U.S. retailers plan to stop paying rent to offset virus closures

That's absolutely what should happen actually (rent decrease coupled with price falls). There's no way that real estate prices can stay stable given the current environment.

Prices should be going downward fast across the board, due to the drying up of overall chances to transact for most people. Without those opportunities to engage in business, what little business we can keep going should be kept going.

I think the solution is somewhere in the realm of "pay what you can, and everyone keep adjusting prices down to keep as many people doing the necessary work that we can keep taking place."

Trying to act like the securities depending on on pre-covid conditions mean anything now is like clutching a Reichsmark or Confederate dollar and expecting a satisfactory exchange with a vending machine. The apparatus simply won't support it. The social structure that backed that store of value isn't there.

I think when we look back on this, this pandemic may be quite literally the transition point in Market philosophy moving forward. I'm not sure what it'll look like, but I know if I had a choice in what to hand down to those coming after me, it would be a reset in which those that come after me can have a chance to build up what my parents and grandparents had the chance to.

Maybe I'm just resigned to being the Lost Generation v.2; but the Gilded Age nonsense we've been cruising with up until now needs to stop; both in a normative moral sense, and in a pragmatic, people need to not be sacrificed so the inequality created by current market structures can be perpetuated.

Tear down/stop the pumps trickling wealth up, dump value back in the bottom, let people sit on what productive assets they are physically using, and let people adapt to this new physical threat. We'll figure out the rest in time.

Frankly, the people worrying about a transition to a command economy should realize we were already in one. It was just one where the top 1% were accountable to no one, and growth numbers were what was being optimized for even if there wasn't any net benefit to society at large. See the increasing frequency of corporate malfeasance (Boeing, opioid epidemic, Telcos, PG&E etc) if you really don't believe that everything was reaching the point of too big to fail. We just needed something like this pandemic to happen in order for everyone's physical survival to decouple from the economy's idea of survival to ram the point home.

Around each and every person is the corpse of an industrialized society. We need to figure out what the hell to do with it to maintain carrying capacity. Then we need to just do it.

Ugly times these. Ugly times indeed.

Credit is something entities are willing to extend because they expect to get paid. Once you break this expectation, no one's going to lend. People and businesses have to borrow, explicitly or implicitly on an ongoing basis. Credit makes the world go around. No one is going to lend if the government makes it possible not to pay and still keep the other side of the transactions. This completely breaks the economy.

And policy decisions cannot be made instantly. The moment something like this is close to being implemented, this will freeze the credit system entirely. And there goes the economy.

We got a global financial crisis last time due to a small number of actors becoming less creditworthy and it being unclear whether they could pay their obligations. That slight change in expectations threatened to freeze the entire economy. To do this on purpose for every entity such that no one is creditworthy? That's insanity.

20% is not "most" and no we don't have the figures yet. 20% of Americans being unemployed isn't a good reason to freeze the entire economy such that effectively 100% of Americans are unemployed.

This doesn't make any sense - the Fed isn't going to provide loans to everyone, individual and business access to these loans is still gated by their own creditworthiness. And if you can make credit that easy, why do you have to do this at all? Why can't we just lend everyone money and have them pay all existing obligations? Why do you have to turn everyone who's involved in simple transactions into long-term creditors, when they aren't in the business of doing that?

And you can't actually lengthen payments for everything - some businesses and people with important resources will simply demand an up-front payment. Which will worsen the crunch for those that are stuck in the middle - some businesses will have to pay upfront, but get paid 3 months later. And no, banks won't want to lend to these businesses and if they can't determine whether you're one of those businesses or not, they will tighten credit on most businesses. Not to do so puts their own creditworthiness at risk.

This is all assuming you have perfect execution too - in reality, there will literally be millions of lawsuits since no one will be able to actually define what you're saying precisely enough to make the implied alterations to existing contracts unambiguous. It's also important to understand that most payments aren't interest payments - some of these cover actual costs.

Edit: consider what every company in the world will do in response to do this - they will review every contract they have to see if there's an angle that will help them optimize for this situation, and what kinds of addendum that they can force on others would put them in a more advantageous situation. No one will just sit and work according the spirit of the new rule, any ambiguities and angles will be exploited and lots of businesses and people will go end up on the wrong end of this.

Banks can get loans for free, and pass that onto credit-worthy businesses. Less credit-worthy businesses can get loans through the SBA through the stimulus. The government's existing programs (assuming the stimulus passes) will breach the extra 90 day gap for most.

And to flip it around, if 50% of small businesses go under, banks will be left holding a lot of bad debt. Banks will go under. Landlords won't have renters, and will be left holding mortgages. Without action, the whole system collapses.

You're assuming the economy is humming along right now. It isn't. Large parts are shut down. Some parts aren't. Those frictions are causing massive structural collapse as we debate.

Also: In most cases, up-front payment is fine while everything else is shut down. I understand the importance of credit. But the alternative is worse. If this continues for 18 months, virtually all mortgages, private and commercial, will be under water. Virtually all renters will be evicted, or rents will have gone down many-fold. Etc.