pre-figuring the H7N9

H7N9 is the latest flu scare.

I have been working on book reviews, so I thought I would just link to the latest source material.

The New Bird Flu, and How to Read the News About It
Maryn McKenna, Wired, 5 April 2013 (hat tip: MR)

 

And H7N9 might not, as well. It is far too soon to say, despite the rapidly escalating case count and the reports — which came in while I was writing this — of a possible animal reservoir in pigeons and a possible human-to-human case. I have been writing about flu and possible pandemics since 1997 — for what it’s worth, I wrote the first story in the US in 1997 about that first H5N1 case in Hong Kong — and so at this early point, what I most want to say is this: We all love scary diseases. (If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this blog.) But there is a fog of war in disease emergencies, just as there is in military ones, and it is very easy to get lost in it.

Scary chart

This was  as the scary chart as posted by the Economist Brad DeLong.  He titles it:

"Less than 100,000 Payroll Jobs, a 58.5% Employment-to-Adult-Population Ratio Exactly Where It Was a Year Ago, and Labor Force Participation Down by 0.5 Percentage Points in the Past Year"

Source (hat tip nc)

Note that Mr. DeLong believes that it was a lack of serious stimulus that has sunk the economy.  While I would agree that stimulus would not have been as bad as the seriously flawed medical program we got, I think we are pretty much where we would be in any case.  We have been kicking the can down the road to some degree, but there is a very definite possibility that if that had not been done our economy would have imploded and we would have had a militia-favorite collapse scenario.  Bubbles push economies beyond the normal corrective patterns.

John S. Wilson has released Traveler

There is a new release from John S. Wilson out.  It is in the same world as his earlier novel Joshua, but is not directly related to that story.

 

It is is called Traveler (Kindle, paperback): the blurb:

America - the near future - the United States has experienced a complete economic and social collapse, clean water and abundant food, relics of a dying age. Small groups of survivors struggle to stay alive in a world rampant with starvation, disease, and violence. "Travelers" live amongst them, savage gangs that roam the countryside, always searching for fresh prey.

 

Joshua was a mix of Solar Flare meets the Road.  This one sounds a little different: at least the little bit of the teaser I read looks like it is survival from the bad guys point of view.  I liked Joshua, so I am interested in this one.

 

Bubbles keep a burstin!

The Dutch this time.

Which is only surprising if you aren't paying close attention.  The Danish citizenry are also deeply in debt, and have a robust economy masking a lot of debt.

Underwater: The Netherlands Falls Prey to Economic Crisis
Cristoph Shult and Anne Seith, Spiegel, 2 April 2013 (hat tip: NC)

Underwater" is a good description of the crisis in a country where large parts of the territory are below sea level. Ironically, the Netherlands, once a model economy, now faces the kind of real estate crisis that has only affected the United States and Spain until now. Banks in the Netherlands have also pumped billions upon billions in loans into the private and commercial real estate market since the 1990s, without ensuring that borrowers had sufficient collateral.

Private homebuyers, for example, could easily find banks to finance more than 100 percent of a property's price. "You could readily obtain a loan for five times your annual salary," says Scheepens, "and all that without a cent of equity." This was only possible because property owners were able to fully deduct mortgage interest from their taxes....

The Netherlands is still one of the most competitive countries in the European Union, but now that the real estate bubble has burst, it threatens to take down the entire economy with it. Unemployment is on the rise, consumption is down and growth has come to a standstill. Despite tough austerity measures, this year the government in The Hague will violate the EU deficit criterion, which forbid new borrowing of more than 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

... The prices of commercial and private real estate, which were absurdly high for a time, are sinking dramatically. The once-booming economy is stalling.

"A vicious cycle develops in such situations," says Jörg Rocholl, president of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin and a member of the council of academic advisors to the German Finance Ministry. "Customers have too much debt and cannot service their loans. This causes problems for the banks, which are no longer supplying enough money to the economy. This leads to an economic downturn and high unemployment, which makes loan repayment even more difficult."

The official unemployment rate has already climbed to 7.7 percent. In reality, it is probably much higher...

Note that these little collapses are going on all over Europe.   The focus is mostly on sovereign debt, but households, compared to their payment capabilities, and banks are in equally hot water


from here

The lower green line (triangles for the color blind) is households: but it is well over 50% of GDP.  This chart is from 2008 but the situation has not gotten better.