Auto news updates

I’ve been catching up this morning and this is the best single article.

https://www.just-auto.com/news/updated-daily-automotive-coronavirus-briefing-free-to-read_id194210.aspx

Commentary available on request. There isn’t much about the cratering credit situation though, so you can find that here:

https://www.autonews.com/automakers-suppliers/automakers-warned-coming-credit-shock

5 dead at FCA, 2000 laid off, so we’re also looking at about 0.25% deaths per unemployment per capita. I like this stat because the number of deaths at Chrysler is going to map well to working demographics in general, though leaning a bit more male and black than average. So even if it’s the Boomer Doomer, we can still do cost-benefit on the shutdowns based on this number.

Basically it’s a tradeoff between the number of people who will die of Coronavirus and the number of people who will die from economic downturn. There are other issues like quality of life, like kidney failure from the disease or the grinding misery of poverty, but we’ll assume for simplicity those cancel out. According to a Hollywood movie I saw, 40,000 people die when unemployment goes up by 1%. We expect that approximately 5% of the population would die if no businesses closed (i.e. no flattening of the curve). That’s about 17.5 million, hereafter referred to as 2.91 Holocausts. So it’s unlikely to be a good idea to keep things open. That means either giving them taxpayer money to inflate unemployment numbers or letting them fail, in which case we’d expect perhaps 25% more unemployment at the end, which predicts 1 million deaths or 1/6 Holocausts.

Presumably there is an optimal point, but clearly it’s somewhere closer to closing down the economy than letting things stay open. To that end, we assume it’s better for more businesses to pay more employees devalued dollars from a printer, by giving businesses printed money, than to give it directly to people who are afterward unemployed. The $1200 is just a way to keep outrage down, because in reality the economics works like this:

“The Covid corporate bonus bailout costs about $18,000 per citizen. So Congress is taking $18,000 from your future, giving $16,800 to corporations and giving you back a check for $1,200.”

Keep in mind the David Graeber book which claims a majority of jobs exist for reasons other than profit. Austrian economic analysis will fail in this situation because approximately 80% of business activity is completely irrational and counterpeoductive. Covert feudalism is the better model.