121–130 of 227 posts
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They don't have to be doing a perfect job for you to be able to do a worse one...
Pretty sure I could do better. Downvote me again. You're making a difference!
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> fragile ... the word is fragile. We've built an insanely fragile economy. Take a look. There's been no war. 100% of the (not so great) US infrastructure that was there before SARS-COV-2 is still there. We've lost about 100k people, which is horrific but in the scheme of things at "USA" scale, and with the skewed demographics, not much of a hit to the economy. And yet the economy is staggering and it's likely to get…
Fragile compared to what? Which economies can comfortably absorb the indefinite suspension of nearly all activity?
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Ah, but comrade, paying rent itself is inherently unfair. It allows for profit off merely having bought something sooner than another had a chance to. If the rent stops now, why should the rent start back up?
I guess you're being sarcastic, but what value is being provided to society by having landlords rent houses out to people who would rather buy them?
Preferring a better option doesn't mean much unfortunately. To go with a variant on a crass old joke "I would rather be paid billions to sleep with an endless line of beautiful women than work retail but they aren't hiring for that position unfortunately."
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No, it’s due to people not going to movie theaters and not going to Home Depot and not going out to eat at restaurants. You know, things they would normally do but haven’t been doing because it’s not essential.
They are definitely still going to Home Depot
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The whole banking system would collapse like in 2007-2008 because "everyone stops paying mortgages all at once" is basically what happened then. Renters stop paying their rent so landlords go broke. Landlords stop paying their mortgages. Mortgage-backed securities go into default. Anyone with lots of exposure to mortgage-backed securities folds. Their counterparties in all sorts of financial arrangements can't collec…
What's the proportion of commercial landlords that have a mortgage to pay? Because when their building is already paid, interruption of rent isn't really impacting them.
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I think the GOP is more likely to start trying to implement austerity measures than they are to try to help people. They've been building up a drum beat about debt and deficits over the last several weeks
> They've been building up a drum beat about debt and deficits over the last several decades FTFY
I am afraid we are in a real Wile E Coyote moment here. You know, where he's suspended in air for a few seconds before he goes crashing to the ground? Our crash may come in the fall when UI payments stop and the rent floats become unsustainable. About the time the second wave hits. https://66.media.tumblr.com/bbbf0aec68490ae2679ef489709c3d18...
> fragile ... the word is fragile. We've built an insanely fragile economy. Take a look. There's been no war. 100% of the (not so great) US infrastructure that was there before SARS-COV-2 is still there. We've lost about 100k people, which is horrific but in the scheme of things at "USA" scale, and with the skewed demographics, not much of a hit to the economy. And yet the economy is staggering and it's likely to get…
> We've built an entire economy around people doing things they don't really need to do.
Even hunter-gatherers spend a great deal of hard-earned resources on things "they don't need to do," such as art, music, parties, luxury foods and jewelry, and so on. This is human nature. It has nothing to do with how the economy is structured. The stuff we're not doing that "we don't need to do" is not economically redundant make-work symptomatic of an inefficient economy. It's symptomatic of us being a species that prefers nicer digs to "a cave with access to rice and beans."
In any economy, activity shuts down if individuals fear an active plague. Human nature also entails people being scared of choking to death on their own lungs.
The last paragraph here is trying to sound profound but it's really just catastrophically stupid. There's really no such thing as an economy that has the "spare capacity" to offset 25% of the workforce being furloughed. There are political economies that can adequately respond to this shock - perhaps with a large Keynesian stimulus - but that's very different from having an economy that's somehow structurally immune to the impact of widespread inactivity.
Unless its author means "give people free money until the crisis passes", the comment you're approvingly citing badly misunderstands what an economy actually is.
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>Given the harsh economic reality, I'm very bearish right now. as am I. I've more-or-less frozen my trading until a) a recovery plan is clear and being executed or b) until it is more clear we've hit a real bottom. All these hopeful spikes that do not correlate to the economic reality are probably going to throw a lot of people through hoops until any real roof or floor is hit. It sucks because I keep having these "b…
Time in the market beats timing the market. If you continue to invest regularly even in a down market you will eventually make more than those who target peaks and dips.
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I guess you're being sarcastic, but what value is being provided to society by having landlords rent houses out to people who would rather buy them?
My goodness, people here must really not have any experience either renting or owning. As a new homeowner, it is obvious what I used to be paying for -- someone to fix my living space any time something broke without charge and someone to maintain my building and my outdoor areas. It turns out that these things are actual work...
When the next pandemic hits, I doubt any government will dare to attempt a closure. The costs for these closures have been high in terms of economic pain. In addition, the protests, though they are justified due to the oppression the community has experienced, are likely undoing a lot of the effects of social distancing by putting a lot of people together in close proximity for hours. So in the end, we will have expe…
> The costs for these closures have been high in terms of economic pain.
It's not as if the choice is have a lock down and reduce deaths but ruin your economy vs don't have a lock down and have a lot of death with a good economy. Having a lot of death will ruin your economy too.