Results for “from the comments” 1938 found
From the comments, on Covid and our response
From the Comments, On FDF
Sure and Tom Meadowcroft have been hitting it out of the ballpark in the comments sections. Two examples.
Sure:
Protocol was made to serve man, not man to serve the protocol.
The reason we have protocols is because we need to weight the harms of waiting without a treatment against the harms that happen if the treatment is counterproductive in some unforeseen manner.
We can, normally, pretty easily measure the benefit side: count up the mortality and morbidity for the illness in question. The risk side is harder so we developed tests and processes to elucidate those: RCTs, literature reviews, regulatory oversight, mandatory waiting periods. At the end of the day though, the whole process is just one giant test to measure the likely harm of a new entity.
So when is a test worth doing? After all I do not order an MRI for every patient even though I could find a lot of early stage cancers that way.
..GSW to the abdomen with crashing bp with minimal response to volume? Straight to the OR. No matter the results of the CT scan they are still getting opened to stop the bleeding.
…So now we look at the vaccine approval process and methods to stretch doses. Pre-test probability that vaccines work? Inordinately high after passing Phase II. Odds that we hit on the precise optimal timing regimen on the first go? Nil.
The likelihood ratios for RCTs and approval mechanisms are powerful. But we are talking thousands of deaths per day. The odds that these tests will remotely alter management decisions is nil. It is malpractice to delay life saving treatment on tests exceedingly unlikely to change management decisions.
And remember the UK is not seeing horrid outcomes for doing this for a while now. A lot of theoretical failure mechanisms are now off the table.
Science is wholly about building a reliable model that accurately predicts future outcomes of current actions. While doing the actual experiment is the gold standard for knowledge acquisition, it is not the only option and in cases like this pandemic is not sufficiently better than past data to merit waiting.
As far as the regulators. I work with some of them directly. They are not overburdened to anywhere near the degree that the frontline clinicians have been hit. When I ask them to explain their cost benefit calculations, they have none. Not I cannot follow them. Not I disagree with them. They have done not an iota of math to justify their course of action.
Sorry, but I believe in evidence based medicine, not eminence based medicine. If you as a regulator cannot explain to me in technical terms the math behind your decision process, even if only back of the envelope, you are not worth putting in charge.
Approve all the vaccines, FDF, fractional dosing trials, and first dose followed by variolation trials should all be done now. It is was [what] the math demands.
Also this from Tom Meadowcroft:
Scientific researchers search for the truth. Medical clinicians use limited data balance cost and benefits in the face of uncertainty to save the most lives.
When searching for the truth, it is important to have high standards of statistical significance, integrity, and patience, because credibility and a reputation for integrity is everything. Every academic knows that a retracted paper or an accusation of playing fast and loose with statistics can be the death knell for a career. As a result it is prudent to be very certain before publishing. Public health officials, particularly those in charge of approving vaccines, dread the possibility that a vaccine that will be given to millions of healthy people, often children, to prevent diseases where death is rare, which could harbor some flaw that causes a hundred avoidable deaths; they seek the highest standards of proof of safety and efficacy before approving such a vaccine.
But a pandemic is not a search for truth, and a COVID vaccine administered in the midst of a pandemic is very different than a measles vaccine administered to 2-year-olds. The pandemic makes these decisions for FDF or for vaccine approvals into clinical decisions, where health professionals should be balancing the certain benefit of reducing the thousands of daily deaths against the uncertain cost of the possibilities of harmful side-effects and uncertain details of efficacy (when does immunity kick in, how long does it last, how valuable is a booster) that additional months of testing and trials would reveal more clearly.
Public health researchers, academics for the most part, lack the ability (and courage) to make the sort of cost/benefit analysis with necessarily limited data that clinical physicians make every day in examination rooms. Any good clinician, faced with the citizenry of a country as their patient, would have opted for FDF, the AZ vaccine, and quite likely reduced doses by the start of the year. Because we are stuck with academics and administrators as our decision makes, unable to see beyond their usual routine of searching for the truth and protecting their reputations, thousands more will die.
From the comments, on the stimulus
The people were grumpy yesterday!
I’m pretty sure that the “stimulus” package isn’t really about stimulus. I think it’s more to do with trying to compensate or mollify a citizenry that is rightly angry about the incompetent pandemic response. The government can’t come out and openly say “hey we screwed up so here’s $2,000”, so they call it stimulus instead.
