How exuberant will people be, how V-shaped will the recovery be, when the government and media have scared the hell out of most people? From L. Reichard White at lewrockwell.com:
The Rock is the designed-for-perfection just-in-time economy plus record debt. The Hard Place is the jinned-up fear of COVID-19 and the deaths it may cause.
To an extent almost no one except maybe hard-core preppers appreciate, nearly everyone in the modern world — especially in the so-called First World — depends entirely on the economy to survive. By “survive,” I mean “keep breathing.”
Just food. Suppose, as CNBC is suggesting and the local WALLY*WORLD is verifying, the supply-chain from farm to store is breaking down. I just bought the last plastic carton of blueberries. It came from Chile. The only beef is four packages of burger.
The food banks and charities just aren’t designed for this unimagined black-swan event. An indication is the record-smashing 3.2 million new U.S. unemployment claims filed the week of March 24, 2020, the following week’s 6.6 million and this week’s 6.9 million for example. That’s a total of 16.7 million newly officially unemployed in just the last three weeks.
