Watersheds

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A little play on words there, a riff on the pop-rock band Panic! At the Disco.  It's actually the name of a cover band founded in 2015 that plays 80's and 90's hits, although it works well for what's been going on at every Costco in the Nation due to COVID-19.  I'm sure their Tee-shirts are selling quite well right now.  Not sure if you have a Costco where you live, but it's a big warehouse store, like Sam's Club, that is experiencing huge crowds and massive runs on bottled water and toilet paper.  And this often results in mob-mentality behavior as seen during Black Friday- pushing, shoving, fights, injuries, etc.  Damn hoarders, I'm almost out of TP!

It's obviously not the first time we've had a major crisis that affected the entire nation. 

Remember the subprime mortgage crisis?  President Clinton rescinded a couple acts and signed a couple more leading to risky housing loans for millions of people who had no business owning a home in the first place.  Ninja loans as I recall- No Income, No Job - no problem.  And he pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to secure these loans with our money.  It was a big house of cards that eventually crashed and caused a global recession that hurt the world for nearly eight years and put 10 million out of work.

And of course you remember 9-11.  We had never heard of, or at least cared about Al Qaeda, but there they were, on our doorstep, killing thousands of Americans in a matter of minutes.  The economy tanked then and a million people became long-term unemployed.

These are all watershed moments in recent U.S. and world history.  Whether it was actions by terrorists, leading to the deaths of over a half million people, or policies put in place by terrible politicians, causing eight years of suck and a crushing recession, they reshaped the world and have forever changed how we live, how we fly, and how we borrow.

However, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the Coronavirus, aka COVID-19, aka the Chinese Wuhan Virus, the Kung Flu, or whatever you want to call it, will have an even greater and longer lasting impact on us and the world's economy.

You see, it's quite a different world than it was just three weeks ago don't you think?  We were sitting in financial bliss with the stock market soaring, unemployment barely on the register, and a virus over in China.  And now we're 180 out from that- on lock down as we attempt to flatten the curve, social distancing ourselves, with thousands sick, millions soon to be out of work, and the market crashing more and more every day.  After 9-11 it was a gradual decline.  After Clinton, it took years for the Great Recession to come about and about three years more for unemployment to reach its peak.  

However, COVID-19, originating in China and possibly manufactured*, has caused an immediate and massive closing of the world's economy.  In order to avoid being infected, we've closed EVERYTHING.  We're on lock down here in California as of last Thursday at 1700 to help slow the rise in infections and flatten that curve.  That means ALL businesses are asked to close, not just social-type gathering places such as bars, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.  The Governor of CA is now ordering everyone to stay home.  Think of how many people are now out of work, doing nothing but watching Netflix, ordering takeout, and staying inside- not working, not earning money that gets put back into the economy, not buying, selling, trading, building, paying taxes, or anything that is vital to our economy.  

Source

It's not just the economy that is on hold.  I feel really bad for the kids, over 50 million of them, who have to put their education on break for what is likely to be six months or more.  I don't know how the education system will correct for that.  It's not as if they can just start in September with an automatic promotion to the next grade, nor can schools easily add months to a school year.  Budgets are somewhat fixed and teachers would require additional pay to teach longer, or during cancelled or reduced holiday breaks, etc.   College applications, scholarships, cancelled graduations (my daughter's included) are lost opportunities to some extent.  

The Artist as a 16 year old on her College tour

We're very disappointed that our daughter, once the Teenangster, and now The Artist as I've referred to her a few times, won't be having a commencement ceremony.  She's devastated.  The school told them to extend their spring break by a week, then cancelled graduation** and ordered them out of the dorm for the year, moving to online coursework for the remainder.  For the seniors, that meant not getting to say goodbye to friends, roommates, professors, nor see the product of their year's efforts at the end of year showcase of their art.  Those were very important as they were used for their resumes and a key component of their job hunt.    

I'm flying to Savannah GA tomorrow with her to help her pack up and ship stuff back.  I'm sure more tears will flow.  Probably some from her too.

