Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Economic implications of a SARS/Coronavirus outbreak

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satanoperca said:
Thanks Junior for adding to the discussion of the economics of a society dealing with a virus that takes life.
Hence my question: How much is a life worth should be rephrased to: How much can a community pay to save a life?
Click to expand...

You've started with the premise that Australia has spent $33m per life in the fight against this virus.

I'm saying, the US has spent somewhere in the order of $3 trillion dollars in COVID stimulus, to save how many lives? There's 175,000 dead and counting, versus 400 in Aus.

My point is, if Australia took NO action to stop the virus, the economy still would have taken a massive hit, and the Govn't still would have provided massive stimulus.

There is a massive cost in taking action against this virus, in terms of restrictions and shutdowns, but in the case of the US, they only imposed very limited restrictions or shut downs, and they've somehow ended up spending far more than we have propping up the economy through this pandemic.
 
Junior said:
You've started with the premise that Australia has spent $33m per life in the fight against this virus.

I'm saying, the US has spent somewhere in the order of $3 trillion dollars in COVID stimulus, to save how many lives? There's 175,000 dead and counting, versus 400 in Aus.

My point is, if Australia took NO action to stop the virus, the economy still would have taken a massive hit, and the Govn't still would have provided massive stimulus.

There is a massive cost in taking action against this virus, in terms of restrictions and shutdowns, but in the case of the US, they only imposed very limited restrictions or shut downs, and they've somehow ended up spending far more than we have propping up the economy through this pandemic.
Click to expand...
But it would have only been the one economic hit.

It is highly likely that the virus will blitz through Australia anyway at which time we will take a second huge economic hit.

No matter which way you look at it these totalitarian lock downs are downright stupid and counterproductive.... unless one has megalomaniacal fantasies like dear leader down in Victoria.
 
wayneL said:
But it would have only been the one economic hit.

It is highly likely that the virus will blitz through Australia anyway at which time we will take a second huge economic hit.

No matter which way you look at it these totalitarian lock downs are downright stupid and counterproductive.... unless one has megalomaniacal fantasies like dear leader down in Victoria.
Click to expand...

The dear leader will have to face an election sometime which is when it will all be sorted out.
 
Well it is really starting to bite now, some big brands biting the dust.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/...ores-in-wake-of-pandemic-20200825-p55ozf.html
From the article:
Fashion retailer Mosaic Brands has swung to a massive $212 million loss and will close as many as 500 stores across the country after the retailer was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At its full-year results announced on Tuesday, Mosaic's chief executive Scott Evans, who operates brands such as Noni B, Rivers, Millers and Katies, told shareholders the company had been "utterly derailed" by the coronavirus pandemic.


Mosaic reported a statutory loss before tax of $212.1 million, a 1900 per cent decline on the prior year's statutory profit of $11 million. The huge fall was partially due to $113.5 million in impairments of the company's brand names and other goodwill.

Revenue fell 16.5 per cent to $736.7 million. The retailer did not declare a dividend.
 
sptrawler said:
Well it is really starting to bite now, some big brands biting the dust.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/...ores-in-wake-of-pandemic-20200825-p55ozf.html
From the article:
Fashion retailer Mosaic Brands has swung to a massive $212 million loss and will close as many as 500 stores across the country after the retailer was ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At its full-year results announced on Tuesday, Mosaic's chief executive Scott Evans, who operates brands such as Noni B, Rivers, Millers and Katies, told shareholders the company had been "utterly derailed" by the coronavirus pandemic.


Mosaic reported a statutory loss before tax of $212.1 million, a 1900 per cent decline on the prior year's statutory profit of $11 million. The huge fall was partially due to $113.5 million in impairments of the company's brand names and other goodwill.

Revenue fell 16.5 per cent to $736.7 million. The retailer did not declare a dividend.
Click to expand...

It's very much worth noting that reporting such as this, which is extremely widespread, is very dishonest.

It is not the virus which has "ravaged" or "utterly derailed" etc these businesses. It is government-imposed restrictions. The virus itself would not have done more than a very small fraction of this damage without a scare campaign and government-imposed restrictions. These businesses would still exist, those jobs would still exist, with the virus and without the human-produced destruction.
 
Sdajii said:
It's very much worth noting that reporting such as this, which is extremely widespread, is very dishonest.

