Yes sir...

See also:

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-52070082/pope-gives-prayer-to-empty-st-peter-s-square

"Well, what else are we gonna do?"

The message went around my share house group message chain on Thursday. 

A Friday night barbeque inside the protected (hopefully germ-free) realm of our yellow terrace house in inner-city Sydney was the plan. 

That is, if we could find something to cook. 

Before coronavirus, trying to organise a Friday night barbeque with five late-20s/early-30-something housemates was pretty much impossible. 

We'd all have Friday night drinks, dates, individual plans — you wouldn't bother trying. But like a lot of things over the past week, those days are gone. 

As coronavirus changes our lives forever, new realities have emerged. And my house is like a warped test case of the virus's impact on young professionals — pretty much a demographer's dream.

Two of my housemates, both freelance TV producers, lost their jobs overnight. Gone. Done. No more income. Just brutal. 

One of them sent a text through to the house group chain on Wednesday: "House fam," it read. "What's your age and how long you been living in the house again? I need it for Centrelink. Cool" 

At the start of the month, my housemate sending a text like that was simply implausible. She was travelling overseas to start a three-month contract on a very successful reality TV show (well, as successful as you can in today's TV land). 

She was saving to buy a house. Not anymore. She baked cupcakes instead this week and completed a puzzle.

Both are unsure what they're going to do — their previous experience in retail and making coffee is redundant as well. 

Scott Morrison's call for people to man the phones at Centrelink is something one of them is seriously considering, while the other worked on a live entertainment streaming event last night. 

"It won't make any money, I just need to keep working," she told me. 

The other two housemates — it's a big house — kept their jobs. They both work in the digital space, one of the few areas — outside of toilet paper manufacturing — that appears to be safe from drastic cuts. 

In the meantime, for us still lucky enough to work, our house has turned into a makeshift co-working space, with Zoom meetings and emails pinging around like Tom Cruise on that computer in Minority Report. It's utterly surreal.

But we're lucky; we're all healthy. We've all been very mindful of physical distancing measures and basic hygiene (I think I've washed my hands more over the past two weeks than the previous two months put together).

We know how important it is to stay home (I made the house watch Foreign Correspondent on Tuesday night — we do not want to turn into Italy). 

We've been exercising (one housemate bought one of those "you got a door, you got a gym" things and has been doing five chin-ups every time he needs to go to the "lunchroom" — our kitchen).

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-covid19-in-a-share-ho...

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Meanwhile, optimism in the Freakyecnomics is satistically wonky:

As a general rule, any time you need to use the phrase “since the Great Depression” things are not going well. Right now, of course, things are not going well. They are not just going badly, they are going badly quickly.

Through my lifetime there have been three “worst since the Great Depression” times for the economy – the early 1980s, the early 90s and the global financial crisis. In each case we never really got close to experiencing dramatic declines in production and income that happened during the 30s.

Out of those three cases the worst our GDP per capita ever fell in a year was 2.2%. By contrast, during the Depression, there were three consecutive years where it fell by more than 3.5% and one where it fell by more than 10%.

Most of us have lived in a time of moderation.

Consider that from 1920 to 1946, Australia’s annual GDP per capita either rose or fell by more than 4% 14 times; over the past 50 years it has happened just once.

Right now it would not be a shock if such a fall occurs in the June quarter alone.

In the US things have ground to a halt such that the total number of unemployed has increased by more than 50% in a week.

When such things occur, even comparison with the Great Depression fails.

Here in Australia the numbers are going to be just as bad. The numbers of people this week applying for Newstart this week are unprecedented (though not unanticipated) and Westpac economists now predict our unemployment rate will hit 11% by June.

Were that to happen the unemployment rate would have risen 6%pts in four months. The previous biggest four-month jump was in 1982 when unemployment rose 2.4%pts, from 7% to 9.4%.

The Great Depression was as bad as it was because economies around the world went backwards for three to four years. Australia’s GDP per capita in 1931 was 20% below what it was in 1928; in the US it fell 31% from 1929 to 1933.

Were our GDP per capita to fall by 20% that would take us back to 2001 levels – 20 years of growth wiped away.

