Bastiat's Bastions

A few weeks ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) released its study, “Healthcare policy in an Obama administration: Delivering on the promise of universal coverage.” (You can read about PricewaterhouseCoopers here).

Obama’s plan is modeled after the Massachusetts healthcare system. His (near) universal coverage plan comes, not from a public takeover of the healthcare industry public ownership of the means of production in that industry-socialized medicine, but from subsidizing small firms’ healthcare coverage expenses and requiring businesses of all sizes to provide healthcare coverage for workers or face a hefty fine. What is substantially different about Obama’s plan from the Massachusetts system is Obama’s plan does not force individuals to purchase healthcare coverage. What we do have to keep in mind, however, is that it is unlikely that the healthcare reform that goes through Congress and is signed by Obama is the exact one that Obama recommended.

PWC estimates that the federal government’s cost for this expanded coverage, mostly from subsidizing small businesses, would amount to $75 billion a year, at least initially. As with all entitlement programs, initial estimates of future costs are underestimated and often overlooked. Real costs for Medicare and Medicaid were about 10 times what was originally estimated. Let’s hope that the estimates for Obama’s plan come closer to the mark. Here is what happens: as more people are covered, demand for health care expands greatly, pushing healthcare costs up dramatically. This results in calls for price controls, which create shortages, along with political civil wars to drop coverage for certain procedures and certain medications.

Healthcare coverage for more people, while laudable, drives healthcare prices up for everyone and ignores consideration for how these more highly demanded services are to be delivered. Giving more people the ability to pay without increasing the number of healthcare providers merely puts more people into waiting rooms, without doing anything about actually getting people diagnosed and treated. We end up worse than the Canadians, with not only month-long waiting lists for specialties, but with month-long waiting lists to see primary care physicians. Massachusetts was able to handle this by getting more doctors and nurses from other states. This cannot be done so easily for the nation as a whole.

We often fail to see things from both sides. It is easy for us to put ourselves in the place of healthcare buyers, because most of us are. We have a difficult time seeing the big picture of both healthcare buyers and healthcare suppliers, but if we succeed in putting more people into waiting rooms without getting more doctors and nurses to into examining rooms and treatment rooms, we will see prices for healthcare take the express elevator through the roof. Then, political demands arise for a government takeover of the healthcare industry. As Steve Lieber, CEO of the health trade association Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), is quoted as saying: “Apply traditional economic principles. If you have an increase in demand, there should be some type of effort to address the supply side. It takes time to increase the number of physicians. As demand increases in that sense, it can be an economic incentive on the provider to become more efficient.” (p. 18)

However, the AMA and ANA control the accreditation of medical and nursing schools, and the licensing of doctors and nurses. There are several ways of increasing the supply of providers. Massachusetts, for instance, allows patients to designate a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant as their primary care provider. They also required their medical schools to graduate a minimum number of primary care physicians. Of course, this does not keep these graduates from going out of state and obtaining more lucrative specialties.

Two things beyond the Massachusetts reforms are needed to really increase healthcare supply. First, is to require the medical schools and nursing schools to increase their graduation numbers. Second, with the political support from the AMA and the ANA and the current political frenzy over immigration, it is far too difficult for qualified doctors and nurses from overseas to come into the US and practice their professions—this needs to be reversed.

All-in-all, Obama’s plan is not the takeover of the healthcare industry that Hillary Clinton’s almost became. Still, without some rollback of the governmental regulations that provide unnecessary barriers to entry into the healthcare industry, his plan will cause prices to rise so substantially that the voters will demand a government takeover of the industry.

-MC

Sometimes I love being an economist – a case in point was the part of today when I read the article I’ll discuss below. (Sometimes not so much love – I graded some exams today).

As I sometimes tell my students, the reason I like thinking like an economist is that it helps me to understand the world around me and occasionally I can predict the future.

Today, I read an article about the “cheap” flat panel televisions and DVDs that were going on sale at Walmart on Friday morning at some god-awful hour of the morning.

When we discuss supply and demand in class, we certainly stress that price adjusts so the quantity demanded equals quantity supplied. A shortage would cause upward pressure on prices, while a surplus would cause downward pressure on price. Equilibrium would occur where the market clears – where there is neither a shortage nor a surplus.

