Recovering from capitalist pandemic

We obviously want people to recover from COVID-19, but when it comes to society as a whole there's going to be a bigger recovery from the structural impact of the virus that effects everyone.

The pandemic caused an infection in capitalism too. Even if you recovered from the virus, you'll have to recover from the economic crisis it’s causing.

Here's a podcast whose first segment is really interesting on this, though it might not seem like it at first. It’s about bond markets. I’ve been dealing with my anxiety around the pandemic by looking into wonky capitalist stuff that socialists don’t tend to talk about. I’m an education researcher, but what happens in places like bond markets really impacts public education. So here we are.

Everyone's rushing to do a fiscal response (when the government spend money to do a thing, as opposed to a monetary response, which messes with interest rates, etc).

Okay sure, but what makes a fiscal response possible? The fact that the government can spend money to do stuff.

Where does government money come from? Other than printing more money (paging MMT), it comes from bonds: when people give the government money with the promise that the government will pay them back later with interest.

The US bond market is considered the safest in the world. It's a 'haven'. While that's still sort of true, this podcast is talking about how the bond market is 'dysfunctional' right now: it's not as good as it should be. People aren't buying bonds.

Why? This capitalist guy Jim Bianco—who appears to be able to predict things pretty well— says it's because of the lack of coronavirus tests.

If we had more tests, we'd know the extent of the infection and then how long it'll take to recover physiologically and economically. But since we don't know, people don’t want to give the government money because anything could happen. Bond markets are low when they should be high.

So what does that mean in terms of production recovery? It means the government's legs are weak as it tries to help. And overall the relationship between the viral recovery and production recovery are agonistically linked.

The recovery immunity you gain from dealing with covid-19 does not extend to the economic collapse spreading throughout society. Even with a moratorium on utility shut offs or evictions, the debt will still remain

Meanwhile, jobless claims came in this morning and it's bad. The US national rate spiked 70,000 claims over what was expected. Recovery might look like an L rather than a V, as the capitalists are saying.