Coronavirus state of play, April 29 update

This is bad.  Very problematic.  The virus is not good - infectious and harmful.  Data is hard to come by.

Here is a nice attempt by FT

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported 



Mark Manson (author of THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A FUCK) has a nice summary of why we really don't know much.



The lockdowns hurt a lot of people economically.



That is technically solvable but politically... not so much.  Unfortunately, we are living with the systems and government that we have, not the ones we want.  Only so much can be done through the ballot box to change that, and that's frankly another system that's not working for the majority of the citizens.



It's really freaking easy to help, although we have difficult challenges.  But, just give people money.

It took no time at all to spit out $6T to support ... well ... not really sure.  No one I know.  But that's $20,000 per person.   The economy is all about real resources, production and consumption, supply and demand... and money is simply a measurement.  It's not a "thing" (more on that some other time some other blog...)



McConnell is already making noises of austerity which generally means he decides which cronies get paid and stiffs the working class.



Economically, we have a lot of shocks happening.  Even in "normal" times, supply chain instabilities happen.  We have a bunch of interconnected nonlinear systems with independent agents making decisions with grossly incomplete and imperfect information.  What could possibly go wrong?



We could look at it from the virus' perspective...



There is a lot of commentary and some news... places to find at least somewhat curated info are few

Reddit?    I read Naked Capitalism regularly; have been following since pre 2008 crash for financial links and commentary but the COVID coverage has been decent - mostly linky goodness to reasonably vetted sources.