Originally Posted by Amkeer
The bottom could be a year and a half out. Short term bottom could be in place now. I still see 14000 to 16000 on the DJIA.
I agree 1000%. I posted something similar somewhere else and I believe I was laughed out of there.
Anyone 110 years old around that remembers exactly how bad a pandemic flu can be that kills many millions of people? People have their head in the sand and don't understand exactly how bad it's about to get.
There is no recovery in sight. And no bottom in sight. If your financial adviser says that he expects it to hit bottom in a few weeks, fire him. This is a two year plus event of daily worsening news with no optimism in sight.
Mathematical models show the virus growing at a rate of ten about every 16 days. So today we have 100,000 cases. Expect there to be a million cases in 16 days. In 32 days, expect that number to be ten million cases. After that, govt is overwhelmed and they stop counting cases.
They have war gamed this stuff for years and years due to the threat of bio-warfare. They know what is happening and likely to happen. The US govt has already thrown in the towel and they just expect almost everyone to get it at this point. A poster above said that the media was blowing things out of proportions and causing panic. In my view the media is under reporting the threat and should be doing more to inform the public what the next two years look like.
China, an authoritarian, communist country with massive manufacturing capabilities, is perhaps the best country on the planet to handle this pandemic. They can institute quarantines and measures that would never fly in a free western society.
What can be expected to happen:
1) rationing and limited care. Hospitals will be overwhelmed. The non thinkers say "we have the best health care in the world". Hospitals today are ALREADY at 95% capacity. Add in millions of pneumonia cases, it will collapse.
2) Hospitals did not stock up on personal protective gear. They have a 20-40 day supply worth of mask and gowns. Once they run out, health care workers will not endanger themselves to come to work. Expect a mass exodus of perhaps 80% of the nurses/doctors in US healthcare to quit and stay home.
2a) millions of cases and only 20% health care work force to care for them? A disaster scenario of epic proportions.
3) supermarkets will begin having shortages of supplies , food, and water. They will restock it, but panic buying will cause people to buy way more than needed. So shelves will be perpetually empty and when new stock hits the shelves it will be cleaned out in minutes. This could last for weeks or months.
3a) stores are stocked and managed by...people. The same people that will likely be quarantined , sick, and told to stay home. Most stores, IF they can open, will only have a very limited staff of perhaps 10-30% of normal. Don't expect shelves to be stocked. They likely will just move the pallets out to the store and set them in the aisles, at which point the pallets will be stripped bare in minutes by hungry hordes.
3b- Stores will have a hard time staffing so many will not open. It's hard to get supplies to people when the stores are closed. If civil unrest becomes a thing, managers will not endanger their staff and open to violent or desperate people.
3c- stores not open, people desperate for supplies? They will smash the store entrances and loot. And then you have a store that is damaged and unable to open or supply people any longer.
4) The military is the only workforce that can be required to go to work. With many millions of important civilian jobs not getting done, expect the military to be fully deployed to communities to take up the slack. Soldiers can be used to for law and order, public safety, guarding and distributing supplies, digging mass graves and burying the dead. They will probably supplement some civilian hospitals with military doctors and nurses, or use them to staff field hospitals which will be set up in communities. Normal civilian nurses and doctors can quit and stay home. Military doctors and nurses cannot quit or face court martial and jail time.
5) China and India make perhaps 95-98% of the antibiotics and medicines that are used in America. They have stopped shipping medicines to the western world because they need those medicines at home. Pharmacies will be out of life saving drugs for a very, very long time before being re-supplied, or best case, American manufacturing comes online. But building this capacity from scratch takes a long time and many billions of invested dollars.
There are many more facets but I left you with a small thinking exercise to chew on.