1. Roman Frydman and Edmund Phelps write,

The government’s approach is ill-suited to the crisis. The stimulus isn’t merely the wrong dose, but the wrong medicine altogether.

Instead of boosting public employment or seeking to stimulate demand, lawmakers should focus on mobilizing the private sector to combat the public-health crisis. We don’t dispute the need to improve America’s highways, airports and other infrastructure. But that would do nothing to address the specific causes of today’s crisis: self-imposed lockdowns to stop the spread of disease.

The CARES Act will live in infamy as one of the worst pieces of legislation every enacted. The portions of it that were supposed to address short-term liquidity needs have been nullified by complexity and bureaucratic snarls. But you can bet that the portions that reflect rent-seeking and irrelevant agendas will be implemented much more effectively.

And the politicians in Washington think that this is only the appetizer. They are preparing the next course.

2. Gary Cohn and Glen Hutchins write,

The Fed will be operating at an unprecedented scale, reportedly lending as much as $5 trillion, which is more than its entire balance sheet before the crisis. It will also be engaging in a practice in which it has little experience: targeting capital to individual companies in commercial industries. This is an important and complex task that requires great care and speed.

The Fed’s ability to identify and implement appropriate tools will be critical to its success in this new role. It is vital that the central bank succeeds in mitigating the pandemic’s damage to the economy. It is also important the Fed avoids the stigma that followed the 2008 “bailouts.” This will require a thoughtful approach to staffing, process and disclosure that ideally would be implemented at the outset.

They are cheerleading for the Fed, which I am sure is what you have to do if you want to stay in mainstream journalism or economics. We have become more Chinese than China, in that the centralization of capital allocation is more rigorous here and the Distributed Information Suppression Complex is more effective than China’s much cruder control over news.

3. A reader forwards a pointer to paper by Ke, et al.

Here, we argue that because death and the cause of death are usually recorded reliably and are less affected by surveillance intensity changes or delay in confirmation than case counts, the time series of death counts reflects the growth of an epidemic reliably, with a delay in onset determined by the time between infection to death. Based on this idea, we designed a simple 88 methodology to disentangle the epidemic growth from confounding factors, such as underreporting, delays in case confirmation and changes in surveillance intensity. We fit models to both case incidence data and death count data collected from eight European countries and the US in March 2020. We show that in most countries, the detection rate of infected individuals is in general low, and COVID-19 spreads very fast in these countries

In other words, they agree with me that the death rate gives you a way of looking at the spread rate through a rear-view mirror. I don’t know why they even bother to look at confirmed-case data at all.

4. Another reader sent me a link to an article behind an FT paywall (https://www.ft.com/content/9ee6f251-f3ee-4d42-8cac-e372f8564088) that says that Iran has adopted a credit-line approach similar to what I have suggested. Who says I have no influence?