Comment by chii
4 months ago
car manufacturers, right at the beginning of covid, started cutting orders of components from their suppliers, thinking that demand is going to drop due to covid induced recession.
Guess what happened next?
4 months ago
car manufacturers, right at the beginning of covid, started cutting orders of components from their suppliers, thinking that demand is going to drop due to covid induced recession.
Guess what happened next?
Covid was a black swan event. Unless we see something like the MBS collapse, the underlying economic weakness isn’t due to a such an acute root cause.
Not sure how comparable they are.
I know it’s not popular to bring politics into things on HN, but… From the outside at least, White House policy sounds like at least as much of a black swan event as COVID.
Not at all, people voted for this and the outcome was expected by people paying attention.
I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
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Black swan event should be unexpected. Trumps victory was within expected possibilities. It was also his second victory.
And his moves after winning were not unexpected either - he is doing what his opponents predicted he will do.
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From the inside, this is nothing compared to COVID. 2025 feels a bit weird but to compare it with 2020 is laughable.
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A week before the election I bought shares in Lynas, (the major rare earth producer outside of China) when it seemed Trump could win.
Rare Earth exports was a known lever that the CCP uses in a trade war, and Trump was very likely to restart his previous one.
However, the Pentagon putting money into MP Materials was quite unexpected, and people are still throwing money at them.
A contagious disease pandemic is not a black swan event. We have had many of them before and there are people whose day jobs are to model and plan for them.
These are not mutually exclusive properties. Pandemic modellers do not predict exactly when a pandemic will emerge, they predict how a pandemic will evolve once it emerges. The actual emergence of a pandemic is still about as predictable as, say, a stock market crash or a war.
It was the only such event in most people's lifetimes.
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The virulence and adaptability of Covid makes it very much a black swan.
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Then almost anything is not a black swan by this logic.
Russian invasion is not a black swan event, we had many of them before and there are people whose day job is to plan for them.
Tsunami, earthquake are another examples. We had them before and there are plans for such events.
Trump fired many people whose job it was to plan for it. RFK Jr canceled vaccine research and various practices that will make it worse. I never imagined such idiocy on top of Trump's more likely racism policies. Future pandemics are much more likely now.
> Covid was a black swan event
I beg to differ. Epidemiologists and public health planners always knew such a pandemic would happen eventually. In fact, it wasn't even surprising that it came from a coronavirus as this virus group was the most likely contender with the influenza family.
The only open question was when. We dodged the bullet several times over the past two decades with SRAS, H5N1, MERS and H1N1 (notice, two influenza and two coronaviruses), but one virus slipping through was definitely the most likely outcome.
And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
Ah, so an asteroid obliterating NYC is not a black swan event because it's statistically likely to happen over long enough time horizons?
If you can forsee the event, but not predict the time, it's just as bad as an even you cannot forsee.
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Sure, all probabilities go to 1 over a large enough time span. I don't think there's anything useful you can do with that information. Being early is the same as being wrong.
>> The only open question was when ... >> And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
If you can't tell us when, your predicition is useless.
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Tariffs can easily be turned off, and in December the supreme Court could rule that they majority of tariffs in place are illegal AND must be refunded.
According to Polymarket, there's a >50% chance that happens: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-...
Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...
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I can push that market to 100% with 10k usd so I wouldn’t weight that too strongly as evidence, although I agree on the tariffs part.
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> Guess what happened next?
Stimulus and zero interest rate followed by 10% inflation.
and that inflation was (partially) due to the lack of supply of production (say, of cars). Which is due to the lack of supply of components (that was cancelled due to expectation of low demand, as well as various shipping/cargo issues in the ensuing period).
A gigantic contracyclic fiscal policy was adopted to sustain demand.
Do you think Trump and the GOP will do that anytime soon?
At least until such time as his polling stumbles the GOP will do absolutely anything he says. And Trump will do whatever it takes to keep the grease coming in, I really think him turning on the printing presses is a long from the least likely scenario.
Would the GOP have to eat large quantities of excrement, yes. Have they become used to doing that (cf Epstein), yes.