411–420 of 563 posts
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…
"unemployment benefits can pay up to an equivalent of $50-60K/year right now." Wow. It's bizarre one can neither create nor add value yet proceed to receive thousands of dollars for an extended period of time (often multiples more than they will ever "pay in" to the system). I know too many people already milking it before the pandemic (including family & friends). I accept that it is their personal choice and I don'…
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Do you have any reason to think we're not going to see the situation in NYC play out in numerous other US cities over the coming weeks and months?
Not really. I have been thinking its going to play out like China, Italy, Spain etc where certain regions take disproportionate hits. Texas and California don't seem to have been hit as hard as NY-NJ. So was just wondering if the unemployment filings have jumped equally in all 3.
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”Joining some political death cult to sacrifice the weak and elderly portion of our population...isn't going to make the virus end any sooner” Barring the development of a vaccine (which is far from guaranteed, and a year or more away, in the best case), letting the virus sweep through the population is pretty much the only thing that would bring this to an end quickly. We could achieve herd immunity in a few months…
Letting it sweep through uncontrollably quickly by pretending it's business-as-normal out there will lead to many times more deaths due to hospital overutilization. Our current actions are focused on the goal of leveling the curve, not putting up a wall. There aren't armed guards outside our homes preventing us from leaving. The grocery stores are open. We can come into contact with others to order just about all goo…
Literally the fastest way to get this over with is to let it sweep through the population. More people might die if we did that, but it would get it over with quickly.
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…
I believe that 50-75% of restaurants will never reopen. 20-35% of small to mid-size hotels, venues, spas will declare bankruptcy within this year. Both employ a lot of people.
So I'm afraid the number is going to much higher, maybe even double.
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…
This is just a personal opinion, but I think ~15% unemployment peak is far too optimistic. I believe that 50-75% of restaurants will never reopen. 20-35% of small to mid-size hotels, venues, spas will declare bankruptcy within this year. Both employ a lot of people. So I'm afraid the number is going to much higher, maybe even double.
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Regarding 3, upper estimates for the 2009 swine flu are north of 500k deaths and the 1918 Spanish flu is 50 million. Flus can be very deadly and the poster obviously did not intend to use the word in a diminutive way. You added that interpretation, knowing it is wrong, and then challenged it.
The whole post was playing down the effects of the current pandemic on society. The whole conclusion was that "a flu won't cause [society to break down]". So yes, the poster was using flu in a diminutive sense. And yes, flu is deadly and a lot worse than a lot of people (who've probably never had flu) realise. But even given that, even recent novel flu strains haven't stressed and shut down the global economy like th…
We had several options for how to respond to this, and chose the most invasive, drastic and potentially economically catastrophic one.
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They also aren’t counting the huge number of mild or asymptomatic infections, which is orders of magnitude larger. There’s error in the numerator of the equation, but it’s swamped by the error in the denominator.
Remember, it's a ratio. What matters isn't the raw number of missed cases, it's the ratio of missed-to-detected cases versus uncounted-to-counted deaths. If Italy has missed half of its deaths but also half of its total cases, the fatality ratio would remain the same. To bring its CFR down to the level of South Korea, you'd have to make the implausible assumption that Italy has caught nearly all of its deaths but mis…
It’s not at all implausible that Italy has missed the vast majority of it’s cases, because they’re barely testing, and they’re not testing minor cases. It’s essentially guaranteed that they’re missing a huge number of cases.
A reasonable estimate is that they’re missing 10 cases for every one they actually detect. The error in the denominator is much larger than the error in the numerator.
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This is just a personal opinion, but I think ~15% unemployment peak is far too optimistic. I believe that 50-75% of restaurants will never reopen. 20-35% of small to mid-size hotels, venues, spas will declare bankruptcy within this year. Both employ a lot of people. So I'm afraid the number is going to much higher, maybe even double.
So much of this depends on how the administration handles this. I don't have great confidence based on how they've handled things so far.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just a personal opinion, but I think ~15% unemployment peak is far too optimistic. I believe that 50-75% of restaurants will never reopen. 20-35% of small to mid-size hotels, venues, spas will declare bankruptcy within this year. Both employ a lot of people. So I'm afraid the number is going to much higher, maybe even double.
So much of this depends on how the administration handles this. I don't have great confidence based on how they've handled things so far.
It's easy to criticize the government without having to bear the responsibility but I wish they did this much earlier, with more force to bring confidence to the people rather than markets.
I spoke with a branch manager at a bank day before they announced the extended timeline for shut down up until end of April. She was cheerful because she believed that this will be over in two weeks. I tried to gently tell her that I believe we are looking at months (two at minimum), not weeks of lockdown and even that might be very optimistic. She didn't take it well.
People are confused and scared. I do wish the govs (local and federal) would be the leaders everyone needs them to be, but unfortunately, that's not yet happening (there are some exceptions, but very few unfortunately).