Dan Ferris on financial media waiting for stimulus

Every finance TV network is running the same headline: "blah blah blah as investors await stimulus." It's like a kid sitting in jail waiting for his dad to come and bail his dumbass out.

~ Dan Ferris, editor of Extreme Value, tweet, March 11, 2020

Bill Bonner on crowd behavior and simple narratives

The world never works the way people think it does.  That is not to say that every idea about how the world works is wrong, but that often particular ideas about how it works will prove to be wrong if they are held in common.  For only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people.  Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies... and often dangerous ones.  Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves in sync with it, and thereby change the world itself.  The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight.  Soon, a person's situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.

~ Bill Bonner, Financial Reckoning Day, p. 3

Kevin Duffy on coronavirus hysteria

Fears that capture the public's imagination and are stoked by media and government are usually overblown.

~ Kevin Duffy

Robert Higgs on how government uses fear to maintain control

Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats.

~ Robert Higgs, "Fear: The Foundation of Every Government's Power," Independent Institute, May 17, 2005

Hyman Minsky on stability

Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.

~ Hyman Minsky

Robert Higgs on government reaction to the coronavirus

There is no threat so mild and manageable that the government's reaction to it can't turn it into a catastrophe.

~ Robert Higgs, Facebook post, March 8, 2020

White House announces additional travel restrictions amid coronavirus spread

Robert Higgs on the coronavirus

As for coronavirus disease, there's good news and bad news. First the good news: the odds that you will die of this cause are very low. Now the bad news: even if you don't die of coronavirus disease you will die of something else, sooner or later.

Did you really think you would be the exception to the rule?

~ Robert Higgs, Facebook post, March 9, 2020