I also think the Democrats are keen to refight the global financial crisis of 2008. It’s embarrassing to them that Trump was able to inject such massive stimulus into the economy.
Economists are quite right to object to all this as being way too much, way too late. But, well, here we are. Maybe we’ll see inflation after all.
That is from Brad F., and from B.B.:
Let’s bring James Buchanan into this.
Politicians have figured how to get away with handing out checks to get votes. It has nothing to do with stimulus. Biden would have done it without a pandemic if he could get away with it. But he couldn’t, so he used the pandemic. Never let a crisis go to waste.
He added the largest percent rise in the minimum wage in history to the “stimulus.” Is that going to boost employment? Of course not. Economists express frustration that politicians don’t under economics. They do, they don’t care.
Unions don’t want competition from lower-wage workers. So they want both minimum wage hikes and protectionism along with legislation to promote unionization. The unions understand their self-interest. Biden understands his self-interest; he gets union support.
Economists are supposed to understand self-interest. Why won’t we apply it to politicians?
And from Moral Panic:
I think he’s partly complaining that one can argue Biden’s proposal is way, way off, and yet we can barely discuss it. And the autopilot is not because there are minor differences, so come on, let’s get on with it. No, the alleged bill of goods has major issues.
I appreciate what Summers and a few others are saying. This seems similar to Obamacare’s passage. No debate allowed, and we’ll figure out what it means eventually. I find the straight-up endorsement by elite media especially disappointing, with the only notable dissent in true progressive form being about not giving stimulus $ to affluent people.
To be clear, no one is arguing for doing nothing, or questioning the value of automatic stabilizers. Most of all, it is to the credit of Summers that we are debating this at all.
From the comments, on Congressional cybersecurity, from Gomer
Here’s a new service sector job: Capitol IT admin. The staffers left their computers unlocked when the building was stormed. All it takes is one bad actor to infect the network with malware or steal top secret data. Those rioters broached the physical security of the building so all machines are considered compromised and have to be rebuilt from the ground up. The buildings will also have to be scanned for bugs, wires, and other spook stuff. A state actor hiding in the mob could do some serious damage to national security. Not hard to imagine those Trumpies opening the doors to let an agent from China, Iran, or Russia on to the floor of the Senate. An unknowing useful idiot is still a useful idiot. If this isn’t a coup then this is a serious, serious transgression.
Knowing House IT stuff, I don't think I'd sleep well until the networks were rebuilt from scratch and every computer wiped and the internals visually inspected before being put back in service.
Every printer, every copier. Every nook and cranny.
— Ian (@neurovagrant) January 6, 2021
You don’t have to think these are the major cybersecurity threats to USG to find this situation intolerable. There are also reports of Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs in or near Congress. You simply have to secure the physical building if you are to have credible security at all. I am very familiar with these entrances, and even an outnumbered force has the ability to keep out intruders, if it has the will to do so. In contrast, the Secret Service has a long history of agents using their bodies to block or shield presidents from threats of violence. Does Congress as a whole (which is harder to replace than a single president) deserve any less?
From the comments, on HCTs
The box most bioethicists are in is so small their thinking can’t extend beyond a few target people. In this case, the control group in a vaccine trial.
The subjects could be paid for the risk, which is what we do for jobs all the time. Those risk/reward amounts for risky jobs are used to make estimates for the value of human life. Life insurance would allow high-risk people (us geezers) to join the trials.
Their box doesn’t even consider human challenge trials (HCT) that give you very rapid and accurate data on efficacy even with pay and insurance to cover the risk. The lives saved by a month faster approval is in the 10’s of thousands more than offsetting and risk to a few people. Tracking the first million doses for side effects would provide the side effect data that is usually within days of injection.
Outside their mental box, 1000 people per day are dying for each day they study the issue and delay a decision, but those lives are not included in their thinking and analysis.
That is from Dallas. I would stress there are higher costs yet from delay, noting the hundreds of millions of people in developing nations who are falling back into poverty while the pandemic continues to rage. Some of them are dying too.
From the comments, on AstraZeneca vaccine trial resumption
America is really, really messed up.
The only place with such intensely wasteful discussions about a disease is the U.S. And it is getting increasingly easy to ignore the U.S. as the world continues to respond to this pandemic.
