During discussion about things where you had strong opinions and then changed your mind, someone mentioned EMH. Do you believe in EMH and if so is it strong or weak version?
I used to believe EMH but not strongly. The pandemic changed my view because I managed to invest some money when the stock market dived and was clearly influenced by overly pessimistic view of the impact of covid. Some might argue that the market reacted to the irrational government measures, so it is not that the case that the market was mistaken. I still think that investors were equally irrationally pessimistic. I reject the view that this is a hindsight and I was merely lucky. I am not big expert and I did not possess any proprietary information. I had the same information as everybody else, I just didn't let my emotions take over me. This is further confirmed that even today when all the events have passed exactly as predicted, majority of people still maintain their mistaken views that covid was very dangerous to young and non-risk population.
It is the only time when I saw the rest of the society to be so wrong in their views and clearly this was my once-a-lifetime chance. I haven't see any other opportunities for easy money so far but I think that people who are experts in their fields and investors might have been able to find more opportunities.
One of them was found by Michael Burry who definitely saw that the 2008 financial crisis was coming. He wasn't just lucky because he had read and analysed all the documents and had to create special investment instruments to profit for it. In this way, it wasn't easily accessible by laypersons like me who have no time or understanding about investment. Again, most professionals were blinded by collective frenzy.
What is your opinion about EMH?
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Notes -
I never said it had "no deleterious effect on the economy".
The data is easily found.
This data does not show this. Even if the expenditure increased but it could be the case that it went to wrong sectors of the economy.
Can you be more specific? Eating in restaurants, for instance, was more than recovered by March 2021. There was a significant shutdown between March and May of 2020, but outside those three months, we're talking like a 10% decline in eating out. This is in the sector that I saw most harped on as ruined by Covid.
I was in Spain and it definitely hadn't recovered in 2021. The amount of people on streets were visually lower.
Healthcare utilization in the UK during covid was 80% of normal. That is one of the most contra-intuitive things because most people believe that healthcare was totally overwhelmed during pandemic. Well, some places were but in general the income of healthcare workers took a hit.
However, the amount of money we spent on vaccines that later were thrown out were unusually high. That means that other needs did not get financed sufficiently. The distortions are quite clear and apparent in every sector where I look.
In the US (again aside from March - May) there was a modest decline in healthcare spending. By 2020Q4, spending was a wopping 1% lower than 2019Q4. The UK government reported a significant increase in health care spending in 2020 and 2021 relative to 2019. Please cite your "80% of normal" claim.
Utilization, not spending.
There was a 4% decline in real healthcare consumption in the US between 2019Q4 and 2020Q4.
Please cite the source for "Healthcare utilization in the UK during covid was 80% of normal". [ Edit: I'm pretty sure what you are failing to remember is that healthcare utilization was 80% of normal for 1-2 months before dramatically rebounding, but that obviously largely refutes your thesis.]
That still is not utilization. My sources are the BMJ. I am too lazy now to search for the article I had read before but the quick search sent me an article that it had decreased by a third, so I am not sure which data is more trustable.
The rebounding after 1-2 months of depression is simply not believable. We had unexplained excess mortality of 10-15% in December 2022 which was neither due to vaccines, nor covid (despite panicking voices on both sides). In medicine we don't just look at test results to make diagnosis. We have to corelate to what we observe in patient, all manifestations and functions. And we have to admit what we don't know.
It may be fully possible that the measures introduced to limit covid exposure increased actual spending while utilization remained below the normal.
I can now better understand why 2008 crisis caught so many unprepared. That was the belief in reported numbers that everything is fine. It took a doctor to actually look behind those numbers and see what is going on in the field.
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