When we discuss this in class, we usually think of this price as the “monetary price” of the good – that is, how much money it takes to acquire the good. However, as I’ll expand upon below, it is really proper to to think of this price as the “full price” of acquiring the good – and this includes non-monetary aspects. But some background first…

In the case of a price ceiling set below this “market-clearing” price, quantity demanded exceeds quantity supplied. So as we typically discuss in class, some other mechanism must ration demand – some other mechanism must decide who gets to consume the good.

When it came to price ceilings, the main possibilities are nepotism, bribery, and germane for this post, queuing. Queuing is simply econ-speak for waiting in line.

To be a bit more explicit, consider an example where the (monetary) market-clearing price of a TV is $500. Now suppose, for whatever reason, the monetary price was set at $400.

At this monetary price, there would be an excess quantity demanded for this good. In fact, a person would be willing to pay a “full price” of $500 for this good. This person would be willing to bribe someone up to $100 for the ability to buy this good. Or offer $100 of their time to wait in line to enjoy the good. (Of course, if they could bribe someone $10 or use $10 of their time to get the TV that would be better than paying $100.)

Now, think about those folks waiting outside of Wal-mart to buy TVs? Are they getting as good as deal as it appears? Not if we consider the opportunity cost of their time. In the end, if we believe people “compete” to get to acquire these goods, it is quite possible that some marginal consumer will have paid the “full price” of $500 – only that they have paid $400 of money and $100 worth of their time.

So here is where I can predict the future.

I swear I didn’t go to Wal-mart this morning, nor have I seen the news stories, but I believe I can predict, generally speaking, the characteristics of people that will be outside of Wal-mart waiting in line for 12 hours for the right to save, say $100, on a TV. Doing some math, it will be the people for whom 12 hours of their time is worth less than $100. While people’s value of their time is not perfectly correlated with their market wages, there surely is a relationship. I’d predict that we will not see a bunch of doctors and lawyers in line (they’d simply pay the $500), instead we will see students, retired persons, other people with no jobs or part-time jobs, or people who really enjoy sitting in lawn chairs in parking lots. (I know what you are thinking, but go to Wal-mart on Saturday night at about midnight).

If there were no purchase limits, we’d expect the people in line to be folks who planned on purchasing many DVDs.

Now, be sure to understand that I’m not suggesting that people don’t get “a deal” – nor that people are irrational – only that this deal was not as good as you’d think if you didn’t factor in the value of the time spent acquiring the TV.

Ceteris paribus, the people with the lowest value of their time get the best deal. Not all consumer surplus necessarily is eroded away, but it is quite plausible that consumer surplus for the marginal consumer will be eroded away. Waiting time will tend to adjust to make this so. Further, the length of time people will wait is directly related to the difference in the monetary price at Wal-mart and the monetary price at other stores.

One last thing to consider. If this “full price” idea is important as I think it is, might there be another component of the “full price” of going to Wal-mart at 5:00 on Friday morning that is non-monetary and not related to the value of time?

Ask the pregnant woman whom the article refers to. I think she’d tell you there is.

What amazes me is that Wal-mart is willing to incur the liability — I wonder if we don’t see some policy changes in the future. During the scary parts of the financial crisis that we saw a few months ago, banks were allowing customers in 5 at a time to make transactions. I heard some stories about similar policies at home improvement stores after the hurricanes. Concert tickets often involve lottery numbers. Might we see such things at Wal-mart?

–CT

Well, this post is not really from a guest blogger, but Gokhan Karahan is, regretfully, no longer teaching and working at Nicholls State University. Dr. Karahan was one of the four founders of Bastiat’s Bastions back in 2005, and we will not let him go. Dr. Karahan sent this to me today to post.-MC

The ill-timed and ill-designed bailout does not seem to show any sign of bringing solutions to the current economic meltdown. Given that there will be a bailout (as soon as Secretary Paulson and his team finally make up their mind on what to bailout and how much!), not attaching strings to how banks may use the bailout money makes one feel that the government’s ultimate objective is to create a “lean” and more competitive banking system. Call it a conspiracy theory but stories available in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and several blogs, all point to the possibility that smaller/regional banks may be swallowed up by the very banks asking for the bailout money. In other words, it is possible that the government feels that a fragmented banking system may be a bigger threat to the US financial dominance than a short run credit freeze.

