FIRE Land

First let me say this blog is not monetized or advertized and it is barely read. I write it to keep track of my thoughts during my retirement and to allow you to track my thoughts as well. The feedback from the few who comment informs me as much as I hope what I write informs them. Being not monetized, and the fact I never check analytics gives me a writing environment not encumbered by agenda. I don’t write click bait but some of what I write is provocative. I write about stuff I’m studying and thinking about and my choice of topic is based on what I think is interesting about financing a retirement. I try to avoid politics except the political sometimes enters into retirement reality BIG TIME. This is one of those times.

It’s all very interesting. Big ERN is still taking my feedback on his bog for which I am grateful. I consider ERN a blogging buddy and smart as hell and I give his advice considerable merit. I think I have something to say and I hope what I say and because my opinion is considerably different than the prevailing “buy the dip” understanding of reality, it gives his readers some counter point when trying to decide what is going on. Others like CD takes my posts as well. CD is a hell of a writer and always refreshing and is the ultimate UN-Boilerplate in a blogoland full of boilerplate and tripe.

I have posted to Financial Samurai in the past. He no longer takes my posts, which is fair enough but telling about his agenda. His blog seems to be about promoting a dogma as opposed to engaging in discussion and acquiring knowledge. He feels himself a financial mastermind peddling his masterful knowledge to the mere masses. In the mean time he’s about to unFIRE and go back to work because he figured out his 50 year retirement narrative doesn’t work, and he’s smart enough to get it and then change it, and honest enough to share that with his readers. That takes cojones, and will be his secret to success. He’s front running the train.

I was over there this week and he wrote this:

4) Financial Samurai traffic is down ~20% YoY. Instead of Financial Samurai benefitting from fear and uncertainty in the stock market and economy, it looks like more people would rather stay as far away from anything finance-related as possible. It feels better not to look at your finances when they’re getting clobbered, so people don’t.

People also tend to stop trying to educate themselves as it’s simply too painful a time period. With a decline in traffic comes a commensurate decline in revenue. If finance-related companies start shutting down, revenue will decline even further.

Again I have to hand it to Sam as he rationalizes the death of his golden goose. It’s not that his financial advice that is bullshit, its his readers who are no longer interested that are bullshit. It’s not his overexposure to leverage that is his problem, and so he has yet to come to terms with reality. He started his blog in 2011 and the market has gone strait up in those 9 years. He’s made money in real estate and finance and glories in his non frugality, which is fine by me, but a $300K financed lifestyle in a market that’s going up isn’t that big of a trick. The trick is living a $300K/yr financed lifestyle when the market is blowing up. It’s the Buffet perspective. You know who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. I think old Sammy’s narrative has gone and bit him in the naked ass, but my hat is off because he is man enough to admit it. It’s in the volatility we all learn the truth. The path to success is only understood by the experience of and response to failure. We are in the middle of one MOTHER of a failure and he’s kvetching about his analytics being down 20%. He hasn’t seen anything yet. The unemployment rate is going to 20% and the GDP is projected to be down 24% this quarter. They are optimistic the year ends flat. I’m not that optimistic. Neither am I surprised that people are not tuning in for the latest “how to make a million dollars in your spare time with crowd funding scheme” when job loss makes being able to feed the family a problem.

I’ve surveyed a few other FIRE blogs. DiversFI is still pumping out podcasts about living the life. It’s audio of “the oh so smart” engaged in their own delusion. I got better things to do with an hour much less an hour a week. Our Next Life is writing Our Next Book which will sell zero copies. Who the F*** cares about some middle aged chick with red hair’s take on “living with liberal purpose in the land of plenty” when it’s unclear if your are going to spend the rest of your liberal life living as a respiratory cripple or even live at all, much less whether you will have the funds to do that? It’s shear arrogance. I wonder what’s happened to her analytics.

