We are in uncharted territory here. I hope you're all staying safe, as are we here. Maybe we should all be hoarding TP instead of gold or whatever...

The lockdowns will never work as well in the West the way they did in China and South Korea. There, they used technology to track peoples movements to identify who they may have come in contact with and people can download apps to check their current risk level. I'm sure Google, Facebook and Apple could do the same here, but I doubt the political will is there to try and force what would be called spying, even on a temporary basis.

Trump seriously dropped the ball here re early testing. He bought time with the China air travel restriction, then did nothing with that time because of course he didn't want anybody to be tested anyway. We should already have been in the process of making masks and ventilators, but again he didn't want to prepare because that would spook the stock market. The irony being if we were better prepared we probably wouldn't have had such a fast and big crash.

So how do we get out of a global depression initiating lockdown? The data will show soaring new cases for a while because of Trump's early failure, so that's out as a metric. The data for daily deaths is a lagging one, with an average 18 days from symptoms to death so just as with Italy, everyone dying today caught it before the lockdown. That number will rise for a while too. It doesn't help that many young people are just ignoring it and partying in big groups anyway, feeling safe from it personally while ignoring the harm they can do to other people including their own older relatives. Realistically it's going to be 4 weeks lockdown at least. If it's longer than that, the economy will be in very deep trouble, and tbh I don't see the point of it going longer. What are we supposed to do, stay in lockdown for 12 months until a vaccine? We're going to have to get on with our lives and accept this is part of it.

The antivirals being used now sound promising. If they lower the death rate, and lower the ratio of people needing ICU's and the average duration of hospital stay, coupled with the rapid production of medical equipment, then we can leave lockdown sooner. Same if it seems to be seasonal. With the unprecedented stimulus and zero rates and QE5, a lot of stocks will in hindsight be looking cheap here. I like MSFT especially, also AMZN on dips. I'm still wary of TSLA but after its 100% retracement of the bs move lately, that could have support around $350. I've also dabbled in Boeing, down 75% from their high and sure to get a bailout. Short term though, yeah the picture looks grim. Market technicals are horrendous, we're below long term support lines, and we're coming up to a period of terrible jobs numbers and economic data, and company after company taking down their own guidance. It's easy to make a case for the drop from the highs being 50%, I won't argue against that.

At least this should hopefully secure Trump as a single term. Already we're seeing Joe Biden ads highlighting the terrible lack of leadership from Trump, including all the false statements he's made about this. Now it turns out a couple of Republican Senators, and the husband of one of them, were selling huge amounts of stock after getting Congress briefings about the virus, while publicly telling Americans everything will be fine, and Burr even warned his rich buddies with the truth. Outrageous. Loeffler even bought stock in a remote work company, looking to profit from it. Trump of course encouraged people to buy the stock market just after it started crashing, and Eric Trump advised everyone to go all in with their 401K's less than a month ago, then later deleted his tweet. They knew how bad it might get, and they encouraged Americans to buy in anyway.

Hopefully people too will realize that the GOP does not have their interests in mind when it comes to their healthcare. Time had an article about the costs of corona treatment, the uninsured woman had a bill of $35K. Even with insurance, people will be on the hook for thousands considering their deductibles and co-pay, and the GOP is still trying to kill the ACA in the SC.

A key data point to watch will be Italy's daily new cases in coming days, and their death rate in the next week or two. I expect the US to follow their trends.

worldometers.info/co...italy/