Fortunately, things are a bit different now from the 30s.

Firstly, the world is not on the gold standard as it was in the 20s and 30s, so central banks have been able to engage in an extremely strong monetary policy response.

And secondly, John Maynard Keynes has already written his General Theory, so we know that fiscal expansion, not austerity, is the best response.

This, of course, is a different economic crisis – people are unemployed because the government has in effect mandated that their workplaces close. And so the hope is that when the crisis is over everything snaps back into place.

But generally it takes longer to recover than it does to fall.

It took two years of the Great Depression to lose 20% of GDP per capita and five years to make it back. During the 90s recession it took three years for the level of employment to fall from 59.6% to 55.5% and more than seven years to get back to the pre-recession level.

It's likely that this pandemic is going to cost more than a quarter of the world GDP — say about US$23.5 trillion. And according to some "stats" unless the ecomony is not shut down by 80 per cent (yes 80 PER CENT!!!!) the virus will continue on its merry way.

By this stage all the grogonomics of this world will have been superseded by the freakyecnomics... It's could become a bum rush when the gates of hell are opened...

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There is a lot more to this time of massive change than the immediate crisis of fighting a pandemic.

What many, perhaps most, haven’t understood yet is that our economy and society are being upended.

“In a week we have shifted from a globalised liberal economy and free society to a command economy with closed borders, regimented movement and a welfare state,” Reform Club chairman and former NSW Treasury secretary Percy Allan recently wrote to friends and colleagues.

“And through necessity, all sides of politics support it.

“When COVID-19 is over will people demand stronger government (to cope with crises) or pine for laissez-faire (to allow free will)? That’s an important debate.”

The pace of change in March 2020 was a little overwhelming, maybe quite overwhelming.

That pace is playing a role in the sense of unreality people are feeling and why some have been slow to grasp the need for behaviour to change.

The debate about what sort of society comes after this crisis will have to wait. Everyone involved is too busy dealing with the immediate issue.

Suddenly commit to spending a couple of hundred billion dollars, with more to come.

Throw a million people out of work. Close borders. Close state borders.

Give police extraordinarily broad powers over the population. Have troops enforcing isolation curfews.

Nothing near as big has ever happened as quickly.

Talk to people who lived through the last world war (or be someone who had talked to them when more were still around) and the changes to war-time footing were much more gradual, leisurely even, by comparison.

But some of these big changes do need immediate understanding. One of them is: How we pay for it.

The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday ran a column by its political editor headlined “The huge stimulus numbers throw up the inevitable question”. That question was “How do we pay for it?”

It’s slightly bemusing that nobody at Monday’s media conference thought to ask it.

As it turns out, it’s the government’s intention to pay for the couple of hundred billion dollars of quick extra debt the old-fashioned way: The government will be borrowing the money.

There are possible alternatives, extreme unconventional monetary policy whereby the government could issue zero-coupon bonds directly to the Reserve Bank to print money.

Instead, the Australian Office of Financial Management will issue bonds to the required value and the market will buy them, boosting our government debt total.

In theory, such a sudden flood of extra raising might put some upward pressure on interest rates and, if foreigners fancy our bonds, the Australian dollar.

But these are not times of textbook theory, particularly with the QE twist of the Reserve Bank officially targeting a three-year bond rate of 0.25 per cent and buying about $3 billion worth of bonds a day to achieve that target.

The RBA has even posted the three-year target on its home page, just to underline the commitment.

Given that Monday’s effort was only Stimulus 3.0, with 4.0 and maybe 5.0 yet to come, the AOFM’s current $558 billion of treasury bonds on issue is likely to end up close to $1 trillion.

Remember a decade ago when government debt was a demon figure used to scare the kiddies?

Or June 30, 2013 – the year the government changed – when gross government debt was $257 billion?

It was a nonsense, of course.

It was low government debt and affordable, but a decade of political opportunism painted it as evil.

The reality of our current debt explosion is that it is quite affordable if it pays for a return to anything like ‘normal’ growth.

Like the price of reducing climate change, it is cheaper than the alternative.

