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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

#161

Post by Someone »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #45

When the next pandemic hits, I doubt any government will dare to attempt a closure. The costs for these closures have been high in terms of economic pain. In addition, the protests, though they are justified due to the oppression the community has experienced, are likely undoing a lot of the effects of social distancing by putting a lot of people together in close proximity for hours. So in the end, we will have expe…

If the next pandemic hits relatively soon, we will be better prepared, so the shutdown can be more restricted.

Also, if a government doesn’t attempt a closure, and things run out of hand, the population may start a chaotic closure.

I may be too pessimistic, but looking at the political climate in the USA, I think that could take the form of neighborhoods attempting to close off other neighborhoods to ward of the (perceived or real) threat of an epidemic spreading. The result could be a lot worse than what we see now.

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

#162

Post by formercoder »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #50
chrisseaton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banks shouldn’t have a ton of this stuff on their balance sheets I don't understand what you mean - banks issue millions and millions of mortages.

But they don't keep the mortgages. They sell most or all of them.

Correct, they package them up in CDOs and sell them off.

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

#163

Post by diogenescynic »

uoaei wrote: post #112
ohyes wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but we don’t want that. How can we avoid that?

The roadrunner is achieving prosperity. He goes far, fast. He keeps winning because he is obeying his animal spirits[1] -- literally running on roads. The coyote pursues prosperity, but rather than using his animal spirits, which would tell him to hunt like a coyote does, he instead repeatedly requisitions absurd contraptions that are manufactured by "Acme." We presume (because the cartoon is on TVs in America, and A…

Did you just make this comment on the fly? Really superb analogy using OP's example. Love this comment.

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

#164

Post by IAmGraydon »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #105
ikeyany wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fragile ... the word is fragile. We've built an insanely fragile economy. Take a look. There's been no war. 100% of the (not so great) US infrastructure that was there before SARS-COV-2 is still there. We've lost about 100k people, which is horrific but in the scheme of things at "USA" scale, and with the skewed demographics, not much of a hit to the economy. And yet the economy is staggering and it's likely to get…

Obviously, companies that depend on crowds and foot traffic are seriously hurting right now. However, many other industries are still business as usual. E-commerce businesses might actually be doing better than ever. I tried to schedule a few contractors to get work done recently, thinking they’d have additional openings with the slowdown. Turns out, they’re booked farther out than ever. Everyone else working at home…

As one data point, I run small online retail business and saw sales utterly rocket worldwide during this event. At the peak of the lockdowns, I saw a 200% increase in sales. I’m in the musical instrument accessories business. My wife has a retail business as well (photography accessories) which also saw large gains. In the last week or so, things have nearly normalized.

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

#165

Post by fortran77 »

They really should have offered dollar-for-dollar grants to landlords who forgave rents. (Or dollar-for-dollar property tax discounts.)

I own commercial property in 94089. We didn't charge our tenants rent in April and May. They received $44,000 in stimulus and grant money--each. We received zero. Weren't eligible for anything.

Fortunately, we have no mortgage to cover. But we do have a $50,000 property tax bill coming due. There's no relief for property tax.

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

#166

Post by fortran77 »

rwmj wrote: post #2

Purely as a thought experiment, if we suspended mortgage repayments for N months and rental payments for N months, what bad (or good) effects might we see?

There's still property tax. I'm a commercial landlord with no mortgage, but a hefty property tax bill.

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

#167

Post by AnimalMuppet »

DanBC wrote: post #159
5ociety wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure I could do better. Downvote me again. You're making a difference!

People cannot downvote comments that are replies to their own comments, so any downvotes are not coming from AnimalMuppet.

To be fair, I did downvote his initial comments...

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

#168

Post by ethbro »

chkaloon wrote: post #94
rurp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. People often forget that optimizing for efficiency isn't free, it has a cost in flexibility. The modern economy is heavily optimized which, yes, can produce enormous profits, but it also makes the economy extremely brittle. Approaches like just-in-time manufacturing or loading up on debt in a good economy to expand faster work out great... until they don't. And when things go bad, they can go bad quickly.…

Yes! That is an astute point. Corporate farms are efficient. Monoculture forests are efficient, etc. But they are fragile. Unions and income transfers cause inefficiencies, but without them, society becomes fragile.

Efficiency has to be integrated over a timespan.

Despite all the disruption, I'd be surprised if it were on the whole more efficient for companies to optimize for resiliency... for an event that happens once in 100 years.

Rather than fall back on central banks & governments, and expect them to throw everything and the kitchen sink at it.

Ideally, though, what the government will and won't do should have been communicated well in advance of a pandemic, so that everyone had an even investment playing field. Piecemeal bailouts are asking for insider trading.

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

#169

Post by karatestomp »

StillBored wrote: post #124
pgodzin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are definitely still going to Home Depot

Yah, I should take my own advise here and buy HD, I'm pretty regular at the one near my house. I don't think i've ever seen HD as busy as its been recently. I guess instead of going to restaurants people are fixing all the little things wrong in their houses.

Everyone who's still got stable employment used that stimulus check to DIY-reno their kitchen, I think.

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

#170

Post by IAmGraydon »

diogenescynic wrote: post #156
uoaei wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parallel here, to me, is that the stock market is solely based on investors' perceptions of reality, not reality itself. As soon as investors realize that their investments are untenable, they will pull out, triggering an accelerating freefall until we hit terminal velocity. The economy is unhealthy but people can be convinced to ignore that because it's not easy to see the holistic conditions of the US economy o…

The stock market is a game of expectations and essentially is a graph of how rich people feel about the economy.

The stock market, at it’s basis, is a gauge of whether investors believe that other investors will buy at a higher price than they did.
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