Occam's Razor

During our recent cruise, we at least got grainy MSNBC satellite TV. When I watched it, I watched the stock market yo-yo back and forth pretty much every day: the DJIA down a thousand one day, and it would often recover it the next day. The general trend though was down, a lot.

In a way, it was good to be on one of the last cruises because I was mostly insulated from this madness unless I sought it out. (Our cruise turned out fine. No passengers developed COVID-19 symptoms, but berthing in Fort Lauderdale we learned that the half dozen ships in port weren’t going anywhere for a month. I felt sorry for the staff, many of who were likely facing unemployment and a one-way ticket home.)

Today though takes the cake, with the DJIA having its worst day since the crash of 1987, down more than 3000 points in just one day. It all feels so predictable by now. I’m just wondering why the wizards of Wall Street are so late to this party. All the signs were there for those with clear eyes. I’m no Wall Street wizard, but I saw it coming. And I took some steps before the crash to mitigate our risk.

Today’s crash was because Wall Street suddenly discovered that the Federal Reserve had essentially used up all its ammunition, which means in effect that there is no steady hand on our financial system anymore. On Sunday, it dropped the Federal Funds Rate to 0%. Soon predictably it will probably go negative, charging banks to temporarily give them money to insulate them from even graver financial calamity. It probably won’t calm markets.

These same wizards of course were cheering companies that bought back their own stock with borrowed money. It gave the market a sugar rush and made stock prices worth way more than they were actually worth. Now many of these same companies, in debt to the max, are discovering the downside: they don’t have a whole lot of liquidity to ride out an economic downturn. In short, expect a lot of these companies, including some of the biggest of the blue chips, to go into bankruptcy.

The coronavirus is going to cause a recession, if not a depression. The virus though is just the trigger that revealed the larger problem, which has been sinking markets. Margins are gone. Businesses are in hoc up to their eyeballs, as are most consumers. Layoffs have already started and are inevitable. When public gatherings of fifty or more are not allowed, restaurants and many public-facing businesses like theaters close down for the interim. This takes money out of the economy and with predictable results. People living on the margins won’t be able to pay rent, or afford to see a doctor, and there are plenty of them thanks to a gig economy that Wall Street just loved but which added immensely to our overall financial fragility.

Stock market declines show that people are sobering up. Donald Trump of course is making things much, much worse by his lack of leadership and counterproductive strategies. He’s also making it worse for himself by continuing to shake hands with people. Most of his supporters still haven’t figured out what a fraud the guy is and are doing really stupid stuff like licking toilet seats to “prove” coronavirus is a myth. Sadly, it is likely that in a few weeks they need to only go to their local hospital’s morgue to see how wrong they are, if they are not victims themselves.

Children are out of school, day care centers will probably just pass on the virus, so parents predictably will stay home with their kids and fret. For many of them, this will collapse their house of cards. Social distancing should help reduce the number of cases, but it’s likely that there will be far more patients in need of critical care than our hospitals can handle. Our wonderful private health care system will prove unable to handle the coming crush of cases, which will kill lots of people needlessly as well as probably feed a mostly downward economic spiral.

It’s Republican government that will prove bankrupt once again, as it did in 2008, in 1987 and of course during the Great Depression. We never learn. The fall in the stock market proves these stocks were wildly overvalued and did not factor in the risks that are now obviously manifest. Having come off a cruise ship on Saturday and now home, I got to experience it first hand at our local supermarket where the meat counter and frozen food aisles were mostly empty. So far people seem to be soldiering on, but there is the pervasive undercurrent of social disorder. Things could get ugly not just medically, but civilly. We may be seeing the partial collapse of civilized behavior.

So we’re doing what we did before: hunkering down. We can’t count on our medical establishment, so we have to look out for ourselves. We wash our hands regularly. We take calculated risks going to the store. We wipe surfaces. We reflexively do social distancing. We also try to handle things soberly, mindful of the risks but realizing that we’ll likely survive this; it’s not really the big one. Lots of people won’t though, mostly the elderly and infirmed, and we are approaching our elderly years.

We can’t stop all pandemics and likely we could not stop this one either. But it could have been managed much better. Similarly, the collapse on Wall Street was entirely predictable. We just chose not to keep in place the regulations we needed to cushion this fall. And in search of short-term profits we refused to provide sick leave for workers, raise wages, invest in our public health or do the sensible stuff that government is supposed to do. It’s all so pointless and unnecessary.

We can control only what we can control. We can hunker down. Our pensions should provide a steady income in good times and bad. Moving to bonds at peak market insulated our losses. We are fortunate. We will also likely thrive in this challenging time because we didn’t do the stupid stuff. Unlike Wall Street, we acted logically as best we could best on a sober assessment of the world as it actually is. It was smart of us to do it, but it didn’t have to be this way for the rest of us. As a society we chose to ignore the obvious risks right in front of us.