Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

I took some gains last correction and have been holding my ira contributions as cash for basically just this moment

It's beginning ... confirmed layoffs already among:

-- Port drivers in LA
-- Hotel workers in Seattle
-- Travel agencies in Atlanta
-- Stage hands in Las Vegas
-- Festival workers in Texas

& more to come ..@abhabhattarai @byHeatherLong @rachsieg https://t.co/KZRrezrbGD

— Jeffrey Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 11, 2020

Whirring overhead:

"On March 12, 2020, the Desk will offer $500 billion in a three-month repo operation at 1:30 pm ET that will settle on March 13, 2020."

Wednesday was an unsettling day on global financial markets, and not just because the stock market fell sharply enough to bring a decade-plus bull market to an end.

Underneath the headline numbers were a series of movements that don’t really make sense when lined up against one another. They amount to signs — not definitive, but worrying — that something is breaking down in the workings of the financial system, even if it’s not totally clear what that is just yet.

Bond prices and stock prices were moving together, not in opposite directions as they usually do. On a day when major economic disruptions resulting from the coronavirus pandemic appeared to become likelier — which might be expected to make typical market safe havens more popular — many of them fell instead. That included bonds of all sorts and gold.

And there were reports from trading desks that many assets that are normally liquid — easy to buy and sell — were freezing up, with securities not trading widely. This was true of the bonds issued by municipalities and major corporations but, more curiously, also of Treasury bonds, normally the bedrock of the global financial system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/upshot/markets-weird-coronavirus.html

all i know is that because of Dodd Frank all these large financial firms should have funeral plans to unwind in an orderly fashion if they go under so they don't fuck the rest of the world.

I put half my 401(k) into a low risk bond fund this week. It rarely falls with my stock funds but it did this week.

Whoa what the hell was that spike

BREAKING: Fed is injecting $1.5 trillion into short-term lending markets, a rare move to try to calm investors' worries about coronavirus

just a little $1.5 Trillion injection

whoa whoa whoa what’s with the government interference

total student loan debt (federal + private): $1.6T

lmao the bounce only lasted about 2 hours

nbd, just inject another $1.5T every 2 hours

Bitcoin took a 20% drop too, I'm guessing people are cashing out to cover their losses now

gonna be interesting to see how that acts in a bear market for the first time ever

Based solely on having watched the Fed for the past few decades, I'd expect another multi-trillion injection fairly soon, though probably not again today. Liquidity is bound to be drying up and the Fed will always act to protect big financial institutions.

schwab.com has a lot of good resources about investing and such if you are interested. I like the fact that it gives you a DIY option to investing, rather than the traditional "we will manage your money and take a bunch of your money as fees for our service" brokerage model.

Looks like by tomorrow we will have pretty much wiped out all of the gains of the Trump presidency. Probably even more than if you account for inflation.

to be a fly on the wall for that White House conversation

which is why it is so cool that the default retirement savings package for every corporate job now is a 401k and not a pension :/

― mh, Thursday, March 12, 2020 9:52 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

BTW, as much as I agree with this, pension funds basically depend on a mix of stocks, bonds and other investments to be able to pay retirees, so it's not like they're immune to this.

well, yeah, but the benefits themselves are derived from a set formula and it's entirely employer paid (other than those archaic contributory plans), so worst that happens is the trust gets severely underfunded and the company can't afford to fully fund it or fund it at all. and then possibly the PBGC has to step in. which it did quite often during the Great Recession.

LOL some EU mkts banning short selling.
here comes the predictable manipulated covering bounce

Surge!

Josta!

I give that esoteric joke an 8!

When Coke introduced its Gen-X soda OK Soda, my friend joked that Pepsi should make Epsipe.

