U.S. retailers plan to stop paying rent to offset virus closures

How in the hell is anyone going to know if retailers or people can actually afford to pay rent?

"OMG everyone is going to totally take advantage of this!"

Not everyone, but yes, plenty of people and business will.

"OMG that's unfair."

Yes, I acknowledged that from the start. The whole point of my argument is that this might still be preferable to the alternative, it might still be better than sticking to what's 100% fair, because collectively we might emerge stronger from this crisis if struggling businesses are afforded leniency, while the rest of us keep paying our bills on time.

But thank you for perfectly illustrating my sidenote on how this way of thinking is completely alien to many Americans.

There isn't any real accountability as far as shareholders being able to hold corporate executives and boards of directors accountable. That is a huge breakage in corporate governance that won't be easily fixed.

> saying that these are people's retirement savings and so structurally should only ever be allowed to go up in value

Who said that?

All I said is that, since the shareholders weren't the ones that made the questionable business decisions, they shouldn't be the ones that are shafted because everyone wants a scapegoat.

> perverse incentives

There are certainly perverse incentives for corporate executives and boards of directors, but they aren't of the form you describe. It's simpler than that: it's just what I said above, that there is no practical way for shareholders to hold them accountable.

> Shareholders benefited massively and accumulated huge rewards from the market leveraging up during the borrow-for-buybacks period

And now they are taking the hit from the market tanking. My 401k is down quite a bit.

> now in a downturn we're throwing our hands up and saying that we can't let those companies face any negative consequences for taking on that risk because nobody was in control?

I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that (a) the shareholders weren't the ones that made the bad decisions, and (b) the shareholders are already taking a hit anyway.

If you really want the government to Do Something, it should fix the perverse incentives that corporate executives and boards of directors face. Having real criminal penalties for breaches of fiduciary responsibility, and stricter rules for what companies that take any investment from retirement funds can do, would be a good start.

Most people need their monthly salary to survive. We already need several hundred billion dollars just to shore up unemployment insurance funds, which just pay for a fraction of people’s salary.

This has nothing to do with “the poor bankers”. Mostly it had to do with small businesses which make up the backbone of the American economy and which are collapsing at an extremely alarming rate.

The government can’t just press a big magical pause button on the DVR. The government can try to pickup some of the bills, or it can loan money out at good rates, or it can fire cash bazookas directly into people’s checking accounts, but even the Fed can’t just print enough money to single handedly keep the entire economy afloat while legally restricting people from doing business.

As long as everyone has stopped buying anything and everything discretionary, businesses will be failing and unemployment will skyrocket. Unemployment is a massive drag on GDP because consumer spending is the majority of consumption.

GDP of -25% is not just a “tighten the belt and we’re gonna deal with this” type of event. It’s not merely a question of “we have to do this to save lives” because shooting the economy in the gut actually costs lives too.

You put people out of work and into financial insolvency, and their general health is very negatively affected, and some of them will die. Look at the opioid crisis, for example.