Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

From the Federal Reserve's annual report on households:

"self-reported financial well-being reached its highest level" since 2013.

"In the fourth quarter of 2021, 78 percent of adults reported either doing okay or living comfortably financially." https://t.co/VChSwhUGBR

— Arthur Delaney 🇺🇸 (@ArthurDelaneyHP) May 23, 2022

it's (voters' wildly warped perception of) the economy, stupid

"The report draws from the Board's ninth annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, or SHED, which was conducted in October and November of last year before the increase in COVID-19 cases from the Omicron variant and other changes to the economic landscape in recent months."

i think some things have changed since then idk

"other changes" -- like the cessation of the increased, paid-monthly child tax credits? defunding SNAP? knocking the added supports out of unemployment insurance?

I just signed a new electricity contract and my rates doubled vs. last summer. Not sure voters perceptions are warped much less wildly so.

yeah but that's texas, right?

everyone i know talks about struggling compared to last year? the signs are everywhere, numbers of homeless people increasing, lots of messaging about "cutting your spending" etc. i see facebook reels about "savings challenges" and so forth a lot lately. for some reason this federal reserve report doesn't strike me as accurate, though it does serve the useful purpose of being more fodder for the people invested in pushing harder in class warfare.

when netflix stopped adding subscribers i knew shit was real

Xxxp - for sure deregulation and climate fed into a worst case scenario for me but prices are spiking to a lesser extent everywhere because of natural gas AFAICT and a lot of those places already had higher energy prices than we do.

I think that Fed report might be technically accurate for seven months ago but seven months ago might as well be three years.

Electric rates are supposed to spike here, too.

What I’m dreading is finding out our new property tax rates— apparently they’re up between 16% and 65% throughout the city. All the motherfuckers who moved here from NYC during the first two years of Covid are sure doing their best to turn this city into a yuppie shithole

A clerk tried to charge me $4.50 plus tax & CRV for a 24 oz can of Coors last week (Total: $5.21), I almost had a heart attack

I found the same can for $2.99 out the door at another shop, but still.. it was a wake-up call

oh i'm sure my electricity bills for the next four months are going to be extremely painful, but at least it's not ercot

Hey, at least perpetually on the verge of collapse ERCOT is also generating power for almost half of all bitcoin mining in the US!

The fed's attached fact sheet is a little less rosy than Delaney's pull quote

first the thing that no longer exists

The majority of parents received additional income in 2021 through the monthly Child Tax
Credit (CTC). Most higher-income parents primarily saved this money, while most lowerincome parents primarily spent it on housing, items for their children, or food.
• Three in 10 CTC recipients with income less than $50,000 used the largest portion of
their credit on housing expenses, just over 2 in 10 spent the largest portion on their child,
and 15 percent spent the largest portion on food.
• Fifteen percent of adults with income less than $50,000 struggled to pay their bills
because of varying monthly income. Among parents in this income range, 27 percent
struggled to pay their bills because of income variability.

Rents were up 10+% Jan 22 vs Jan 21, and have continued climbing since

Low mortgage rates resulted in a continuation of the wave of refinancing in 2021, although high
income borrowers were primarily the beneficiaries of this opportunity. The share of renters who
had been behind on their rent in the prior 12 months was higher than before the pandemic.
• Nearly one-fourth of all homeowners with a mortgage refinanced their mortgage in 2021.
Nearly 30 percent of mortgage holders with an income of at least $100,000 and 16
percent of those with income under $50,000 refinanced during the year.
• Seventeen percent of renters were behind on their rent at some point in 2021, including 8
percent who were behind at the time of the survey in late 2021.

the crypto crash hits middle-income people pretty hard

The survey asked about cryptocurrency for the first time in 2021. Differences exist between
those holding cryptocurrency as an investment versus those using it for financial transactions.
• In 2021, 12 percent of adults used or held cryptocurrency in the past 12 months, although
a far smaller 3 percent used it for financial transactions, like buying something, making a
payment, or sending money to family of friends.
• Forty-six percent of adults holding cryptocurrency only for investment had an income of
$100,000 or more, while 29 percent had an income under $50,000. Additionally, 99
percent of these cryptocurrency investors had a bank account.
• Nearly 6 in 10 transactional users of cryptocurrencies had an income of less than $50,000
and 13 percent did not have a bank account.

Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange founded (and, up until recently, based) in San Francisco, is now rescinding job offers that were already accepted as headwinds continue to impact the tech and crypto industries at large.

In a letter sent to employees and made public Thursday, Coinbase’s chief people officer L.J. Brock said that the company would take back “a number of accepted offers” and “outstanding offers” — just weeks after the company announced that it would be pausing hiring. (That halt will continue “for the foreseeable future,” he added.)

like a sand castle dissolving into the tide

...so are the days of our lives

finally, some good news

New study: Pandemic and remote work could obliterate half a trillion dollars of office value:

“We find a 32% decline in office values in 2020 and 28% in the longer-run, the latter representing a $500 billion value destruction.” https://t.co/VFh6CXBnW8

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) June 4, 2022

aka 'the cubicle glut'

TURN IT INTO HOUSING

i'm sorry, we're currently only accepting solutions that enrich a select few at the expense of the many

they would rather raze the buildings

mookieproof otm, there’ll be a few years of stories about developers and owners having done feasibility studies that “prove” it to be “impossible” to convert these buildings into anything other than cubicle farms, with the “impossible” being read as “not as profitable as tearing them down to put up another shopping complex or ‘luxury’ condos”

no more cake in the breakroom

I don’t care if they are new condos at least it’ll add to the supply of housing. All private new housing is “ luxury” when it’s built I’m sure my thoroughly middle-middle class condo community was considered luxury when they were new.

