The economy

Dreams do come true.

 

Yessirs everyone likes staying at home all the time - it's been a ****ing joy to be crammed in your house for 3 unending months 24/7, not just for those alone with no social contact but especially those with kids, it's liberal paradise.

Anyway I can see there's some Galaxy brain **** going on here so I won't interrupt.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/11/politics/what-matters-may-11/index.html

Andrew Yang, the former Democratic presidential candidate and pusher of a universal basic income, was interviewed by Joe Biden on a campaign podcast released Monday and he shared his concern that the economy won't just bounce back in part because companies won't be fast enough about rehiring workers.

They're actually not that interested in hiring workers at all, argued Yang, who's also a CNN commentator. This is an interesting point:
"Investors aren't investing in job growth, they're investing in bottom line profitability of the firms, and the tough truth is that a lot of these firms can operate more efficiently and more profitably with fewer people.

"I'm privy to the thinking of many major company CEOs and they are telling people confidentially that they're not going to hire back a lot of the people that they furloughed or let go.

"This economy is not going to snap back into place like a rubber band in part because that relationship that you described, that if businesses do well then workers will benefit, that bargain has broken down and now it barely exists."​

 

Anyone who didn’t see this eventuality is an idiot. Companies are going to realize they can get by with less employees and no they will not rehire all the laid off or furloughed.

Service economy workers being paid dogshit will be hired back as restaurants and entertainment is still a thriving business. This just continues the hollowing out of the middle class as those jobs were meant for teens and college students not to actually support families.

It’s been going on for years and COVID is just hastening it.

 

on Monday,

at the press conference, at the WH rose garden, Trump spin that the US can just flip on the switch, towards a V-shaped economic recovery​

yesterday,

• Fauci testified that there will be a second wave of COVID 19, which could lead to a 2nd shut down for some business
• Los Angeles County public health director announced that the stay-at-home order will be extended to July

Earlier this AM

• Fed Chair Powell, a life-long Republican, said the US economy will recover, but it will not be a V-shaped recovery, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/13/fed...-to-pull-the-us-out-of-economic-downturn.html
  • “While the economic response has been both timely and appropriately large, it may not be the final chapter,”
    
  • more measures likely will be needed to pull the economy out of its downturn.
    
  • small businesses, such as dry cleaners, restaurants, etc. need more fiscal support from Congress

 

Just came to post that Powell said 40% of households making less than $40,000 a year lost their jobs.

It’s upper middle class and the dirt damn poor. This country desperately needs a blue collar working class again.

 

Again it's just happy talk that this will be a 'V' shaped recovery. Even if we opened up everything and the NBA, NHL and MLB had games we wouldn't be back to normal. There isn't enough confidence in the measures to deal with this disease for everyone to return to where they were at before. Even if there is a vaccine it will take time to deploy it and even then it will take time to get things back. For example with sports there is no way they will start playing right away. The leagues will negotiate with the player unions to have training camps. Besides sports it will take many businesses awhile to get back up to speed.

 

after Trump's calling for a v-shape economic recovery, we've just witnessed 2 consecutive days of dow being down > 500

Trump is under pressure to have Moscow Mitch negotiate w Pelosi for more Congressional stimulus

 

I will give yall credit. You folks called it back when he was elected. What a clown.

 

Let’s make a deal with our robot overlords | Commentary

If you worry that robots will render human workers obsolete, the coronavirus pandemic offers ample reason to worry more: Surely companies will take the opportunity to replace demanding, imperfect people with machines or artificial intelligence wherever possible.

That said, I’m hoping the crisis will also create an opportunity to negotiate better terms with our algorithmic overlords.

The pandemic has made me reconsider the sanctity of work. Just look at the situation at America’s meat processing plants, where hundreds of mostly immigrant workers are getting sick. Workers have been brutally divided into two classes: those whose employers protect them from the virus, and those who lose their jobs or their unemployment insurance if they refuse to labor under dangerous conditions.

If certain businesses — say, the next generation of meat plants — can’t reopen safely and profitably with humans, they can and should do so with robots. Some jobs just aren’t good enough to protect. Until now, among the biggest obstacles was the transition cost of going from badly paid humans to machines. But if companies disrupt their workflow by actually shutting down production to save lives (as they should), then they will have paid much of the cost. They can train the robots using data gleaned by thoroughly surveilling some model workers.

It’s not just meat packing plants. Robots run by algorithms will do a lot of jobs, replacing the human workers who in many cases will have trained them. People will probably welcome the brave new world, particularly if it’s more hygienic. They’ll buy their groceries by simply taking them and leaving the store (now available from Amazon), they’ll let robots vacuum their floors (already quite popular) and deliver their purchases (not quite yet). I confess I’d prefer a self-cleaning, self-driving car so I don’t have to share space with a human driver, for both our sakes.