And it is not just the British based trial. This is from Reuters on Sept. 14 – “Clinical trials for the coronavirus vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca PLC and Oxford University resumed in Brazil on Monday after the country’s health regulator got confirmation over the weekend that its British equivalent MHRA had approved the restart, a company representative said.
The Federal University of Sao Paulo, which is running the trials, said in a statement that 4,600 of the planned 5,000 volunteers have been vaccinated in Brazil without any of them reporting any serious health issues.”
This from the Times of India on Sept 20th -“The phase-III human clinical trial of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII) will begin at the Sassoon General Hospital in Pune next week. Dean of the state-run Sassoon General Hospital Dr Muralidhar Tambe told this to on Saturday.
“The phase-III trial of ‘Covishield’ vaccine will begin at Sassoon hospital from next week. It is likely to start on Monday. Some volunteers have already come forward for the trial. Around 150 to 200 volunteers will be administered the vaccine candidate dose,” he said.
Regulators in Japan and South Africa also have no problem with the trial continuing.
That is from Easy-Peasy. And I did google to ensure that those claims about foreign trial resumption are correct, for instance Japan resumed no later than October 2. This is one reason — not the only! — why I am puzzled when Derek Lowe claims on Twitter that American perhaps cannot go any faster with its vaccine. If you think Japan and the Brits are irresponsible, by all means let us know. Otherwise…it is time to speak up in favor of maximizing expected value.
On vaccine timing, from the comments
Current US excess all-cause mortality is running around 10K above trend line on a good week. For these purposes we need neither know nor care if this is do to Covid directly, fear of catching Covid, or the effects of lockdown policies (e.g. increased rates of suicide from business failure).
Suppose we vaccinated the entire population. We would have to have a fatality rate of 1/32,000 to match a single week of the excess deaths the CDC is reporting every week.
Phase III, according to Moderna, is going to last around 4 months. If we skipped phase III and just jumped to phase IV, we could look to avert around 170,000 deaths with perfect effectiveness. Let’s say that between it being a lousy vaccine and people giving up on social distancing early we only save half of those lives. That gives us around 85,000 lives saved.
This means that we are looking at a 1/4,000 as our rough fatality rate for vaccines to be safer than waiting.
To date, I know of no vaccine that passed phase II clinical trials that has ever had this sort of fatality rate. Further, the vaccine adverse event rate is typically an order of magnitude or more higher than the fatality rate so absent truly astonishingly high rates of clinically significant adverse events it is highly unlikely to hit something greater than 1/4000 but not see some evidence of it with just a few hundred patients under your belt in the early phase trials.
My pre-test probability that any vaccine fall into a mortality rate somewhere between 1/100 and 1/4000 absolute risk increase is pretty low. So low, that all the papers I have read name them specifically rather than tabulating (e.g. Merck V710) and even those tend not to have dramatic increases in mortality (e.g. V710 had increased rates of Staph infections, but no increase in mortality).
Maybe something will be different this time and that will happen. Maybe we will be stuck with an inferior vaccine (though my guess is if we declared all of the top candidates ready for phase IV we could get a wide variety of use). But from where my point of view as I understand things from the coroner, we would need some massively high pre-test priors to make a dent in the weekly excess mortality rates.
For places that have been able to limit the virus’s entry (e.g. the island nations), this is all moot. For places that had massive initial spikes (e.g. Italy), this may also be moot. But for the US which flatten the initial curve and has maintained a steady excess death rate, early adoption seems to have very good Bayesian odds
You could of course make a QALY argument about Covid fatalities against vaccine fatalities, but again you are trying to hit a pretty narrow window: dangerous enough to beat down 10,000 excess deaths a weak, not so dangerous that it would have obviously failed early studies.
Challenge studies may have their place (e.g. ruling out antibody dependent enhancement), but we need to be sure that the immune response works in real world conditions. And at this point I still have terrible data for what actually happens during the course of the infection.
Inaction has one of the highest price tags we have ever seen in modern medicine. I just do not see any evidence that my pre-test priors for a vaccine being that deadly should be remotely high enough to make the math on delay work out (particularly if we can avoid the most susceptible patient populations for VAEs). Certainly my priors for the ability of social action to stop infections is far worse (e.g. HIV, Lyme, Scabies) so I am increasingly convinced that long term it is either a vaccine or the hard road to herd immunity.
