COVID-19 Update

"The new normal" is likely to be a pretty ugly one for a while.

WaPo:

“In the absence of warfare between major powers, we have never seen anything like this,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for Economics in Washington.

At Changi (Singapore), one of the world’s great travel hubs, traffic plunged from 5.9 million passengers in January to a mere 25,200 in April — a 99.5 percent drop. The number of airlines serving the airport collapsed from 91 to 35. Two of the four main terminals have been temporarily mothballed; plans for a fifth have been set back at least two years.

But travel is only one way that the coronavirus is disrupting global interconnectedness. The pandemic is interrupting the flow of workers, money and goods that increasingly bound the postwar world, helped to lift more than a billion people out of poverty since the fall of the Berlin Wall and delivered unprecedented stability and prosperity to much of the planet. To encapsulate: U.S. investment in China raised demand for soybeans that enabled Brazilian farmers to buy German cars.

President Stoopid said trade wars are simple things, and easy to win.

He started fucking with all our partners - China in particular - and we'd seen some of the effects of isolation when COVID-19 kicked in. The pandemic just made it a lot worse.

Remember, the Trump Recession started in February this year when COVID-19 was barely a blip on the radar.

I'm generally in favor of a globalized economy because if we do it right, there's a good bunch of positives when it comes to raising people up out of poverty, which tends to tamp down on the kind of violent rebellion that rarely accomplishes anything other than trading one asshole ruler for the next.

Unfortunately, big players in economics often do the same thing with banks and paperwork that others have done with tanks and rifles.

The version of globalization we were living was the workin' guy's nightmare - a cycle of deflation that pushed down on prices and wages while it boosted profits and power of a smaller and smaller group of CEOs.

Anyway, as we move through the pandemic, we can expect lots more upset and the usual calls for sacrifice, which I fear will be coopted and used against us by unscrupulous manipulators.