Here I think you are onto something. I can’t believe that the stock markets are defying gravity like this.
We may see 35% unemployment rates. The highest rate of unemployment we EVER saw was 25% in 1933 during the great depression, the stock market had dropped 90% by 1933. This could be a rough rough ride.
That’s what happens when you vote Republican
Who would take seriously any ramblings, from someone who addresses their audience as, “…listen kiddies…”?
Who cares about your opinion if You can only manifest contempt for the people you’re addressing.
Actually, what we’re doing right now doesn’t require economic growth. You can just borrow against the future, which is exactly what we’re doing now. We’re probably going to borrow an entire year’s worth of GDP against our future: that’s several years worth of federal budgets. We were already piling up massive, massive annual deficits even before coronavirus. Now? Pssshhh! Bro, our debt volcano is spewing up plumes of shit into the stratosphere now.
We’re borrowing against the future. If you’re in your early 50s now, what exactly do you think is going to happen to SS and Medicare? I mean sure we’ve made it this far, but you know the saying: (debt) isn’t a problem…until it is. Since the 1980s, the GOP style of governance has been to balloon and bloat the debt on everything that isn’t of value to working class people, and then scream that there’s a debt crisis the moment democrats take over. This is what will happen again, and we’ll eventually get to the point where the US is forced to reckon with debt payments and to choose between its debt obligations and its social responsibilities. You can’t just fix this long-term problem with a Treasury Department printing press, either.
We’re approaching this problem with the solution of borrowing against the future. That’s one problem. But the other problem is, for untold numbers of people, our efforts won’t stop the crisis that’s happening now. They will drown at sea. We won’t hear about them in the news. They’ll just become statistics, or non-statistics. Instead of becoming ‘unemployed’ they’ll disappear and drop out from the workforce and end up becoming part of the St. Louis Fed data that tracks the percentage of wealth at the bottom of the curve.
And yet…
Looks like that story wasn’t misleading after all. We’re seeing those 40 percent show up in the 2020 equivalent of the soup and bread lines.
I actually saw a number of 42% unemployment. 42%. And it could be.
Oh, wait, that’s what Trump said was happening before he became president. I guess he’ll get his wish. It’s an Easter miracle! Maybe the best Easter miracle ever!
LOL
The fatalistic, the end is nigh, soothsayer extraordinaire invests in stocks?
The People’s Poet has a portfolio?!
CMC fnord!
The dyspeptic dissident has dividends?
I thought we had several indicators of a good economy. Better unemployment, better wage growth, better economic growth. This was not a hollow stock market boom that came from overexuberance or overly low interest rates or economic stimulus (although there was in fact plenty of those things).
And what is with the notion that an economy could sustain itself through a frikking shutdown?
Right–the OP is wrong in assuming that he is the only one aware of this.
The traditional metrics of measuring the “health” of the economy are not telling the whole story. In particular, housing, healthcare, and higher education (with a diminishing return on wealth enhancement), have become disproportionately less affordable. So the increase in wages and the lower unemployment rate, taken alone, don’t reflect the reality of what families are experiencing economically.
Not all of them did.
However, I agree that the financial crisis was largely the result of perverse market incentives and market failures that ran amok due to lax regulations that all arose from Republican “free market fundamentalism”. With the economic crisis 10 years behind us it is clear what the problems were and that we only learned half the lesson.
He thinks he’s teaching elementary students:
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and on this issue, he’s 100% correct. Our economy is “healthy” yet no one is saving. That’s not just a lack of education (although that’s plenty lacking too). From financial institutions to employers to insurance companies, predatory practices have left our middle class little more than an illusion.
I don’t know how familiar you are with the concept of economic stimulus but whenever the government injects more money into the economy than it takes out (deficit spending), there is the possibility of stimulating the economy. Whether that money goes into the hands of the poor and gets spent (thereby increasing demand) or into the hands of the rich and gets saved (thereby decreasing the cost of funds and increasing supply), there can be a positive economic effect.
In theory, you have to pay that money back at some point but the hope is that providing the economy a larger base from which to grow organically can provide more than enough growth to overcome the contraction you will have when you pull that money back out of the economy to repay the deficit spending.
Yes I understand that fiscal conservatism only exists when a Democrat is in office. This is in large part because Republicans realize that deficit spending stimulates the economy. They only pretend not to know this when a Democrat is in office and has to clean up a Republican mess. I agree that we jumped into this current stimulus without looking very closely. I think we spent months on the 2009 stimulus for $800 billion and $275 billion of it was tax cuts ($1 of tax cuts for every $2 of actual stimulus). We spent like 4 or 5 days on this $2 trillion stimulus.
What would you suggest?
OK so if that is true, then you would expect the breaking points for quintiles to go down but they’re not. It has been going up. not as fast as the top quintile but going up nonetheless.
You realize that those numbers have been fairly consistent for years, right? Things were improving before COVID 19. The study mentioned in the article explicitly says that these numbers are an improvement over the previous year:
“If faced with an unexpected expense of $400,
61 percent of adults say they would cover it with
cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next
statement—a modest improvement from the prior
year”
With only 61% of people able to handle a $400 expense, 75% of people thought they were doing ok financially.
There is obviously a disconnect between actual financial condition and perceived financial condition for a significant population.
Exactly. The money question is the first one, not the second one. People are going to say they’re okay - until they’re not.
That also explains why we people don’t feel passionate about the issue of health insurance – until they need it. The guy who is healthy and employed - for now - doesn’t think about health insurance and probably doesn’t want Big Gubmint taking his Obamacare away or raising his taxes to pay for it – until his wonderful employer throws his ass out on the street and leaves him without insurance in the middle of a pandemic.
So my point still stands: our “great” economy is clearly, now more than ever, being exposed for the bullshit that it is.
But yeah, have fun and good luck with your bootsrapping, boys.
I’m tired of bashing Trump. I just wish he got his act together enough to get us through the next few months. This last press conference was the first time he sounded like someone taking this thing seriously.
I am not impressed with Birx. I am not impressed with Redfield. Birx seems too political and Redfield seems too ideological. I don’t care how you feel about abortion or taxes or unions, tell me the truth about COVID19.
Yes, the middle class has been hollowed out and the professional class is being put under pressure as the leisure class and the capitalist class try to push as much of their social obligation as far down the totem pole as possible.
We now generate most of our tax revenue from labor but barely tax passive investments.
The disconnect may explain why people have so little in savings. People are making more than they used to but they’re saving less (at least at the lower end of the scale).
I don’t know if it’s being exposed more but it is no more bullshit than it was last year or ten years ago.
You want a bullshit economy, the real estate bubble of the early 2000s was a bullshit economy.
Interesting article on the bailout, and one I agree with.
Everyone is so excited about their $1200 that they are overlooking the really horrible stuff. To be fair, most of them don’t get it, especially the part where are tax dollars are being used to buy back billions of dollars in bad investments.
Quote from article
“We’re about to find out that the American economy has been living off dying, dysfunctional or hyper-leveraged markets for more than a decade. The Trump Administration just bought this undead economy at retail and committed the Fed and the Treasury to sustaining it”
Care to share your opinion of the My Pillow guy?