Turnaround time

In addition of the non-existence of herd immunity vis-a-vis COVID-19, President Trump's accusation that the WHO was misguiding the world by advising end of lockdowns, and the palpable failure of Singapore and its return to strict lockdown, is desinflating my natural optimism. We may write down this year 2020 as lost, certainly from the economic point of view.

I expect:

- breakdown of global supply chains and re-organizaton of world commerce, including stop of globalization, just-in-time inventories, and complex supply and finance chains
- sovereign debt downgrades as countries cannot export enough to pay their foreign obligations
- huge and unsustainable increases in public sector debt, including via unprecedented commitments to private sector debt obligations, specifically in the USA

So, why should it be that global equities are within 10-15% of their 2020 highs? 

I have to reverse direction and start selling instead of buying stock.

P.S.: On the other hand, why should a bad flu cause such a universal quilombo? (Balagan, in modern Hebrew)

PSS: China is agressively testing America's resolve to defend Taiwan. Coming a testing time for America. Its alliances will be tested on the field. Bad, bad. 

No Herd Immunity in sight

The Koreans discovered that people "cured" of the flu disease, can be re-infected by the virus. This is very bad, it means that only total erradication of the virus a-la-Wuhan can lead to renormalization of economic life. I wonder if NASDAQ will crash tomorrow.

The idea of herd immunity is that as more people get infected, that is, once a large proportion of the population gets infected (more than 50 percent), then this would protect the rest from infection.

While UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his advisers sparked an uproar when they bluntly proposed this approach - and later, at least formally, backtracked - this is actually something approved by politicians and public health experts in Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway as well. This is considered a cruel, eugenic policy. However, it appears that it would not work. 

Lab ferrets

The internet is a great collective mind, and processes a great number of ideas. Someone remembered news of criminal trials of Chinese lab workers selling lab animals in the local wet market. It was not in Wuhan, but knowing China, it stands to reason that the large biowarfare lab in the center of the town, two blocks away from the market, was supplying live and dead lab animals.

I posed a question in Greg Cochran's blog: Will the coronavirus evolve to a more or to a less virulent form? Natural selection will favour the lines that infect faster and more effectively, and that means ambulant and coughing carriers. Those lines that send the carriers to the bed or kill them, survive less. So the tendency, I reason, is the corona virus gradually turning into a common seasonal flu. Let's see what is Greg's opinion.   

Winding down the corona epidemic

Several teams in Israel are building models how to end the economic disaster of the corona epidemic lockdown.

Bar-Ilan University researchers led by Dr. Baruch Barzel of the Department of Mathematics, have devised a strategy based on alternating lockdowns: first splitting the population into two groups, then alternating these groups between lockdown and routine activity in weekly succession.
The official team that is dealing with this problem includes the Ministry of Health and the Treasury, and the Modeling and Prediction Unit of the Mossad (I didn't know of its existence). Their solution is gradually freeing up the industries that employ much manpower and pay low salaries, to avoid mass unemployment (which is almost irreversible), and the high tech sector. Tourism, restaurants, entertainment, aviation, etc. are to be left to the end. One of the reasons to lift asap the lockdown is the possible increase of social tensions between economic classes and ethnias.

Vengeful Germans

Der Spiegel does not hide its Schadenfreude: 

 Donald Trump's disastrous crisis management makes the United States the new epicenter of the pandemic. The country is facing an unprecedented economic crash. Is the world experiencing the implosion of a superpower?

Mass Graves in New York

Long trenches in Hart Island (near Staten Island) being excavated for the coronavirus epidemic victims. And the malignant blogger world was searching for trenches in Iran, schadenfreude. Now no one is laughing. It is frightening. 

Working in Captivity

No one is allowed in the street. My downtown corner is deserted, there is a strange silence, the air is pure and the pidgeons are seeking where to nest. I am clearing up my contract debts, like preparing a clean autocad scheme of the flowchart of a large wet food factory. What are all those pipes? Which is connected to which machine? The factory has dozens of Gordian pipe knots like the pic. There is no one to ask because they don't answer the phone and because no one knows. I left this to the end, and now the deadline has been reached. I finish and hopefully get paid for the whole project. I know that if I focus for a few hours I can do it, but focusing is extremely hard work and I prefer to blog. Oy! J,  if you keep distracting yourself blogging, you will lose the payment. J, think of all that money!