CatintheHat addds:
I agree with this rough analysis and the risk is even less because we, probably only have to vaccinate 25 % of the population to stop the epidemic completely which could be done relatively quickly.
For the opposite case, don’t forget this earlier in August post of Alex’s.
I would very gladly run further estimates of this kind. To be clear, I am not endorsing any particular conclusion, rather I think several hundred smart people should be working on this full time. My personal suspicion is that the decisive factor will be “the gains from possibly ending a global depression a few months earlier” vs. “the risk that with a lower quality vaccine we don’t end said depression more effectively than we otherwise might have.” And I hardly see anyone considering that trade-off at all.
There is also a closely related but conceptually separate question of how many vaccines to approve on an earlier basis, and also for how many should we be in a position to do so.
From the comments, on alien visitation
…it looks like Avi Loeb (Harvard astronomer) is writing a book that will argue that we have been visited by aliens.
Harvard’s top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star.
In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.
https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/Extraterrestrial/9780358278146
That is from Josh P. And here is the Amazon link.
From the comments, on the value of management consultants
As a retired management consultant, some views on their stated value (as stated by clients, which is not necessarily the same as “value” as seen by other observers, e.g. Douglas Adams). 1. Consultants as temps. Keep own planning staff small, hire consultants when surge capacity needed. 2. New views. Yes, the young consultants may not know your industry well. This fresh look may actually be desired. In my own experience clients oscillated between “Give me people who actually know something about my business!” and “Stop giving me people from inside my world, they just tell me what I already know!” 3. Cowardice. Client knows he must lay off 5,000, call in consultants to figure that out, blame them for it. 4. Sounding boards. Senior executives believe it or not often have no one to talk to, who is not scheming to take their job or playing other politics. Consultants play politics of course, but they are at least transparent: “If I give you advice you find valuable you will hire me again.” 5. Pollination. The client cannot go and ask 5 rival firms what they think about developments in the industry, at least not easily. If the consultants have worked for many clients in the industry, they can transfer best ideas. If you like this, you call it “dissemination of best practices;” if you don’t like it, you call it “stealing and re-selling trade secrets to rivals”. 6. Complexity. A client on its own may not want to invest in learning all it needs about AI, IOT, Bitcoin, on and on. The consultant invests in this knowledge (McKinsey’s research budget is in at least 8 digits, including opportunity costs) and can deliver it packaged up for easy access by the client.
That is from Glenn Mercer.
From the comments, comedy vs. drama
I would say that many, if not most, comedies are “conservative” in their underlying messages or themes. Look at romantic comedies: the whole point is for characters to establish a committed relationship and either explicitly or presumably get married. The comedy is in watching characters who are notoriously bad at following tradition and institution find themselves desperate to follow tradition and institution. That’s a very conservative theme: happiness comes from family and a serious, formal commitment to family.
An American Pickle isn’t a romantic comedy, but it follows the same structure and offers the same lesson. That makes it a fairly typical comedy.
Dramas, by comparison, tend to be more “liberal” and “radical,” because they often show a character breaking from tradition or from institutional boundaries to find happiness or to resolve a serious problem. The messages of dramas are often the polar opposite of those of comedies.
That is a remark by WB on An American Pickle. One striking feature of the creativity of Shakespeare, of course, is that he does not follow this usual pattern.
From the comments, on coronavirus and humidity
I am not convinced by the humidity hypothesis, as I don’t see it having much macro explanatory power globally, but I find the questions very important. On New York City, I tend to blame all those cramped indoor spaces combined with bad ventilation systems, but that too is an unconfirmed hypothesis. Anyway, here are the words of Daniel Hess:
Dear Tyler and Alex –
As you know the case fatality rate from COVID has been dropping dramatically from COVID. Many have suggested age profile and treatment advances are the cause urge you to consider indoor humidity as the biggest variable. It is *the* governing environmental variable for respiratory health, above all others and it is an accessible way for everyone to improve respiratory health. Urgently, CFR is likely to return in the fall and winter to its previously high levels unless this knowledge can be more widely disseminated.
The idea that the COVID death rate is dropping so rapidly primarily because of age or improvements in medicine does not explain why tropical and humid areas never had high death rates in the first place. Or why the CFR in the southeast was always lower than in the northeast, even before understanding of COVID improved.
