I'd recommend learning about markets and economics. My suspicion is that states will continue to implement all steps necessary to contain the virus over the next 18 months and bail out all businesses and consumers in order to keep the productivity of the economy close to the level prior to the outbreak. Depending on how difficult it will be to contain the virus, this might require funds on an unprecedented scale in modern times. It's difficult to predict how eager investors will be to finance these deficits. Obviously something like a hyperinflation scenario is completely out of the question for a developed state like the US and there will likely be more deflationary pressure over the next few years, but at some point states will have to deleverage and I'm inclined to say that they will probably do this using higher inflation rates, in which case you can probably profit a lot from knowing about markets and economics.
Do you have any advice on where to read up on this sort of thing? I’ve always been interested but never acted upon it. Now seems like a good time to understand more about how our world actually works in terms of the economy
Take a look at the Economics & Finance videos on Khan Academy [1]. I have only watched some of them, but those I watched were good.
You could read some standard macroeconomics textbooks, but I'd advise against doing that, since they are expensive and unnecessarily formalized using elementary math, which doesn't really add anything to the material itself. There's however a good book on monetary economics by Mishkin called Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets, which is really good, but the Khan Academy videos on banking mostly cover the same material.
Personally I've learned a lot from reading economic history. Some books I can recommend are:
Eichengreen - Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System
Frieden - Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century
Soros - Alchemy of Finance (skip the first couple of chapters on his reflexivity theory, but the 'diary' chapters are a gold mine)
Ferguson - The Ascent of Money (probably a good book to start, the others might be harder to completely grasp for a beginner)
Some other good book I can recommend (not history books) are:
The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities by Baumohl
Inside the House of Money by Drobny (mostly about global macro trading, but you would learn a lot about economics along the way, would only recommend this after having built up some basic knowledge though)
Most importantly you should start reading the Economist, which has really high quality economics and finance articles, but is released only weekly and offers a good trade off with regards to time commitment and knowledge about what's going on in the world. Note that you will probably need to know some basics in order to understand everything, but you can look up things along the way. Economics really isn't hard to learn if you have a technical background.