Accepting such a transformation, however, means subjecting ourselves to the companies that make the algorithms, such as Amazon and Google. They will essentially hold all the data, control the supply chain, and have more direct power over our consumer and even political behavior than ever before. And a lot of people seem to be OK with that: Surveys suggest that they trust the tech companies more than the federal government.

The question, then, is what will happen to the enormous jobless underclass that such an accelerated shift to automation will create. This is where I think the sheer magnitude of the coronavirus crisis might actually help, for three reasons.

First, when so many people are suddenly and violently thrown out of work at the same time, it creates a sense of solidarity that a slow, insidious process such as offshoring does not.

Second, the jobless are not perceived, and do not perceive themselves, as at fault for their predicament. This is a natural disaster, beyond their control. They will be more likely to claim a political voice, because they will feel entitled to one.

Third, and perhaps most important, real change will look newly possible in light of the unprecedented measures the government has already taken to combat the crisis. Congress conjured trillions of dollars to bail out mostly businesses, which means it could do the same for people. Granted, that’s not what happened in the 2008 financial crisis, when the government primarily rescued the banks — but that experience could also be invoked to demand a better deal this time around.

So this crisis brings with it an opening for collective action. How it will work remains to be seen. Pitchforks aren’t effective against social-media algorithms, and Amazon might not care if some large fraction of the population can’t buy its stuff, as long as the rest keeps buying more. But if the winners of the AI revolution want to avoid the business disruption of an actual revolution, they should be prepared to negotiate a new and very different deal.

Cathy O’Neil is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a mathematician who has worked as a professor, hedge-fund analyst and data scientist. She founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and is the author of “Weapons of Math Destruction.”

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.​

 

And as Mitch and his GOP cohorts sit back and wait:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...e-delinquencies-surge-1-6-m-april/5231835002/

Mortgage delinquencies surge by 1.6M in April, the biggest monthly jump ever

Delinquencies among borrowers for past-due mortgages are soaring, a sign that Americans are struggling to pay their bills due to a wave of layoffs or lost income from the coronavirus pandemic.​

Mortgage delinquencies surged by 1.6 million in April, the largest single-month jump in history, according to a report from Black Knight, a mortgage technology and data provider. The data includes both homeowners past due on mortgage payments who aren’t in forbearance, along with those in forbearance plans and who didn’t make a mortgage payment in April.

At 6.45%, the national delinquency rate nearly doubled from 3.06% in March, the largest single-month increase ever recorded, and nearly three times the prior record for a single month during the height of the financial crisis in late 2008, Black Knight said.

For context, it took more than 18 months before the first 1.6 million homeowners became delinquent during the Great Recession, says Andy Walden, economist and director of market research at Black Knight. And there is still potential for a second wave of delinquencies in May, he added.

“The impact of COVID-19 on the housing and mortgage markets has already been substantial," Walden says. "It will be some months before we can gauge the full extent of that impact. Whatever the ultimate scope, it is almost certain the effects will resonate for many months to come.”

The CARES Act, passed in March, allows homeowners to suspend their mortgage payments for up to a year on federally-backed mortgages. But it doesn’t protect mortgages that aren’t backed by the government, which make up about half of all mortgages in the U.S.

About 3.6 million homeowners were past due on their mortgages at the end of April, the most since January 2015 as households face financial hardship. That included the roughly 211,000 borrowers who were in active foreclosure.

The CARES Act also prevented lenders from beginning foreclosure proceedings on federally backed loans for at least 60 days after March 18.

With foreclosure moratoriums in place in response to the outbreak, both foreclosure starts and foreclosure sales, or completions, hit record lows. Starts were down more than 80% from this time last year, while foreclosure sales saw a 93% decline over the same period.

"Forbearance plans, by their very nature, are intended to assist homeowners through times of crisis until they can get back on track financially, and historically, they have proven to be broadly successful in doing so," Walden says. "Given the sheer number of mortgage holders impacted, there remains a risk that some may progress into default and foreclosure further downstream."

In the top 100 largest metropolitan areas, Miami (7.2%), Las Vegas (6.2%) and New York City (5.4%) topped the list for cities with the largest delinquency increases. Nevada was among the states with the biggest delinquency rates, climbing 5.2% to nearly 8%. New Jersey and New York followed, rising 5.1% and 4.9%, respectively. ​

 

How much faster would our recovery be if your stupid leader encouraged people to wear masks instead of think the whole thing is a hoax?

Forget the loss of life since the right obviously doesn't care about that, lets talk about the economy. We could open up right now but the problem is people's unwillingness to wear masks which is going to just let the virus make a nice big comeback.