Dropped by WCI and found the latest boilerplate “classic article” on “6 things to do in a bear market”. What a hoot! A 24% projected drop in GDP and 20% projected unemployment and a world wide pandemic and he thinks we are in a boilerplate bear market! Are you really going to model your life after this idiot? Physician Philosopher is “buying and holding” with the best of them. Jimmy has about 2 years of investing experience. Hopefully if he doesn’t die his portfolio will come back. At least he is pretty smart about having insurance except what if there are no insurance companies? Going to be a LOT of claims I do believe. Jimmy’s a big fan of Pareto, 20% account for 80% and presumes himself part of the 20%. What if he really is part of the 80%? Statistically it’s more likely to be an 80%er than a 20%er. PoF’s latest is on “how much time it takes to manage your own rental property” Guess it won’t matter much of there are no tenants. If you’re levered much you might consider dropping the keys in the mailbox and just walking away. That takes seconds. Get Rich Slowly is heading underground

Believe it or not, the current coronavirus crisis is affecting Get Rich Slowly too. Things are slow around here. Traffic is down. Revenue is down. Production is down. Plus, I have a big deadline at the end of the month. My project for Audible and The Great Courses is due on March 31st.

So, just like the rest of the world, we’re going to press “pause” for a couple of weeks. I will return next Wednesday with my annual birthday article, but you’ll have to scroll down to see it. I’m going to pin this post to the top of the front page

Revenue is down so time to do more profitable things than write blogs about Armageddon that might hurt the brand. Actually a pretty smart move. I think JD is a smart guy. I stopped by MMM what a treat! In true MMM format he’s trying to sell you shit! Pure shit. Stick that in your mustachian and smoke it! (Mustachian does sound like some kind of hookah) Damn the torpedoes full steam ahead screaming 4 x 25 all the way!

The NIH is projecting 70K cases by next week and it’s already Saturday and these bozo’s are telling you how to best fund the 529. Now you see FIRE as it really is. A quaint technique that works during a period of gross if not obscene abundance. When the abundance dies the FIRE goes out. Completely disconnected from reality. Completely worthless in the pinch. Completely without credible risk management. Their advice “when the train is barreling down on you, stand your ground!” Personally I’d get off the tracks. I’m not sure getting run over by a train is good risk management.

The county will survive but I think a very different landscape will present on the other side after the storm passes. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. There is permanent and unrepairable damage that occurs. I think permanent damage to the machine will happen to the extent the plumbing will need rebuilding world wide. It’s time to stay humble and try to separate reality from fantasy. The media is not your friend. The media including FIRE bloggers wants to sell you My Pillows and their agenda.

22 Replies to “FIRE Land”

  1. You mentioned you sold your long term bonds and went to cash. I still have a large position in symbol IEF 7-10 yr govt bond ETF. Since the 10 yr yield is now below 0.9% and I do not believe we will have negative interest rates, upside from here is limited. There may even be downside price risk if the govt has to do a massive bond issuance. So I am considering liquidating, but am curious what you chose as your cash vehicle. Short term treasury fund like BIL ? Money market fund ? I am hesitant with money market without knowing the strength of the counter party. At least the govt owns the printing presses..
    Thanks,
    Eric

    1. I went to a treasury only MM fund FDLXX for now. Short term like 1 mo T bills went negative a couple days ago. This whole thing is out of control with only a pretense of rationality. That’s what happens when every measure of volatility goes nuts, reality becomes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Picture yourself in a boat on the river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies…

  2. Some blogs are small businesses, or large like WCI, and not in the spirit of the early Internet of freely sharing opinions and information. For example, look at the wide promotion of real estate crowdfunding on those sites. Individuals who have bought too much into the idea of getting out of work early on 4% forever will likely have a difficult time ahead unless they can re-enter the dwindling workforce.

    It looks bad for the financial “system” right now. They were able to punt in 2008, but the unfolding crisis may be the reckoning. In that case, permabears and goldbugs will finally be correct having predicted a deep financial crisis for so long. Or, maybe not and the financial system that able to reinvent itself after 2008 will do so again. I think you are seeing things clearly and yet I can’t bring myself all into gold, BTC, and USD to ride out a liquidity crisis. I think corruption (not quite the right word) is so baked into the system that we may somehow get out of this crisis by means of manipulation. A debt jubilee? I’m not sure.

    1. The problem is we never got out of 2008. That bad paper is still on the FED balance sheet. That is moral hazard, which is the idea you get stuff for free. You can take all the risk you want and if you win pocket the cash but if you loose no foul and someone else gets the tab. We are in a car crash somewhere on the event horizon. The FED policy will just drive us deeper into the black hole and slow down the “apparent crash” but we will be crashing none the less. The correct and more painful maneuver is to move away from the event horizon and slowly let things reset. The virus is the perfect model for this. If we crash all at once that’s like no intervention medicine will be overwhelmed and there will be maximum carnage. If you collapse the curve carnage will be minimized but carnage MUST occur since the only way to immunity is to get the infection. If you lock everybody up (money for nothin and your chicks for free) the infection will die for a while then roar back. In 2008 we effectively bailed out everybody and now the infection is back.