If the interest rate on the bonds is below economic growth, the growth takes care of the government’s ability to service the debt.

It would require a mighty bleak world and particularly inept management for Australia’s growth to get stuck below a fraction of a percentage point.

So one of the first changes of our post-COVID-19 political world should be a recalibration of political rhetoric.

It would be too much to ask for the Prime Minister to come clean with the population, fess up to the decade of debt demonisation being largely political BS, like the attack on pricing carbon and a more rational taxing of resources rent.

The debt will have to be dealt with when times suit.

It could be used as a force for good, as a cattle prod (or excuse) for genuine, overdue holistic tax reform that would help create a healthier economy and society.

It would need to be reform that would offend just about every vested interest – broadening the GST, at least capping the franking credit rebates, an inheritance tax, no-exceptions land tax, a carbon price, lower income tax rates, removing the tax-free status of superannuation in the pension phase, et al

“Never waste a good crisis.”

Or it could be used to damage the country with the sort of austerity drive and reduction in government services beloved by the hard right – the small government, low-taxing neoliberal myrmidons exemplified by the Institute of Public Affairs and its alumnae and fellow travellers populating the governments’ ranks.

There is a very important debate ahead about our post-COVID-19 nation.

In the meantime, be grateful the ideologically straitjacketed didn’t hold sway last month or many more of us would be in dire poverty – or dead...

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2020/03/31/coronavirus-debt-michael-pascoe/

Read from top.

The epidemic or pandemic or coronapanic isn't going to go overnight. It's going to take more than eight months to have a vaccine, which might work in about 45 per cent of "cases". No vaccine is ever 100 per cent proof. There will be "several" vaccines available coming from different labs. "Flattening the curve" by isolation is working to a point. Beyond this WE DO NOT KNOW THE LENGTH OF THE CURVE, which should we follow the rates of infection and compare with the rate of flu transmission, the curve for the coronavirus has to be "twice" as long as that for a flu season which is about 6 months — even with vaccination.

So what do we do? Stay in our little boxes?

Already there are signs of people going mad in isolation..., with no clubbing, no pubbing, no shopping for frivolities, nor public/stage entertainment, the young and the restless — the next generation — are traumatised beyond their iPhones.

We, old people, can cope much better with this lonely status, but we are weaker against the coronavirus. All we need now is for John to be seasick... or get gastro from the ship's food... which would affect far more people under present conditions. Happy days, take as much cash from the government as you can — and maintain your stock of toilet paper...

Some people say never meet your heroes, but I say don’t bother having heroes – because they’ll only let you down. Fine, you might get lucky with a Muhammad Ali or Tom Hanks, but why take the risk of pinning your colours and devotion to the works of OJ Simpson or Gary Glitter? Best to keep a respectable emotional distance.

I mean, just look at the poor anti-lockdowners, particularly the British Anti-Lockdown Squad (BALS). This merry band of what feels like thousands of mainstream media columnists, mavericks who defy the world’s leading scientific experts and their worthless scientific expertise, always had one guy they could point to and say, “Look! He’s a scientific expert and he says lockdown is stupid and that we should all be hanging out in bars, listening to Roxette and having sex with anyone we like.”

That man was Anders Tegnell: Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the man behind the country’s remarkably laidback approach to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I say ‘was’, not because he’s died or been fired, but because Tegnell has admitted that Sweden should have adopted tougher measures. He’s become a bit anti-anti-lockdown. Or pro-lockdown. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/490761-lockdown-protest-sad-sweden/

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From the onset of Covid19, stats would have revealed that the dying from the disease were older people mostly over 65 years of age. As well people with low immune system, people suffering from chronic illnesses such as diabetes, even obesity, were more susceptible to be affected. As well, even in the worse conditions of transmission, basically only 20 per cent would catch the disease, and many would show no sign of infection.

The lesson here is... Isolation needed to be SELECTIVE and designed to protect the old people far better. In fact old people in retirement villages, communal homes and even on cruise ships make a huge proportion of those who died. 

