Casey

Yea. Logistics is hard. Who knew? ::) Wouldn't it be nice if the US actually had a government? Like people who knew what they were doing? These guys are managing a national emergency, the only way they know how. Tweets, changing websites, checking their ratings. Shit show. You have the Pats flying masks from China on their team's 767. Oh and they can't bring as many as they're available cause the plane can't carry it. Wouldn't it be nice if the US had some sort of organization who's job it was to carry shit from one place to another. Something that may resemble this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Mobility_Command What? You do not want to give credit to Trump for this? He need not have given them landing rights for the plane. Vinod True, Trump should get credit for any success, but any failure (such as in "shithole NYC" belongs to local/state leaders of course). In his playbook and his devout followers' MO. After all, Bill De Blasio and the governor of WA are where the buck stops when it comes to CDC/FDA botching testing in January/Feb. Don't they oversee these agencies? And who's this Cuomo guy and what's he doing? Jared Kushner knows better. Watching this thread get invaded by Trump apologist brigade who have been repeatedly wrong in predicting magnitude of this crisis (watching Hannity is bad for your brain cells, folks), and now excuse their leader because "no one could have seen this!" Garbage in, garbage out is what you get--the brigade is here! Enjoy their astute analyses that they bring from their politics section... FWIW, I think it is better to not reply back to things that are obviously not-constructive (while it can be tempting). Takes up much less space in the thread, and in your brain. Cheers.

Kasparov couldn't be more wrong. OPEC+ is a cartel. Everyone knows that OPEC+ is a cartel. Trump's tweet is nonsense and ill-advised, but there isn't anything criminal about the US President asking the largest OPEC+ members to reduce oil production in the face of a worldwide glut and historically weak demand. It‘s Ok to ask, but does anyone believe what Trump tweeted is actually real? He has duped the markets before... I would read it similar to 'Funding secured.' They talked about oil. Words were spoken. Numbers were thrown around. Trump tweeted some of them. There is zero agreement, but Trump would like the price of oil to go up.

I dont disagree he's gotten thing wrong. But who's gotten this perfect? Maybe, maybe you can make the case for some of the SARS countries who have been practicing for these things like school kids do fire drills? OK, but thats not us, not under any president. All in all, theres good and bad and always will be during unexpected times of crisis/panic. The least productive thing anyone can do is bitch and moan and be a negative. Ive stated plenty how I dont like Trumps credit grabs and he deserves the flack that comes with that. Like signing the stock chart a day before the 3,000 point drop. I just dont see how anyone wins playing games with political narratives in this situation, its really no different than 9/11. People pushing agendas during times like this are no different than the scumbags selling N95 masks for $50 on eBay... Noone's gotten this perfect. And both dems, republicans, every country have gotten things wrong. I guess I do have a political opinion and narrative. Its basically "Trump is a mediocre-to-poor-at-best president, bad for long term health (& now also short term health) of the country, and we should get someone better." And TBF plenty of other leaders across the aisle have also shown their great skills at "leading from behind", "inability to adapt" and "not understanding whats in front of their face" during this crisis. Maybe that's easy to say watching from the outside. I dunno. It's a crisis, sure, and you have to buckle down and deal with it. So just complaining is unhelpful. For me it's been extremely frustrating who we've had in the room.

well Gregmal, I guess you call it like you see it. I thought Trump's response had a lot to be desired and can understand why many "jack assed" lefties and Americans in general were extremely pissed and complaining. Especially if you live in a major city, which many of them do. In the end, the slowness and un-seriousness while the virus played out in front of our eyes in other countries is going to cost a lot of American lives. Personally I find it really, really sad and tragic, both because strong competence would have made a huge difference, and because it seems like enough of us are dumb enough to buy Trump's "I did great, I closed the border with China" shtick that the guy might actually get elected again despite killing off what he predicts will be 100ks of Americans w/ our slow and cavalier response. If there is a silver lining perhaps some apolitical Americans will shift attitudes about politics and whether it "matters" who is the leader.