Just look at these numbers (see table below) fresh from this morning from worldometers.info :
In Florida deaths/confirmed case is 0.015 but in New York it is 0.073. Is Florida medicine and age profile so much better than New York’s? Florida is a very old state and medicine is not regarded as more advanced in Florida than in New York. Both had to deal with COVID early and Florida’s age profile is particularly skewed old. In fact Florida is typically the retirement destination for aging New Yorkers.
In Mississippi deaths/confirmed case is 0.028 but in Massachusetts it is 0.072. Is Mississippi medicine and age profile so much better than Massachusetts’s? Mississippi is very poor and 40% black, and known to lag socioeconomically. Massachusetts is very wealthy and just 7% black, and known for its advanced medicine and socioeconomic success. If anything, you would expect a much higher CFR in Mississippi than in Massachusetts. But Massachusetts has cold winters, which translates into dry indoor air in the colder months.
In Georgia and Alabama, deaths/confirmed case are 0.019 and 0.017 respectively. In Michigan and Connecticut they are 0.069 and 0.088 respectively. Is Georgia so much younger and medically superior to Michigan? Is impoverished and 30% black Alabama so much younger and more medically advanced than wealthy Connecticut which is just 10% black? Of course not. You would expect Alabama to have a much higher CFR than Connecticut, but instead it is more than 5 times lower. This is an incredibly dramatic difference that is inexplicable until you realize that humidity (including indoor humidity) governs respiratory health to a very large extent.
It seems certain that seasonality plays a role, but more specifically indoor humidity. That is to say, where humidity seems to be most crucial is in reducing severity of symptoms and mortality for those already infected with COVID-19.
That was the finding of a group of 51 scientists in this new paper:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.11.20147157v2.full.pdf
“Severity of COVID-19 in Europe decreased significantly between March and May and the seasonality of COVID-19 is the most likely explanation. Mucosal barrier and mucociliary clearance can significantly decrease viral load and disease progression, and their inactivation by low relative humidity of indoor air might significantly contribute to severity of the disease. ”
Innate respiratory immunity is impaired in conditions of low humidity, as has been shown extensively in this large review of the literature by a group led by renowned virologist Professor Akiko Iwasaki of Yale University. In fact, this may be the most comprehensive review of respiratory infection seasonality published anywhere:
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-virology-012420-022445
Folks, this is huge because it shows that a simple remedy (indoor humidification in temperate areas in winter months) can cut COVID-19 mortality by almost an order of magnitude.
Humidity as protection against respiratory infections is not new or surprising. Parents have been using humidifiers in nurseries for this reason for generations. Yet somehow, when it comes to COVID-19, all this knowledge is ignored. Madness!
Here is Alex’s source post, and there are a few interesting responses in the ensuing discussion.
From the comments, on coronaviruses
I am still waiting for the new conventional wisdom about what is happening to emerge, and I believe it will be as follows.
A particular ancestral betacoronavirus emerged in bats several decades ago with a special superpower, different from but conceptually not too distinct from HIV’s ability to rapidly mutate. This virus had the ability to easily spread out among many animal species and evolve among them through a standard slow process of mutation subject to selection pressures, but then to occasionally co-infect a single host and recombine to create a radically different variant (a “chimera,” although I think it’s better thought of as an “offspring.”). These offspring would occasionally be very deadly because they combined well-developed abilities that had evolved in separate lineages from the original ancestor evolving in separate species.
Eventually I think we will categorize all the recent betacoronavirus outbreaks (Sars-1, Sars-2, MERS) as part of this broader process, and require a vaccination strategy that can be quickly deployed against new recombinations from this original ancestral betacoronavirus as they randomly emerge from the primordial stew across many animal species, including ours. The evidence thus far points to recombinations resulting in the emergence of a distinct dangerous variant with some regularity.
This story also explains the existence of some preexisting immunity in much of the population to Sars-Cov-2, but substantial variation in what feature of Sars-Cov-2’s genetic code the immune system reacts to depending on whether the individual is known to have had SARS, MERS, or neither. In all likelihood, possibly many relatively nonlethal or even asymptomatic variants of the same betacoronavirus ancestor have been circulating undetected among human populations during this same 10-20 years, resulting in people people who have been exposed to different random bits of genetic material present in Sars-Cov-2.
Here is the link. By the way, it turns out that smallpox is much older than we had thought (NYT). Betting on origins being longer and deeper than other people expect is often the bet to make.
