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More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

businessinsider.com

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Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#181

Post by devalgo »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #79
fooey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utah is very clearly having a significant infection surge, and the state just recommended to itself that we pretty much drop the rest of the few restrictions we ever had in the first place. https://coronavirus-dashboard.utah.gov/#incidence-epicurve https://senate.utah.gov/majority-newsroom/2020/6/2/public-he...

My guess is that in two weeks, we will be seeing an infection surge everywhere. So, Utah is not really losing much by opening up now.

Mine as well. I do hope the reports saying outdoor spread is unlikely are correct becaust the protests seem to be ideal superspreader events. Hot sweaty people packed into enormous crowds coughing because of tear gas and smoke? Thankfully some people are wearing masks but it's almost a worst case scenario.

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#182

Post by devalgo »

jdm2212 wrote: post #10
rwmj wrote: post #2

Purely as a thought experiment, if we suspended mortgage repayments for N months and rental payments for N months, what bad (or good) effects might we see?

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…

>The whole banking system would collapse like in 2007-2008 because "everyone stops paying mortgages all at once" is basically what happened then.

This obviously ignores the issue with massively leveraged firms making poor bets on housing bonds. But lets be real, they'll get bailed out if there's any problem.

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#183

Post by ethbro »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #170
diogenescynic wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market is a game of expectations and essentially is a graph of how rich people feel about the economy.

The stock market, at it’s basis, is a gauge of whether investors believe that other investors will buy at a higher price than they did.

Underlaid by etf rebalancing purchases and sales.

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#184

Post by devalgo »

seph-reed wrote: post #73

I'm kind of glad things are falling apart. It's like walking in the slightly wrong direction, every day you don't change course you add a bit of debt. At this point we're hitting something of a dead end, and it may finally be time to fix things. It's going to be painful, ofc. But it always was.

The burn it down and rebuild approach is terrifying. There's absolutely no reason to think there will be anything left to rebuild. Do you really think a Country like the US with thousands of nuclear weapons will allow itself to be torn down? You really think strongmen won't appear and enforce totalitarianism on any country sufficiently destabilized? There's a million ways for that sequence to go horribly wrong and like 5 where it works out. It's not a real solution.

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#185

Post by brewdad »

ojnabieoot wrote: post #151
uoaei wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point. If I understood GP correctly, the "things they don't really need to do" are the modern-day pencil pushers and middlemen who exist in industries that are basically modernized rent-seeking. Health insurance is an obvious example but we can also take it to the extreme and point out that there are sometimes (not often) 3 people at some grocery checkout counters: the cashier, the bagger, and…

Although I agree with the rent-seeker problem I really don’t think that’s what he was saying - for starters, the pencil pushers are much more likely to be at work (from home) than the food/entertainment/etc people I mentioned, and much more likely to keep their jobs during the pandemic. If your argument is what OP meant then I was giving them too much credit. > The latter two aren't really necessary, but we gave them…

I see it as a bit of both. I don't see myself going to a movie theater anytime soon even if they are allowed to open. Our restaurant spending is 1/3 what it used to be. A tank of gas lasts almost a month rather than a week. I used to go grocery shopping every week with at least one additional trip to grab one thing I needed. Now I go every 2 weeks and don't make a special trip unless we absolutely can't make anything without that missing ingredient.

All kinds of jobs are at risk in this type of environment. Service will be hit hardest but there are ripple effects that will impact pretty much everyone to some degree.

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#186

Post by subsubzero »

chkaloon wrote: post #34

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...

I don't know, I went from being an extreme pessimist to somewhat of an optimist around this pandemic's effect on the economy. One of the first positive points is the covid-19 death rate, during Feb/March it was quoted as being 4-6% which was terrifying. Very quietly the CDC has mentioned it now thinks it is around (0.8% to 0.26%)[1] (it is impossible to know the exact number but given S. Korea's numbers this seems reasonable). There are talks of a vaccine that could arrive around the September/October 2020 time frame by astrazeneca (provided results of testing are positive)[2]. Lastly, a treatment has been found in remedivsar [3] (although not extremely effective it is found to have some efficacy). Once a vaccine arrives expect a wave of shopping/travel the likes of the world has never seen being a majority of the people have been locked down for almost a year which would revive a frozen travel industry. What is still concerning is small mom-pop businesses closing and never reopening, Just remember 6 trillion was created out of thin air to alleviate the effects of this pandemic in the US [4]

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

[2] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/04/astrazeneca-is-set-to-make-t...

