Quote:
Originally Posted by petegz28
In reality little will change from this aside from people maybe doing things they should have been doing before like washing their hands and staying home when they don't feel good. What else is really going to change? Bars and gyms and theaters going to limit crowds to 50 people and keep everyone 6ft apart?
I am not sure what is going to change compared to things that changed with say 9/11?
|
I think it likely will have as long lasting effects as 911 or the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
I don't want to get banned and I have given up on trying to have discussions in DC. But let me throw out some things hopefully in a neutral enough manner:
Even in a super optimistic scenario, where we get things under control in 4 to 6 weeks and can slowly open things up without another surge:
The Feds are pumping $2 trillion into the economy. The Feds are going to be more tied up in the economy than they have before. That won't disappear overnight. After 2009 the Feds were far more involved with the large banks than they were before. To take just one example, the Feds are going to be far more involved with Boeing and the airline industry than they were pre-pandemic.
A lot of small businesses probably won't make it. There is going to be more consolidation in the economy. Chipotle isn't going out of business. The local mom and pop restaurant might.
And it gets worse the worse the pandemic is. It could be that even if you recover from the virus, you can get it again a year later. It remains to be seen how long the anti-body response lasts. They tend to fade with time. The virus might mutate so you can get a new strain. Mutation would make a vaccine much harder.
So the economic hit could be far worse.
The people who graduated from college during the 2009 financial crisis are on track to have less lifetime earnings than people who came before or after. Some did fine, but there was a greater percentage of graduates who never got that important first job, or not as good of job, and their career ladder was never as lucrative.
After 2009 some older workers and marginal workers never rejoined the labor force. That can happen this time around also. After 2009 it took years for the economy to get back to pre-peak.
I think this is very likely for the current crisis.
Now that there has been a massive precedent for the Feds to keep things going during the pandemic, there will be calls to have the Feds do more during the next, garden-variety recession.
It may take a herculean effort to keep the virus under control. China and South Korea have clearly had some success with using phone data for contact tracing. If you take a subway in South Korea, and someone on that specific subway car (car, not train) later tests positive, you get notified that you may have been exposed.
In order to open the economy up, the US may decide that if you test positive, your phone data will officially be used to see who you had contact with like China and South Korea is doing. That would obviously be an expansion of the surveillance state.
More office workers are likely to continue working from home. We may switch to mail in ballots for November and keep doing that afterwards. I could come up with plenty more ways life might never be the same.