  3. Hi Gasem,

    I appreciate the frankness. In the worst-case scenario, an 85% decline (on par with great depression) could happen. I hope that’s too pessimistic as the financial system is much looser now, so QE will prevent that. unfortunately, inflation or stagflation may occur. How do you mitigate this risk?

    Unrelated question: Is there any individual benefit to testing? I don’t see any treatment offered to mild cases.

    1. I think I won’t practice internet medicine and let your physician make that decision regarding testing. States have pretty specific guidelines.

      The FED just added 4 facilities to take any crap onto their balance sheet. Gotta boat bring it on down to the window! We don’t need more liquidity we need for poorly run businesses to go out of business and be replaced by well run business. We need airlines, we don’t need airline companies that have taken perverse amounts of debt to enrich the C suite. If airline companies go bankrupt the assets will be sold and whoever buys the assets will inherit a clean balance sheet and air travel will continue. Constantly wrecking the economy by pumping money we don’t have WILL lead to stagflation or hyperinflation. The S&P 500 since it’s peak in 1999 adjusted for inflation and dividends reinvested has returned only 2.275%/yr from Dec 1999 to today. I had a bank account that returns 2.43% FDIC insured. Today it’s paying 1.75% so what’s the point of expo?sing your money to risk for an extra 50bp? With regard to inflation, I’m not sure what to do. I’m for sure buying gold back. I may have made a mistake selling that but I felt I needed to go to ground and I needed to take some time to understand why gold was falling as much as it was. The reason is levered risk assets are backed by collateral and when you get the margin call you need to come up with the cash or the position is automatically closed for you. If you own gold you sell the gold to cover the bet. Because of this GVX gold volatility blew out and the price became more unstable. Gold vol went to like 51 and it’s usually 10 so a 5 SD move. I’m not sure how much to buy but I’m buying it in a Roth so if it triples I can start to move that gain into another asset class. GLD moved down 10% stocks moved down 35% so there is some relative vol but I think it’s worth the inflation protection. I’m looking at TIP I don’t know if TIP can go negative and TIP can become illiquid but it is some kind of inflation protection. Another problem is the inflation is gauged against CPI which is a way underestimate of real inflation. Stocks in the long run tend to hedge inflation but if they go bankrupt they didn’t hedge much. Commodities can hedge in a growing economy but at a – 24% GDP good luck with that one. In 1929 gold held up and gold miners did very well. The problem with gold miners is a lot of them are like penny stocks, they have a good narrative but no assets. The only gold to be seen is the wrapper on the Hershey’s kisses in the break room. Not quite sure what to do but I gotta do something at least with some percentage.

  4. Hey Gasem,

    So my 36 year old self was not so silly after all. I accumulated 50 x my living expense. I never even heard of FIRE.

    My plan was to simply work part time to make 100K and call it a year. Easy peasy.

    The thought of completely stopping work when able would never have crossed my mind just bc one had so-called enough money.

    Cuz something always happens in life. Everyone is getting a severe dose of this right now.

    Money isn’t fully real. Risk lies everywhere.

    I told my kids and parents to isolate long before the government issued guidelines.

    1. Hey MB I hope 50x is enough, this is very freaky and I’m not sure how this is going to proceed. The FED under Obama went head long into moral hazard and now we are paying the price and it’s going to be a world wide price. Money is real but risk is its match. Good luck my friend!

  5. It is scary times indeed.

    Even professions such as being a physician does not make you immune to losing your income. There are stories popping up now that because elective surgeries have been canceled at a lot of hospitals a lot of docs who rely on this for their livelihood may have a greatly diminished paycheck or not one at all.

    This makes my decision to be debt free in retrospect the best decision I could have made. Not worrying about a mortgage payment and other debt really eases my mind that if the belt has to be tightened it shouldn’t cost me a roof over my head.

    I’m still a bit perplexed about how bitcoin and gold is performing in this market. I would have thought btc would shine during a crisis such as this especially when the feds are pumping in money and under the FIAT system can lead to inflation. But btc took a hit and gold did too (though it does make sense with your explanation that people may have to sell to make margin calls etc).

    I did buy some more btc on the dip because I do think the technology concepts behind it are pretty sound and a great hedge to take.

