COVID-19: Scrimmage games | July 23 (NBATV), 26 (NBATV), 28 (FSSW) for DAL

[MrGoat]

Really good visualization of the official stats over time in this video compared to the other epidemics of this century



We really need to flatten that curve soon

Well, the tough question is, what if, after April, we have not flattened the curve?  What then?  I can see one more month of this economic shut down, but after that, we better start letting people go back to work, or there won't be an economy sufficient to keep the federal government afloat.

Well that's not even the right question to ask because the federal government will be just fine because they have the 'Federal' Reserve to bail them out, but that would be a looooooong conversation about currency and central banks and I don't want to get too political on a basketball board. 

The real question is more when would letting non essential workers go back to work not be even more detrimental to the economy than staying locked down will be, and that timing is tricky

Well, don't you think that at some point if they keep pumping out this money, it's going to cause inflation down the line?  You can't just print more and more money and expect it to retain value.  We are going to have to have a real economy.

Yes.  At some point if those that regulate monetary policy, The Fed,  just print money then economic theory suggests that not only inflation but hyperinflation would result. 
Others might say that with fiat currency such as we have now in America this is not a great concern.  A large economy like the USA they would say has the ability to absorb it.  See MMT for example. 

What is fundamentally clear to most people in charge we hope is that money represents the power to buy goods and services.
Unless the country is working it cannot produce as many of those goods and services. 
The value of the money ultimately has to be reduced as the supply of the goods and services decreases. 
That's inflation.    

Fortunately the economy was very productive before the crisis, so the thought is that a temporary period of (extremely) low production can be sustained.

Another thing to consider is that inflation is a function of the money supply multiplied by the velocity at which it moves, so adding a lot of cash to a market without velocity doesn't really have an inflationary effect. 

The banks are going to have some number of defaults in their mortgage portfolios and their small and medium enterprise lending businesses. All the loans the banks make are going to have an unexpected number of defaults that would either force them to stop lending and create a financial crisis or they could take that defaulted paper and sell it to the taxpayers at 100 cents on the dollar. Then they just invent the dollar on the computer at the Fed using the currency and diluting the currency but because it's the reserve currency it doesn't reflect dilution. That's what the cash is really doing in this case