Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

Time to start laying more train tracks.

Or just throw a couple of passenger cars on the end of freight trains, no service you have to bring your own food and water.

Taking a cruel pleasure in yahoo finance comments like "Time to load up on cruise ship stocks, they haven't been this cheap in years!" Yup folks, expired milk on sale!

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, April 9, 2020 1:10 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

not a good metaphor tbh, unless you believe no one will ever go on cruise ships ever again.

― sarahell, Thursday, April 9, 2020 1:13 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.businessinsider.com/norweigan-cruise-lines-warns-of-substantial-doubt-continue-operating-business-2020-5?fbclid=IwAR3ZLvANP49VMRWu30ewWsAkJjnYLWeSz6clogvBV6DNhk9kKGGWjYW4JHc

I've bad news about the current state of meat processing

•Tyson plant in Perry had 730 positive cases, which represents 58% of the employees tested

•The Tyson plant in Waterloo had 444 positive cases, which represents 17% of the employees tested

•Iowa Premium National beef in Tama had identified 258 positive cases, which represents 39% of the employees tested

•The Tyson plant in Columbus Junction identified 221 positive cases, which represents 26% of the employees tested

•TPI Composites in Newton had 131 positive cases, which represents 13% of its employees tested

not going to run the numbers or quibble about "employees tested" but something like an average 25% of meatpacking employees in what is apparently the largest region for that business are out. there are a lot of reasons, including hiring recent immigrants packed into tight housing, responsible beyond the actual plant conditions

undoubtedly meatpacking robots are the proposed solution

They’ve already put limits on fresh meat per customer at my local Safeway; this was like a couple weeks ago.

Restrictions here too

Feeling like tomorrow is a good day to just go buy a bunch of steaks and chicken cutlets from my locals

I can hit four grocery stores in walking distance pretty easily

Time to live like my ancestors, on boiled potatoes and hatred

the boiling might take some work though

There's a place called Fabulous Meat City in the next town over. Might go see just how fabulous this weekend.

stock up on tofu and seitan imo

Seems like a good time to have just ordered what I initially thought was massively too much chicken and hanger steak from a restaurant distributor that started selling to consumers. Scheduled to arrive today.

Related: full size freezers have been sold out everywhere since March.

This Axios piece is bizarre, and kinda gross, and can't possibly be an accurate reflection of reality:

The coronavirus-driven gold rush

Having been conditioned for years by financial pundits to see the next recession as their opportunity to get rich after largely missing out on 11 years of a surging bull market, young people are viewing the coronavirus-driven stock market crash as their golden ticket.

What's happening: Thanks to zero fees, easy access afforded by the internet, and an unexpected glut of free time on their hands, millennials and Gen Zers are opening online brokerage accounts at a record pace.

Finance apps have seen a 55% growth in usage time from the end of 2019 to the week ended April 18, according to new data from App Annie.

TD Ameritrade reported a record 608,000 new funded accounts in the first quarter and more than three times the number of users in March compared to March 2019.

Brokerages like Schwab, Fidelity and E*Trade also reported record new users.

"The way we can see that a lot of these people are newer to investing is because they are accessing our educational resources at a rate that is three to four times what we’d normally see," Steven Quirk, EVP of trading and education at TD Ameritrade, tells Axios.

"And the courses they’re accessing are explainer video series about investing principles, investing basics, 'How do I buy a stock?'"

"Our investing courses are laid out as a journey and a lot of them are hitting the ones that are the first part of the journey."

Driving the news: Despite two separate embarrassing outages on critical trading days this year that could have sunk its business, millennial-focused trading app Robinhood has seen its valuation rise to $8.3 billion, while investing platform Stash got a new $112 million infusion that took its valuation to $800 million.

Yes, but: In their thirst for a piece of the expected market rebound, these new investors may be ignoring the economic reality of the moment.

The Fed, IMF and an army of the world's foremost economists predict the recession will be long lasting and many companies are expected to go bankrupt or dissolve entirely over the next year.

The last word: Those who have used their new accounts to buy the dip since late March have done quite well.

But if equity prices don't continue to defy gravity, the downturn could destroy already fragile savings gains for millennials who have largely been priced out of home ownership and are just starting to build wealth, wreaking further havoc on the broader economy.