    1. The story is yet to be written. Macro themes are yet to be written. I also bought a little more BTC when it dropped around the 12th and that’s gone up like 40% since then. I decided to buy a little Etherium as well because of it’s ability to add contracts to its ledger. I bought it at $100 and it’s $132 today. If there is no electricity in 5 years it will be worthless, but then so will all of my assets since they only exist in a computer anyway.

      Gold does not serve a simple risk on risk off function. Gold is a currency and when the margin man calls and you’re trying to unwind a bazillion dollar levered position the last thing you need is the margin man making you flat. I had this happen to me when I used to trade commodities. It took a profitable trade and killed it dead just before it went into profit. In fact that’s why I quit trading commodities. I decided you need to be on the floor or in one of the trading rooms directly above the floor to be close enough to the market to make decisions. I had a 10ft C band satellite dish in my yard and that data stream wasn’t close enough to real time. So gold is a store of wealth that can be used to pay the margin man when he comes calling. The market works like any other market if the supply goes up the price goes down. You can see this is the case by looking at the volatility of gold the vol is GVX and it went from 10 to 50 last week this means a shit load of supply hit the market to pay the margin man.

      All of your perceived notions of what “ought” to happen go out the window when volatility moves 5 standard deviations. Last week every measure of vol moved at least 5 SD so there is no price predictability in any asset class stocks bonds gold currency debt oil real estate etc Eventually the vol will drop and some kind of correlation will once again develop between the various markets and things will be a little more predictable. The problem is by the time that happens what you own may be worth 30% of what it was valued at prior. This scenario is called tail risk and we are not living near the mean right now but out in the tail, about 5 SD into the tail. 5 SD is called a black swan. At 5 SD into the tail, risk becomes completely unpredictable so that’s why I sold most of my risk. BTC is the only risk I own right now, except my cash is liable to inflation so even that isn’t risk free and needs to be hedge. It’s a very disorienting time.

      Were it me, I’d keep my job and erase any plans to retire at 53. I think this whole FIRE thing is going to prove to be a total load of crap. Unfortunately I’m pushing 70 and not really able to pull the load of a full time physician anymore especially a hospital based practice. So I don’t have the luxury of being able to accumulate and I think soon enough all of these side gig money schemes like blogs or being a real estate tycoon are going the way of the dodo also.

      Finances are going to be the least of our tragedies. There are 26,000 cases in the US and 12,000 are in one state mostly in one city. That state is the tip of the spear. If you look at my Wuhan Fractal article you will realize the NY experience sooner or later will be all of our experiences because that fractal is how the virus embeds itself into humanity. The only way to immunity right now is through illness, and illness will come hell or high water. Slowing the rate of illness won’t stop the illness it will only change the pattern of spread.

      If you have a beaker with water, and drop in a drop of food color eventually the whole beaker will be a uniform color. If you raise or lower the temp it will raise or lower the rate of spread but not alter the eventual outcome. Treating the infected makes a difference on the margin but it won’t alter the end game. 3% of us aren’t getting out of this one alive. Those are the laws of thermodynamics.

  6. Gasem,

    You’ve been a gadfly for many, whispering uncomfortable truths when they ran contrary to our understanding of reality.

    Considering and continually re-examining your ideas is how I arrived at a place where I was able to take some risk off the table before the crisis hit (a lot of dumb luck factored into the equation as well). You brought home the value of the Bernstein adage: The goal of investing is not to get rich, it’s to not die poor. I am grateful to you for thinking I and others were worth reaching. I’ll also add that even when the future was crystal clear to you, it took me additional time to come around. It was coming fast and hard, and I wasn’t ready to see it for a long time.

    I see human frailty more at play than any ill will on the parts of many of the bloggers you call out – some had written the content before things were dire. Some are just offering a bit of escape. None diminish the current landscape, and all will likely see their incomes reduced significantly. Like me, perhaps they just weren’t ready to see what has been there. It’s a bug in the code.

    This period will teach most docs I know (those who read these blogs) the need for caveat emptor in any investing philosophy. Hopefully the physics will penetrate in bad times so that they are not forgotten in the good times.

    Thanks for being the conscience of the physician investor world – it’s no small feat, and it’s often unpopular, but you are making a difference. And as someone who has a bug in my code, and is regrettably blind to rational decisions more often than he’d like to admit, thanks for forgiving my frailties when they arise.

