The coming Great Depression

[Bjauck]

Yes, it's all been said many times before. Still we struggle on...……….

The Black Death in Europe resulted in scarcity of labour and the rise of the Guilds (unions) and an increase in living standards for surviving workers. In England this may well have seen the beginning of the end of feudalism.

However today with the effect of this virus and the medical ability and democratic urge to save lives, there will not be a post-epidemic labour shortage. The effect of the epidemic response will likely fall heavily on the surviving workers. The challenge will be to compensate and mitigate the loss of workers' income and employment without over-taxing and stifling business and investment.

[Jiggs]

...the effect of this virus and the medical ability and democratic urge to save lives, there will not be a post-epidemic labour shortage....

Isn't the virus just the straw on the camel's back for the predicted Great Depression II? Many financial journals and websites have been pointing to the oceans of debt and collapsing globalism as the real forces for the coming collapse. I have been studying the 1929 collapse and we now seem to be where they were in early 1930, just after their dead cat bounce.

I bought TRU when it was cheap because I figure countries will still want a cheap test for cervical cancer, even in a depression, and I figure that other shareholders who expect a coming crash will sell retail, agricultural and tourism shares and buy utilities, so have CEN and GNE for now, waiting for the crowd to pump up their prices. But most of the other utilities look overpriced to me, so I'm keeping my pennies in my broker's account at 1% until prices drop. Should I be doing something else? I read of how sales of lipstick skyrocketed in the 1930s depression but I don't know of any NZ companies manufacturing lipstick.

[SBQ]

You can not simply compare the 1929 great depression to today. For the simple reason, and i'm certain these critics that spew their angle of the issue, is that the world is far more connected today than in the early 30s. Because of this close connection and wide use of economic data (with a MUCH higher degree of accuracy than 100 years ago), gov'ts around the world and the central banks are able to have a tighter control of the global economy. Issues like Quantitative Easing & MMT never existed back then, the "tools" that central banks had at their disposal again, never existed back then. You simply just can't forecast or base assumptions on a graph showing how much the market crashed in the Great Depression and assume that the same could happen again. That's the biggest problem with looking at charts ; much like a photo snapshot at the time but certainly should be not indication history will repeat in the SAME manner.

Yes crashes do come and go but to the smart investor, all of that is noise and what is more important is the long term plan. "It's not how many times you go in or out of the stock market but rather... how long you stay in that counts"

[arekaywhy]

Isn't the virus just the straw on the camel's back for the predicted Great Depression II?

you mean...the government's response to the virus