Meanwhile the S&P 500 is 5% away from an ATH record. Unemployed people = gambling with stocks + FOMO?
My hunch is the people losing their jobs weren't the ones likely to be participating in the stock market in the first place.
Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
11–20 of 176 posts
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#12Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do. This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
Do you have any sense of how people are managing? I sort of assumed that people _must_ be receiving money because there's no way Americans in the lower deciles of savings would be able to pay their bills consistently without work or stimulus. If there's no stimulus and no work, how are they paying bills? Is it on credit? Was there actually some savings?
People are coasting on tiny savings, eviction freezes, not paying bills, and moving in with their friends or families. Or at least my friends anyway.
The fall/winter is going to be an absolute disaster because you can’t fix anything about the economy without getting the pandemic under control, which a large percentage of our leaders in the US have decided they have no obligation to do.
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#13Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do. This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
Do you have any sense of how people are managing? I sort of assumed that people _must_ be receiving money because there's no way Americans in the lower deciles of savings would be able to pay their bills consistently without work or stimulus. If there's no stimulus and no work, how are they paying bills? Is it on credit? Was there actually some savings?
I have no data to back this up, but I would guess with interest rates at record lows and massive amounts of stimulus money with nowhere to go, getting a personal loan is rather easy right now...
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any sense of how people are managing? I sort of assumed that people _must_ be receiving money because there's no way Americans in the lower deciles of savings would be able to pay their bills consistently without work or stimulus. If there's no stimulus and no work, how are they paying bills? Is it on credit? Was there actually some savings?
People are coasting on tiny savings, eviction freezes, not paying bills, and moving in with their friends or families. Or at least my friends anyway. The fall/winter is going to be an absolute disaster because you can’t fix anything about the economy without getting the pandemic under control, which a large percentage of our leaders in the US have decided they have no obligation to do.
Please remember to vote based on candidates’ record not FB/Youtube ads
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#15Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do. This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
I know several people who had been furloughed, including my 69 yr old mother and the extra $600 has been a godsend to them. I dont even understand where we would be as a country if that legislation had not passed considering 1 in 3 homeowner/renters missed their payments last month.
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#16Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do. This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
Do you have any sense of how people are managing? I sort of assumed that people _must_ be receiving money because there's no way Americans in the lower deciles of savings would be able to pay their bills consistently without work or stimulus. If there's no stimulus and no work, how are they paying bills? Is it on credit? Was there actually some savings?
I can really only give my personal viewpoint of it. But for me personally I just have not been paying my mortgage only because I was lucky enough to have a government backed mortgage loan where I could tell the bank "tough shit" until the end of the year.
Also there have been temporary measures in place for things like utilities, ISPs, mobile phone plans etc. where people will keep accruing obligations on their bills without the services being cutoff. However it seems that those programs are about to come to an end. Locally where I live the utility service here said they will start doing cutoffs in August.
So I think it's a mixture of some amount of savings, some access to credit, and then a kicking of the can down the road for a few months. So my guess overall is that basically we are simply delaying the problem in a bunch of different ways. But at the end of that delay is going to be a lot of economic hurt when those bills actually come due.
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would guess that most unemployed people don't have money in individual stocks in the market. In fact, 85% of all stock is owned by the richest 10% of Americans. While it is true that a slim majority of Americans have some stock, the vast majority of that is in retirement plans, not brokerage accounts.
I've heard the following theory: Most trading volume is algorithmic, so it only takes a small number of real humans doing unusual trading activity for markets to move. I've phrased it like this because I don't have expertise.
“ only takes a small number of real humans doing unusual trading activity for markets to move” - WHAT? Link? Proof? Obviously false unless “small number of people”=folks like Buffet
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#18Meanwhile the S&P 500 is 5% away from an ATH record. Unemployed people = gambling with stocks + FOMO?
No. The government is injecting tons of cash into the market. This props prices up and causes inflation, or at very least avoids deflation.
this. The cash is basically on fire now with all the money printing. Thus inflated asset prices
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#19Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do. This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
Most of this is run at the State level. What State is at fault?
Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment
#20Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do. This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
Do you have any sense of how people are managing? I sort of assumed that people _must_ be receiving money because there's no way Americans in the lower deciles of savings would be able to pay their bills consistently without work or stimulus. If there's no stimulus and no work, how are they paying bills? Is it on credit? Was there actually some savings?
Roughly 1 in 3 american households are behind on their housing payments.
Most states (and all federally backed mortgages) have temporarily suspended evictions so the short answer is that people in financial distress dropped that expense, which is usually the single largest on most people's budgets (for low-income people this can often be 50% or more of take-home depending on the city - yes, the rule of thumb is that it shouldn't be higher than 25% but you simply can't find affordable housing in a lot of areas).
However that one eventually is going to come due because the federal mortgage eviction moratorium doesn't prevent you from going in default on your mortgage, it only prevents evictions. The 3-month timer is still running and as soon as the moratorium on evictions is lifted, they can kick you out immediately. So as soon as that lets up in a month or two there's going to be a massive surge in evictions in states that do not go out of their way to keep evictions suspended.
(and in fact this is probably a snowballing problem, the longer this crisis goes unchecked and the worse the economic pain gets, the more people that will be in default and the bigger the difficulty of getting "back to normal". Furthermore at some point that shit starts rolling back uphill economically, banks turned your mortgage into financial products and you not paying is cutting off the income of someone else, and in fact there is an eventual risk of a 2008-style crisis occurring on top of all the current problems if we get into a situation where people are defaulting en-masse.)