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I think it is crucial to keep the timeline to reopen the economy as short as possible and in order for that to happen, new infection rates will need to come down. I think the key moving forward will be how quickly each state is able to pivot to the next stage of the battle: aggressive testing in volume and contact tracing (like South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan). Is this model 4 weeks away from being implemented or 8 weeks away? Big difference for how big the economic contraction is and what the recovery looks like on the other side (V or U). In my province (BC) it does not look like it is on anyones radar (the South Korea model) so my guess is we are in lock down for at least another 6-8 weeks. Disagree with Bernanke unless the natural disaster was something that left a lingering fallout a la nuclear accident, and what natural disaster shuts down the entire United States and Europe and others all at the same time? Here is how I've been thinking things play out: April - Rest of US cities go through the early part of the curve. NYC reaches peak and daily counts start moving downwards. Florida is a shitshow as are rural areas unlucky enough to get an outbreak. Can't re-open yet. May - Growth of daily confirmed cases levels off in the second batch of cities. Cities are still doing >100 cases for most of May. Economically getting very painful. Can't re-open yet though. June - Still in a "soft lockdown" with cases trending downward. Pressure to re-open things, and we'll probably try to do it. July - Same as June with less and less cases. During June & July stores that didn't close permanently open back up to reduced thresholds of people. Aug - New Normal 75% cash right now fwiw. I can't see the economy doing well during the next 5-6 months and there's the chance we get a double-dip outbreak in fall with a more depleted economy and healthcare system. SP 2000-2200 in the next couple weeks I'll add to some things.

We know the numbers are going to increase don't we? Did anyone say they wont? Whats the point where numbers increased way more then expected? Earlier in the thread when compared to the flu some links posted posited millions of deaths as "this is not the flu." Whats a reasonable cut off in your mind to determine whether or not this was all overblown or underestimated? Personally, I don't think it is overblown at all. I do think it will be easier to answer your question later on as there is more data. I'd want to know the case fatality rate when hospitals are experiencing normal load & when they are full, and a hypothetical R0 where people are behaving normally like it was "just the flu." At the end of this, I think we'll be able to know those numbers. If acting like any other flu projects to 80k-160k deaths when all is said and done then I'd say it was blown way out of proportion. 80k flu deaths in 2018 was the worst year in four decades. And life carried on. I dunno. Choose your proportion. We will be able to plug in the numbers at some point. At the end of this I think we will get to 80k deaths with the entire nation locked down for several months. Italy has 90k confirmed cases and 9k deaths. I think the USA ratio will look similar at the end of this. Our health care quality is nothing special. Currently, we are tacking on 15-20k confirmed cases a day. That should stabilize and go down, but over the next 60-90 days I think it's pretty likely we'll get to 800k cases and 80k deaths all the while under a soft-lockdown scenario. To me that is not overblown, because if we weren't in soft lockdown you could be looking at 10s of millions of cases and single digit millions deaths. For example, here are annual flu numbers. Estimated that 9-45 million people a year get it. > CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010. I would ask you Orthopa the same question, what would you need to see to say that it's NOT overblown?

LOL. The article: Our house didn't get cold after my parents turned on the heat and closed the windows. Winter is way overblown! Open the beaches 8)

Worst flu season in 4 decades was 80k deaths. That's with everyone behaving normally. This is going to get to 80k deaths with 75% of the country hiding inside and wearing face masks to the grocery store. BTW, if the Stanford guy is Ioannadis then the article you read was misleading. It's also dangerous, because .. yeah .. you'd think someone with 5 different Stanford degrees would observe basic things like: If the hospitals are full to the brim the case fatality rate goes up! Time is of the essence with something like this and you need public health experts to be giving advice that's ... better.

