G'day go flow... I appreciate your views. The rebuilding of all economies will be an enormous challenge IMO... I think that the most impacted nations will struggle for some time, especially US as the POTUS has sent many mixed messages and heavily contributed to the massive rise in infections and deaths through the exhaustion of health services. This has been exacerbated by the attempts to undermine the Obama health initiatives and all this will play out and reduce Trump's chances of re-election. The hiatus of the election will stall much of the needed recovery effort imo, but if Trump isn't re-elected the chances of sensible efforts to rebuild should move into a positive frame.
Consequent of this issue I believe that the US will struggle to recover... they are only now entering the truly serious phase of covid and it is likely to get much worse before it improves.
"Wether China offers anything or even just an apology ..." I have to ask you
@goflow, why do think China is "responsible" for the covid pandemic. Yes it started there, as did swine flu and bird flu as well as SARS, but this is incidental rather than causative. What do you think China did to cause the covid 19 crisis?
I don't think China will have much great difficulty recovering from their epidemic. They acted quickly once they realised the seriousness of the virus and quarantined whole regions to stem the infection. Their efforts have paid off and China is now in rebuilding. recovery and re-opening its economy. The BRI will no doubt continue apace and will help many Asian nations. In the long run, I'm dubious of the overall benefit to Asia as I think the BRI is more about importing resources and increasing market penetration for exports, though there will be further use of Asian workers in their home states to supply the Chinese economy with parts required for Chinese manufacturing. It looks to me more like a colonial expansion of their economic empire.
I read today Ian Verrender's insight piece on
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-06/is-capitalism-dying-or-just-in-isolation-coronavirus/12123874?section=businessFor several years now, Macquarie Group managing director and the group head of Asia Pacific, Viktor Shvets, has been warning clients that conventional capitalism is dead and that it will be replaced by some form of communism....
His argument is compelling. Financial market liberalisation has seen debt levels explode, at a national, corporate and personal level. Central banks have injected so much cash into the global financial system, in an effort to keep it afloat, that traditional business cycles have halted.
Past excesses, rather than being cleared, merely have been added to. And all the while, wealth has become ever more concentrated at the top.The dotcom crash was solved by adding ever more debt. So too was the global financial crisis.
Now we have the COVID-19 health crisis that has shut down the global economy.
According to Mr Shvets, there are only three possible outcomes.
One is that central banks win; that an economic recovery allows them to withdraw their stimulus without collapsing asset prices like stocks and housing. Not much chance of that, he reckons.
The second is that governments take over, pick up the slack in jobs and cooperate with each other to solve global poverty and inequality. Slim chance.
The third is war. This, he argues, is the most likely and the least pleasant outcome. To my mind, I doubt that China is economically a Communist state. It seems to be a nominal politic rather than the Marxist ideology. It could be that China becomes the capitalist stalwart while, if Shvets is right, the US and EU become communist or at least socialist.
Europe is still very much in the grip of covid and is struggling, yet it is looking like they might be at the peak and starting to flatten the growth rate of infections. This is an assumption that may prove quite wrong but imo its looking hopeful. Yet it'll be some months before rebuilding the economies of the four most economically viable EU nations can start to rebuild. At a guess maybe around 6 months. It is likely that nation building will require nationalisation of industries as corporations collapse. Crikey, if that happens the impacts will echo round the planet with consequences only to be guessed at. Imagine the collapse of the German and the Swiss financial systems.
all we can do right now is guess and speculate. Yet I consider that Aus is in a good position and our economy should recover due to the compliance of the Aus people with infection control strategies. I had considered that the claims that the "curve is flattening" was PR rhetoric as the main lowering of the infection rate was due to reduced imported infections, but I now see the community transmission rate is not climbing as I feared and so my hopes of a stronger recovery are bolstered significantly.
Because our electricity generation and distribution network has been able to be maintained, I don't think this will lead to a rise in domestic energy independence. However the struggles in EU and US will, I think, lead to an increased desire to establish community energy grids and individual domestic and industrial independence from the national networks. This may benefit RFX in the long term, probably more in EU than US, as the flow battery benefits of longevity and reliability.
Anyway, I've written too much. Thanks for posting this thread goflow.
respects, Scott.
(20min delay)
