The airline industry has clearly been prone to booms and busts for decades. Yet instead of planning for hard times, these corporate welfare machines called "airlines" use resources to inflate stock value and pad executive salaries.
There is a misconception among critics of the COVID-19 lockdowns that they're being imposed over the howls of the local population, which wants freedom. If only that were true.
What the economy needs now is more real savings and more real production. Creating more money will not help with either of these things.
What we can learn from the Patriot Act is that during a time of crisis governments can pass legislation that impacts citizens’ lives long after the crisis of the day has passed.
The coronavirus demonstrates how crises become local.
How much must total mortality increase to justify a global suspension of commerce and the rule of law? One percent? Ten percent? And what if overall mortality doesn't even go up?
Modern central banks have already moved far beyond what was once considered the proper role for a central bank as a "lender of last resort." Now Keynesians and MMTers want to take things even further.
The Left conveniently ignores dozens of state-dominated and state-controlled medical systems and decides that the lack of preparedness for COVID-19 was all the fault of those small slivers of healthcare systems that are actually private.
Whatever happens with the virus, the real story, the real historical change, is probably economic. Abenomics—Japan's ultra-Keynesian experiment—seems to be dead.
Contrary to Fed assumptions, we are not presently facing a problem of liquidity vis-à-vis Great Recession; we are confronted, instead, with a serious shortage of quality collateral.
