Tuesday Links

1. The Fed: Avoiding a Depression
   Helpful context for the Fed's recent actions. It all comes down to making sure the economy has enough liquidity. It starts with the banking system and flows through to essentially all parts of the credit markets: treasury securities, repo markets, money markets, commercial paper, residential and commercial mortgage debt, even investment-grade corporate bonds.
   The Fed’s immediate goal is to keep credit flowing to the real economy.
2. NBER: The Coronavirus and the Great Influenza Pandemic: Lessons from the "Spanish Flu" for the Coronavirus's Potential Effects on Mortality and Economic Activity
3. The Forgotten 1957 Pandemic and Recession - Marginal Revolution
4. Bill Gross: How Technology Can Solve the Climate Crisis
   A mind-blowing, inspiring presentation from Bill Gross that frames the climate change fight in a very digestible way, and presents some incredible technologies he's investing in to create sustainable energy and solve the problem.
5. Party Zero: How a Soirée in Connecticut Became a ‘Super Spreader’ - NYT
   The Westport soirée — Party Zero in southwestern Connecticut and beyond — is a story of how, in the Gilded Age of money, social connectedness and air travel, a pandemic has spread at lightning speed. The partygoers — more than half of whom are now infected — left that evening for Johannesburg, New York City and other parts of Connecticut and the United States, all seeding infections on the way.
6. Fed Bombshell - The Grumpy Economist
   A useful explanation as to why the Fed's actions are not inflationary:
   When the Fed buys a Treasury bill, it creates new money with which to buy the bill. It simply increases the amount of reserves, which banks can freely transform to cash, so you can think of it as printing up money to buy the bill. Why doesn't this cause immense inflation? Well, the Fed backs the money with the bill. The overall quantity of government debt has not changed, just the composition.
7. Buying During a Crisis
8. How I’m Managing My Own Money Through the Crisis - Ben Carlson
   Stocks could continue to fall further. As a long-term investor, I don’t mind. I have plenty of time to wait and if I regret buying down 50% in 30 years we’ve got bigger problems on our hands than the stock market.