Makes total sense to me. If you have excess income and can ride it out for 10 years...
Also, explains why the stock market itself doesn't reflect reality right now.

i know a few people who are kinda doing what that is saying; trying not to judge

Yeah, that's fair, I think. Personally I still fear that the under-counted and upcoming deaths will have a real effect that is being ignored, no matter how detached from reality the Dow might be.

i know a few people who are kinda doing what that is saying; trying not to judge

U.S. Unemployment Rate Hits 14.7%, Worst Since Great Depression

A Devastating 20.5 Million Jobs Were Lost in April

stocks are up, though!

"stocks up on hopes of coronavirus treatment"

there's always some headline like that on my stocks app, accompanying news of massive unemployment

Why can't they just come out and say "Stocks up on news that an increasingly desperate American population will have to work for whatever pittance their employers choose"

you know this but: the stock market is not a perfect image viewed in a mirror of present economic reality. it's the sum of peoples' perceptions from billions of such mirrors, some of which are magic fortunetelling mirrors existing only in peoples' minds and many which are badly distorted funhouse mirrors. people can also just ignore or misinterpret what they see in the mirror. some people looking at these mirrors can't see at all. you are only trying to guess what people perceive on average and how they will respond to it.

stocks up on fed printing money that is only going to big businesses and so Trump can get re-elected and we need to kick as many people off of unemployment as possible. Also, If you are dead you cannot be unemployed at the same time.

The stock thing continues to baffle me, despite clear explanations in this thread--I'm still operating in a parallel universe. My fund is one good week from being back to par, and then I'm going to try to get out of it (hoping I don't get talked back into it, and wary of what it'll cost to extricate myself--I seem to recall him assuring me it was as easy as could be but knowing that's never true).

definitely true that greed causes people in power to try and distort the mirrors and peoples perceptions, though. it's just weird when people post things that seem to say "i am outraged that i cannot predict what the stock market will do".

i swear i want to slap people through the internet for daring to say anyone is making more money being unemployed so they need to get back to work.

Mentally preparing for the arrival of Lord Humungus

i swear i want to slap people through the internet for daring to say anyone is making more money being unemployed so they need to get back to work.

― Yerac, Friday, May 8, 2020 11:59 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I got into an argument on fb with a guy like this in my neighborhood group who seemed to think that the real tragedy is that he can't find a good office manager for whatever his stupid business is because people are getting paid too much to stay home

which means he's a cheap motherfucker underpaying his staff.

i swear i want to slap people through the internet for daring to say anyone is making more money being unemployed so they need to get back to work.

― Yerac, Friday, May 8, 2020 11:59 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, I've got in heated arguments about this with many people. like, we bail out corporations for doing nothing except "failing" time and time again. I feel like this is an opportunity for some people who've been through hell for 3-4 years to get caught up financially during a crisis if the amount they get on unemployment happens to be higher than what they were making.

my mother surprised me by telling me she made only $3,500 last year (in addition to the social security of her and my father). this is what they're living off of. and dad isn't working anymore (he was probably making 9k - 10k a year when he was). the reason she couldn't work more is because she was taking care of him and has chronic medical issues of her own, plus hours weren't always available.

she could make 3x what she made last year from unemployment the next few months, which she could use to not only pay bills, but permanently remove debt and emerge from this first quarter of this crisis at least better positioned to face the months going forward. Tons of other people I know are in that position too. Considering the uneven playing field that has materialized over the last 40 years, who the fuck cares? This unemployment isn't putting companies out of business. and it's perhaps discouraging businesses from opening to oearly and preventing sick people from going to work.

also all of the people arguing this are people who make no money themselves, at least in my circle. people who are probably getting the same unemployment.

the thing that’s not stated when people claim that some workers are making more by staying home is whether or not they’re living well. of course they aren’t, the bare minimum just got upped — maybe only notionally! — and the complainers never gave a shit about how their employees were living before. you don’t get to complain that people are able to scrape by slightly better if you didn’t notice they weren’t making it previously

