During the current coronavirus lockdown, I’d pay good money to see just one public official be asked:

“How many lives are you willing to sacrifice to prevent one coronavirus death?”

Thomas Sowell has repeatedly written that in a world of scarcity there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. The lockdown debate has thus far focused on that tradeoff as one between saving lives versus a temporary blip in the economy.

Most people are not aware that there exists a huge conglomerate in the US with trillions in sales. This business provides insurance services such as healthcare financing, disability income protection, worker’s compensation, and retirement income guarantees. Revenues emanate via premiums from customers. Since there is limited or no competition, this firm is a monopoly and therefore controls these markets. But that’s not the extent of its commercial enterprises.

The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has reached all productive sectors. The massive spread of the virus and social distancing measures have led to a dramatic decrease in economic activity.

The aviation industry, vital for tourism and business, has been hit hard. Investors and analysts state that this crisis could be worse than the one that followed the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the one after 9/11.

In this article we will describe how the future of airlines looks and explain how bad the current situation is.

The fiscal and monetary response to the economic shutdown embodies the federal government’s most recent rejection of Say’s law of markets. Contrary to the actions taken and the assurances made by these authorities, the economic fallout from COVID-19 is not due to a scarcity of money, but a scarcity of goods and services.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

There are several important differences between the global financial crisis of 2007–08 (GFC) and the coronavirus crisis (CC).

As the COVID-19 pandemic is taking place worldwide, many leftist pundits and communist politicians are blaming its spread on the alleged inborn flaws of neoliberalism—which they identify with globalization, laissez-faire, the absence of solidarity and greater inequality. However, all their claims and theories are either factually wrong or deductively and praxeologically nonsensical.

What matters for the stock market is not the state of the real economy as such, but the state of monetary liquidity. In fact, bad economic conditions can actually be good for stocks. This is because monetary liquidity is determined by the interaction between the demand for money and the supply of money, the latter of which is associated with a looser monetary stance during crises.