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Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

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Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#151

Post by BurningFrog »

aluminussoma wrote: post #48
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Unemployment benefits have been significantly expanded under the Coronavirus aid bill. The benefit amounts will sound small if you're living in an expensive city like SF or Seattle, but $600/week from the federal government and a similar amount from state unemployment insurance means that unemployment benefits can pay up to an equivalent of $50-60K/year right now. That goes a long way in most parts of the country, es…

What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA. I fear that we will see revolutions in countries where this is not contained, from either a health or economic perspective. An old saying is that you should buy stocks when there is blood in the streets. I hope that doesn't become literal.

It's rather fantastic that congress spends $2,000,000,000,000 to handle a virus, where $0 of that goes to paying for treatment of those infected by that virus...

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#152

Post by generalpass »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #44

The odd thing to me about it is that futures seem largely positive. Is it because the CAREs act or dropped labor is supposed to equal money not spent and thus meant to shield companies ( and investors )? I honestly do not get how market interprets it as good news.

> The odd thing to me about it is that futures seem largely positive. Is it because the CAREs act or dropped labor is supposed to equal money not spent and thus meant to shield companies ( and investors )? I honestly do not get how market interprets it as good news.

Personally, I think things are happening too fast to gauge what investor activity is actually reacting too. There can be big movers who are still in decision-making stages and their actions have yet to be made, or they acted hastily and sold, then come back and repurchase, etc.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#153

Post by dwiel »

faet wrote: post #121
ihm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already most Americans support Medicare for all – it’s our bought elected officials who don’t.

eh. Most Americans support a public option. M4A is down to about 26% support as of yesterday. https://i.imgur.com/H9bAwV9.png

What is the source of that imgur meme? Here is an article with a link to the pdf which claims 55% of voters are in support of M4A

https://morningconsult.com/2020/04/01/medicare-for-all-coron...

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#154

Post by pjc50 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #151
aluminussoma wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA. I fear that we will see revolutions in countries where this is not contained, from either a health or economic perspective. An old saying is that you should buy stocks when there is blood in the streets. I hope that doesn't become literal.

It's rather fantastic that congress spends $2,000,000,000,000 to handle a virus, where $0 of that goes to paying for treatment of those infected by that virus...

Got to maintain the principle that people who can't afford their own healthcare get to suffer. That is far more important to the US system than other outcomes.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#155

Post by agarden »

adrianN wrote: post #69
cm2187 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case fatality rate is meaningless when testing isn't done extensively.

I know. But we don't know the true fatality rate yet and we won't know it before it's way too late to act. I don't think it's okay to literally risk millions of lives on the off chance that we missed 95% of the cases with our testing.

That is a reasonable line of thought, but incomplete. How many lives are we risking by tanking the global economy? That seems like it should be a more quantifiable risk. It becomes a trade-off between the amount of lives we can calculate will be lost via our pandemic-prevention measures (and to what degree of certainty) and the number that might be lost without them (and to what degree of certainty).

The trade-off is between loss of lives one way versus loss of lives another way.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#156

Post by withinboredom »

Frost1x wrote: post #107
aluminussoma wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA. I fear that we will see revolutions in countries where this is not contained, from either a health or economic perspective. An old saying is that you should buy stocks when there is blood in the streets. I hope that doesn't become literal.

Also I'm not sure if I'm in agreement with the tactic of immediately pushing employees to unemployment. Unemployment is funded by taxes which are largely paid by the same people being laid off. If you're promoting businesses push people to unemployment instead of first trying to cover them during hardship and also taking a loss (as everyone else is), you're pushing for more tax subsidies to businesses indirectly. Une…

> If I'm laid off, I'll first look at my savings and hit the job market before I consider driving right into unemployment.

This is a great case of “the world doesn’t revolve around you.”

1. Most states only give you a few weeks to apply.

2. You already “pay” for your unemployment several times over during your career through unemployment insurance. Your employer pays this, but they could have paid you more if they didn’t have to.

3. It’s income. You still pay taxes on it. It’s not free money out of nowhere.

Use the tiny social net that you have instead of waiting too late and out of money and having to rely on family or friends.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#157

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

nck4222 wrote: post #138
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Unemployment benefits have been significantly expanded under the Coronavirus aid bill. The benefit amounts will sound small if you're living in an expensive city like SF or Seattle, but $600/week from the federal government and a similar amount from state unemployment insurance means that unemployment benefits can pay up to an equivalent of $50-60K/year right now. That goes a long way in most parts of the country, es…

This "economy is paused" idea is getting more and more unjustifiable by the day, weeks, and months. We're not going to emerge from this and just hit the unpause button. Yes some industries will bounce back quickly, but 9 million people over two weeks losing their jobs is an absolutely massive number, and we haven't hit peak yet. There's no way they'll just be simply rehired when this is "done".

If the economy bounced back to what it was on Feb 28th, what is your acceptable number of dead? Would you trade 9 million unemployed for 9 million dead? Do you think that wouldn't have an effect on the market as well?

We're in it now, and no amount of wanting to hit the abort button will change anything. It's a fantasy to assume people will just go back to work, the economy will get better, and everything will return to normal, aside from a hot new opportunity for mass body disposal services.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#158

Post by throwaway55554 »

buzzkillington wrote: post #15
airstrike wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also hearing this morning that we've hit the 10% mark. I also heard the same economist say "The economy is collapsing, and it's a global collapse". I don't even need coffee to be alert the rest of the day...

And all this for a virus that kills around 1% of the people who get it, and the majority of them are retired. Future generations will look at us and wonder how we were this stupid.

Do you know 100 people? Pick one.

Crass, no? So what if it's 1%. It's life. Nothing else matters.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#159

Post by schrijver »

vekker wrote: post #56
stupandaus wrote: post #2

Building on my analysis from last week: 1. This week's 6.6M new jobless claims represents ~4% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce. 2. This is incremental to the 3.3M new jobless claims filed week ending 3/21, totaling ~10M total jobless claims in the past 2 weeks. 3. The US unemployment rate was ~3.5% as of EOM February [1], so cumulatively that means we've hit ~10% unemployment as of EOW 3/28 (~10M incremental j…

That's not too bad... here in Belgium we currently have half of the working population on unemployment benefits.

Then again for the part of that which is related to corona it’s mostly through the mechanism of temporary unemployment, where the state takes over paying part of the paycheck for the duration of the time that the workers can’t work, and they are expected to return to their jobs once the lockdown is over. Of course not all companies will survive post-corona but it seems like an approach that potentially better preserves the social and economic tissue.

cf https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/business/france-coronavir... (not about Belgium, but the approach is common to multiple EU countries)

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#160

Post by jiofih »

matwood wrote: post #120
stupandaus wrote: post #2

Building on my analysis from last week: 1. This week's 6.6M new jobless claims represents ~4% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce. 2. This is incremental to the 3.3M new jobless claims filed week ending 3/21, totaling ~10M total jobless claims in the past 2 weeks. 3. The US unemployment rate was ~3.5% as of EOM February [1], so cumulatively that means we've hit ~10% unemployment as of EOW 3/28 (~10M incremental j…

Correct. Todays number isn't even much of a surprise, although it's still shocking to see. I thought the consensus estimate was way too low. Some analysts have been kicking around 20%-30% unemployment before this is all over.

The US economy looks more like a pyramid scheme than ever.
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