The widely followed IHME model of coronavirus cases has been much too optimistic The IHME model by the University of Washington has gotten a lot of attention in the past month, most likely because it has always forecast a much lower number of total deaths caused by coronavirus than, for example the Imperial College […]
Arnold Kling has a recent post up on “Lockdown Socialism”: I’ve seen headlines about polls showing that people are afraid of restrictions being lifted too soon. To me, it sounds as if they prefer what I call Lockdown Socialism. Under Lockdown Socialism: –you can stay in your residence, but paying rent or paying your mortgage […]
An Update on Shadow Government Not only is the current level of testing for the coronavirus insufficient, the tests themselves are flawed. Read this summary by infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm and a coauthor for particulars. Their key policy conclusion is A blue-ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The coincident and short term leading indicators, as expected, continue to be awful — probably the worst since the Great Depression. Whether this downturn can be turned off relatively quickly, or whether […]
This was the first pass (Ernie Tedeschi of Evercore prepared the data) and it is arranged by the percentage of loans completed in each state. As you can see Nebraska received ~81% of the loans applied for by the small businesses in Nebraska. One million, 35 thousand and 86 SBA PPP Loans (1,035, 086) were […]
I missed this when it first came out: We think that the debate regarding extreme social distancing has a clear verdict — it is imperative that we should engage in this social distancing (shelter in place for all but essential workers) at least for the foreseeable short-term, but for reasons that both sides have missed. Our […]
The House yesterday approved the Payroll Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The PPP part of the law quite literally just increases the amount of money allocated to the program. That’s it. The law does almost nothing to fix the serious defects of the program in the original CARES act. This is remarkable because […]
Jobless claims still point to over 20,000,000 lost jobs in April, 15%+ unemployment rate As I’ve written in the past few weeks, the number of initial jobless claims correlates roughly with the number of net new jobs added or subtracted in any given month. Normally there is too much noise for it to be of […]
The actual US coronavirus trajectory: “flattening the curve” at least until 2021 “Flattening the curve” was not such an appetizing option either, because it meant that *everybody* got infected with the disease during the period of flattening, and so the death toll would still be horrifying, perhaps 1% to 3%. It also meant that the […]
It should be worth noting that the federal deficit under Trump is already at 5% of GDP even before the Coronavirus stimulus begins. Figure 1 Interestingly, if you look at the long term record the only policy or strategy that fits the data is the Republican policy of starve the beast. That policy is to […]