A new day

Even after yesterday's debacle in the markets -- for the second time in a week, the worst day since 1987 -- I slept better last night than I did the night before. Frankly, I was exhausted.

Yesterday had one absolute victory: Natalie had somehow booked her flight home from Detroit on the wrong Sunday, so I had to book her a new one. For the cost of $80, she is now coming home a day early, on Saturday. One more night and then we see her and get to plug her into her room. One less day circulating in the world, for the time being.

I am going to have to draw on all the lessons learned through almost 30 years in AA and recovery. One day at a time, that's what we are dealing with here. I just need to maintain my discipline: exercise, sleep, hygiene (brush teeth, shave, shower), meditate, read. There are new disciplines to be sure: hand-washing, stand 6 feet apart, etc.

For the time being I will stop going to AA and Al Anon meetings, which means using the telephone more to speak to people in programs on the phone. I called up one guy yesterday -- also a financial advisor -- and he told me he was buying for himself and clients and characterized himself as a perma-bull. I also generally believe in markets as asset allocators, but I don't think they always do the best job of allocating capital for all of society's needs. For example, healthcare surge capacity.

I remember back during Katrina and Ivan, it was the heyday of hedge funds, when they were the It thing in asset/wealth management and everybody had to be in one. There was a lot of hullabaloo and back-patting about how hedge funds were able to allocate quickly and somehow move funds to places that were able to get supplies to disaster sites quickly. I was young to that world, I never delved deeply into it. (There is probably record of it somewhere on the blog) We can only hope that some fleet-footed financiers are out there right now trying to figure out how to finance surge capacity. Of course they will be hoping to make money. I tend to think it is more likely Bill Gates than Bill Gross, but one never knows, does one?

Certainly we know there is a lot of fallow retail real estate and there will be fallow labor. We should be looking at what we need to do to convert, for example, empty anchor stores at malls into Covid-19 triage sites. I'm sure somebody is doing it somewhere.