Who is MMT and where can I find out what you know? Thanks.

And I don’t know the share of debt but plenty of debt investors and bind holders will need their repayments with interest or there’s no market to borrow from.

I see where you’re going here - I’d be lying if I said it was impossible but unlikely? For sure.

Yes vaccine could be ready by Xmas theoretically, but then there’s a few issues with that. It takes a while to mass produce, and then it takes even longer to administer across the population. And then on top of that, will it even be tested properly? I’m think anti vaxxers are complete idiots but even I, of reasonably sound mind, would be wary about shooting up with what will effectively be an unproven vaccine. Not sure if you have read any of Ben Goldacre (bad science etc. Again highly recommended) but as we know there have been plenty of examples of pharma rushing stuff out or using bent scientists and so on to push products to market that years down the line have caused immense harm. Obviously there’s a risk balancing scenario to be explored here but when people go ‘Oh vaccine, will be fine’ it’s way more murky than that.

This is what I posted yesterday:

I'm not an economist myself (can't stand them generally because they seem to have the answer to everything, but only after it's happened - and are incredibly pompous about it) but check out Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) on Google or wherever. Far too complicated to go into but it basically suggests that (all lifted directly from Wikipedia)

MMT's main tenets are that a government that issues its own fiat money:
Can pay for goods, services, and financial assets without a need to collect money in the form of taxes or debt issuance in advance of such purchases;
Cannot be forced to default on debt denominated in its own currency;
Is only limited in its money creation and purchases by inflation, which accelerates once the real resources (labour, capital and natural resources) of the economy are utilized at full employment;
Can control demand-pull inflation[5] by taxation and bond issuance, which remove excess money from circulation (although the political will to do so may not always exist);
Does not need to compete with the private sector for scarce savings by issuing bonds.
These tenets challenge the mainstream economics view that government spending is funded by taxes and debt issuance
Because the government can issue its own currency at will, MMT maintains that the level of taxation relative to government spending (the government's deficit spending or budget surplus) is in reality a policy tool that regulates inflation and unemployment, and not a means of funding the government's activities by itself. The approach of MMT typically reverses theories of governmental austerity. The policy implications of the two are likewise typically opposed.

Misanthropic fatalism - all very Nietzsche. I won't read him as I still have a problem with the boche.

All true of course.

Still, you know it's going to happen.

You know that when the time comes that like the guinea pigs we are...we will run on the wheel provided as there's little other choice....unless of course, the virus massively reduces in the summer and only comes back weakly due to the greater immunity....as has happened with previous new viruses.

Being in a 'vulnerable' group myself (though on the edge of that) I qualify for the 'flu' jab each year.

Last year I didn't bother and laughed it off.....what can I say...I was reading too much Nietzsche.

While I'll go back to taking it I tend to be of the rather more fatalistic view that if your system is weak enough...something's coming for you anyway.

Edited by Stirlingsays (04 Apr 2020 4.05pm)

Sounds like divorce and re-marriage.