Day: March 16, 2020, 11:52 PM

Demand Shock

Chill Uncategorized

Fed Flails, Markets Don’t Care.

The Fed can’t do much at all when the problems aren’t monetary in nature. A pandemic and its resultant effects are definitionally non-monetary. There has been and will continue to be a real demand shock in the general economy.

This shock will worsen over the next few weeks and months and monetary tools will do very little (though not nothing). Fiscal tools, however, can do something — but some of those tools are more effective than others. Romney’s proposal to give every person $1,000 a month until the crisis abates would be a very good one to enact immediately, for instance.

Monetary tools can only fight monetary crises. That’s not what’s happening now.

Endure

Chill Regular-ass Post

Goldman Sachs warns US stocks could plunge another 16% before rapidly recovering.

That plunge is certainly possible. Likely, even. Still leaving some of my powder dry just for such an eventuality. I think the outside risk is another 40% fall, the minimum is another 10%. I’d say 16-20% sounds reasonable.

Unfortunately that will come with a lot of job losses, pain and misery to many millions, all inflicted on those who can least endure it while we frantically bail out the banks. Isn’t America a great country or what?

Sight Of It

Chill Regular-ass Post

What’s odd is that most people are just realizing this now, even liberals, when I and others have been saying this for years. Many look but do not see, have brains whirring but not actually thinking. Or perhaps it was just wanting to disbelieve the obvious truths before their eyes.

Swine

Chill Uncategorized

It’s great what the woman who originated this thread is doing for her parents, but it’s shocking just how pig-ignorant so many people are.

Ok, that’s not fair to our suid friends — they are after all quite intelligent.

How exactly have we produced a society where so many people know so very little about anything, even regarding events that will have huge impacts on their lives? Is this just a necessary state of affairs? Or what? I can’t understand it. I know that most people just are not very curious at all but this general ailment seems more than just lack of curiosity.

Knives

Chill Regular-ass Post

I enjoyed Knives Out more than any movie I’ve seen recently. It was good fun. Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette and Chris Evans all did outstanding work in the film. And as Emily points out, it relied on plot rather than pacing and camera tricks to drive the narrative.

Recommended.

Detectors

Chill Uncategorized

Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” does not hold up well, but that’s mainly because it’s still operating too much on the scientific-rationalist isolation of variables environment, and the world just does not function that way at all. So I mostly agree with Visa here.

For instance, I have a very high-resolution bullshit detector. I don’t mean lying, necessarily — that’s different. But the reason I knew roughly what was going to happen with Covid-19 is because of my intelligence in that area and my ability to just see through BS without much effort. How exactly do you measure that? It only works in a real-world scenario, but it works quite reliably.

Science will always miss just huge areas of human endeavor and capacity. There’s no way around that.