It is not the virus which has "ravaged" or "utterly derailed" etc these businesses. It is government-imposed restrictions. The virus itself would not have done more than a very small fraction of this damage without a scare campaign and government-imposed restrictions. These businesses would still exist, those jobs would still exist, with the virus and without the human-produced destruction.
Click to expand...
Quite possibly, but we can only work with actual events, not speculation. The end result may well have been the same whether the virus caused it or the restrictions, maybe the business model is no longer viable.
There are a lot changes happening in the retail sector, this event may have just accelerated them?
https://www.theage.com.au/business/...mic-sinks-value-of-malls-20200825-p55p08.html
From the article:

Australia’s largest shopping mall owner Scentre Group has sunk to a $3.6 billion loss as the coronavirus pandemic wiped away the value of its properties.

The retail landlord is the latest to feel the scourge of the pandemic, with the steep decline in Westfield’s malls leading the group to report a statutory loss of $3.613 billion for the six months to June.

The decline in the mega retail complexes, has been in decline overseas, for some time. It will be interesting to see, if when this is over it returns to business as usual, or the online model gets a bigger foothold.
 
sptrawler said:
Quite possibly, but we can only work with actual events, not speculation. The end result may well have been the same whether the virus caused it or the restrictions, maybe the business model is no longer viable.
There are a lot changes happening in the retail sector, this event may have just accelerated them?
https://www.theage.com.au/business/...mic-sinks-value-of-malls-20200825-p55p08.html
From the article:

Australia’s largest shopping mall owner Scentre Group has sunk to a $3.6 billion loss as the coronavirus pandemic wiped away the value of its properties.

The retail landlord is the latest to feel the scourge of the pandemic, with the steep decline in Westfield’s malls leading the group to report a statutory loss of $3.613 billion for the six months to June.

The decline in the mega retail complexes, has been in decline overseas, for some time. It will be interesting to see, if when this is over it returns to business as usual, or the online model gets a bigger foothold.
Click to expand...

You can say that hypothetically they may have eventually died anyway from another cause, and you may be correct... which is a really interesting spin on things that you're putting out there... like, say, a virus with kills mostly restricted to people who were about to die anyway! The double standards and biased spin on this whole issue are amazing. We do know that people in palliative care who will die soon... will die soon. You are only speculating that maybe these businesses were going to die, despite the fact that they were in many cases going strong, thriving, growing, until this year.

I'm not trying to equate the value of a business to a human life, but human lives do depend on livelihoods which are dependent on jobs and economies which are dependent on businesses. Either way, the concept of 'it was maybe already going to die' it being used with blatant double standards against 'we literally knew that person was going to die'. We literally have the health minister acknowledging (bluntly and openly) that people dying with the virus and not from the virus are being counted as virus deaths, while you are saying that a business clearly dying from the restrictions and not because of the virus can legitimately be counted as dying from the virus and not the restrictions which actually are killing them.

Same thing with all the mental health issues, suicides, mental health issues, alcoholism, etc etc. The virus is not causing these problems, the restrictions are.

Part of the economic issue every country is having is economic contagion. That is, even without any economic restriction or restriction of freedoms, any individual country would still have problems because virtually every other country is imposing restrictions, and the global economy reaches every nation. The real global effort required is a collective effort in abandoning ridiculous restrictions.

If we genuinely care about lives, abandoning restrictions is clearly the critical, urgent goal. If we look at it on a global context it is so obvious it's absurd. Looking at Satanoperca's figure of around 33 million dollars worth of economic damage per life saved, if we take that in a global context, that's the economic destruction caused (whatever percentage you attribute to Australia specifically or the overall global situation). How many lives can be saved with tens of millions of dollars in a world where people die for want of a few dollars' worth of food? Even with no effort put in to controlling this virus, the number of deaths it caused would be small compared to the deaths caused by things like obesity, starvation, lack of basic medicine and healthcare, workplace accidents etc etc etc etc. Clearly this is not about saving lives, it's just nonsensical to say that.
 
Sdajii said:
You can say that hypothetically they may have eventually died anyway from another cause, and you may be correct... which is a really interesting spin on things that you're putting out there... like, say, a virus with kills mostly restricted to people who were about to die anyway! The double standards and biased spin on this whole issue are amazing. We do know that people in palliative care who will die soon... will die soon. You are only speculating that maybe these businesses were going to die, despite the fact that they were in many cases going strong, thriving, growing, until this year.

I'm not trying to equate the value of a business to a human life, but human lives do depend on livelihoods which are dependent on jobs and economies which are dependent on businesses. Either way, the concept of 'it was maybe already going to die' it being used with blatant double standards against 'we literally knew that person was going to die'. We literally have the health minister acknowledging (bluntly and openly) that people dying with the virus and not from the virus are being counted as virus deaths, while you are saying that a business clearly dying from the restrictions and not because of the virus can legitimately be counted as dying from the virus and not the restrictions which actually are killing them.

