – until 31 Dec 2020 – a govt subsidy would be illegal under EU law 
I don’t normally support taxpayer propping-up of failing businesses but FlyBe were running a regional service which other airlines would not run because the routes didn’t make enough money, but they were important to the local communities. And every country has “relatively poor” areas which nobody wants to serve. This situation is being played out more sharply on Alderney which more or less directly depends on the airline, Aurigny, which is allegedly doing various financial manueuvers to get out of doing it.
I suppose I am at risk of being labelled a socialist or a communist, but I don’t think I fall into any clear category in terms of my political beliefs. What I am getting at is the recognition that on personal, local, national and international levels we are all interdependent. In recent years our politics and economics has become more cut-throat ‘winner take all’, and life for those at the bottom or even the middle of the pile, has become pretty grim. It will be up to us how we reshape the world, and I hope that we will opt for a model that is more public spirited.
I think you make very good points, and hopefully attitudes will change a bit.
Zero hour contracts are a tricky one. A small company of say 5 people can be crippled (both financially and in terms of management time wasted on it) by one rogue employee who has “rights” and knows how to game the system. I could tell some stories… But a supermarket, or the NHS, has much less need for that sort of protection.
China will become a bit poorer because 1st World customers will go back to what they used to do: buy only low value items from there, and only the biggest players who can plant their own staff in the Foxconn factory will carry on getting complete products made there. IMHO that’s not a bad thing because Chinese companies became incredibly arrogant in the last few years. In the West a company behaving like that would lose all its customers very fast; China kept them because it is cheap, but any good student of business will know that customer loyalty based on cheapness is worth zero.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
If the economy is shut down till then, huge chunks of it won’t exist anymore and the result will put the Great Depression to shame.
The “economy” isn’t shut down, only small part of it is, transportation (of people), tourism, and other “non essential” stuff. It’s a huge blow for those working there of course. But I mean, skype meetings works just fine. Production facilities are up and running, transportation of goods works just fine etc. The web/IT sector is blooming.
“If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger”, apply to this thing as it does to everything else. Lots of “fat” will be removed in the process (not thinking about corona victims), but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the long run IMO. Besides, the situation right now is mostly characterized by “new”, “unprecedented”, “chaotic”. There are lots of ways this might end, but overall bad only, is that a likely scenario?
