What if the market is right, and what it is saying with its sudden and steep drop is that this a a huge disaster, so big in fact, that the proper response is for a big crash followed by…here’s the question, a long drawn out bear market where prices grinder ever lower? Maybe that’s what the market is saying. Perhaps what it is not saying is that it somehow immediately priced in all of the negative things to come.

Seems like there are some really bad things that aren’t exactly priced into a stock market that has only given back a year’s worth of gains. I mean, that market was up 30% last year and that’s been sort of taken away. Frankly, unless you were starting from a low base, a 30% gain would probably be taken away under moderate to good scenarios. So really, the result of trillions of dollars a debt stimulus on the long term economic health of the country, the possibility that this disease will be even more horrible in the developing world, the possibility that it will be worse here than predicted, the unknown result of stopping a huge, industrial economy, the unknown social ramification that come from this sort of disaster, the fact, which responsible leaders don’t want to harp on at this point, but the fact nonetheless, that this is much worse in here than in China.

While we’re on that, the disease started in China so, by definition they were behind the curve. We on the other hand, had two months to prepare. China, a country of 1.3 billion people had 3400 deaths. Let’s assume what we know, that the Chinese lie about statistics and that the actual death toll was closer to 10,000 so 1 death for every 130,000 people. We on the other hand, have 330,000,000 million people and the White House, which also lies about statistics, estimates 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. So let’s assume their optimistic number, that’s 1 death for every 3300 people, 40 times worse than the Chinese. How is this anything but a catastrophic failure of leadership. In fact, the scale of it scares me now that I write it out.

Responsible leaders in this country are focused on the problem at hand and are mostly avoiding pointing fingers at Trump.

But as for the stock market, it hardly seems to be pricing in the possibility tha this administration bungles the economic stimulus response as badly, or even half as badly as they bungled the preparation for this pandemic. I think we are still in group denial about how bad this is.