Coronavirus and oil wars sink world financial markets

boing
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Sounds like 2008 all over again. And 1992.

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By the numbers hurricane Katrina wasn’t as bad as a typical flu season either.

The reason we don’t react to the flu is because it is “typical”. If we didn’t have the flu and suddenly it appeared we’d be freaking the fuck out.

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The experts are treating it like any novel flu strain- with appropriate caution. Nobody is telling people to hoard toilet paper and masks, or crash stock markets.

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Yes, a novel flu strain with a mortality rate that has the potential to kill a hell of a lot of people. There is a hell of a lot of difference between a .1% rate and something in the 2% range.

I agree, hoarding toiler paper is a bit on the silly side at this point, but nobody here is advocating that. And as far as crashing the stock market, that’s a result (or at least a huge portion) of people taking the appropriate caution that the experts are recommending, not just someone deciding to make it happen.

Avoiding travel (or travel being forbidden altogether), canceling large gatherings, staying home if possible, all these precautions are adding up to produce the crash we’re looking at now.

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Also, of course, there have been all kinds of other stressors to the economy and the markets; things like Trump’s moronic trade wars, or the equal idiocy of Brexit, or poor European economic growth, etc. A lot of people, both economists and investors, have been expecting a downturn of some sort, whether just a sharp correction or a wholescale recession, for a while now. And now we’ve got the coronavirus pandemic, and a price war on oil at the same time. It’s not surprising that markets are now falling, the only question is how long and how far they will go.

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But I think it depends what you mean by “hoarding”. Being asked to self-quarantining for two weeks is something that could happen to any of us. Having enough toilet paper (and food, medications you need, etc) to last two weeks seems like it might be good sense.

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And Republicans will try to impeach, first thing.

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This. We’re being told by calm, rational sources to have supplies to self quarantine for two weeks. TP is something most Americans probably just run out to the store for when they’re getting low. And we might be overestimating how much we need because honestly, how many people know how much TP they go through in 2 weeks? I do most of the household shopping and I’d be just guessing.

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This comparison is fucking asinine.

  1. mortality for flu is ~0.05%. Mortality for coronavirus is ~0.5% (when there are enough intensive care beds) to ~5% (when there are not). What happened in Wuhan makes it clear that the default for this disease is to spread fast enough to overwhelm the medical system.

  2. Unlike the flu, there is no vaccine for this, and no immunity.

  3. The small numbers you see now are artificially small because of lack of testing, and, without drastic interventions, growth is exponential.

  4. People planning for this in hospitals are expecting about 500,000 deaths in the US. Plausible estimates for a worst case scenario could be many times higher than that.

So, it’s not time to panic, because panicking doesn’t do any good, but it is time to take this very seriously. We need to be worrying about the pandemic, not the stock market, right now.

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Not necessarily true. I must be sitting on a gold mine with a steady 6% monthly return in crypto-land. The worldwide response to the great purell shortage of 2020 has made me change a few things though…
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We have email and social media now, so we probably don’t need to keep exchanging business cards by pressing them gently against each others’ faces with an open palm and smearing them around.

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Regular flu also has a near 100% saturation rate in the general public. The actually mortality rate for COVID19 is substantially higher, it just hasn’t infected nearly as many people yet. Of course it’s obviously not something like Ebola or whatever, but it’s still far more serious than the flu.

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The Trump Slump.

I’m sure they shorted the US on this, so they’re still making money.

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The Dow hit 29,551 in February 2020, it’s lost near 6000 points since then, just under 2000 just today.

123… Blame Obama, but never Cheetolini.

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But for perspective it is around sept 2018 levels

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It’s all on tRump now, just for perspective.

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That’s what unitary executive means-- everything that happens is his fault.

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Except Trump is the urinary executive.

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drain the swamp!

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Urinary Fast Tract!

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i dont think that tracks.

once broken, why rebuild the old thing so that you can later build something new. that’s twice the cost. not to mention demoralizing to all involved.

take something like the green new deal. when 45 has systemically dismantled the epa and environmental regulation: use that leverage of needing to fix regulation to move off of oil instead.

take something like the aca. rather than try to fix the mandate and pre-existing conditions which has been destroyed piecemeal by republicans these past few years: don’t bother. shift towards m4a.

rather than trying to fix the courts in order to re-establish precedent for women’s rights, actually write some laws to lock them in place.

and so on. don’t replicate the past. aim for what we need.

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