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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

#221

Post by leetcrew »

_qwfv wrote: post #66
chkaloon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, there's always two parties in every transaction. Holiday for the rent payer is a death knell for the landlord. Mortgage holiday is the same for the bank and its bondholders/depositors.

Is that a problem? Those landlords and banks have collateral -- the properties and mortgages themselves. I care a lot more about housing from a "how well does it house humans" perspective than a "how well does it generate income for landlords/capitalists" perspective. If landlords and mortgage lenders ended up having to sell their assets for pennies on the dollar, I'd imagine it would make housing a lot more affordab…

what makes you think those houses would end up being bought to live in rather than scooped up en masse by even wealthier (aspiring) landlords with some spare cash? seems like the best case scenario would be a brief period where it's a great time to buy a house, followed by a return to the norm but with different landlords. that's not necessarily worse than what we have now, but I wouldn't expect anything to change long term without adjusting any of the other factors that make housing expensive.

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

#222

Post by leetcrew »

devalgo wrote: post #173
prewett wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time in the market beats timing the market. This has merits in a bull market regime. However, we may not in a bull market: history suggests that we will have a deeper bottom within 3 - 12 months. So if you buy stock now, when the market is within 10% of it's peak, and you have to wait for two years for the market to recover to that peak, there's plenty of time for someone to wait for the trough and substantially ou…

IF you're so confident then why don't you plug your life savings into shorting the market? You'll make millions. There's been countless examples of projecting returns for an investor who tries to time the market and one who keeps buying and almost universally the timer loses.

being pretty sure that the market will crash at some point in the next year isn't really actionable information for an investor. a temporary rally at any point could trigger a devastating margin call. you could just sell all your long positions and buy back in whenever you think the market is at its lowest point, but you're probably not gonna make millions this way.

FWIW, I haven't sold anything, but I haven't bought any shares either since the beginning of the crisis. I would be wealthier today if I had kept buying on my normal schedule.

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

#223

Post by vagab0nd »

satvikpendem wrote: post #111
serf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Does this apply to once in a life time events though?

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

#224

Post by satvikpendem »

mycall wrote: post #194
satvikpendem wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dollar-cost averaging is theoretically sub-optimal to lump sum investing in terms of expected return. This was shown to be the case in a mean-variance framework in 1979 by George Constantinides [0] [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=148754

Correct, however most people don't have the discipline or money to put in all their money in the beginning of the year, or whenever they get it. It's better to automate the habit of deposits rather than not doing so.

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

#225

Post by matthewdgreen »

subsubzero wrote: post #186
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 re…

> Very quietly the CDC has mentioned it now thinks it is around (0.8% to 0.26%)[1]

The CDC says CFR -- deaths out of cases that involve symptoms -- could be as low as 0.26% but this is bonkers. New York City has seen 16,992 deaths plus 4,760 probable. The total city population was 8,336,817 as of last July. So if we assume every single man, woman and child in NYC was infected and symptomatic, we get a death rate of 0.204% using only confirmed deaths, and 0.26% by adding in the probable cases. (Note that this doesn't include excess mortality, which could add thousands of deaths.)

Of course, antibody tests last I checked were only at about 20% for NYC, and presumably many of those people were asymptomatic. So the rate is potentially much, much higher than that. But even under ridiculously "optimistic" assumptions, the CDC's lower bounds are crazy.

Edit: calculators are hard, fixed a bogus number.

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

#226

Post by ping_pong »

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.

If you have the ability to pay your debt by printing more money, but then default because you don't, is absurd. It just won't happen. They would never choose to not pay when they can simply print more money.

If you want to go down that route, you can say that the US can also cancel its own debt by threatening every country that owns its debt with nuclear missile attacks if they don't cancel the debt.

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

#227

Post by seph-reed »

devalgo wrote: post #184
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 li…

You walk down the wrong nature path until it reaches a cliff. Do you jump off, or start walking through the brush?

Ofc we should just turn back, but humankind is far too head-strong for that.

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