I have this other facebook friend who makes basically the same whiny, childish post every day or two to the effect of "Wheeen are we gonna open UUUUUUUUUUUUP" *does peepee-dance-like frustrated motion*. He's not a dumb guy and he generally believes in science but he has this extremely lazy way of looking at things. I get that he is frustrated because he has an entertainment business that can't operate right now, but he refuses to face that no one would be signing up for the entertainment his business provides even if things were officially "opened up." Every fucking day, no acknowledgement of the fact that the reality is harsh, just "HOW LONG, WAAAAAH, WE GOTTA FIND A WAY TO OPEN UP"

if every store opened up tomorrow people still wouldn't want to go to them

I don't really want to go anywhere until there are roughly zero new cases a day in my county for several weeks and a robust contact tracing operation is deployed for new cases.

hey guys I'm in the EXPERIMENT STATE and I guess we're gonna FIND SHIT OUT

not in my county, thankfully

the thing that’s not stated when people claim that some workers are making more by staying home is whether or not they’re living well. of course they aren’t, the bare minimum just got upped

With the extra $600 per week, a lot of folks I know are actually living pretty "high on the hog" compared to where they were before. I definitely don't begrudge them that. It's not like the money they are getting is money that is being taken from me. It's possible that I would be making more money if I went on unemployment as opposed to continuing to work. ...

What is interesting is the effect of the increased unemployment benefits on the PPP loan forgiveness issue, because there are people who do the cost/benefit analysis (esp. when their previous jobs were only part-time) and stay on unemployment. And it will be interesting to see who takes those federally-funded jobs and whether they keep them and whether there are any significant changes to the workforce after this? Idk

It's like John Maynard Keynes has disappeared down the memory hole.

what did keynes write about recessions induced by pandemic? not familiar with any

why is a pandemic a vital component when addressing the need to keep cash flowing and credit available at a time of asset deflation?

you don’t think that’s happening right now? central banks are going nuts

The initial response has been OK, but now there's a rising tide of criticism from asinine conservatives about how it's horrible to pay people to stay home, which happens to be the most vital job they can do right now, unless they are involved in keeping people alive and delivering essential goods and services. These fools are wailing because government is borrowing to accomplish this vital goal and instead of this being the occasional voice of a shithead crying in the wilderness, it's being orchestrated and amplified by conservative media.

I’m reminded of this article I just read in the NYRB, which I thought was great

https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/blog/against-economics/

Nice quote from that article (which is v good btw):

Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies—which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced.

im a graeber fan

I highlighted like 20% of it when I read it. Very quotable. Here’s my highlights sorry it’s long you should just read the article.


“We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.”

“As a result, heterodox economists continue to be treated as just a step or two away from crackpots, despite the fact that they often have a much better record of predicting real-world economic events. What’s more, the basic psychological assumptions on which mainstream (neoclassical) economics is based—though they have long since been disproved by actual psychologists—have colonized the rest of the academy, and have had a profound impact on popular understandings of the world.

Nowhere is this divide between public debate and economic reality more dramatic than in Britain, which is perhaps why it appears to be the first country where something is beginning to crack.”

““There is no magic money tree,” as Theresa May put it during the snap election of 2017—virtually the only memorable line from one of the most lackluster campaigns in British history. The phrase has been repeated endlessly in the media, whenever someone asks why the UK is the only country in Western Europe that charges university tuition, or whether it is really necessary to have quite so many people sleeping on the streets.

The truly extraordinary thing about May’s phrase is that it isn’t true. There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way.”

“Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong. The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate—to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create.”

“One sign that something historically new has indeed appeared is if scholars begin reading the past in a new light. Accordingly, one of the most significant books to come out of the UK in recent years would have to be Robert Skidelsky’s Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics. Ostensibly an attempt to answer the question of why mainstream economics rendered itself so useless in the years immediately before and after the crisis of 2008, it is really an attempt to retell the history of the economic discipline through a consideration of the two things—money and government—that most economists least like to talk about.”

“The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement? This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years. What we call “money” is always a mixture of both, and, as I myself noted in Debt (2011), the center of gravity between the two tends to shift back and forth over time. In the Middle Ages everyday transactions across Eurasia were typically conducted by means of credit, and money was assumed to be an abstraction. It was the rise of global European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the corresponding flood of gold and silver looted from the Americas, that really shifted perceptions. Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies—which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced.”

