Note: Peak Prosperity is about connecting dots. We take a systems level view of things and try to make sense of the world, and predict where things are headed, by joining our understandings of the economy (and systems of money and credit), energy (specifically oil), and the environment into one cohesive story.
It’s impossible to disconnect the social and health impacts of SARS-COV-2 from the economic consequences. One will influence the other. Managing both, and well, is vital to a better outcome for all.
Our current view, unfortunately, is that SARS-COV-2 is exposing the degree to which the main institutions of our time, the Federal Reserve, the CDC and most of its foreign equivalents, the WHO, and most seated politicians, are unable to shed their entrenched ways of thinking (and various conflicts of interest). They’ll catch up. Eventually. But by then the damage will already be done.
I can drink from a firehose of data, it’s my superpower, but I’m struggling to keep up with the economic impacts of this pandemic. So many things simply stopped on a dime. That created both first and second order damage. The first order damage is easy to grasp, the second order damage is exceedingly difficult to calculate.
It’s easy, for example, to calculate the impact on cruise lines of their cancellations, but much harder to figure out the impacts on their ports of call. What happens to the Curacao economy, for example, when 30% fewer ships land there to disgorge their hordes of willing marks?
Flybe, the major regional airline in Europe was struggling, but SARS-COV-2 instantly overwhelmed it and now it’s in bankruptcy:
The immediate impact on the stock and bondholders of that airline, as well as all the pilots and flight attendants is not difficult to assess. The second order impact on all the travel not taken, and all the business not conducted is exceedingly difficult to assess. It would take a dedicated team with some great data feeds and powerful AI to begin to unravel.
The trucking industry in the US is in similar shape to Flybe. Already in a trucking recession SARS-COV-2 seems to have come along at a particularly unstable moment and delivered a swift boot to the lower back.
by madaxerem 