Weddings, vacations, anniversaries, and many more milestones are gone as well.  Some will be re-attempted, but many just can't be rescheduled.  Our timeshare reservation in Orlando following her graduation is probably gone because there just isn't excess inventory or open dates for us to reschedule into- all the other dates are booked.  Even if we could get down there, I'm not sure that the Disney parks will even be open.  Same for restaurants, bars, the pools, etc.  We have until next week to cancel, but I'm not sure we have any good options.  Oh well.  Yet another victim of the virus.

As a member of DoD, we were directed to go to essential/non-essential manning at work.  I'm so non-essential that I'm barely useful.  This was after USNORTHCOM set HPCON Bravo, then Charlie (minus).  That minus is key.  Not really anything like DEFCON, HPCON is Health Protection Condition.  I think my command's work was fairly unimportant over the past week or so since every exercise or event in the next couple months was already cancelled or pushed back, so that we really didn't need to be at work anyway.  But I work for Surface Warfare Officers who could be given no job, no duties, and they'd figure out a way to work Sundays.  Give them a deadly pandemic, cancel everything, and they still found a way to keep working.  One of the O-6's at work who is on his last job just raised the BS flag and ordered his folks to stay home several days before the NORTHCOM order, and despite what our Admiral at HQ had ordered.  Gotta like it when common sense breaks through.  And in an epic showing of bureaucratic intelligence, we're directed to come in to work today, to be told to go home.   We set up a phone tree and a group text to pass the word, but nope- come in to hear it live and in person I guess.***

I think this virus will hurt the economy far worse and far longer than the previous recessions since so much is shut down.  After 9-11 and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, people were still working.  Many were out of work, but not everyone.  This time, we're hiding from a virus and nothing is happening.  No work, no travel, no manufacturing, no buying anything but food and excess off of Amazon.  Small business will go out of business, big businesses will be laying off workers, and we don't know how long this might last.   It's not just for 14 days of incubation, it's not just a few weeks and we'll all go back to work like it was the Christmas holiday, this is expected to go through the summer.      

Like President Obama did in 2008, an Economic Stimulus plan has been proposed by the White House.  In 2008 it was $152 Billion.  Trump does everything bigger and it's $1 Trillion.  Understandable because of how far reaching this virus is though.

Finance.Yahoo.com

While that '08 stimulus sort of worked, over time, the economy show signs of recovering in 2011 or so.  It took another 5 years for marked recovery.  Amazingly right after President Trump was elected.  I think that was a key factor.  Consumer confidence has been at an all-time high under Trump.  I do think this will happen again.  He is not the stuffy refined diplomat that some might wish him to be, but he understands business.  I think everyone believes in him, even if they hate him and will never admit the economy was good before, and that eventually we'll recover from this.  It's a watershed moment, but water flows and is eventually water under the bridge.  Wow, two metaphors in one sentence.  My high school English teacher would either be proud or appalled.  I'm not sure which.

So I guess I have that same consumer confidence that we've all had since 2016.  You could say I have high high hopes for the economy.

However, and this is more of a post-script epilogue, I'm not a big fan of those stimulus packages to be honest.  We're just screwing our economy over the long term- adding more to the debt.  We're into crazy town with the debt now- over $23.5 Trillion, 24.5 with this latest package.  Nobody is a fiscal conservative any more and it's going to come back to bite us, but probably in our children's lifetime, not ours.  Oh well.  Nevermind that! Lets get that stock market back up!

*Not to be a big conspiracy theorist, but I think COVID came out of China's bio-weapons program.  Not that it was an intentional release into the world, but it probably got out somehow.  They claim it was from people eating bats or snakes, but the Chinese have been eating weird stuff for centuries so I don't buy it.  

**Parents begged for them to just postpone the graduation, but the school claimed it wouldn't be fair to ask grads to return at the end of the summer, financial hardships, disrupting jobs, etc.  

***Found out as I came in Friday morning that not only is the Military is exempt from the California order, but  civilians aren't part of any essential/non-essential plan.  So I'm still working, violating 6 foot spacing, like nothing ever happened.  More stupidity- while the CA order and intent of HPCON C is to help the social distancing, my command only seems to care about the mission that isn't really being accomplished now anyway.  The C- means that it's up to the Commander to decide what he wants to do.