[quote=The-Shoveler]Can’t help but feel we are really going to regret all these drastic measures (economically). Hopefully this is over in a month or two. There are lots of rumors that China is lying about having this under control as well.[/quote]
Some part of the economy will take a hit, others I’m not so sure.
I don’t think technology will be that bad. As you alluded to, technology will probably be used to try to avoid human contact. For example, we need to spend more money to make remote conference calls more efficient and we have already spent quite a bit. We now need to build out more co-location data farms. It’s not for the same previous reasons that a natural disaster would take out a geographical location, the new concern is if a pandemic cripples workers in one location. Also, the cost is going to be the need to hire more redundant workers.
Biotech and pharma will do well.
Tourism will take a pretty big hit. Just the number of closures and people not wanting to travel. I’m sure the gaming industry will take a big hit. And workers in those industry will take a hit. And any businesses that depends on those workers will take a big and shocking hit Sichuan Casino is advertising heavily. I’m getting an offer for free flights and heavily discounted hotel stays at Vegas (free flight + buy 1 night stay for an extra 2 for free), haven’t seen anything like this since right after 9/11, lol. As tempted I am to “work from home at Vegas” next week , I’ll pass….don’t want to get sick by entering a petridish for a virus. And Asian tourists, a magnet for gambling, probably had fallen or will fall off the cliff. Most of that is discretionary spending that is the first to immediately vaporize very very quickly in any sort of short term unexpected unplanned disaster, more so than a gradual cyclical slow unwind of the economy. Just refer back to the aftermath of 9/11 for reference where people were freaked out and didn’t want to go anywhere.
The other complaint some of my guys are saying is now that they have to work from home, it sucks they are stuck in a 1/1 rental. They now want to live in at least a 2/2, and they were asking the age old question… Is it a good time to buy a 2/2 because renting sucks. I thought about this. Since people no longer need to spend so much time or money commuting to work , maybe that extra cost savings per month does make sense for them to upgrade from a 1/1 to 2/2. even after we return to normal times I don’t think we will continue to work the way we did where everyone returns to the office. It might even make sense to downgrade our office space since if we have gotten use to remote worker, you really don’t need such a big office lease and the company can save money that way too.
