[ExI] Trump's Coronavirus Response

Sun May 10 13:28:56 UTC 2020

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Trump's Coronavirus Response

On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 8:48 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

OK, what if productivity unexpectedly drops for some reason? 

>…Then that would be bad…

Future tense?  Would be?  We are living that unexpected drop right now.  But no worries, we can blame the guy who cannot help us, and promote a different guy who cannot help us, ja?

>…No polacy can protect you from every possible bad thing…

True.  Some “polacies” can make us vulnerable to every bad thing.  The policy of government gobbling up every loan every lender is willing to make is an example.

>…much less every hypothetical bad thing…

Ja, the hypothesis is playing out real time right now.

>…all we can do is play the odds…

OK we did that.  Here we are.  Too bad for us.

>…use our brains and do the best we can…

We are in a very uncomfortable situation, not just USA but everywhere: governments and citizens must make a decision to stay locked down to protect their people from disease or open their businesses to protect their people from massive simultaneous bankruptcy.  I don’t know how it works outside of USA, but I suspect it is a universal rule: nations cannot shut down their economies very long.  No nation can survive that.  It doesn’t matter what form of government or what social safety nets they have, those aren’t designed to carry a high percentage of their population.  They won’t hold.

We don’t know what will happen if we re-open economies (this week) and there is an enormous surge in C-19 cases.  But we do know that the government, state and local, are reaching the tail end of their ability to influence the citizens to stay on lockdown.  I can imagine something similar in other countries everywhere.  No nation can avoid chaos for long under these conditions.

> A Ponzi scheme is a great investment until it suddenly isn’t anymore.

>…If you can find a Ponzi scheme that has made investors richer since 1835 then please let me know and I'll grab my checkbook!   John K Clark

By all means, grab up all the US government bonds you can get your hands on.  They are paying 2% and they are as secure as they were 6 months ago.

spike

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