Version 2.231

I received an email from the Brooks Museum announcing that they are shutting down until January 6 in anticipation of what they expect will be decided by the local authorities in Memphis. Tennessee is one of the states with the highest progression of cases and, in Memphis, we have a positivity rate in excess of 28%.

Our early success has become our downfall, as peope met their families over Thanksgiving and the number of cases started to take off. What this feels like is being in one of those domino chains and seeing the pieces before us falling off in sequence until at some point it gets to us. I hope it stops soon.

According to the news, Congress reached an agreement to implement another $900 billion stimulus bill. The euro is at $1.22, while before the pancemic it hovered around $1.10, so that tells you which side has pumped more money in the economy since the beginning of the pandemic. It's the right thing to do, as there are a lot of people struggling. During the first round of stimulus, poverty in the U.S. declined a bit, but then as the money ran out, it started to climb up.

The silver lining of this pandemic is that we have never learned so much so quickly about how the U.S. economy works and what is effective and what isn't. We are entering a new age of economic analysis, in which there is decentralization of data collection. We will see how long it takes to spill over to Europe, if it ever does.