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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

#211

Post by martinflack »

pjc50 wrote: post #89
ping_pong wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US by definition can't default on its own debt. It's literally impossible because all debt is in USD. If the US gets into the situation where it doesn't have enough money to pay off its interest payments, the only one solution is to print more money to pay off the debt. This will lead to #2 in your list, which is actually just #1. When the US starts printing money, it will lead to a lot of destruction of assets b…

It can default on its debt by .. refusing to pay it. Remember all the debt ceiling fiasco and the furlough of federal workers? It would be a huge moment of voluntary stupidity, but anything's possible.

To be legal it would require a constitutional amendment to alter the 14th amendment.

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

#212

Post by nitrogen »

stormbrew wrote: post #191
nitrogen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Recognizing that there are degrees and differences in hardship between people who own property and people who rent is not any of those things.

We're in a thread where people are talking about just "canceling rent". If the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, the renter is out (and possibly the landlord too). If the renter doesn't pay rent, the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, and the renter is out. They're both in a bind. A landlord with a mortgage is not a property owner if the mortgage isn't paid.

If they work together as human beings they might find a solution that works with the means of each party, but if they start a hardship contest then they both lose.

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

#213

Post by dylz »

freehunter wrote: post #104
munificent wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undoing a lot of the effects of social distancing We've had several months of social distancing, which bought us a lot of time to ramp up healthcare and medical supply manufacturing capacity.

Honest question though... did we? Did we actually ramp up healthcare and medical supply manufacturing? I saw a lot of news about it when the pandemic first started but I still see a lot of news stories about PPE shortages.

My state is reopening while simultaneously not even having enough tests to be able to test one city's protestors, so this isn't going to end well.

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

#214

Post by ljf »

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…

I would disagree - everyone didn't just stopping paying their mortgages. The issue was that it was uncovered how inappropriate a portion of mortgages had been and how toxic the investment mixes were. This realisation led to banks valuations changing and led to a run on banks. The property behind these mortgages was worth less than the mortgages supplied on them.

While the default rate increased in some areas, it was in no way universal, or as high as we see today in the retail property market. Also (currently) the property backing the mortgage has retained its mortgaged value. So these are not that similar scenarios

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

#215

Post by stormbrew »

nitrogen wrote: post #212
stormbrew wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recognizing that there are degrees and differences in hardship between people who own property and people who rent is not any of those things.

We're in a thread where people are talking about just "canceling rent". If the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, the renter is out (and possibly the landlord too). If the renter doesn't pay rent, the landlord doesn't pay the mortgage, and the renter is out. They're both in a bind. A landlord with a mortgage is not a property owner if the mortgage isn't paid . If they work together as human beings they might find a s…

So, I started this particular thread on cancelling rent and I started it with a proposal that both rent and mortgages go on a holiday and a universal income supplement be enacted for the duration of the emergency. This is an arrangement that enables all three of renters, landlords with mortgages, and landlords without mortgages to have a shot at getting through this without bankruptcy.

And yet every reply comes in crying about mortgages, which I said right in my first post should have a holiday as well because otherwise there's conflict.

There's a knee-jerk reaction of empathy for people holding property that isn't being extended to renters here in this thread. It's showing in where people stop reading and hit the reply button. If you can't read past "rent holiday" to see the next part, you aren't spreading your empathy evenly, let alone fairly (which is not necessarily the same thing).

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

#216

Post by nopzor »

uoaei wrote: post #135
ojnabieoot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Because people have stopped doing things > 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 do…

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…

your example is really not appropriate. a grocery store (big or small) will not hire additional checkout staff "because it looks good when you report the quarterly unemployment stats".

private businesses really couldn't care less about those stats. they will hire the minimum number of people necessary to perform their service, at the minimum cost that they can.

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

#217

Post by sumedh »

fooey wrote: post #59
chkaloon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if Mitch can help it, unless, of course, his eventual KY challenger starts climbing in the polls.

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

Why does the debt rise during a Republican Presidency?

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

#218

Post by tonyedgecombe »

crazygringo wrote: post #102
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…

> We've built an insanely fragile economy. Citation needed. Things seem to be functioning pretty well, all things considered. I can still buy virtually everything I need from the local grocery store and Amazon. I've lived in third-world countries where regular products would be out of stock for months at a time under normal circumstances. To me, the economy looks insanely resilient in a global pandemic. > the mere fa…

> To me, the economy looks insanely resilient in a global pandemic.

It does seem having a large part of the economy focussed on frivolous endeavours has given us a fairly big buffer. We have seen formula one teams making medical equipment, supermarkets hiring restaurant staff, hospitals hiring air stewards (after the opposite in recent years).

It looks to me like the developed world will cope with this (some countries better than others of course).

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

#219

Post by tonyedgecombe »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #210
IAmGraydon wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that in the financial crisis, The market was in a bubble. Almost anyone you would talk to at the time would tell you the Stock market has never been stronger. A very, very few number of people knew what was coming. Now, every armchair trader is believing they’re reliving The Big Short and they’re the main character. They fail to realize that this is literally the opposite situation- a crash tha…

You're asserting that the crash happened (came to an end) and we're in recovery now. A lot of people, myself included, are less than convinced that's the case: believe it or not, there's still a lot of room for this to get much worse. The pandemic is barely getting started in places like India and South America, and the US is not out of the woods yet.

Poorer parts of the world are going to see the virus work its way through their population without much resistance. I doubt it will have the economic impact that it will in the developed world.

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

#220

Post by tonyedgecombe »

dzonga wrote: post #200

US is on the brink of two major things. 1. a civil war: lots of guns lying around n a demagogue in the white house. n trump like a rat, he's been biting n blowing air on the wound. come nov, he can easily say the elections were rigged, if in the small chance event he loses to sleepy Joe i.e Biden. he's supporters will buy it, as they already bought about mail in voter fraud. n his repeated calls for violence against…

Probably neither.
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