About a quarter century or so ago, the manufacturing share of the US GDP was about twenty-five percent. The financial services industry had a twelve percent share. We succeeded in reversing it in less than two generations. With the advances made in the computing and telecommunication technologies, this “new service” economy was to increase our standard of living to unimaginable levels. Smart people came up with financial products that were sold as “high return” investment vehicles. We were led to believe that those conventional thinkers arguing otherwise were all wrong when they questioned where the “beef” was coming from. Moreover, some financiers even bet that the stock market would hit 36,000!!!

Well, it has not and will not for a long time to come! Easy credit and imprudent government policies encouraging “ownership” have led to financial practices, some of which were outright fraud and speculation. We now realize that the “new” economy is still the old one with a bruised face. This time, however, it will take a lot to make the rest of the world believe in our “high yielding” financial products as well as credibility. In other words, a good portion of the US GDP may be in trouble. Unfortunately, the manufacturing sector does not have the muscle it had not long ago to help us out.

Where do we go from here? Given the recurrence and the magnitude of the financial crisis since the 70s, moral hazard does not seem to be a part of the government’s calculus in bailouts. In fact, the bigger the failure, the bigger the bailouts. One way this vicious circle could be prevented and excesses in the economy can be corrected is to live through a severe recession now and not bailout anybody. This would mean a shrinking economy but over the long run it would make us learn not to live beyond our means. If not, there will be a time when this country would not be able to spend its way out with borrowed money from overseas. And, I truly fear that we are not too far from it.

Gökhan Karahan
Associate Professor of Economics
College of Business
Delta State University
662.846.4195
gkarahan@deltastate.edu

This is a guest post from Mike Kurth, Professor of Economics at McNeese, and an old friend of mine from grad school at VPI (aka known as Virginia Tech). When he sent this along to me and others, he attached this article that makes a similar point by Peter Cohan.

-MC

They say generals always fight the last war. I think the same is true of many economists; we are always fighting the last depression. In the Keynesian economic model, recessions are associated will falling prices due to insufficient demand. Ergo, the solution is to pump money into the economy to keep people spending. But recessions do not always lead to deflation. For example, in the seventies we saw “stagflation” with double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation.

Basically, an economic depression occurs when markets collapse. Not just the stock market, but markets in general. In the nineteen-thirties this happened when the Fed raised reserve requirements in an effort to restore public confidence in the banks, but it had the unintended consequence of contracting the money supply and forcing banks to call in good loans. Faced with deflation, people began hoarding their money-burying it in cans in their backyards or stuffing it in their mattresses-rather than it saving and investing.

The Roosevelt administration then implemented a series of reforms to fix the economy, but each “fix” only made things worse. Somehow, for the next ten years the Democrats managed to convince the American public that all our economic woes were caused by Herbert Hoover and the failure of capitalism, and that government intervention was the solution rather than a large part of the problem. The point is that in the nineteen-thirties the causation was from a currency collapsed, followed by ill-advised government intervention which caused markets to collapse, rather than the other way around.

The problem today is not insufficient money, but too much money. The world is afloat in debt. Governments and their economic advisors in the post-war era have confused prosperity with the ability to spend. As long as we can buy big homes, new cars, fancy appliances, and the latest electronics, we are prosperous. Thus, at the first sign of a slowdown they have pumped more money into the economy, primarily by expanding consumer debt, to keep consumers spending and the nation “prosperous.” For over two decades now, US consumers have spent more than they earned. Clearly, this is not sustainable, and I fear we have now hit the credit wall.

The sub-prime crisis did not come about because the market system failed or because Democrats wanted to qualify low-income persons for home loans. The problem developed as money fled the stock market after the high-tech bubble burst, much of it going into real-estate, causing home prices to rise. Wanting to expand debt to maintain the appearance of prosperity, the government relaxed regulations were so that sub-prince lenders such as Countrywide and DiTech could encourage people with poor credit due to high credit card balances to consolidate their debt into one low payment by tapping into their home equity.

Thinking they had discovered manna from heaven, many of these high-risk borrowers then re-maxed their credit cards in the belief that in the future they could simply roll this new debt into their mortgages as home prices continued to rise. But, alas, the housing market also proved to be a bubble too, and when home prices fell these people were trapped with huge credit card debt, mortgage payments they could not afford, and negative equity in their homes.