I don't know anything in particular about WAsh numbers, but check this story out. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronavirus-update-dead-covid19-doctors-hospitals

How long was that cruise (with those passengers), how long was the virus on it, how long was patient 0 asymptomatic vs symptomatic (probably much more contagious after that), and how long after that did they try to lock things down and create extra hygiene measures? There's a lot of variables that makes this not as clear cut a case study as some would want it to be. I mean, I generally agree with the points you raise, and that they are good signs, but there's still all these other questions. I mean, it's very different if it's a one-week long cruise, patient 0 spent 4 days on it asymptomatic and then was able to infect all those people in just a few days after that before lockdown, than if it was a two-week cruise, he/she got on board sick from day 1, there was no lock down until the end, etc.. I think another big issue w/ extrapolating from the cruise ship stats is that they are from a time when the healthcare system was functioning normally. Perhaps it shows a lower bound for CFR? But if quality of care drops from hospitals getting hundreds/thousands of cases at once its going to be worse.

My thought for a while has been that SP 2000 will be the floor on all this, but having a hard time being patient. More FB today.

AMZN

I don't see how a recession is avoided. 1. Households QE. 2. Later, massive infrastructure projects. We should build out some of those influenza-specific hospitals that China has. Seems like they're damn useful.

Hopefully he's confining himself to taking calls from his bathtub.

Yep. I'm extremely concerned. I read a few different descriptions of Italian response/situation on twitter. 10-15 days from now sounds like it is going to be brutal. Boston, NY, Seattle, D.C. and probably others should all be looking at doing exactly what Italy is doing right now and figuring out: What should the soft lockdown / quarantine rules be and what situation/case numbers should trigger them? And second, how can we set up ways for people to get access to testing while endangering minimum amount of other people? Drive through testing in S Korea was a great idea. Maybe we get lucky with spring weather and physical distance of US suburbia helping us out. I am really hoping so. I am in Boston. people are in the park swinging on the swings, and cafes/Starbucks are full of people working on their laptops. It's mindblowing tbh.

There are a couple of issues with extrapolating from this data. First, it has been very well managed in S. Korea. The efficiency of testing alone undoubtedly resulted in better outcomes. Also, at this point a better estimate of the ultimate CFR is probably provided by dividing the number of deaths by the number of deaths added to the number of recovered cases. The problem is that there has been a long lag between presentation of symptoms and death. Let's take it to Coronavirus thread. I agree that they have done well w/ managing it.

Another realistic number is South Korea case fatality rate (0.6%). They did a lot of testing. Taking that to the U.S. 330 million people * .006 gets you in the area of 2 million deaths. Multiply by whatever percentage of the population you think gets the virus. - 4% and we'll be at 80k which was 2018 flu deaths (a bad flu year) - 20% of population, 400k deaths - what scares me is epidemiologists throwing around estimates that 20-60% of the population potentially getting this. Anyways, it can get pretty bad even if the death rate is only in the area 1%. And I suppose on the topic, since I thought this was the Coronavirus thread, I bought some BRK, US banks, and SBRCY today.

As soon as they hear "Quarantine" people will try to get out of dodge, which will be both chaos and a very efficient way to spread the virus. It seems like the best quarantine is either no quarantine so that people don't panic and disperse, or a very well-implemented one. Latter seems hard to get right. I don't trust particularly trust us to do it based on how most of the rest of this has been going. Basing all this on the plot of Contagion though, so YMMV.

I read it as Trump putting someone on virus who he doesnt mind "taking the fall" for it, because we don't seem particularly well prepared.

Not much yet. I think we have weeks or more of worse Coronavirus news to go. It would surprise me if Trump & the fed can paper over it.

added to DFS, ALLY, BRK.B this week On Berkshire: I feel they should be buying back shares instead of trying to operate Buffet's elephant gun for 50 billion dollar acquisitions. Buffett & Munger have always emphasized looking for 1 foot high hurdles to step over instead of doing the more difficult thing. At their size, buybacks seem like the 1 foot hurdle. I think they will eventually come around to that.

Yep, I do this. Usually the letter from "past me" arrives in email around mid-December. Format is mostly: What were my goals for the year, how did they go, any reflections on that, things to change and goals in the upcoming year. I try not to let it get too long. I'm not sure how valuable it's been vs not doing it, but I enjoy it so I keep writing the letters.

Why don't you like ETFs being popular?

Probably some gas station chain or industrial parts company I've never heard of.