241–250 of 368 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just one or two companies. At minimum: all retail, all airlines, all hotels, all cruise ship companies are at risk.
Apart from paying people to stay at home during the pandemic what's the issue? Why would tourism disappear? Buy the failed airline/hotel, change the name, personnel returns to work, business as usual.
Frenzied grand constructions, wars and great rituals are among the common responses of ancient leaders to crises. These demonstrate powerful responses by the leaders (enhancing their threatened hold on power), but almost never really address the problems themselves. A cynic might characterize the giant U.S. stimulus bill of 2009 as such an effort.” -Arthur Demarest
Lots of voices missing the mark: the fed is acting to keep the corporate bond market from seizing up. Corporations finance part of their borrowings through bonds. These bonds need to be paid in full + the interest when the bond matures. Corporations and banks typically repay some of these from cash, and some by issuing new bonds. Right now no one is getting to issue new bonds at all. Banks cannot lend because the ris…
We are also talking about companies that are leveraged to the tits to juice their return on equity. What is glossed over in all of these discussions about bailouts is that the managers of these corporations respond directly to financial incentives, and the existence of a "lender of last resort" such as the Fed ensures that corporations will tend to leverage their balance sheets far beyond a level commensurate with the actual risk of the underlying business.
> We are talking about companies which have plenty of assets and strong businesses.
Except that those assets are owned with borrowed money. Someone has to eat the losses, and in an actual free market there are two options: the equity holders, or the bondholders. Now, the Fed provides a third option: the holders of U.S. dollars, whose currency is devalued as money is printed to paper over the void which was opened up by the pandemic. And so the charade will continue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you think that? People said similar things in late 2008 when the Fed greatly expanded its balance sheet, and then inflation went negative for the next year.
There was great inflation in financial assets, for the whole decade leading up to the current crisis. So there is a good chance the same thing will happen again, now that the central banks have taken the big guns out. I keep hearing that the FED (and other CBs) our out of bullets, but I think they have unlimited bullets. If you inject enough liquidity even a dead horse will bounce back; and for an example of that, yo…
The Fed kept interest rates artificially low for the past decade such that everyone could dance around a stock market bubble, and now they've backed themselves into a corner. Rather than let interest rates naturally rise as the bond market is currently signalling, they're making further moves to suppress them. Fundamentally they're continuing to undermine the distributed decentralized economy, and reshaping it into a centrally planned one revolving around who gets access to newly created money.
Lots of voices missing the mark: the fed is acting to keep the corporate bond market from seizing up. Corporations finance part of their borrowings through bonds. These bonds need to be paid in full + the interest when the bond matures. Corporations and banks typically repay some of these from cash, and some by issuing new bonds. Right now no one is getting to issue new bonds at all. Banks cannot lend because the ris…
Live well. Get rid of a lot of bad behavior by just not doing.
I don't want to work. I don't want to be told what to do, by anyone. I don't even want to leave my home.
I want to stay at home. Learn. Contribute knowledge.
Drones deliver what I need, for free. If I run out of power, I crash something into the Earth from space to charge batteries.
My economic bubble of knowledge pops when we reach the point of just not knowing, as in existence is due to minimum focal length of what I just built.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to "pause" commitments would take years to implement. It would be like trying to go through the world's internet and "suspending" all user requests and server processing. Instead the Fed and US government have a much simpler and near instant tool: act as the lender of last resort. A bonus feature of this implementation is it costs not much money. Big corporations have lots of assets and the government is sure…
> A bonus feature of this implementation is it costs not much money. Big corporations have lots of assets and the government is sure to be re-paid. Says who? The whole point of loans is that there is a possibility that they will not be repaid. Banks thinks it is risky to lend money at the current interest rates so American taxpayers instead have to shoulder the whole burden. The assets owned by corporations is mostly…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current problem is that money right now will be evaporating when loans default. The financial system is built on itself so that loans create money. It does not expect to come to a grinding halt. If it does, loans aren't repaid, and money literally disappears. Deleveraging occurs. Wealth disappears. I think the aim is that we don't lose money from defaults over the short term.
If the government wanted to so decree, they could decree banks could not forclose on bankrupt customers and must restructure loans. They've already done that for rent and mortgage agreements in many areas where people are hard hit by this. That would stop the loss of money right there. The market is demanding liquidity to be able to manuver an uncertain future; this has caused an effective collapse of the credit mark…
The savings to pension plans alone...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is 110% not good to have any major corporation go into a technical default. We are talking about companies which have plenty of assets and strong businesses. That's where the problem lies. Who is going to decide that? Traditionally we have debt markets for that.
The biggest problem at the moment is the debt markets have almost completely stopped functioning. Let me repeat what the other poster said: “We are talking about companies with plenty of assets and strong businesses”. And they still can’t get needed short term financing. Should we let clearly creditworthy companies go bankrupt because the credit markets are temporarily closed?
Also, is it really accurate to call a company "clearly creditworthy" if a 2-3 month gap in cash flow results in bankruptcy? Surely the CFO can get down on his knees and find some spare change under the couch cushions to get through this.
Lots of voices missing the mark: the fed is acting to keep the corporate bond market from seizing up. Corporations finance part of their borrowings through bonds. These bonds need to be paid in full + the interest when the bond matures. Corporations and banks typically repay some of these from cash, and some by issuing new bonds. Right now no one is getting to issue new bonds at all. Banks cannot lend because the ris…
Do they? That's kind of a big assumption here. If the virus is going to have a major negative effect on their ability to deliver value, then that means they aren't (currently) sound businesses, and the market is correctly marking down their value.
There could definitely be fiscal -- and epidemiological! -- measures that can reverse this state. However, to buy up the bonds without those measures doesn't change the fundamental soundness of the business; it just loads up the Fed's balance sheet with garbage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the issue with the gov being the employer of last resort is that you end-up with a fat, inefficient government. What politician will dare to fire all the redundant workers once that crisis is over? You can see this issue in ex-communist states.
Why fire people? wouldn't companies be able to lure workers away from the government with better pay and benefits? The government could offer some kind of incentive to companies where the government pays the person for some length of time and they work for a private company for free as long as the companies keeps that person on for 1 year or something like that.