The Economy

It's great compared to the alternative of things having stayed where they were three months ago. It's also fairly meaningless. Even if they could measure GDP in a meaningful way, which they can't, the operative thing with the type of devastation we have seen isn't the 3 month numbers. What matters is where we are relative to before the pandemic. And we have lost more than 3.5 percent of our economy if you compare where we are today to where we were at the end of last year.

Look at it this way. If I have $1,000 and I lose half of it, but then make a 50 percent return on what I have left, I am sitting there with $750. ... when I started with $1,000.

On top of it, much of what we are talking about isn't normal economic activity. They took a $3.5 trillion dollar decline in economic activity (or something like that) and threw more than $5.5 trillion of fiscal and monetary "stimulus" at people to keep them spending. If I max out a credit card and buy a lot of stuff with it, it doesn't mean I am financially healthy. And that doesn't take into account that that "stimulus" is the least efficient way to allocate resources. It doesn't necessarily go toward the productive things that a market sorts out way better than a helicopter drop of money.

But yeah, we have never seen economic swings like this.

 

One other thing. Those GDP numbers, even if they were accurate measurements, are backward looking. And Covid cases are spiking again right now, unfortunately.