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Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

forbes.com

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Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#111

Post by syspec »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #64
syspec wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this is not discussed more, or that congress and the president have already "moved on" is so frustrating. The president should be making distributing this aid, and fixing the unemployment benefits mess his priority for these people. Instead he's doing a photo op with cans of beans in the Oval Office, and another photo op down the street with a bible he holds like an alien artifact

Trump messed up a ton in this crises, and has a lot to answer for. This is not one of them. Unemployment is almost all within the remit of the individual states. The government approved additional payments to each state, but the state government is responsible for dispersing and managing the unemployment system.

I'm saying he should be using the power of the bully pulpit, to help coordinate the fixing of this issue, not selling beans

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#112

Post by thehappypm »

nitrogen wrote: post #74
paulmd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further. The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority. Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia a…

You don't think the people who live somewhere should have a say in what happens there? Having city dwellers decide what happens in rural areas is the tyranny of imperialism.

No, it isn't. One person, one vote. If there are more farmers than city dwellers, the farmers have more say. If there are more city dwellers than farmers, the city dwellers have more say.

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#113

Post by saagarjha »

hyperbovine wrote: post #76
bitxbit wrote: post #48

August will be brutal if unemployment stimulus ends. I don’t think Washington understands the dire nature of the situation.

Half of it does.

Politicians aren't stupid, they just play it on camera. Everyone knows how it will play out, but some are selectively ignoring it.

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#114

Post by derivagral »

option wrote: post #17
kiplkipl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the concept is similar to how BTC (and other crypto) have major price fluctuations that get reported and acted on via liquidity from a vanishingly small proportion of the actual total BTC. There's reasons, differences, nuance, etc, but I think that's where the thought starts.

If most capital is in rarely-traded funds (I think 90-95% are passive?) then by definition those last 10%-5% active investors are going to set the market, at least in the general day to day.

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#115

Post by superkuh »

scrollbar wrote: post #77
imchillyb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can UBI scheme help to overcome Unemployment crisis ? @varbhat You realize that UBI requires monies, right? The US Federal government, and most states, are bankrupt. There is no money for this years bills. There was no money for last years bills, and we keep borrowing at exorbitant interest rates. Our deficit (shortfall for this year) is -more than- 2.7 trillion dollars. Our debt (shortfall for previous years) is -…

Money is created by the government, and creating more of it to distributed equally across individuals just redistributes the relative purchasing power from people with more than average to people with less than average.

Not just the government, not really the government at all unless you consider the Federal Reserve Banks lending money to regional banks "government".

The majority of the M0 money supply, that bit of currency we use to get things done in our economy, is created by fiat at any of the ~4500 commercial banks (in the USA). Every time they give out a loan they create the money out of thin air as debt on their balance sheets. They are only required to have a tiny fraction of the money they 'loan'/create (fractional reserve).

If instead of letting only these banks create money, if the new M0 money supply was distributed to ~300 million human people instead of ~4500 corporate people, there'd be plenty for basic income. It'd be universal basic income then instead of commercial bank basic income. And banks could just be banks and get by on their actual services instead of being money machines.

... and that's not even acknowledging what the NY Fed have begun doing since October of last year, 10s to 100s of billions a week swapped for worthless items from corporations who can't pay their bills in Reverse Repo operations: a shallow attempt to pretend it isn't just giving money away (https://apps.newyorkfed.org/en/markets/autorates/temp).

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#116

Post by charwalker »

j7ake wrote: post #30

Is this a spike compared to last few months? Where is best place to get the latest chart of unemployment over time for 2020?

BLS: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

They release a jobs report on the first friday of each month with asjustements as data from prior months made it in. They survey businesses and process a lot of other data to deliver these reports and have been generally apolitical and data focused though the current administration has tried to influence numbers to their advantage, effectively undermining a critical component of our democracy.

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#117

Post by jcranmer »

j7ake wrote: post #30

Is this a spike compared to last few months? Where is best place to get the latest chart of unemployment over time for 2020?

You can get exact numbers in table form here: https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/wkclaims/report.asp

The latest jobs report, which has a graph of the year's data, is here: https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf

The numbers here are basically on an exponential decay curve from ~6M new claims in the last week of March. (FWIW, the pre-2020 record for new weekly claims, seasonally adjusted, was ~700k in 1982--we broke that in March and haven't stopped breaking it since).

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#118

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

wronglebowski wrote: post #28
ethanwillis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience access to credit besides credit cards has been extremely limited. My wife and I looked into several different personal or short term loan options for our upcoming IVF cycle(approx 30k$). Most banks have either stopped offering them completely or made the requirements much harder. The two of us with credit scores of 750+, combined 200k annual income and little existing debt couldn't get approved for a…

Is there a reason why you can't get by on $170k?

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#119

Post by thehappypm »

landryraccoon wrote: post #42
raziel2701 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic data ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL#0 ) is showing deflation. The quantitative easing has so far been deflationary. The Fed can lower interest rates, but it cannot make people spend. People are unemployed and scared, they are not borrowing money, and it shows in the lending data as well ( https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/current/default.h... ) where we can see falling numbers in…

I am speaking anecdotally here but.. Deflation? I can’t think of a single product that has gone down in price and numerous things are more expensive. In particular, virtually every single food item at the grocery store is more expensive than it was in March. Am I the only one who has experienced this? It seems like basic staples (milk, eggs, flour) are substantially more expensive than a few months ago.

I have experienced what you have -- food is about the same or more expensive than before. But the housing market has softened. Retail goods in stores are much cheaper. Clothing is incredibly cheap -- go to an outlet store and you'll see 50% sales everywhere.

Re: Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

#120

Post by refurb »

saint_abroad wrote: post #66
imchillyb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can UBI scheme help to overcome Unemployment crisis ? @varbhat You realize that UBI requires monies, right? The US Federal government, and most states, are bankrupt. There is no money for this years bills. There was no money for last years bills, and we keep borrowing at exorbitant interest rates. Our deficit (shortfall for this year) is -more than- 2.7 trillion dollars. Our debt (shortfall for previous years) is -…

> You realize that UBI requires monies, right? Like the $1.5trillion tax cut that had "no major impact on businesses' capital investment"? https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/1-5-trillion-tax-cu...

God damn I hate the media. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere in that article does it clearly state that's $1.5T over 10 years.

So in fact, it's a $150B tax cut annually. For a $3.7T budget that's costing about 4%.

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