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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

#191

Post by stormbrew »

nitrogen wrote: post #187
stormbrew wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in the position of owning a condo with an underwater mortgage with difficulty finding work. It was fucking awful and it made my life hell for years. When I finally sold it it was for less than 2/3rds the remaining value of the mortgage. I still had more viable options and was in a better place than most people living paycheque to paycheque are if they're renting and their ability to work is interrupted for…

that's a problem. Especially in times like these, we should be trying to find common ground with one another, not putting up walls and saying "you aren't allowed to think you understand what I feel" or "your problems are insignificant because mine are worse".

Recognizing that there are degrees and differences in hardship between people who own property and people who rent is not any of those things.

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

#192

Post by Ididntdothis »

jotm wrote: post #116
Ididntdothis wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would make sense to me. Why are some businesses being shut down and have to deal with income losses and others like landlords can keep going and demand their income? This seems fundamentally unfair to me.

I wonder how many people asked that during the World Wars? Why do they have to suffer because some rich assholes decided they need every industry to support the war.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

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

#193

Post by IAmGraydon »

prewett wrote: post #152
satvikpendem wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time in the market beats timing the market. If you continue to invest regularly even in a down market you will eventually make more than those who target peaks and dips.

> Time in the market beats timing the market. This has merits in a bull market regime. However, we may not in a bull market: history suggests that we will have a deeper bottom within 3 - 12 months. So if you buy stock now, when the market is within 10% of it's peak, and you have to wait for two years for the market to recover to that peak, there's plenty of time for someone to wait for the trough and substantially ou…

History suggests that? The only time in modern history that this has happened (1918), the stock market never had the slightest reaction. It just carried on its merry way...with 50 million dead.

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

#194

Post by mycall »

satvikpendem wrote: post #111
serf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Given the harsh economic reality, I'm very bearish right now. as am I. I've more-or-less frozen my trading until a) a recovery plan is clear and being executed or b) until it is more clear we've hit a real bottom. All these hopeful spikes that do not correlate to the economic reality are probably going to throw a lot of people through hoops until any real roof or floor is hit. It sucks because I keep having these "b…

Time in the market beats timing the market. If you continue to invest regularly even in a down market you will eventually make more than those who target peaks and dips.

Dollar-cost averaging is theoretically sub-optimal to lump sum investing in terms of expected return.

This was shown to be the case in a mean-variance framework in 1979 by George Constantinides [0]

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=148754

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

#195

Post by mycall »

toast0 wrote: post #130
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…

> 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. It's not as if the choice is have a lock down and reduce deaths but ruin your economy vs don't have a lock down and have a lot of death with a good economy. Having a lot of death will ruin your economy too.

Humans are better prepared for next pandemic, knowing what to do. This should be a factor to consider. We have adapted.

Also, I'm sure coronavirus is now a high priority for science to master.

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

#196

Post by IAmGraydon »

russellbeattie wrote: post #108

Both of the movies The Big Short and Too Big To Fail have a moment where they're watching people come out of a subway or walk down the street, and say something like, "They don't have any idea what's about to hit them." It sort of feels like that now. Lots of normality still. There is definitely something not right about the stock market not feeling the impact of millions of unemployed and more than half of retail st…

The difference here is that in the financial crisis, The market was in a bubble. Almost anyone you would talk to at the time would tell you the Stock market has never been stronger. A very, very few number of people knew what was coming. Now, every armchair trader is believing they’re reliving The Big Short and they’re the main character. They fail to realize that this is literally the opposite situation- a crash that has already happened and now the subsequent recovery we’re in.

How many crashes did you know about before they happened? I’m guessing zero. You still believe this time is different.

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

#197

Post by ipnon »

devalgo wrote: post #174
ipnon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare this to the (once upon a time) conventional wisdom that buying a house with a mortgage is a sure bet because housing prices must go up. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying I don't know. Unprecedented times can result in unprecedented outcomes.

Doesn't this really only apply to variable rates that people thought they could consistently refinance as their homes value went up? If you have a set rate you'll just pay the same monthly payment for 30 years, I don't see how your homes value would really affect you unless you had to move and sell at a loss.

My point is that financial assets are practically always more complicated than conventional wisdom belies.

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

#198

Post by mikekchar »

rurp wrote: post #84
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…

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.…

According to Wikipedia, the original author does not consider COVID-19 a black swan event, so I think you must be right. However, while we know a pandemic will occur, we don't know when. Neither do we necessarily know ahead of time what measures are appropriate to take to mitigate the risk.

The aspect of the Black Swan theory where you point to the data after the fact and say, "We should have known" is very similar. For example, countries that experienced SARS and MERS where very much more prepared for COVID-19. Other countries which didn't have many problems did not prepare. This is because they didn't realise that they should prepare. For them COVID-19 was out of the blue -- a complete shock. Of course, we should have looked at the original data and if we had, we could have improved the outcomes. But we didn't have that experience and we didn't know when to expect a large problem.

The Tohoku earthquake in Japan in 2011 was similar. Earthquakes of that size hit Japan about once in 1000 years. We know it will happen. We don't know when. We don't know if it will happen in our generation. Should we prepare for it. In hindsight, yes, of course. At the time, it was a shock.

Is that a black swan event? I don't know. However, I don't think we need to have much of a distinction. Even if we should know, the fact that we don't know is all that matters. It is still a surprise.

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

#199

Post by chkaloon »

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…

Great analogy. I just finished "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and your concept of animal spirit sounds similar to Phaedrus' concept of quality.

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

#200

Post by dzonga »

US is on the brink of two major things.

1. a civil war: lots of guns lying around n a demagogue in the white house. n trump like a rat, he's been biting n blowing air on the wound. come nov, he can easily say the elections were rigged, if in the small chance event he loses to sleepy Joe i.e Biden. he's supporters will buy it, as they already bought about mail in voter fraud. n his repeated calls for violence against minorities etc. people frustrated by the economy n elites etc

2. a major depression: this is already in play, as unemployment numbers had been propped up. n the fragility of the US economy i.e dependent on excessive credit n consumption.

so it's catch 22: which one is gonna happen first.

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