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What could post-lockdown life look like?

We’ve been home for over three months now and with a few exceptions, things have been going OK. Everyone in our household has remained healthy, no one has gotten sick (knock on wood), and we’ve been managing fairly well.

Every once and a while, I blow off some steam on Twitter:

Other countries are at different points in their lockdown and it’s interesting to see how life has changed for them, as it gives us a hint at what things may be like for us after this is all over:

“There Is Hope!” Dispatches From Asia-Pacific On The New, Post-Lockdown Normality [Mr Porter] – “As elements of normality return here, it’s easy to feel a confusing sense of guilt. My friends in these (now, very distant) places can’t meet, their children can’t play, their businesses can’t trade. And while the crisis in Asia feels economic rather than existential, perhaps our day-to-day can this time be a harbinger of hope rather than doom. Four men from across the Asia-Pacific region shed some light on lessons learnt, practices found and promise seen as their communities move into a new, post-lockdown normality.”

Just when you think it was all roses, here’s an article that gives me a little pause:

The Looming Bank Collapse [The Atlantic] – “The reforms were well intentioned, but, as we’ll see, they haven’t kept the banks from falling back into old, bad habits. After the housing crisis, subprime CDOs naturally fell out of favor. Demand shifted to a similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to businesses—specifically, troubled businesses. CLOs bundle together so-called leveraged loans, the subprime mortgages of the corporate world. These are loans made to companies that have maxed out their borrowing and can no longer sell bonds directly to investors or qualify for a traditional bank loan. There are more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The majority are held in CLOs.”

Hmmm… read the whole thing. It gets in deep into the weeds but useful to understand.

Finally, more signs that maybe there’s going to be a second dip in the market:

The Rich Cut Their Spending. That Has Hurt All the Workers Who Count on It. [The New York Times] – “The steepest declines in spending during the coronavirus recession have come from the highest-income places.” The NYT article is behind a paywall so I shared a version on Pocket, but it does a bad job of parsing the charts so just scroll past that beginning part to reach the article. Here is the original if you have a subscription.

It’s almost Friday! Cheers to you if Friday means something different than any other day! 🙂