As well poor people needed to be protected. The rest of you could have carried on as usual (Gus is too old to be let out), while countries would close borders nonetheless, in order to deal with the problem within, without adding difficulties incoming from outside. Quarantine and isolation would have worked without the entire shut down of the "economies", which actually impacted far more on the restaurant trade, the live entertainment and artistic industries far more than most activities deemed to be essential.

Too difficult to enact a selective isolation system?

Lockdowns have saved more than three million lives from coronavirus in Europe, a study estimates.

The team at Imperial College London said the "death toll would have been huge" without lockdown. 

But they warned that only a small proportion of people had been infected and we were still only "at the beginning of the pandemic".

Another study argued global lockdowns had "saved more lives, in a shorter period of time, than ever before".

The Imperial study assessed the impact of restrictions in 11 European countries - Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK - up to the beginning of May.

By that time, around 130,000 people had died from coronavirus in those countries.

The researchers used disease modelling to predict how many deaths there would have been if lockdown had not happened. And the work comes from the same group that guided the UK's decision to go into lockdown.

• UK changes course amid death toll fears

They estimated 3.2 million people would have died by 4 May if not for measures such as closing businesses and telling people to stay at home.

That meant lockdown saved around 3.1 million lives, including 470,000 in the UK, 690,000 in France and 630,000 in Italy, the report in the journal Nature shows. 

"Lockdown averted millions of deaths, those deaths would have been a tragedy," said Dr Seth Flaxman, from Imperial.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52968523

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Thus extrapolating this report, we should not relax the lockdowns until NO-ONE has the infection and EVERYONE has been vaccinated... Easy come easy go... especially the oldies... Less of us, the one-footer in the grave, more youth taking over the world, thus becoming a smarter iPhoney planet — as most of us, oldies, can't remember where we live, what is our own name and why we placed something we can't eat into the microwave thinking it was the whatsisname... er... the freezer. Did I just do that? I was actually looking for the tool box.

There is an unroyal Covid-battle going on between the Isolationists and the liberalistas... And some cordial exchanges between two mega-thinkers has turned bitter.

Kit Knightly tells us:

Eric Zuesse, our erstwhile contributor, recently wrote an article published on Strategic Culture titled “those in denial about coronavirus”. Throughout he refers to a “prominent libertarian site” and the editor he was communicating with. It suits him to be coy and keep it anonymous, but I don’t see that need.

OffGuardian is the “libertarian” site in question, and I am the editor with whom he was exchanging e-mails.

So we need to (we don't really need to) to investigate the ammunitions:

People Who Are in Denial About Coronavirus

By Eric Zuesse

There are basically two different policy-approaches to the coronavirus problem: One is the passive approach, waiting for ‘herd immunity’ to develop naturally. And the other is the active approach, in which the Government does take action — not just wait while the most-vulnerable individuals die off from the disease. The “herd immunity” approach is libertarian; it assumes that “let nature take its course” is always best; it is “laissez faire.” The “take action” approach is the exact opposite — very restrictive (including strong disincentives — “punishment” — for individuals’ misbehaviors that transmit the disease and endanger other people). This is the old debate between some form of anarchy on the one side, and some form of “socialism” (legally enforced governmental policies) on the other side.

The earliest popular ideological debate regarding coronavirus-policy was between advocates of Denmark’s socialistic approach, versus neighboring Sweden’s laissez-fair approach. EuroNews headlined on March 26th “Neighbours Denmark and Sweden miles apart on coronavirus confinement”, and reported that “when it comes to handling the coronavirus crisis, they are on very different trajectories,” which were Denmark’s socialism, versus Sweden’s libertarianism.

At that time, there was no clear indication, yet, as to which approach would win out. For example, on April 19th, Denmark had 1,275 Covid-19 cases per million, whereas Sweden had 1,424. So: per million inhabitants, they were about the same.

Even as late as 12 May 2020, three libertarian co-authors at the prestigious U.S. neoliberal and neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations’s journal Foreign Affairs headlined, confidently, that libertarianism would win out: “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s: Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely”.

