Quarantine Diaries: Day 8

Yeah, I’m starting to get a bit of cabin fever. But there are some advantages to self-quarantining. I’m getting to take our dog for for nice long walks that she loves even more than I do. And I’m getting to read more. I’m halfway through Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and am finally getting around to starting on Proust’s six-volume magnum opus. Ironically, given its theme, I now have plenty of time to read it. But cabin fever can express itself in odd ways. Now that almost all of the snow has melted, exposing the chaos that is our fenced backyard, I found myself hoping for a few days of dry weather so I’d have an excuse to venture out there to deal with our dog’s accumulated poop. I’m starting to crack; that’s not a chore to look forward to.

Prolonged semi-isolation is going to have effects that will be hard to quantify. Kids are going to have a hard time being separated from their friends and there are mental health implications for the general public in light of prolonged quarantine.

Here in Minnesota, bars, restaurants, and other gathering places have only been closed for a day now. We do not (yet) have the shelter-in-place restrictions of the Bay Area, let alone the lockdowns that several European countries have. An Argentinian YouTuber who now lives in Barcelona describes how he ventured out for supplies during their lockdown wearing a military-grade respirator and nobody batted an eye:

The response to the imploding economy has been dramatic and fast-moving. Here in America, only a few days ago Trump had asked Congress to allocate $2.5 billion for the federal response to the coronavirus and seemed a bit taken aback when Congress upped that to $8 billion. And then world markets tanked again and two orders of magnitude came into play with the administration seeking $850 billion in bailouts and stimulus which almost immediately morphed into talk of $1.2 trillion which would include helicopter money.

ZH suggests that Credit Suisse repo icon and former NY Fed staffer, Zoltan Pozsar’s latest missive boils down to”...bail out everyone... everywhere. The alternative is 107 years of fake price discovery and Fed market manipulation crashing upon themselves, ending the fiat system as we know it, and leading to the biggest social, economic and financial catastrophe of all time.”

America’s Federal Reserve Bank is going bonkers and pumping massive amounts of currency into the system and, now for the first time ever, will be accepting equities as collateral. This may well be the harbinger of a huge monetization of debt which could, down the road, all but guarantee hyperinflation. But, right now, that’s the least of their worries. The economy is in free fall. Our deeply corrupt Secretary of the Treasury is suggesting that we might see 20% unemployment, something we’ve not experienced since the Great Depression. And even though, just a few weeks ago, Trump was talking about a virus that would be gone in April, our government is starting to think in terms of the pandemic continuing for 18 months.

^{Meme stolen from The Daily Star.}

I understand why people might like Ron Paul for his libertarian views, but when it comes to C☣️VID-19 he’s clearly out of his depth:

The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the seasonal flu, a claim without any scientific basis.

Call me crazy, but Fauci might know more about infectious diseases than a retired obstetrician-gynecologist.

^{I guess I’m going to need a Hive On! graphic fairly soon.}

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