    With gratitude,

    CD

    Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
    You saw her bathing on the roof
    Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
    She tied you to her kitchen chair
    And she broke your throne and she cut your hair
    And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

    1. I don’t intend to be a gadfly. I’m not just a contrarian or miscreant by philosophy. I believe in buy low sell high. not buy high, then buy higher then hold no matter what while your wealth evaporates. I lost my first million in 2001. I was long tech mutuals and some Dow shares like GE. The mutual ended up paying 15 cents on the dollar when they were liquidated by Fidelity out from under me. GE was also at its zenith in 1999 and never recovered to its peak again, so I experienced that reality of actually loosing money through buy and hold and my conclusion was not “the market always goes up”. My conclusion was the market is fraught with risk. In 2003 I put 1M in cash in the S&P when it was about 670 at the beginning of the gulf war. That was my experience with buy low. It worked pretty well. I lost my second million in 2008. I had just discovered efficient frontier investing and got all tuned up with an efficient portfolio and promptly lost 1M, on paper this time. The previous million was a real loss. I did a DCA technique after that and did a buy and hold till I retired and asset reallocation. Throughout that period I learned how it works. Buy and hold only works when the economy is on an upward slope and personally I think the universe has changed. To Friday the S&P 500 inflation adjusted dividend reinvested return on a 20 year portfolio was only 2.275%. That in reality is what the S&P has returned. Essentially 2% above inflation using a 100% all stock low cost index fund portfolio. If I know that the information is readily knowable yet I never see that used as a baseline for doing WR calculations. If you have 2M and loose 1M, and only make 2.275% above inflation it takes 31 years for buy and hold to make you whole again. That doesn’t include any withdrawal. That’s just the remaining 1M in a fund earning 2.275% on the average. Bet you never saw that narrative on WCI did you. It’s not about ill will it’s about arrogance. It’s very hard to back down from your unproven narrative when you are hauling in 7 figures/yr on it.

      I consider FIRE as a hobby, a hobby with very high stakes. It’s a hobby where you bet your entire future on some plumber’s or electrician;s or physician’s fever dream narrative. I don’t believe in their narrative. Mine is alternate and I’m happy to share what I think. Maybe the counter point will help someone. I think it’s a time when the rubber has met the road. I’m glad my counter-narrative saved you and some others some dough.

      Stay safe out there this isn’t over by a long shot. It’s barely getting started.

  7. OMG you are so fucking awesome!!! I am sad I only found you 2 week ago and still can’t figure out how to sign up for your posts. I have been reading the FIRE blogs for about 8 years and have argued with a many dip shits touting how they only need 500k in saving to live the rest of their lives all because MMM says it is possible. I have followed many that went back to work, monetized there blogs and say they are retired but in reality are just stay at home dads, that is “Retire by 40”, he is a piece of shit, while his school teaching wife takes home 70+K and full insurance he talks about how he is retired, he is just a little man trying to compensate for taking care of his kids.

    It will be very interesting if this virus keeps us down for an extended period to see how many of the pompous asses run for the hill and hide for the years of bad advice they gave. I am all for the FIRE movement but when they talk about and praise people to live off of 25k a year and talk about side hustles when we all know that when the shit hits the fan the side hustles are usually the first to go there advice could prove to be oh so wrong.

    1. I won’t be quite that aggressive in my analysis but there is some truth there. It’s a free country and you can publish whatever blows your skirt up and live your life however you like. What I think will happen is FIRE will prove to be a fraud and the market will price their “truth” appropriately. When all the finserv providers go out of biz the add dollars dry up. When people follow your advice and loose 3/4 of their money you somehow loose credibility and the analytics close in on zero. Cause and effect. One thing for sure the best way to insure success is to analyze failure.

  8. Geez,

    How do you really feel though? Ha.
    I’m just glad my blog didn’t make the list. Fortunately, mine too is “barely read.”

    I knew a crash was coming. As did anyone with investing experience.

    After 11 years of increase it was inevitable. But this is a mother of a bear and guaranteed to point to a recession.

    How bad, I’m not sure. But it could be very bad. I have been investing for over 35 years now and I can’t recall a collapse where virtually every sector took a hit.

    The 1970s had inflation and stagflation which were bad. But a slow death.

    Decades of minimal stock movement.
    Then 1987 a shocking loss but fast rebound.

    2000 taught the tech fools a lesson of economics but the big conservative companies did fine.

    2001 hit hospitality and travel.

