03-16-2020, 01:58 PM
(03-14-2020, 12:50 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I would also add that trust in institutions being at a nadir also exacerbates the problem. No one trusts media (what is "fake news" and what isn't?). No one trusts the leadership at the national level, which is brazenly incompetent. There does seem to some hope in the strength of leadership at the local/regional level.
For-profit institutions have something to protect: their credibility. Maybe people are willing to take chances just to shave some pennies in cost in return for some risks and inconvenience if times are tough, but those entities that cut corners and expose customers to risk or offer shoddy or risky wares are the ones that lose market share.
It helps little that the leader of the biggest of all enterprises (the United States Government) is beginning to look foolish. Big Business has taken the lead over a President excessively fond of risk, whether in accepting pseudoscience or financial leverage. Just look at the NBA, NHL, and MLB -- and the profit-generating sector of the NCAA.
Institutions may lose credibility in a culture in which anyone acting as a critic is a muckraker, but institutions lose even more credibility when their leaders are exposed for incompetence or corruption.
By the way -- trading in the NYSE has today (so far) absorbed losses that gut all the gain in share prices that occurred while Trump has been President. We seem still to be in the "falling knife" phase of the share-price cycle. Programmed buys may have stopped the falling knife on Friday only for the slight recovery to itself be devoured. Of course the closes are the official measures. In my experience, except for the short-lived and inexplicable drop of 1987, values fall until P/E ratios revert to reality with return (dividends and retained earnings) become close to a rate paid to savers.
But if the President knows more than the diplomats, spy chiefs, senior military officers, and scientists he can also know more than the physicians and the administrators of public health -- especially if he has a personality cult behind him.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.