Quote:
Originally Posted by conor912
Mostly, it’s this. This thing caught the entire world by surprise and no one was prepared. On top of that, The US dragged their feet in responding and is now behind the ball, scrambling and basically making up solutions as we go. The measures seem drastic, because they are, but it’s better to do too much at this point than risk not doing enough.
The inconsistencies come from no one entity taking the reigns. Some of this is based on political posturing in an election year, some is due to denial and some is due to being caught with our pants down and slow to react. Now with no one agency at the helm, states are taking it upon themselves to do what they think is best and 50 governors are going to have 50 different ideas of what that is.
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I think I agree with this.
The markets around the world have tanked this week and the reason is that they expect the situation in the US to become way worse than it has in China, which is quite scary actually.
The reason is basically they don't see any effective response being formulated by the US government right now and its too late at this point to do much about that.
In China the response was kind of bungled from the start in a similar way - the leadership just tried to ignore and deny it for a while. But then they changed literally overnight from doing nothing to suddenly taking aggressive measures to contain it. And those seem to have worked, it looks like China will peak with fewer than 100,000 cases and about 4,000 deaths, which while tragic is way better than it could have been.
What has markets freaking out is that the outbreak in the US is already way past the point it was in China when it made that pivot. They only had a few hundred cases at that point and it was contained to a single region when the Central government started taking it seriously and imposing strict measures. In the US now it has already spread to almost all 50 states, and there are thousands of cases, maybe 10s of thousands given what little we know thanks to a lack of testing, and its spreading at an exponential rate.
And despite this, there still isn't really any plan for getting it under control being articulated by the Federal government. The opportunity to limit the damage to what China incurred has already been squandered and the markets recognize this. They seem to be pricing in an epidemic with numbers in the millions in the US and commensurate economic fallout.
I would not be buying stocks right now, nobody knows where the floor for this is.