I watched Ackman’s long rant. Funny how a guy who is so smart and articulate still resorts to the verbal tic of “Ok” between every sentence when he is excited and nervous. Wonder what mine is? basically his thesis is that the only way to get control of this virus is for everyone to stay home for a month and that any other course of action will essentially destroy the modern economy. When it comes to understanding how the modern economy works he is aprozimately several billion times more knowledgeable than I am, at least judging by the money he has made. But i wonder if he is right. The stagger along shedding population model seems more likely to me, even if it isn’t as good of a choice, it seems more in line with human nature, and I don’t see why it would mean total economic collapse. Basically at some point we just give up, live resumes some version or normalcy with catastrophic malfunctions in the hospitals, people dying for lack of care and other people unable to get treatment for lack of resources, but people drag themselves along for a few years.

We just went down and saw the new baby. For at least two hundred thousand years women have been giving birth to children with enormous heads because somehow in evolution that trade off made sense, and frankly the heads probably weren’t all that much smaller in the millions of years before we became home sapiens. The narrowness of that margin, the death and destruction wrought by that evolutionary choice, and yet we persisted. That seems like the model to me. We make a valiant effort with social distancing, it isn’t enough but it blunts the crisis a bit, then we soldier on not because we are strong but for lack of alternatives.This is a manageable problem, rational choices as exhibited by the Chinese and, it seems, especially the South Koreans, can manage this. There is no evidence here that we are making rational choices yet. The nearly complete lack of leadership from the top has made it a necessity for local leaders to react as they see fit with the inevitable result that we have gone from a crisis where no one wanted to be seen to be panicking to one where no one wants to be outdone by someone else taking more aggressive measures. Sort of from ignoring the problem to panicking.

I don’t have any more idea than anyone else what it means for the markets. Bought a little BUD, USB and BRK-b today. Kind of like getting in cold water. Instead of jumping in all at once I’m flicking a little on my face. Assuming tghat we don’t have a complete failure of capitalism–and what would that mean exactly? At what point does a failure of capitalism start to be a failure of democracy?When people lose their jobs and riot? When the government triesd to make it all right with free money and inflation gets out of control? What does it mean for the system to fail? The Great Depression would be the nearest example, i guess, but the system actually held, we didn’t become communists. Most property rights were respected. Anyway, assuming some semblance of the current system remains after this is over, what will it look like. Yields going up on the ten year, is that because the appetite is finally getting sated, or is it just some market malfunction>? Or is it actually a market function and people are demanding a return, maybe a theoreticaly or hypothetical return, but a return based on the idea that there will be a system where markets function to the extent that you don’;t want to hold and asset unless it pays you something and so they want more than .3%. But if people actually start demanding a return on their money and interest rates go up, that’s got to be bad for the stock market even at these valuations.