“To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.”

“Ever since Hume, economists have distinguished between the short-run and the long-run effects of economic change, including the effects of policy interventions. The distinction has served to protect the theory of equilibrium, by enabling it to be stated in a form which took some account of reality. In economics, the short-run now typically stands for the period during which a market (or an economy of markets) temporarily deviates from its long-term equilibrium position under the impact of some “shock,” like a pendulum temporarily dislodged from a position of rest. This way of thinking suggests that governments should leave it to markets to discover their natural equilibrium positions. Government interventions to “correct” deviations will only add extra layers of delusion to the original one.

There is a logical flaw to any such theory: there’s no possible way to disprove it. The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can only be tested if one has a commonly agreed definition of when the “end” is; but for economists, that definition turns out to be “however long it takes to reach a point where I can say the economy has returned to equilibrium.” (In the same way, statements like “the barbarians always win in the end” or “truth always prevails” cannot be proved wrong, since in practice they just mean “whenever barbarians win, or truth prevails, I shall declare the story over.”)”

“The one major exception to this pattern was the mid-twentieth century, what has come to be remembered as the Keynesian age. It was a period in which those running capitalist democracies, spooked by the Russian Revolution and the prospect of the mass rebellion of their own working classes, allowed unprecedented levels of redistribution—which, in turn, led to the most generalized material prosperity in human history. The story of the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and the neoclassical counterrevolution of the 1970s, has been told innumerable times, but Skidelsky gives the reader a fresh sense of the underlying conflict.”

“Surely there’s nothing wrong with creating simplified models. Arguably, this is how any science of human affairs has to proceed. But an empirical science then goes on to test those models against what people actually do, and adjust them accordingly. This is precisely what economists did not do. Instead, they discovered that, if one encased those models in mathematical formulae completely impenetrable to the noninitiate, it would be possible to create a universe in which those premises could never be refuted. (“All actors are engaged in the maximization of utility. What is utility? Whatever it is that an actor appears to be maximizing.”) The mathematical equations allowed economists to plausibly claim theirs was the only branch of social theory that had advanced to anything like a predictive science (even if most of their successful predictions were of the behavior of people who had themselves been trained in economic theory).

This allowed Homo economicus to invade the rest of the academy, so that by the 1950s and 1960s almost every scholarly discipline in the business of preparing young people for positions of power (political science, international relations, etc.) had adopted some variant of “rational choice theory” culled, ultimately, from microeconomics. By the 1980s and 1990s, it had reached a point where even the heads of art foundations or charitable organizations would not be considered fully qualified if they were not at least broadly familiar with a “science” of human affairs that started from the assumption that humans were fundamentally selfish and greedy.”

“There is a paradox here. On the one hand, the theory says that there is no point in trying to profit from speculation, because shares are always correctly priced and their movements cannot be predicted. But on the other hand, if investors did not try to profit, the market would not be efficient because there would be no self-correcting mechanism….

Secondly, if shares are always correctly priced, bubbles and crises cannot be generated by the market….

This attitude leached into policy: “government officials, starting with [Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan, were unwilling to burst the bubble precisely because they were unwilling to even judge that it was a bubble.” The EMH made the identification of bubbles impossible because it ruled them out a priori.”

“Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth.”

“Intellectually, this won’t be easy. Politically, it will be even more difficult. Breaking through neoclassical economics’ lock on major institutions, and its near-theological hold over the media—not to mention all the subtle ways it has come to define our conceptions of human motivations and the horizons of human possibility—is a daunting prospect. Presumably, some kind of shock would be required. What might it take? Another 2008-style collapse? Some radical political shift in a major world government? A global youth rebellion? However it will come about, books like this—and quite possibly this book—will play a crucial part.”

i like graeber but have struggled with his books' tendency to relentlessly drive every point 30 feet into the ground

I have only read the bullshit jobs article, none of his books. Are you talking about his books or more generally?

bullshit jobs is otm but you don't need more than the article

debt is great and insightful but also repetitive and never-ending imo