lol, only an idiot would buy 58k testkits without getting a sample first to make sure they were dealing with a reliable supplier, they aren't naming the company probably because they are too embarassed to state they aren't even sure who they bought it from

it mentions they bought it indirectly, which means they bought them from a rando who either unknowingly connected them to a scammer or was part of the scam himself, probably some Spaniard living in China

sure sounds like the spanish government also responds to those nigerian prince emails too

I will bury you: strong man duarte threatens quarantine violators with death

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavir...-laws-11967407

seems a bit more Draconian than the no nagging policy. Perhaps these guys can get together and somehow combine their policies?


https://www.npr.org/2020/04/01/82505...-advises-women

Ya malaysia has since back tracked on that policy. Or we can just follow billy joe saunders' advice (who also back tracked)

Hit her in the chin

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theprov...2a388c26fd/amp

Who spilled the beans on my religion of choice?

Because you are artificially increasing the money supply for the same amount of goods and services. It dilutes the value of existing money and eventually results in inflation.

When money is cheap (like it is now) it leads to malinvestment. Cheap debt pushes yields down on interest bearing investments like bonds and leads corporations to unproductive activities like buying back billions in shares with stocks at all-time highs (rather than CapEx) and then asking for bailouts because they have no cash, decreased cash flow and huge debt balances that need to be serviced/repaid and can't be refinanced because credit markets dried up.

Dug my second footings hole last night.

GthecoronavirusnumbersthatreallymatterG

way to devalue the first hole you dug

RholesupplynoobR

*I said I wouldn't get into a back and forth debate and I won't. This is just good faith contribution to conversation I started to type during my morning coffee.*

Yep pushes down on the value of money. People worry about the potential for hyperinflation during these times. However, recall that in recessions caused by demand drops deflation is the bigger issue. Expectations of deflation can become a self fulfilling prophecy and trap an economy (see Japan last few decades or the Great depression). Look into the intro macro aggregate supply and aggregate demand model as well as IS-LM. For those who care to, 2008 was a "liquidity trap" where the LM curve became very flat with a tiny positive second derivative and a lot of the money supply increases just flattened it out more. Equilibrium was so far away from the upward sloping part of the curve that the money supply increases really only changed the slope way away from the equilibrium.

In normal times, yes low interest rates will incentivize investment in things that aren't profitable under higher interest rates. Is that "malinvestment"? I'm not here to moralize. However, just like with money supply increases preventing deflation above people tend to miss the what the "but for world" looks like. A transitory drop in aggregate demand can cause "hysteresis" where investments that were rational during normal times not only get scrapped (but not completely recovered because of some sunk cost), but also aren't reinvested into with return to normalcy because putting the sunk costs in yet again cannot be justified. Sunk investments are far more common and far harder to quantify that many people realize. We don't want all that stuff destroyed because people were applying normal times logic to a transitory panic (that's what recessions used to be called by the way, panics).

Yes, maintaining low interest rates through booms is not the best idea policy wise. Good macro policy is to move interest rates up in good times and down in bad. Similarly, the defecit should go up in bad times and down in good. This has a moderating effect. This administration blundered when they cut taxes and pressured the Fed to keep rates low during the boom. Stimulus (that's what it was) during boom times cause explosive instability and gives less room for Fed Reserve and Treasury to stabilize the economy in recession.

With respect to looking at time plots, be very careful with what you infer from them. Macro time series are complicated systems with lots of spurious relationships and confounders. (Spurious, they just happened to move together in the same direction randomly. Confounder, there is some third thing C that's driving things A and B so you mistakenly think A drives B.)

TL;DR. Worry about deflation not inflation. Worry about hysteresis not malinvestment.

It also creates bubbles.

I don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of this but the buyback argument (vs capex) shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how capital is to be allocated

Inflation has been consistently low for the last decade, so I’m not sure that’s really been a problem.

Asset bubbles and poor corporate decision making in a low interest rate environment are valid concerns, but not very relevant during a severe recession. No one is buying back shares now.

I posted a video yesterday where Brandon Adams said most of this but also speculated that the obvious inequities involved in the deal created a 5%-10% chance of a Max Max scenario in 2 years. How come no one took the bait to talk about that? I thought people enjoyed that movie enough to speculate about how it might play out in real life.

Go on...

It doesn't have to be buybacks vs. CapEx. There's nothing wrong with paying down debt, building a rainy day fund or offering a dividend from free cash flow.

Issuing debt for no other reason than to buy back stock, boost EPS and increase executive compensation is just lol bad. Asking for a bailout when **** hits the fan is the cherry on top.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...301034337.html

Vanda Pharmaceuticals Announces the Initiation of ODYSSEY, an FDA Approved Clinical Study of Tradipitant in Hospitalized Patients with Severe COVID-19 Pneumonia

A good sign, hopefully more companies are able to come up with some good treatments in the near future.

So if a bubble, such as a housing bubble or commercial real estate bubble, were to burst when we were already in a recession, that's not a problem?

That’s an argument about what monetary policy should have been like years ago rather than what it should be like today. But the Fed was raising interest rates and decreasing its balance sheet up until recently. And there’s no sign of any real estate bubbles.

Isn’t this more of a corporate governance problem?

OK eff this week... it's coffee & Bailey's (but mostly Bailey's) for the rest of the day.

Ugh. 1M cases. And counting.

There's lots of signs of bubbles but I suppose you're an expert on everything. I must say you do come across as the typical fed guy...everything is always roses until after the fact lol

The explosion in higher education debt ($1.7 trillion), healthcare spending (17% of GDP vs. 12.5% in 2000), residential rents ($1,500 national average 1BR vs. $1,200 in 2009), and home and other asset prices rising to all-time highs over the last decade, all the while incomes stagnate, would seem to indicate inflation exists regardless of what "Core CPI" indicates. All the while, consumer credit ($4.1 trillion) and auto loans ($1.3 trillion and lengthening term) are at all-time highs indicating an ever increasing reliance on credit to finance day-to-day lives. Meanwhile, cheap debt finds its way into the hands of the educated/wealthy and parks itself into assets.

Nothing screams PUBLIC SAFETY like cramming 5 men into a dog cage.

Is he laying odds?

I've been saying for years the craft bubble would fizzle out.

Reports of americans paying 3 to 4 times more at airport for medical supplies bound for france

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavir...to-us-11967702

Man with coronavirus spits on stranger before dropping dead (does not drop dead in video but allegedly soon after)

https://www.tmz.com/2020/04/02/man-w...rain-thailand/

Australia's curve looks to be flattening, which is great.

https://www.worldometers.info/corona...try/australia/

https://www.health.gov.au/news/healt...d-case-numbers

we've now tested well over 1% of total population and while the numbers will still skew more to people showing symptoms, the numbers are encouraging.

About 1.8% of the 1% tested have the virus and of that 1.8%, 1.4% either died or are described as in serious/critical condition. (so a total of 75 of the 280,000 tested)

vast majority of our 5k cases are either overseas arrivals approx 60% or people directly related to overseas arrivals 25-30%, which....given our borders are now basically closed with strict supervised 14 day quarantine for all Australians arriving back from overseas, means that cases are relatively controllable.

Most offices/businesses are at the end of week 3 of self quarantine/distancing etc and the govt has said that this will continue for at least another 3 months.

my pov is that this means they're actually going for a 'kill it off completely' approach as opposed to what countries where local transmission is more developed and they're basically going to ease and then tighten restrictions to allow the virus to spread within waves over time to stagger the impact on the hospitals.

logically, this means that we'll have to close our borders almost totally until a vaccine is ready.

There's a thing called velocity of money.