Fun reminder that the USA only has 100k ICU beds total and they’re usually already full.
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I bet if you asked Santelli they’d find my picture of them more offensive than a picture that paints them as callous.
Also, I went a little overboard on having a special and unique point of view. Realistically Santelli is probably just a self-hating human on the side of the corporations.
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Arguably, Santelli is responsible for the political mess we find ourselves in today.
Back during the initial events of the economic crisis of 2008, his televised rant against government intervention to stem the crisis sparked and fed into the right-wing backlash against any government action to stop the crisis. He arguably inspired the formation of the tea party movement, and the hard-line obstructionism that both held back the Obama administration from dealing with the crisis, and set up the false narrative that austerity in the face of a depression was the way to go.
Surprisingly (but not to anyone who had a basic knowledge of macroeconomics, or history), this was all complete nonsense, but it did manage to hold back the response to the crisis, and the anaemic recovery and obstructionism that it engendered helped to cause the lingering resentment that the recovery didn’t end up reaching most Americans, that was a n essential part of the background for the rise of Trump.
In summary, fuck that guy.
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I would be more inclined to consider that argument if he hadn’t explicitly made his proposal* to protect the economy, not people, and if he wasn’t coming from a position of rich man’s privilege. I suspect nothing bad has ever happened to him in his life, and he can’t imagine that it ever would.
*(An incredibly stupid one, as others have pointed out.)
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In defense of my pet theory I think that privileged people rarely know how to handle powerful emotions.
But to your point, the further distant I get from writing that the more it looks like a weird thing I thought for a moment. It’s not that it’s impossible, but probably Santelli lives in economic philosophy land where you have contempt for people and pretend you aren’t one of them.
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I’m ready!
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This type of thinking is why my brother has shingles.
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That’s pretty much the US number.
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I’m not an economist, and my main exposure to the stock market is my 401k which I won’t need for another few decades (depending on whether or not SS is still around) but this bull market was way overdue for a correction. There is no reason for the insane growth we’ve seen with an insane economic policy ushered in by insane leaders. The virus seems like the pin that popped the bubble.
Quite frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to correct. And it’s not like we’re hitting all-time lows. FFS, the Dow was at this level less than a year ago.
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I know, that’s why I couldn’t resist.
And it’s spot on for the mindset anyway.
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Yeah, it feels like we haven’t even begun to see the stock market actually respond to even the economic hits the virus has already caused, much less what’s clearly about to happen (much less what could be over the horizon after that).
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I think his point was more to just get the whole crisis over with in one month so that everything can get back to normal. In reality we may be dealing with the fall out for a year or more. Who knows. It is going to be bad for a lot of people not just health wise but work wise. But it was stupid in delivery.
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I suspect that’s actually a feature of this plan, not a bug.
If the economy goes in the tank, the super-rich will weather it better than anyone else; and when the dust settles, they will be able to buy up the pickings of the wreckage at a huge discount.
And despite what those on the right (and, increasingly and depressingly, many on the centre-left) say, relative wealth is at least as important as absolute wealth. There are only so many yachts / mansions / Scrooge-McDuck-style cellars of gold you can buy before it becomes (even more) meaningless. But relative wealth means, more than anything, dominance. If you lose 50% of what you’re worth on paper, but everyone else loses 90%, you are 50 times more the top monkey you were before.
It is a truism that your typical middle-class person, thanks to central heating, a good and varied diet, reasonable medical and dental care, etc., enjoys a level of luxury unimaginable to a mediaeval baron. But that baron could have you whipped, or even killed, for looking at him funny. Some people are nostalgic for that.
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This. The results from China show ~0.5% mortality when there are sufficient ICU resources, and ~5% when there are not.
Also, there should be a vaccine in 12-18 months, so the fewer people get it before then, the better the outcome. Once there’s enough of an even moderately effective vaccine for everyone to get it, I think we’ll be in a position to stop worrying so much.
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Do I see a @TyphoidRickMycroft in the future!?
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Which would be horrific, because our healthcare system (such as it is) is gravely ill-equipped to handle even a small percentage of the projected infection numbers.
“I wish everyone in the world just got infected at once so our businesses could get back to normal” isn’t just dumb from a human compassion perspective, it’s a terrible idea from a business and economic perspective. Even putting aside the death and suffering imagine if a vast majority of the people who grew our food, delivered our goods, ran our power and water and otherwise provided basic services necessary for human survival were all out sick at the same time.
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It was stupid in fact, not just in delivery. And beyond callous, too.
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Christ; what an asshole AND what a shitty excuse for a human being.
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Even that extremely charitable interpretation of what he said is pointless, though. Then it boils down to “this crisis would be better if it was shorter”. Well, duh. Great insight, Business Guy™.
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I’ve always viewed the WS use of “correction” as a b.s. knee-jerk device used by WS to pacify investors and thereby keep them “in line”.
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