Would love massive public investment in new housing that normal people can afford though!!!

Yeah I'm just so skeptical that any of it would turn into truly affordable housing stock. All of the business parks I've worked in or experienced around here are already in predominantly white, upper middle class suburbs that sure as fuck are filled with NIMBYs and zoning laws that will make sure they aren't filled up with the "undesirables".

I remember reading that office properties are not the easiest to retrofit into housing. IDK if they're harder than converting warehouses into loft apts or anything.

I guess so long as it's easier/cheaper than tearing down the building and building new housing, there's a case for doing it.

Oh I'm sure they aren't "easy", they condensing of toilets and utility chases in the center of the building (as one example) would probably mean lots of extra plumbing and utility expansion, but I would imagine there must be ways to do it that don't require wholesale razing.

interesting part of this dynamic - I'm guessing here - is that the most expensive cities (LA, SF, NYC etc) are probably the ones with the most empty office space, just due to the more privileged workforce that can play hardball with work-at-home demands

And of course these expensive areas are the places most acutely in need of housing stock

But boardrooms to bedrooms? I seriously doubt this will be attempted on any meaningful scale

All I keep coming back to is that architects, developers and landlords have spent decades figuring out how to convert any structure imaginable - barns, gas stations, abandoned theaters, garages, etc. - into profit generating retail spaces. Let's use some of that ingenuity to reverse engineer wasteful office space into affordable housing.

Cleveland has been losing office space even before the pandemic because lol Cleveland. In almost every case the buildings have been converted to apartments (but not necessarily low cost ones) or condos or in some cases, little hotels. It’s happened so often that I just expect a building that’s having trouble renting office space to just start converting to apartments.

Cleveland has been losing office space even before the pandemic because lol Cleveland. In almost every case the buildings have been converted to apartments (but not necessarily low cost ones) or condos or in some cases, little hotels. It’s happened so often that I just expect a building that’s having trouble renting office space to just start converting to apartments.

Sorry for double post there.

I was going to say that hotels or apartments would probably totally work in an office setting.

they could rebrand them as 'live/work' spaces and just install murphy beds and hotplates right in the cubicles

I think buildings that predate the 1960a are easier to convert, just based on what I see on the East Coast here. A lot of downtown Baltimore’s beautiful early-20th century office buildings are housing now.

Surely the traditional "downtown high rise" is more easily converted and more attractive for occupants, I'd be most interested to see creative solutions to turn sprawling suburban office complexes into walkable mini neighborhoods that are truly affordable and push those ring areas ever further away from car dependence.

Yeah, agreed. A crappy 70s office park inside the Beltway in Montgomery County MD turned a long vacant lot into townhouses. There’s no Metro access but decent bus service and you can actually walk to some shopping.

every stock in the S&P 500 is red right now pic.twitter.com/vhrfVc1NIz

— Katie Greifeld (@kgreifeld) June 13, 2022

🐦[every stock in the S&P 500 is red right now pic.twitter.com/vhrfVc1NIz🕸
— Katie Greifeld (@kgreifeld) June 13, 2022🕸]🐦

Holy shit, forget the S&P -- I looked at biggest gainers on Yahoo Finance:

https://finance.yahoo.com/gainers

There is literally one stock there. Can that be right? Only one stock went up today?

I guess that's with certain filters set and not literally everything, but still crazy to have one stock show up in "gainers"

i guess the used car bubble is winding down

Down 92% YTD is just insane to see pic.twitter.com/9S93zP0lp5

— Bucco “Buyback” Capital (@buccocapital) June 13, 2022

I *think* Carvana has other issues at work, since the used car market has most definitely *not* cooled down yet. Cars are still in super short supply. In fact, I recently heard that insurance companies have started OKing repairs they in the past would have passed on, because people have been forced to hold on to their damaged cars.

carvana's business model was fucked from jump iirc

yeah prices are still high, but seem to have peaked in april or may, and the stock in a company like this would be a leading indicator.

of course carvana is also a tech company, and tech is down like 50% on the year, which probably doesn't help. but if you're down more than *coinbase* on the year then you're in a tough line of business.

eh, flipping cars is a good business model while prices are rising.

https://www.motorious.com/articles/features-3/carvana-vroom-serious-trouble/

"An industry source told us “Carvana is no longer allowed to sell in some states because of their title issues.” That’s backed up by multiple reports across the country. For example, Illinois recently suspended Carvana’s dealership license after an investigation concluded the company has been failing to transfer vehicle titles to customers while abusing out-of-state temporary registration permits. Carvana reportedly will have to correct these problems before the suspension will be lifted.

Carvana has had hundreds if not thousands of complaints filed against it in states like Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas. Chalk it up to logistical problems as the company has set up dealership locations all over the nation, but many customers have complained that after months of waiting, they still didn’t receive their vehicle title and couldn’t register their new ride in their state."