    2008 crashed financials and real estate and of course stocks. But bonds held up. And health care chugged along.
    This one is more extensive. It will be terrible for months. I’m hoping it will get less terrible after that and be somewhat normal by 2 years from now.

    I’m only 1/3 in stocks and still am down … well…. a couple years income.

    Glad I’m still working part-time. But there isn’t much of a job for me to do right now. It is a good time not to be in health care. You got out just in time.

    1. Hey WD I hear ya man. I don’t know either where it’s going to end. I would have stayed in bonds except I don’t understand how the plumbing is going to hold up. The fed seems to have one trick, print money and it’s going to print trillions maybe tens of trillions to keep companies alive that should go out of business. This will be exacerbated by the disruption caused by mortality and morbidity of the virus itself. The money printing from 2000 and 2008 went into a everything bubble, everything except core inflation and I think 10 trillion trying to pump up zombie companies will just about finish us off. A business cycle implies EVENTUALLY SOMEONE HAS TO FAIL. Once someone fails many someones will follow. A job is a great diversifier. It’s good to hear from someone that lived through all of what I did.

  9. Hey Gasem,

    I don’t always comment, but I always read all your stuff. I always appreciate that you have no agenda except for telling it how it is in your perspective and in you own entertaining way.

    Just like Wealthy Doc, I’m glad I didn’t make the list too. Fortunately, I’m also barely read; so it’s not like I’m seeing a dramatic drop in readership (ha!). Plus I barely write anymore since I find the time with my family more valuable, plus I’m too busy these days working and not FIRE’ing. Patients out there need my services as a anesthesiologist, so I’m there to work. Who knows, it might get so bad that the ORs will turn into ICU and I’ll have to be a critical care ICU physician again.

    Anyways, I always appreciate your insight. I got lucky and sold almost all of my individual equities around the peak. I took off the profits in investment gains, which was only about $60k since I only invest about 5% of my portfolio in individual equities. Since I know I’ll be taxed on those capital gains, I’m tax loss harvesting with my index funds to try to offset those gains. A profit is a profit.

    I didn’t touch my retirement accounts (Keogh, Roth 401k, and Backdoor Roth, wife’s govt 403b and her 401k) since we are still relatively young (30s), planning to work another 30 years, have a relatively long investment horizon, and have a decent asset allocation mix of stocks and bonds that I’m comfortable with.

    Anyway, thanks again for all your insight.

    1. Hey Doc! Good to hear from you. I’m not working and I don’t have insurance any more but I’m still licensed so I was trying to figure out if I could do some kind of telemedicine thing or something but so far haven’t figured that out, so I spend my time learning more about epidemiology and second order system dynamics than I ever wanted to know. I stop by your site and there is usually a new pic of your kid breaking the camera with her endless cute-i-tude, its nice to see her grow up. I read David FIPhysician’s analysis and he kind of feels most places won’t get overwhelmed but to do that needs the hammer and dance.

      I read tonight the invincible spring breakers are now getting sick. My own kid moved in with her BF so she can go wherever and do whatever she wants. She’s 21 so there isn’t much I can do about it except not act in retribution. Still it’s very distressing to me.

      Glad to hear you made some good moves toward risk off. I won’t be here but it would be interesting to see what 30 years in the future holds. More than ever we’re all in this together

      1. Hey Gasem,
        I feel your pain! Been hunkering down for the past week and a half, but have a 22 yo college kid who wants to go back to his off-campus apartment 200 miles away (spring break plans got cancelled so been staying with the ‘rents). We’d rather he stay but he’s no longer a 3 yo who can be put in time-out. We think he’s mature enough to follow the new social norms and precautions so with trepidation we’ll let him go. I too read David at FIPhysician feel like his analyses is reasonable provided people can actually follow the restrictions on normality. Human density like a cruise ships, nursing homes, or verticle living like NYC seem to accentuate the risk. Stay safe my friend, I enjoy contemplating your musings.

        1. Hey GF David for sure is the expert but I’m on the pessimistic edge of the risk range. I don’t think we yet know enough about the finer points of the viral biology and pathophysiology. The reality given the present understanding is about 4.5 Billion need to get sick in some fashion over the next 2 years for this thing to become tamed. I find it astounding the markets are rallying in the face of this reality. It just goes to show you the power of the buy the dip narrative. Hope your kid fares well my friend.

Leave a Reply to Eric S Schoellkopf Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.