The long-term solution this economic crisis is not to pump more money into the economy and further expand debt. Our government is acting like someone who has just maxed out all their credit cards and is feverishly filling out applications for new cards so they can keep spending to maintain their style of living. Somehow we have to get back to fundamentals: real prosperity depends on our wealth and not simply our ability to spend.

The consumer price index fell this month because oil prices have fallen sharply, but core inflation rose. In other words, lower oil prices are currently masking the underlying inflation taking place in our economy. We are now witnessing bail out mania in Washington: Congress is passing out hundreds of billions-no, make that trillions–of dollars to special interests, and no one is asking from whence the money will come. It cannot come from taxes; the American people-even the rich ones-don’t make enough money to pay that tax bill! If the government cannot get it from taxes, there are only two other possible sources: either borrow it or print it.

Will the Chinese lend us more money? I’m hoping they just hang on to the trillion plus dollars of our debt they now hold and don’t try to cash it in to stimulate their own economy. How about the Europeans or Japan? Their economies are in recession, too. We could ask our friends in OPEC, but with falling oil prices I doubt they are going to line up to loan us money. So that leaves only one option-we print it.

I don’t want to sound like some alarmist nut-case, and I don’t want to scare anyone. But I am concerned that we could possibly see hyper-inflation, similar to what the Germans experienced after WWI. If that happens, the entire global financial structure-which is built on the US dollar-will collapse. Many economists are predicting deflation as consumers cut back on spending and industrial output slows down. We probably will see some falling prices in the initial phases of this recession, but I think the eventual impact of these massive government bailouts will be more money chasing fewer goods, which means inflation and probably the end of the US dollar as the de facto global currency.

Mike Kurth

While I would not call Smucker’s jellies and jams, Knott’s Berry Farms products inferior products, they do seem to be, according to economists definition of the term, “inferior goods.”   Recall from class that “inferior goods are anything we tend to buy more of when our incomes go down.   During recessions, incomes go down, because our production drops.   (What a concept? Incomes have something to do with production.)

A few days ago I posted something on Spam and recessions.   Hormel workers are now  working overtime to provide American consumers the most mysterious of all mystery meat,  Spam.  

Now, the news offers more on the hot sales of an inferior good producer, a major maker of jellies and jams, Smuckers.   It seems that when people’s incomes start to get hit they eat out less at high-end restaurants, and instead eat more at McDonald’s, eat more spam, and eat more PB&J, especially at home.  

-MC  
 

The news is definitely not good for the markets. We have an enormous amount of stock-price volatility, and the Dow is well below its recent high. Take this quote from economist Mark Zandi:

Stock prices are falling across the globe. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 550 points or just over 7%…and is now 13% below its all-time record high set this past summer. The decline in other broader market indices, including the S&P 500, NASDAQ and Russell 2000 has been similar.

Interestingly, Zandi said this back in 1997 (if you sign up for the trial, you can get the full article here). The ellipsis in the quote replaced the words “on Monday , October 27, 1997.” My point is not that we aren’t currently in some sort of tumultuous period. It seems pretty clear that we are. We just have to keep things in perspective.

I’m not really sure if this will work, but I’m going to follow Andy Kessler’s advice and ignore the markets until February. Kessler gives several valid reasons for the recent wild swings in the market, and I suppose he could be correct. Either way, there’s very little I can do about the market, and I’m young enough to maintain a long-term view.

On the positive side for economists, we may have a new opportunity for researching the (somewhat) controversial contagion theory. The name comes from the psychology of crowds; it basically refers to a sort of herd mentality. In the context of the stock markets, once a few big investors get spooked and/or a few large companies’ stocks go down, the herd mentality kicks in. For this theory to be true, the drop in the market could have started based on very real events. The contagion just makes it worse.

There’s actually a pretty good analogy here for the way the financial crisis started. This article, Anatomy of a Meltdown (it appeared in the October 2007 issue of Mortgage Banker Magazine), details some of the intricacies behind the subprime problems. Bear Sterns, for example, probably got into a great deal of trouble due to a herd mentality. Nonetheless, Bear did get into trouble. Hopefully, all of this will be over by February.

