I’m a big fan of Margaret Thatcher, Taleb (he’s already calling bullshit on calling this all a ‘Black Swan’), George Carlin, MrRenev, Kai Stinchcombe, George Hosu, Pete Ross, the kid from ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, God. These guys are my porn. Humanity’s base bullshit needs to be called all day, every day, be it economic policy or New Year’s Resolutions.

Bullshit to call there is aplenty. Trillions of additional printed dollars or 3.3 GPAs for everyone or participation trophies or bullshit jobs.

When the ‘I told you so’ moment finally arrives, it doesn’t feel good at all though. I know companies are leveraged to the tits and have no rainy day funds because they spent 96% of their cashflow on buybacks. I know they deserve to go bankrupt. In a way — it’s not poor Corona’s fault it became the prick to our bubble. I know the U.S. economy shouldn’t grow 31% a year. I know most countries of the world have done fuck all in preparation (compare yours to Singapore, Taiwan, South-Korea?) for a pandemic certain to hit them at some point in time. I know politicians initially brushed it off only to go into full panic mode weeks later, weeks too late. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.

Am I happy people are going to lose jobs/homes though, even if they’re full-time Scrum Masters moonlighting as Marketing Gurus? Am I happy Italy can never pay back its loans, now more so than ever, even if they used loan-money to fund everyday living? Am I happy ‘being Italian about’ quarantine measures bit them in the ass and now children killed their grandparents? Am I happy ‘European Unity’ has proven to be utter BS with EU citizens on the Canary Islands being told to fuck off, Baltic countries having to resort to ad-hoc shipping lines because Poland refuses to let their convoy pass? Not really.

I thought COVID-19 to also be bullshit initially. Just the topic du jour to write clickbait articles of. Anyone remember Zika? When European countries started closing down everything I initially got angry at politicians profiteering off ‘protecting the children’, later sad/scared at what this will have to mean for the economy. I will certainly know someone who’ll lose it all. I might lose my job myself as I’m an independent contractor easily disposed of. Yeah, ‘losing it all’ is better than losing your life. But I think anything can be quantified, really, and the economic outlook is far worse than the virus.

By the way, the COVID-19 panic may turn out to be bullshit in many ways yet:

It seems to be fact COVID-19 can reinfect recovered people and as Hong Kong’s example shows us, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. There also seems to be agreement COVID-19 is ‘here to stay’ and will keep making rounds in the future.

As many as 61,000 Americans can lose their lives to a single flu season. The following paragraphs might read callous, but stating bad global statistics it’s kind of impossible not to be. 9 million people die of starvation or ‘related disease’ each year. Repeating this fact doesn’t equate to not feeling sorry for sweet little African babies or for your grandma in Corona’s case.

I think it’s safe to say if nothing would have been done, more Americans would have died than 61k, maybe even millions if the exponential growth could really continue with impunity (it can’t). I think it’s also safe to say the cure indeed already has been worse than the disease. No one but a murderous psycho (or maybe a hardcore ‘herd-immunitier’) would want more people to get infected & therefore more to die, but lets think numbers, not personal meemaws for a second.

A commonly touted dollar value for 1 human life is 9 million dollars. Personally, I think that isn’t true even in the richest country on Earth and probably off by 2 orders of magnitude. I know my country does not fund cancer drugs costing €100,000, even for children with potentially 80+ years of productive life left ahead of them.

There are human lives that are more ‘invaluable’ than others, but it’s safe to say $1 million is an exaggerated sum. Most of the figures I mention here are pulled out of someone’s ass more or less and I want to be ‘pessimistic’ with my ‘Corona reaction is overblown by X’ value anyway, so here goes. Ray Dalio says: ‘Globally, the outbreak will cost corporations $12 trillion.’ Our local central bank says our economy will drop ‘more than 6%’ while it should be growing around 4. They’re expecting Germany’s to shrink 7 to 20 percent. So going by those numbers, the world could’ve ‘afforded’ to lose 12,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 12,000,000 people (currently at 24k), Estonia 3,000,000,000 / 912,370 = 3288 (currently at 1), Germany between 279,491 and 799,017 (currently at 262) in the ‘let ‘er rip’ scenario vs. warranting this kind of economic destruction.

Reduced pollution and less accidents will save some lives, crowded hospitals will claim some lives. A 1% rise in unemployment costs 4000 American lives. While I was writing this, 3 million more jobless Americans appeared. The jobless rate is expected to climb from 3.5% to 30%, that’s 106,000 Americans sentenced right there. Corona has so far taken 1,036.

Does this look okay to you? https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fpazli/what_3280000_jobless_claims_looks_like_versus_the/

So overall, the economic downturn of a century is pretty much a foregone conclusion unless some disease seasonality or miracle cure magic happens. We are buying extra years for people at a prohibitively high cost, something we don’t usually do. I’m neither an economist nor a doctor and even I can see this. I’m taking a risk here that this post will age spectacularly badly and I will rightly be called an asshole willing to sacrifice people for profits, but the masses are rarely right, and currently the mainstream view seems to be ‘panic’. As far as I know, this is still the case:

I’m calling bullshit on closing down the planet because of coronaviruses. Or hantaviruses. There has to be a better way.