Quote:
Originally Posted by tallpilot
Pollyannas trying to blame the stall on hurricanes.
Correlation is not causation but in this case the proximate cause is the evaporation of government stimulus and attendant lack of spending. As mentioned this is the new baseline until the economy improves or gets another amphetamine injection from the government or the central bank.
Short term fires and hurricanes and longer term economic factors are not mutually exclusive. Clearly, the way the government at all levels have reacted to COVID has been uniquely devastating to the GDP. Even so, our European brethren are starting to reopen their economy (and their public schools) even in the face of the resumption of a higher number of cases.
exactly how the mission morphed from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘shut down until we get a vaccine,’ I’m not sure. I do know that the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed and approved prior to this is a little over four years and that was for Ebola which has a case-fatality rate of about 66%. And even then there was violent resistance to taking the vaccine from those most at risk:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1052421
So it isn’t as if the battle is won even if we do get a good vaccine. Getting the vaccination levels up is not going to be that easy.
So yeah, we’ve probably triggered a pretty bad recession, maybe even a depression, and it might be a long one.