From the comments, more about Maurice Hilleman
By Hochreiter:
“Finally, Hilleman took a step that seems unbelievable in the bureaucratically hardened, litigious society of today. He bypassed the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s (HEW) Division of Biologic Standards and contacted the heads of the six U.S. vaccine manufacturers directly. His message was simple. “Don’t kill your roosters.” As a farm boy growing up in Montana, Hilleman had learned that farmers sell their roosters for stewing pots at the end of the spring hatching season. Because of his years working with the influenza virus, he knew that vaccine manufacturers produce their vaccine in fertilized chicken eggs. To produce vaccine on the scale Hilleman was envisioning would require a massive amount of fertilized chicken eggs. Manufacturers would need every rooster they could get. Recognizing that time was of the essence, Hilleman followed up his phone calls by shipping samples of this new strain to each of the six manufacturers for vaccine production on 22 May 1957. Initially dubbed “Far East influenza,” the virus was later named the Asian Flu.”
From *Influenza* by George Dehner. Here is the previous post about Maurice Hilleman.
From the comments, a bailout through credit card receivables?
Accepting the overall premise of Tyler’s Bloomberg column, shouldn’t the government encourage citizens to run up large credit card balances, most of which will become receivables of the major banks, and perhaps even encourage Amazon, Walmart, et. al. to sell goods on their own credit as well like in the old days of dry-goods stores? Then to the extent a massive government bailout is needed, the government can just deal directly with the relatively few Big Businesses that carry those receivables, e.g. by assuming the receivables or subsidizing them.
That is from Nadav.
From the comments — on Paul Volcker
I worked at the Fed in the Volcker years. I am not a fan.
(1) He tightened far too much to get inflation down. A more moderate tightening and a more gradual reduction in inflation — which was the original agreement with the Reagan team — would have been better. The long 1980-82 recession was longer and deeper than it needed to be.
(2) He got the support of Democrats by blaming large deficits for the high interest rates rather than blaming his own excessively tight monetary policy. Of course, high interest rates caused federal interest rates to surge and boost the deficit.
(3) At the NY Fed and then as Chairman, what did he do to rein in reckless bank lending to Latin America? It is not like the banks had nothing to do with the Fed.
(4) Latam debt was floating rate debt. Volcker blew up those countries’ debt service. But the super strong dollar and collapse of commodity prices, connected to tight Fed policy, also damaged Latam.
(5) Volcker had modern leftists attitudes. The Fed has become quite transparent and communicates with the public and Congress. It may amaze younger readers that the Fed would adjourn FOMC meetings with no press statement or public policy announcement. Volcker figured you would find out what the Fed was up to when it did something. The Republican Greenspan and Bernanke started to let the sunshine into the Fed. The paranoid closeted quality of the old Fed generated resentment and conspiracy theories.
(6) Volcker had an authoritarian streak. He suppressed dissent within the Fed system, going after researchers at Fed banks who contradicted Fed dogma. The St. Louis Fed was particularly attacked, but others also.
(7) You might connect the death of Marvin Goodfriend with the death of Paul Volcker. Goodfriend was a critic of Volcker in the Fed. He said Volcker’s tight policy pushed inflation down, but Volcker would not deliver an inflation target. His Fed had no credibility, no one was wiling to believe that the Fed would keep inflation low. One result was a high long bond yield and a steep yield curve. It was fine that Volcker wanted to reduce inflation, but it was the Fed that needed credibility, not its temporary chairman.
(8) I found the recent Volcker Rule worthless. Prop trading played no role in creating the crisis of 2008. The Volcker Rule has simply made markets less liquid. After 2008, as after 1932, the federal government imposes useless regulations just for fun.
That is all from B.B.
That is from James N. Markels, responding to Don Boudreaux in these comments.
Here is another way to put the broader argument, not my preferred first-order response, but I think significant nonetheless. Given the way government and public choice work, anything that kills over half a million Americans is going to be a big deal for policy, whether we like it or not (Don should be the first to recognize that government will restrict your liberties for far less than 500k deaths!). You want the best feasible version of a response, as there isn’t really a stable libertarian response pattern out there. Trying partial but non-sustainable libertarian approaches will in the end get you more and more statism as the virus keeps on defeating you, deaths rise, and calls for ever-greater state action increase. A lot of what libertarians don’t like about lockdowns in part stems from the “do nothing” response of the first two months of notice that we Americans had when Covid first appeared in China.