Same thing with all the mental health issues, suicides, mental health issues, alcoholism, etc etc. The virus is not causing these problems, the restrictions are.

Part of the economic issue every country is having is economic contagion. That is, even without any economic restriction or restriction of freedoms, any individual country would still have problems because virtually every other country is imposing restrictions, and the global economy reaches every nation. The real global effort required is a collective effort in abandoning ridiculous restrictions.

If we genuinely care about lives, abandoning restrictions is clearly the critical, urgent goal. If we look at it on a global context it is so obvious it's absurd. Looking at Satanoperca's figure of around 33 million dollars worth of economic damage per life saved, if we take that in a global context, that's the economic destruction caused (whatever percentage you attribute to Australia specifically or the overall global situation). How many lives can be saved with tens of millions of dollars in a world where people die for want of a few dollars' worth of food? Even with no effort put in to controlling this virus, the number of deaths it caused would be small compared to the deaths caused by things like obesity, starvation, lack of basic medicine and healthcare, workplace accidents etc etc etc etc. Clearly this is not about saving lives, it's just nonsensical to say that.
Click to expand...
Mate I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying it is what it is and trying to work out what to invest my money in.
If you want to debate the pro and cons of the handling well that's fine, but it isn't going to change anything, the governments are taking an approach and we have to work with that untill they change that approach.
 
SirRumpole said:
The dear leader will have to face an election sometime which is when it will all be sorted out.
Click to expand...
That is assuming the other side hasn't already stocked up on armbands and Jackboots and the inhuman reptiles from both sides have tasted blood... and show no indication of being anything but despotic autocrats.
 
cutz said:
The grim economic news just keeps coming, the stockmarket seems totally disconnected, can't work out why.. Is it a trap ??
Click to expand...
No it is not a trap, just presenting the idea that reality and financial markets are disconnected..

SirRumpole said:
The dear leader will have to face an election sometime which is when it will all be sorted out.
Click to expand...

Bullsh--t, so what you believe in, is if I shot your wife, she is dead, that is okay, as the court system will catch up with me.

Can you lend me some duck down feathers.
 
SirRumpole said:
ie the decision about allocation of medical resources is made in terms of likely outcome not finances, that's the only sensible way of doing it.
Click to expand...

I agree with your post, but the above is so true it is scarey.

Ie we can spend $1M on saving the life of a 85years old which is equal to saving the live of a 5 years cost $1M

All sounds good, until you are told we only have $1M to spend, do you split the costs between the 2 lives and potentially save both or none?
 
satanoperca said:
Bullsh--t, so what you believe in, is if I shot your wife, she is dead, that is okay, as the court system will catch up with me.

Can you lend me some duck down feathers.
Click to expand...

It's even worse than that. It's like if I shot my wife, he could say it's okay, if I was really that bad a husband it's not a problem because she's not married to me any more. Or, if the CEO embezzles hundreds of millions of dollars then resigns due to suspicions, it's okay, because he's no longer working for the company, no investigation or further repercussions required.
 
satanoperca said:
I agree with your post, but the above is so true it is scarey.

Ie we can spend $1M on saving the life of a 85years old which is equal to saving the live of a 5 years cost $1M

All sounds good, until you are told we only have $1M to spend, do you split the costs between the 2 lives and potentially save both or none?
Click to expand...

Tough decisions indeed. But it's also the case that millions of $ are being spent to subsidise drugs to treat diseases that only a few people in this country will ever get. You can argue that's not an efficient way to spend money either.
 
SirRumpole said:
Tough decisions indeed. But it's also the case that millions of $ are being spent to subsidise drugs to treat diseases that only a few people in this country will ever get. You can argue that's not an efficient way to spend money either.
Click to expand...

The fact that there are indeed cases where tough decisions need to be made with ambiguous outcomes does not in any way justify criminal negligence in making a call which blatantly squanders funds and causes far more destruction and suffering than it prevents. Not all cases are ambiguous.
 
"As an example of the narrowing market breadth, Wilson pointed to Friday, when Apple Inc.’s 5% gain could be framed as accounting for all of the total return of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. For the week, the S&P 500 climbed 0.7% to an all-time high while the equal-weight version of the index fell 1.5%, a sign that the average stock didn’t participate in the advance like megacaps...While the lopsided market is nothing new -- the total value of Apple and the other four largest stocks have surged 49% this year while the rest of the market is down 4% "

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...KZhuf0pdlJTCYssoKAu2R6tX70av5aU4kjcXTkfsgLXWM
 

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