by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m a nobody. I don’t know anything. Ignore me. I’m a crank. A hayseed rube in the middle of nowhere who Maggie Haberman called out on Twitter for not knowing anything about (access) journalism.
I am all those things.
I am also, however, someone who believes reality is very important.When otherwise “normal” people who wouldn’t sit next to me in a Manhattan coffee shop act rather delusional I grow concerned. This brings us to COVID19.
The Masters of The Universe who make $20 million bonus in a year are living in a dreamland of their own making. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some sort of doubt about the situation, but there is none — a huge domestic crisis is careening towards the United States and “Dow Joans,” as POTUS recently called Wall Street, is living in a very weird denial. I am well aware that the fundamentals are fine, but so were the Titanic’s until it struck a fucking iceberg.
The crazy thing is it’s empirical that what’s going on in Italy, South Korea and Iran IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES WITHIN TWO WEEKS. What’s more, for a number of worst-case-scenario reasons, we’re not doing anything to mitigate the situation. By the time we do, in a terrified spasm, it’ll be way too late.
What happens — probably around The Ides of March — is going to be like a real life horror movie. So many people will be sick — and so many elderly people will be dying in quick succession — that it goes without saying that the economy is going, for the short term at least, lock up and collapse. Let me be clear — this is not finance advice. Why would anyone listen to me? Maggie Haberman thinks I’m a crank.
I would note, however, that if I had any money — which I don’t — I would probably (glup) be looking at Bitcoin. I also would ever-so-slowly cash out and look for something that might actually do me some good in a short — if severe — crisis. If I was ultra-rich, I would hide out in one of those doomsday bunkers I keep hearing about. (Of course, as a poor, I have I vested interest in this because, lulz, it’s easier to seize rich people’s property if they’re doing rails on tails off of some whore’s asshole in a doomsday bunker and not paying any attention to the revolution taking place in the real world.
Do I really think it will get that bad, though?
Sorta.
I do think the United States’ economy is going to crash very, very soon, for no other reason than we’re going to be sucker punched by COVID19 in a rather dramatic fashion. It will be like a real-life horror movie without the zombies. But it will be real life and so, as such, we’ll make it through it. Though it will be mentioned in the same breath as the Civil War and WW2.
If it makes the Masters of the Universe feel better, once we finally get everything sorted out in about a year, we’re likely to have a post-Civil War level boom. A huge amount of money will be made because of the “creative destruction’ associated with what just happened. It will be a tragedy. Some pretty wild things may happen — not all of them beneficial to plutocrats — but it’s possible Millennials will stop killing industries and start making them.
But I guess, for me, the issue is we have to prepare for the boil to be sliced. We have to prepare for all hell to break loose in a rather Pearl Harbor kind of a way.