But, by the time of June 29th, the data had become clear to the exact contrary, and so I headlined “‘Herd Immunity’ Is a Failed Response to Coronavirus”, and reported the subsequent increases in each of these two countries’ numbers.

...

Perhaps people who are in denial about coronavirus are simply in denial about reality — the broader, global, reality.

On coronavirus-19 — this pandemic — the best data regarding the international reality is this, which is the constantly up-to-date listings of all countries and their respective numbers. To see the rankings there of all countries on the crucial outcome-variable of “Tot Cases/1M pop” just click onto that column’s heading and countries will be ranked that way. Same for the other crucial outcome-variable “Deaths/1M pop,” and for the far less-crucial process-variables (such as “Tests/1M pop”). Two successive clicks onto the given column-heading will reverse the ordering of the countries regarding that variable. You’ll be seeing there the existing rankings, as of that given moment. To see the trends within any given country, just click onto the name of that country, and then scroll down to the charts “Daily New Cases” and “Daily New Deaths” (tracking both of the crucial outcome-variables)

However, people who are in denial about coronavirus-reality avoid those numbers like the plague. Perhaps they do that because, to their libertarian ideology, these numbers are “the plague.”

Read more:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/24/people-who-are-in-denial-about-coronavirus/

Kit is a bit peeved for being referred to as "the prominent libertarian site"... By Eric.

...

Needless to say, we reject his casting of us in these terms, and refute entirely the idea we are “in denial” or “populist” or that our position on the coronavirus “crisis” is in any way ideological.

Eric did not tell me, until the day before publication, that he intended to use our correspondence as the basis for an article, nor did he ask my permission to do so. While I do object to this unprofessional approach, I did not request he not publish but instead asked him to make three amendments:

1. Include my refutation of the “libertarian” label.
2. Put my request for an apology in its proper context – ie. a response to his accusing us of “deceiving our readers”.
3. Most importantly, publish my entire response rather than quote-mining.

Sadly Eric made none of these changes and did not include the full un-edited correspondence in his piece. So, by way of a response, here is the actual chain of emails:

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/08/27/offguardian-is-not-in-denial/

Old Gus tends to sit comfortably with OffGuardian on this issue while taking a lot of caution. I try hard to "avoid sickness" at all cost. I don't visit retirement villages nor homes for oldies, and I also play the show-game of masked shopping. Some Covid figures and interpretations of statistics are misleading. In some fashion, OffGuardian is anti-Guardian at all cost, being silly at times, especially on the global warming question, but in general it provides an important counterpoint to monochromatic culture.

Eric Zuesse is an important commentator on politics. On the Covid issue, the origin, the fear factor, the slanted political reactions, the need to act quickly, the factious sciences on "treatments", the profiteers and precautions has created some muddled confusion, even amongst the best experts — in which being safe is "is it being too safe"? Too many elements to "know for sure" in an evolving situation.

On the question of global warming, the stats are fairly simple: CO2 is a warming gas that controls (regulates) the average temperature of the planet. All the other detailed statistics are only observations of this influence. The denialists are often in the pocket of vested interests and show a great deceitful hubris in their misinformation. On Covid, the disinformation is mostly due to our (and sciences) general lack of knowledge and the "need to act quickly".

Here, a litmus test is to observe the insurance industry. This industry based on gambling stats has included global warming factors to calculate your premiums, for a while now. It knows that things are going to get worse, no matter what... On Covid, the insurance industry would have to sue governments on behalf of their clients, should these governments show no intent of actions... The Covid situation is only episodic... Global warming is ONGOING...

On Covid, we do not have a baseline statistic, except that in 1918, many people died of the flu. Other stats between herd immunity and lockdown are flawed by their own half-and-half measures. None has been fool-proof so far. The major problem has been the destruction of the world economy which is seen by some as a godsend and seen by others as a horrid decision, especially for the younger generations. 

Meanwhile, whether we see it or not, the earth is warming up. This site YD is using Gus's expertise (I've got big feet though a small footprint) on this subject to "defend bombastic Greta" when she is under attack from badly digested information — including some often lurking on OffGuardian. 

See: the political interpretation of probabilities... in The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error...

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