When all this (presumably/hopefully) settles down, I'm seriously considering getting the money I put into this Fidelity fund and putting it back into the bank. I don't have the stomach for this, I do think the insane swings the past two weeks indicate...insanity, and--after I took out the fund, duh--I sat down and looked at how my bank had been doing the past 10 years with what I had in there, and they weren't doing badly at all. (Canadian banks, I should mention, weathered 2008 infinitely better than American banks.) Other than looking at my statements at the end of every month, I rarely gave whatever I had invested with them a second thought, which is how it ought to be. I also, prompted by all of this, just read Roger Lowenstein's Origins of the Crash, about the dot.com/Enron/telecommunications meltdowns (pre-2008), and now all I can think is that there are CEOs dumping stock options and making billions during this.

oh yeah, during crashes, the ceos always end up fine. They were communicating to the lehman employees that everything was fine and not to worry when they were all protecting their own personal assets.

Some equities that I have on watch to eventually add are still way too high.

Some progressive ideas, as a treat.

🚨🚨🚨Suspending student debt payments during coronavirus among the options economic aides will be presenting to Trump, per treasury secretary Mnuchin

— Jeffrey Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 13, 2020

oh please, please, please.

Jan 20.
And 8 weeks later. pic.twitter.com/Ms8fRt3Glo

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) March 14, 2020

In conclusion, the Dow Jones is a land of contrasts.

well, yeah, but the benefits themselves are derived from a set formula and it's entirely employer paid (other than those archaic contributory plans), so worst that happens is the trust gets severely underfunded and the company can't afford to fully fund it or fund it at all.

worst that happens is the employer is the government and due to underfunded pension plans, government services are cut in order to balance budgets resulting in increased poverty, homelessness, dangerous and decaying infrastructure, underfunded schools, and all the other problems facing American cities with financial problems in this day and age.

I know this isn't the ACAB thread but ... even in retirement, cops punish marginalized people -- because their pension obligations take away from city services for vulnerable populations (and yeah, normal people too)

I know cops are unpopular, because too many of them are racist pigs, but public employee pensions are a boon to millions of people who aren't cops and never were. Forcing everyone onto 401K plans basically force feeds the equities market like a Strasbourg goose, which is periodically killed and its liver made into pâte d' fois gras for rich people.

public employee pensions are a boon to millions of people who aren't cops and never were.

why yes! my father was a public school teacher and has a nice state pension. ... Maybe it's different in other parts of the country, but in California, many public employee pensions are funded at the state level, rather than the local level, which is less of a problem for individual cities because the burden is spread state-wide. Cops' pensions tend to be funded at the municipal level.

Cops also get paid way more than teachers, and their pensions are a lot higher as well.

My parents once were bitching to me about my brother who was being forced to retire early from the police department (because he fell down an elevator shaft, got tackled and screwed up his knee, had a heart attack at 39 so he basically was on desk duty (he is very, very not suited for anything desk related) and was expensive to insure). The big issue was that the dept was trying to pay out only a portion of his pension since he wasn't going to make it, just barely, to the full 20 years. My entire family is against anything remotely socialist except the stuff they benefit from directly. So of course I was unsympathetic to the argument that he deserved that money and it was his. I just kept questioning how much of the pension he had contributed to directly

WaPo: Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to zero as part of wide-ranging emergency intervention

um, wait, i can refinance a home with a 0% interest rate now?

ah, no of course not; that would benefit the wrong people i suppose

I wanna refinance every CEOs head with the back of my foot.

The Federal Reserve has always been of the banks, for the banks, from its inception. Don't expect socially responsible action, only action that preserves Finance, and more generally, FIRE.

Zero interest rates seems nice, until you discover pensioners depend on interest income to eat.

As I post this, per cnbc.com, Dow futures are down +1,000. It's going to be a bumpy day.

I really really wonder if/when they will close the market.

it completely seems like something that trump would pressure them to do.

He's good at talking about closing things and not staffing things

I am mad I didn't rebuy some things at the end of the day Friday. I stupidly thought maybe over the weekend things would look up. Completely ridiculous thought.

if action isn't taken re: mortgages/rent, lotta people gonna be ass out in a few weeks. esp if we lockdown like we finna do in a little bit.

https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-halts-evictions-one-week-rebny-pledges-90-day-moratorium

I really really wonder if/when they will close the market.

I'm baffled enough by all this--and clueless--to ask the same question. But I know the answer: because there are billions being made, or about to be made, by enough people to let it happen.