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Some thoughts:

- Short term we need government to step in and avoid a large-scale meltdown of businesses that would be more catastrophic than the virus itself. This will likely involve taking equity stakes in airlines etc. Warren Buffet might also be willing to help here again, he has 128 billion USD saved up for times like these :)

- Stock market likely hasn't seen the bottom yet. There will be more deleveraging and panic selling. Long term (10+ years) it's still a good point to buy (perhaps with one third of the capital you do not need anyway)

- Western countries might lose some civil rights that are necessary to quickly control new outbreaks (e.g. analysis of cell movement data to locate all places an infected person visited)

- There will be long-term impact with regards to stricter controls necessary to quickly contain new outbreaks. This will increase costs for a few, potentially a lot of industries (everything travel, potentially logistics)

- I have some fear that some countries which are simply not able to get the virus under control will be disconnected from the rest of the world economy, since no one wants to risk importing the virus from them again.

I hope most of the countries go the way China went in Hubei: Take the most radical measures immediately - i.e. total lockdown, government backs the economy. This will make it possible to lift them after a very short time and affect the economy the least while controlling the spread of the virus.



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That's a joke. Big airlines are terrible businesses, Warren Buffet would never invest on them like this, unless he has gone insane. Also, those billions is from Berkshire, they won't invest the money of their shareholders into bad businesses, I don't see that happening.

Second thing is that you suppose that there will be forever lockdowns. We're only having it because the current health system isn't able to handle all the patients given this exponential spread. Once we finally manage to handle it well and enough people get infected and cured(yes, it is also important). We will move on... until we find a new kind of virus.


Buffet's already done it for Delta beginning of March: https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/buffett-coronavirus-batt...

I'm not assuming there will forever be lockdowns, quite the contrary, but for that there needs to be an effective system for responding to these kind of viruses so there doesn't have to be a full lockdown again. Basically you have to be able to quickly follow up on each case, and this will require things like determining where someone has been the past 10 days or so, and also regular controls (no more flying with any fever?)


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