[3] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/01/gileads-remdesivir-shows...

[4] - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-us-has-thrown-mo...

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#187

Post by nitrogen »

stormbrew wrote: post #150
nitrogen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes people are forced into becoming a landlord. They bought an affordable condo in an affordable city (think 5 digit prices). The market dies and they can't sell. They lose their job. They have to go back to school. So they move in with friends and rent out their place just to cover the mortgage they can't get out of. Bankruptcy would ruin their chance to dig themselves out. I really feel for both renters and s…

I've been in the position of owning a condo with an underwater mortgage with difficulty finding work. It was fucking awful and it made my life hell for years. When I finally sold it it was for less than 2/3rds the remaining value of the mortgage. I still had more viable options and was in a better place than most people living paycheque to paycheque are if they're renting and their ability to work is interrupted for…

that's a problem.

Especially in times like these, we should be trying to find common ground with one another, not putting up walls and saying "you aren't allowed to think you understand what I feel" or "your problems are insignificant because mine are worse".

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#188

Post by pragmatic »

rurp wrote: post #84
ikeyany wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well said. People often forget that optimizing for efficiency isn't free, it has a cost in flexibility. The modern economy is heavily optimized which, yes, can produce enormous profits, but it also makes the economy extremely brittle. Approaches like just-in-time manufacturing or loading up on debt in a good economy to expand faster work out great... until they don't. And when things go bad, they can go bad quickly.…

Yes. Hospitals in particular.

One I'm familiar with moved to a LEAN system where they did not keep large inventory of supplies. There was some protest about not keeping essential supplies on hand for the lab etc.

And now we see the problem with this. Profit margin over safety.

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#189

Post by sokoloff »

jtolmar wrote: post #171
sokoloff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who would rather buy houses than rent should feel free to do so. No landlord is forcing someone to rent their property. It is often the case that renting is quite a bit cheaper and always the case that it's more flexible to do so, which is why a lot of people choose to rent instead of buying. Society benefits when people who wish to rent housing have housing available for lease.

But the price of buying a home would be a lot lower if there was no rent (or other ways to own a home you don't live in). There are more homes than there are people.

Just about every 4-plex and apartment building in the world wouldn't exist if there was no rent to pay for their construction.

(On a much more minor note, there are not more housing units (about 140M) than people (about 335M) in the US and probably not in the world; though that's literally what you claimed, it's probably not what you really meant to claim. Taking the most charitable re-interpretation of your claim: there are slightly more housing units than households (about 140M vs about 130M) in the US. See above about the prediction that many of these housing units likely not existing [or continuing to be offered/maintained] if rent were outlawed.)

Re: More than half of American retailers didn't pay their rent in April and May

#190

Post by ikeyany »

ojnabieoot wrote: post #151
uoaei wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point. If I understood GP correctly, the "things they don't really need to do" are the modern-day pencil pushers and middlemen who exist in industries that are basically modernized rent-seeking. Health insurance is an obvious example but we can also take it to the extreme and point out that there are sometimes (not often) 3 people at some grocery checkout counters: the cashier, the bagger, and…

Although I agree with the rent-seeker problem I really don’t think that’s what he was saying - for starters, the pencil pushers are much more likely to be at work (from home) than the food/entertainment/etc people I mentioned, and much more likely to keep their jobs during the pandemic. If your argument is what OP meant then I was giving them too much credit. > The latter two aren't really necessary, but we gave them…

I was referring to the notion of "bullshit jobs", optimizing for leanness, and neglecting societal safety nets.
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