NM

If you thought this post was going to be about junk e-mail, I am sorry to disappoint you.     Instead   this is about the other spam, the gelatinous, blood-pressure raising mass of mystery meat in a can, Hormel’s Spam.   As many of my students are aware, I spend a bit of time at the beginning of the term in my introductory economics classes discussing normal and inferior goods.   Normal goods are things we tend to buy more of when our incomes improve, while we buy more inferior goods when our incomes deteriorate.

I usually tell students that just because we name things we buy more of when our incomes drop “inferior goods” does not mean that they are really inferior in some objective sense, and I use shoe repair services as a possible example.   Spam would not be a good example of this point.   I am not sure that my dog, who eats aluminum foil would even eat the stuff.

Well, here is an article from the New York Times by Andrew Martin about how the downturn in the nation’s economy is affecting Hormel’s Spam business.   This is the perfect story for understanding about how income affects the demand for an inferior good.

On the other hand, the recession has affected the demand for gasoline by pushing it down, which has pushed prices to half of their July levels.   Certainly, lobster qualifies as a normal good.   As we see in this article by Daniel Gross in August’s Slate, the price of lobster in Maine has fallen off a lot this year because of the recession pushing incomes down, and so, the demand for normal goods, especially luxury goods.   In some places in Maine, it was as inexpensive to buy a one pound lobster meal as a quarter pounder from McDonald’s.

My suggestion, is to go against the tide.   Go for the inexpensive lobster instead of the expensive Spam.

-MC

Over the weekend, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who voted against the bailout, criticized Treasury Secretary Paulson for “not telling the truth” about what Treasury would do with the bailout money. As I posted here, I don’t buy this at all. If the intent was as specific as Inhofe seems to think it was, there was no reason to have “any other financial instrument” in the text of the bill.

Regardless, this is what Inhofe said:

“It is just outrageous that the American people don’t know that Congress doesn’t know how much money he (Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) has given away to anyone,” the Oklahoma Republican told the Tulsa World. “It could be to his friends. It could be to anybody else. We don’t know. There is no way of knowing.”

I can’t be certain, but it’s almost as if Inhofe was referring to Paulson’s “friends” in an off-hand manner. But I wonder, is there a simple rent-seeking story here? Paulson, after all, was an investment banker, starting at Goldman Sachs in 1974, and ending up its CEO in the late 1990′s. And, we know that the current crisis showed up in the investment banks, not the commercial banks. We even know that some in the commercial banking industry didn’t want any part of the bailout money.

Could the explanation for this bill be as simple as: investment bankers went to Paulson for help with their financial problems?

NM

It looks as though there is at least some resistance to extending “bailout money” to the U.S. automakers, although I’ll only believe it’s over when it’s over. And, of course, universities and big-city mayors are looking for some of the money too. (I have to thank Chad Turner for the university link, I had completely missed it.)

Anyway, according to this AP article, “bailout fatigue” has set in on Capitol Hill. The article says:

The Senate Democrats’ measure would carve out a portion of the Wall Street bailout money to pay for loans to U.S. automakers and their domestic suppliers, but aides in both parties and lobbyists tracking the plan acknowledge they do not currently have the votes to pass it.

But why would automakers need a special loan package, direct from Treasury, when all the banks are now flush with excess credit? After all, the original bailout bill was (supposedly) passed so quickly to avoid the problem of non-financial companies being frozen out of the credit markets. If, even after all of these low-cost “injections” of capital, banks still won’t loan money to the car makers, maybe it’s not a good idea to loan them money?

I know, I know, I’ve heard all the “too big to fail” arguments; if GM and Ford fail, it’s not just those workers who lose their jobs, it’s the suppliers and dealers, etc. The problem is that we can make the same argument about any large industry – the airlines, the banks (I hate using that one), telecom – all of these industries have various suppliers and other businesses connected to them. If we just keep shoveling tax dollars into “troubled” industries, we won’t have industries, we’ll have large government agencies.

We simply have to realize that (1) we’re talking about using tax dollars to bailout private companies; and, (2) when we “bail out” companies in this manner, we’re prolonging the pain of business failure, not preventing it. It’s not like the U.S. car companies have been a glaring example of efficiency. These guys have been limping along for years.

