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Quote from: HairyMaclairy on May 09, 2020, 11:18:06 AM

I am going to post something quite unpopular. It will make some people mad at me. This is not certain, but I would say it is a 50/50 probability right now. I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I am worry that I am not.

The US has dun goofed its coronavirus response. The US locked down too slow, and now it is reopening up too fast. With the exception of New York, case rates are still rising in every state. Nebraska, which reopened on Monday, reported a 57% case rate rise in the past 7 days. In saying this I acknowledge that testing levels are so low it is hard to work out what is really happening except we know there are superclusters at the meatworks which are not closing because they have been deemed essential.

We have extremely bad economic data. On some readings, the data is worse than the Great Depression. This puts the political leadership at both State and Federal level under enormous pressure to reopen. So I can understand why they are doing it, particularly given there is not the appetite for the social welfare schemes which have been rolled out in other countries to support workers staying in their jobs.

But know this. By half-arsing the lockdown and pulling out too early, and then triggering a crushing second wave in late summer / early fall, the economy will get refucked. The number one mistake is thinking that fighting the virus and supporting the economy are mutually opposed aims. They aren't. Crush the virus and you can have a thriving economy back. Surrender to the virus and you also surrender your economy. Because when your hospitals overflow and your doctors are all dying and there are bodies in the street, there will not be a functioning economy. Reopening now, before adequate testing and tracing is available, and while case loads are still rising, is an act of surrender.

The consequences are not going to flow immediately. Things are going to feel just fine through the next couple of months of summer. It will be warm out. People will say that the warm weather killed the virus. Everyone will be outdoors, drinking beer and having a nice time. Food and bev will start to do a roaring trade again. People will think we are winning. There will be cluster outbreaks which will be blamed on poor management by the Governors. Some regional hospitals will be overwhelmed, but they will be a long way away.

But come late summer or early fall, shit is going to start to become visibly bad. We know the second wave of the Spanish Flu killed far more than the first wave. 195,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu in the month of October 1918. There are 328 million people in the US. The Lancet estimates the Case Fatality Rate of coronavirus at 1.38%. Australia's actual Case Fatality Rate is 1.33%, which is one of the lowest CFRs in the world, reflecting a world class health care which is not under stress and massive testing, increasing the size of the denominator. If half of the US population catches coronavirus, and the CFR is optimistically 1.33%, then that is 4.3 million deaths across America. If the hospitals collapse, the death toll has the potential to get much higher.

I think the reality is we will not get there, and there will be a series of smaller state level, or town level lockdowns. This rolling wave of small lockdowns will fuck the economy good and will spark open conflict between the White House and State / local government.

What does this mean for Bitcoin? I believe that Bitcoin is still predominantly driven by US retail demand. I also believe that there is at least a 50/50 chance that the US economy will be fucked good between now and November. The confounding factor is that the halvening will reduce supply by 50%. Normally I would regard this as a sure thing, but it needs to be balanced against a possibly very sick US economy. Further complicating matters, just about every other developed country in the world has managed to figure out how to beat the virus and will be back on the path to recovery behind locked borders. People in those countries will be able to buy Bitcoin.

My conclusion is that we should not expect an ATH this year, and there is a 50% chance that we will not see the AYH again of $10,501 set in February 2020. Volatility will likely stay very high, which means the opportunity to profit from extreme swings and also opportunity to be liquidated if you are using anything other than very low leverage (less than 1x leverage). So be defensive and don't hold open long positions past the halvening.

Good luck and stay safe.

A. Sweden disagrees
B. The actual fatality rate among infected is somewhere between 0,36 and 0,2 according to the latest studies in Europe.

Not this again...
Most of these fatalities stay one or two weeks in a hospital, take up quite some resources like ventilators and have to be quarantined in ICUs.
Do you grasp the gravitiy of this?

You are an idiot.
We are doing this right now, right here.
We have doubled our number of ICU beds in less than a month, and we are not using them all, not even close.
Is that so hard for you to grasp?
Or do you just like to be locked up buy your government? you are Austrian after all, you guys love hard disciplin, so history shows us.

Just compare the infection charts of Austria and see who's doing it wrong, in respect to the fact we were a main european covid hub in february. It's even not over yet, and Hairy already pointed out that numbers aren't to be easily compared because of different base variables (number of testings). At least i'm clever enough for an idiot to understand this Grin

EDIT: The rest of your "argument" is just nonsense based on prejudice.

You don't seem to understand that we don't want a low infection rate, we want a slow infection rate.
We accept the virus as part of our reality, we don't lock anybody up, all businesses are open as usual, distancing is practiced, but it is a recommendation, not a law, no cop will arrest you if you hug anyone.
And I really, really, prefer it this way.

See, that's perfectly understandable, plausible and objective wording here.
You don't get your point through by calling a discussion participant an idiot.

Let's settle with "controlled infection rate", because this is what most nation's leaders want. Some try to achieve it this way, some try other ways, but the health systems, economy, culture of every country is different, that's why i favour the regional, instead of the national control approach. Lockdown is an emergency measure of China, it acted as a role model, and it did match the chinese culture (anti-freedom, so to speak). The rest of the world was caught naked, there were no pandemic plans, but everybody knew that the days when these plans would be needed would come. And here they are. China stuck to the SARS strategy of combating an epidemic virus outbreak.
This is imho the main factor of failure, not being prepared. There are some more black swan events waiting which we are not prepared for, like the global power blackout and such. We will react to these events unprepared, and this will always cause more damage than the events themselves would. It's a complex system we're dealing with, so you can't just say: this is good..., this is bad... but only: this will likely have these effects... and so on.
Whatever "we" decide to do, it's wrong - in some way - as well as right - in some way. It's a point of perspective.
There's much more to this, but i'd need "JJG superpowers of texting" to express all this in a meaningful way, i guess Cheesy