Balta1701

There's one thing to be said for businesses doing a poor job and it leading to 2008, where that was entirely their fault. There's something to be said for limits on stock buybacks and all those other games. But literally no business out there should ever plan for a complete shutdown of everything they do for a period of several months without assistance. You don't want businesses sitting on that many resources, nor do I; if a business in 2014 has a choice between saving 3 months of all their operating expenses and hiring 1000 employees and expanding substantially, wouldn't you want them doing the latter?

Don't worry about the larger ones, they're going to get $4 trillion from the federal reserve.

Chicago's full year GDP in 2018 was estimated at $650 billion. $350 billion is half of all business in Chicago. You're right it's not enough to survive the full year. It's enough for small businesses to survive a month or two. If we don't contain this thing in the first step because we insist on reopening on Easter...then this won't be the last batch of money that needs passed.

That kid sounds like an ideal candidate for the expanded unemployment benefits.

No, they're supposed to pay their employees using these funds so that their employees don't lose their homes, cars, health insurance (which may be particularly important). And on the others, I said this before about student loans. Who the F*** cares if bailing out an overleveraged company keeps them in business too long and it's terribly unfair? So is throwing 50 employees off their health insurance and having them lose their homes during a pandemic. It's this or you suspend all rent payments, all utility payments, shut everything else down. Either you print money so people can pay for those services, or you make them free.

How are you not seeing that by requiring businesses to pay employees...they're supporting the employees?

Isn't a forgiven loan literally = revenue?

Narrator..."They were not".

Right now this bill will add about $2 trillion. however, because the Federal Reserve is going to simply buy up the bonds that are issued as part of their $4 trillion package, the effect in terms of increasing interest rates will be muted/gone as there's absolutely a market for those bonds. In a normal time, printing up $2 trillion and handing it to people would drive inflation, but that's 10% of the economy and the size of the economy is about to drop by more than 10%, so it's still probably not large enough to be a major inflationary push. And if it is...GREAT WE LIVED THROUGH THIS.

I think you're right, but 2 things to highlight - first, the lack of deaths is encouraging the President to say we need to remove these "Shelter in place" orders to get business back open so even if it's not intentional that's adding to the nightmare... Furthermore...if we are unable to test those people, then we are unable to tell people who may have been in contact with them to isolate, so we're creating additional spread.

Oh dear god he specifically cited Texas as an area that he could open today and he's taking support for the idea from the stock market surge. It's going to happen.

The day I defended my thesis, I sat down for 20 minutes, then went to the clinic for H1N1 shot day to celebrate.

WTF is the Spanish World War?

Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore have shown fully that aggressive testing, tracing, and isolation can absolutely work against this. So if you can stop the first wave and you aren't filling mass graves, you institute that policy - any time anyone is sick, you test them, you test everyone around them, you test everyone who went to the same place as them, and anyone who comes back positive you do the exact same thing - isolate, then test, test, test. If and when you do start getting clusters, that way within a week or two you've identified them and you're at least limiting its ability to explode. South Korea seems to be the worst failure of this; they had a patient who was positive (patient 31) who was supposed to isolate but who instead went out shopping and to church, and literally thousands of cases trace back to that one person.

Texas's governor has mostly allowed localities to declare shutdowns, and most of the urban areas are doing so as of today.

I don't think there's any plausible format for ramping up back to work because it depends on what the situation is when we get to that. Right now the US is on a path accelerating in cases faster than Italy and China. If this explodes beyond what happened in China because places won't shut down or because they insist on reopening too soon... China's an interesting case because it seems like they're slowly opening as community transmission stops, but they're doing so when countries on their border are about to start exporting cases back to them. They're an extreme case in the shutdown an d in number of transmissions, but so far who knows? For the US, there's already some obvious potential issues. Stop transmission in New York, but transmission ongoing in prisons in Texas and it gets exported right back to New York. Or, stop transmission in california and uninsured people in Texas keep transmission going.

Yes, that is literally what it tells us. They stopped it in China by shutting down hundreds of millions of people for 3 months.

I have no idea what your point is. That it's not that bad right now and these lockdowns are unnecessary because the numbers are too low?

The President should not say to use something until it has actually been tested and is a medically verified recommendation. He's the f***ing President.

You realize he's the President of the United States and the President endorsing a medication untested for a condition that is causing panic is going to cause people to take that drug immediately without regard for whether or not they need it or have other issues? Apparently not.

Turns out that because of people now hoarding it, there are medical facilities that can't get it to attempt tests.

Man dies in Arizona and wife is in critical condition after taking drug Trump suggested. Other deaths reported overseas as well. https://www.axios.com/chloroquine-coronavirus-death-09c91a91-4fe7-472c-9de9-79b890aa8fff.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100

I think the end result is going to be nightmarish images from medical facilities in the next week or two, to the point where politicians reach the point mayors have in Italy of threatening people with flamethrowers.

For once, Lindsey Graham is right. Whatever the economic consequences, you can't manage anything if you don't get the huge surge of sick people under control or limited. If 1% of your workforce has it, but then 10% of your workers can't go out because they're high risk and can't afford to get sick, and another 10% can't get the medication they need, and 10% of your customers have no health insurance, trying to open businesses doesn't work. You can come up with ideas for opening things, but they all depend on how effective we are being at containment (very poor overall).

If you're talking about 10s of millions of people you have such a large statistical set that it doesn't really matter, the numbers would be monstrous. We're probably around 100k infections nationwide right now, give or take a factor of 4, but not millions. We are probably comparable to Italy in number of infections, give or take a factor of 4, but because we aren't shutting things down like they did we are growing our numbers far faster than they did once they got to this point. They are seeing 600+ deaths per day, we're about 100 deaths per day right now, so we've got a few days before we catch up, but we're on a path to do so quite effectively.