Faced with serious competition from the Japanese in the 70′s, the U.S. automakers were forced to deal with (among other things) grossly underfunded pension liabilities. The “big 3″ became the “big 2,” and they’ve been trying to unwind those bad deals ever since. In fact, one of the reasons 401k plans (and defined contribution plans, in general) became prevalent is that corporate America realized they could not keep going with defined benefit plans.

Of course, if you have high fixed costs and a shrinking market share, you keep your debt down, right? Not these guys.

If you look at the balance sheets from Ford and GM for the last several years, you find debt-to-asset ratios near one (i.e., their total debt is at/above what their total assets are worth). Honda and Toyota, on the other hand, have debt-to-asset ratios near 60 percent.

What are some of the high fixed costs GM and Ford face? According to a Standard & Poor’s market report: “Even labor costs have become largely fixed because of union contracts, which may restrict layoffs or require automakers to pay certain laid-off workers benefits worth up to 95% of their take-home pay.” (I am unable to provide a link to non-subscribers.)

It’s bad enough that our government is seriously considering loaning billions of tax dollars to unproductive, highly levered companies. But it’s even worse when you compare the amount of the proposed taxpayer loan ($25 billion) to the market capitalizations of Ford and GM (approximately $4 billion and $2 billion, respectively).

What’s the market capitalization of Honda? Nearly $40 billion. Toyota? About $100 billion. Which one would be the better investment for your money?

NM

A little extra: For anyone interested, there’s a nice debate at The New Republic and the Corner (National Review); read both pieces to get both sides of the argument.

Lately I’ve been preoccupied with studying the financial crisis. In particular, I’ve been looking for an angle to test whether the credit markets really did freeze prior to the $700 billion bailout. I’m not having great success, but I have come across several unexpected findings.

For instance, I’ve noticed that the U.S. financial crisis is now, supposedly, a leading cause of a global recession. This sort of story, being repeated all over the news, seems a bit peculiar to me. We don’t even have clear evidence that there was a credit freeze in the U.S., much less the entire world, but whatever happened has caused a world-wide recession?

Now, I’m not saying that there is no problem with the derivative securities tied to the sub-prime mortgages; that’s evident. But the notion that these derivative securities, tied to (mostly) a few parts of the U.S. housing market, could cause a global economic recession seems a bit odd. Maybe this scenario is possible, but we need to investigate the cause, not just repeat the mantra.

Yet, the story is getting repeated. In today’s Wall Street Journal, an economist from Wachovia Corp. says “It is clear that the combination of global recession and the global credit crunch is causing world-wide trade to dry up.” An early October article in the Economist is subtitled: At best, the world economy is on the brink of recession. The article starts off:

DEPRIVE a person of oxygen and he will turn blue, collapse and eventually die. Deprive economies of credit and a similar process kicks in. As the financial crisis has broadened and intensified, the global economy has begun to suffocate.

No wonder people dislike economists so much. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we are in a global recession; that trade has slowed, people are buying less, and even investing less. Would the financial crisis be the only explanation? Could there be any other causes?

I had a talk with Morris Coats, and we came up with a brief list of possibilities concerning people’s expectations. In other words, perhaps we are witnessing a global slowdown right now because people expect:

- Higher taxes in the U.S.;

- More economic regulation (Obama promised to let the EPA regulate CO2);

- Less global trade (Obama promised to renegotiate Nafta unilaterally (or not));

- Obama to reinstate the ban on offshore drilling that was recently lifted;

- Democrats to nationalize the U.S. healthcare system;

- Democrats to take over 401(k)’s.

Or, perhaps investors are nervous because the U.S. government has started to nationalize the world’s most formidable financial industry and appears ready to nationalize the auto industry. Or, maybe people in foreign countries are doing worse because the U.S. has stopped importing cheap labor, relegating would-be workers to countries with few jobs.

All of this adds up to heightened uncertainty regarding a significant portion of the world’s commerce. Why would added uncertainty be a problem, you may ask? Here’s the basic story:

People invest based on the return they believe they will get over time (i.e., in the future); when something happens to make that future even murkier, they tend to require a greater return on their investment; If they don’t think they will earn that rate, they won’t invest; If they don’t invest, we end up with fewer goods, services, and jobs.

Financial crisis? Expectations? I suppose I’ll have to pick one, but I’d prefer to wait till the whole thing is over.

NM