Apocalypse Now?

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Pandemic — the board game. The perfect gift for the sick, the quarantined, the home-schoolers and the unemployed.

So is this it? Is this the beginning of the long-expected crash of the industrial world? Don’t think for one minute that I am cheering it on, I fear it as much as anyone. But what we are seeing today (Monday, March 16) is far more than a perfect storm.

• The coronavirus threat is grinding the economic life of the country to a halt. At a time when nearly half the population is living paycheck-to-paycheck, the places where they get their paychecks are closing until further notice. The half of the population that depends on schools to feed and house their children so they can work have just been told the schools are closed until further notice. As have the parents of many — the number increases daily — of the 30 million children who rely on the schools for two meals a day.

• And that’s just the threat of the pandemic. The reality is about to slam the health-care system and the economy of the country with what would not be a mortal blow if the government were in competent hands. But it’s in Trump’s hands, and we are probably toast. 
• The coronavirus is most deadly to organisms that are already sick and weak. Like the American economy. The ridiculously bloated and overvalued stock market, a casino for the morbidly rich churning along on borrowed money, had already taken a hard hit of reality from the crash in oil prices, which dealt a coup de grace to an oil industry that, like the Boeing 737 MAX, had run out of airspeed, altitude and ideas. The new American oil revolution has been on life support — in the form of direct injection of cheap money into companies that have never made any money — for years. Now Russia and Saudi Arabia (Trump’s best friends in the world) have pulled the plug on the life support machine.
• The came the pandemic, and the stock market stopped staggering around and did a face plant. If it closes where it opened today (Monday), it will be the largest one-day loss since 1926.
• Like a person who has been fighting cancer for years and succumbs to a cold, the American economy has been rotted out by debt (among other things). The amount of debt that has been accumulated by consumers, businesses and governments in recent decades is well beyond the place where it can ever be repaid, and is fast approaching the place where just paying the interest will be beyond our reach. We’ve been spending like there’s no tomorrow. Looks like tomorrow’s here.
• And here’s a factor that no one wants to talk about — rage. A large proportion of ordinary Americans have achieved a precarious balance by holding down several jobs, driving a junker, living in a trailer, denying themselves health and dental care, and taking all the food stamps and food handouts they can get. That balance can be preserved only so long as the schools continue to care for and help feed the kids, only so long as every paycheck clears on time, and no one gets sicker than they already are. Anyone who thinks that if these people get the props kicked out from under them they are going to go quietly to their trailers and die, then that “anyone” has, as my mother used to say, another think coming.  

We are here. On the brink, The Fed has just cut interest rates to effectively zero, so the morbidly rich can continue to buy stacks of chips in the Great Casino. When the only trick you know is to cut interest rates, what do you do when they hit zero?  If this were a Western movie and we were the settlers fighting from our lives from behind our circled wagons, the cavalry would come charging over the hill to tell us they ran out of ammunition ten years ago.

Vast powers and wealth are being applied, by vastly powerful and wealthy people who are suddenly scared to death, to stabilize the system. They might do it. But according to Goldman Sachs, high priests to the one percent, the recession has begun. Spoiler alert: It’s not going to be just a recession.

Meanwhile, look on the bright side. All forms of pollution are significantly down in all the areas where the coronavirus has taken a firm hold. Crashes have their uses. We should probably enjoy it while we can.    

“Game Night” by Perfectance is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0