I looked at Greg Mankiw's blog a couple of days ago. I think that's where the $1000 came from. Elizabeth Warren had an idea where we would give zero interest loans to businesses as long as they kept their employees on the payroll. Told Mad Money that a general tax holiday made no sense because people who don't really need the money won't spend it.
Yes. A payroll tax holiday is giving money to people who kept their jobs.
I suppose that I need to say here that linking this tweet doesn't mean I agree with it.
https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1240158497628659713?s=20
$1000 for everyone is will be a very small step to reducing economic inequality if nothing else, and therefore a good thing. How much it helps the economy depends on whether the restaurants, theatres, etc are open at the time the checks arrive. If the pandemic means people have nothing to spend it on other than rent and debt reduction, good for the people who receive it and their landlords and creditors, less useful as economic stimulus.
If there really is a $1000 check for everyone, the effect inside America's prisons will be . . . interesting.
Utah just had a minor earthquake. We're fine.
Roc had 15 minor earthquakes this week. We're also fine.
4: I bet prisoners aren't included.
Bernie Sanders's plan now includes $2,000 per person per month for the duration.
Here we've gone from 40 cases to 100 in about 3 days - all but 2 imports from Europe/ME, other 2 I think from contact with arrivals. So, all foreign nationals barred as of midnight, mandatory quarantine for all arrivals. Which I'd interpret as things still being in hand, except one of those 2 being a HS student (they closed the school) and my employer having 2 students who attend said HS (but in different grades). So anyway, optimism. And bleach between classes. And open windows for ventilation, which is actually kind of nice but won't be when summer hits for real.
The payroll tax holiday is idiotic for exactly the reason Moby gave -- it's targeted at exactly and only the people who are still getting paid, and regressively so.
I'm thinking a few more months out, but this is going to wreck the economy like '08 or worse. We're going to need a whole lot of stimulus. This is certainly "This crisis means that now more than ever we should pursue my preferred policy outcome", but wow does the Green New Deal look good now as an economic stimulus program that's also targeted at climate change.
To reach out to moderates, we may need a stimulus package centered around destroying the planet.
This habit of confusing dining out with waging war
GWB said stuff like this, but did it have any effect really? And are Americans actually socially proximating because of this, or just because ignorance/shitty Trump messaging/sticking it to the libs?
12: They're doing it because they want to, and all of the above are just rationalizations.
Imagine explaining to a D-Day veteran that sports were canceled because of a virus.
Soldiers have never returned from a war and faced disease.
Also diseases always avoid the actual battlefields and frontlines.
Some reasons to think India will do okay.
Just give everyone a bunch of money, millionaires included, and on a monthly basis so they can budget. We can claw it back from the millionaires via the tax code later.
I mean, the sentiment isn't new to GWB, it has some parallel with FDR's "fear itself" - it makes moderate sense when the panic is purely economic in origin.
It's the only way to get popular support. No means testing
Means testing plus incentives to burn coal in open piles near low-income grade schools once they reopen.
Soldiers have never returned from a war and faced disease.
O RLY?
They think they're being ironic. I fucking invented irony.
It occurs to me that there are large numbers of Americans preparing for 'SHTF' scenarios and with Bert Gummer-style rec rooms. Maybe there's something to be said for not convincing them a worst-case is likely?
23: Moby, I love you. That made me laugh for the first time in ages.
The solution is simple. The government tells every business "Continue to pay your employees whether they are working or not. We will reimburse you for the portion that went to employees that were not working due to the virus." It keeps everyone who had a job employed with no disruption in their income. There's no need for complicated verification, no new bureaucracy and provides the security everyone needs to keep going and participating in the economy to the extent they can.
Yes, there will be some cheating or misdirected money but probably not a lot. Unfortunate, but this is an emergency.
Of course this will never happen because it makes sense and doesn't shovel huge piles of cash to rich people.
28: Businesses also need money to pay other overheads they can't cover because of reduced income. So you would need to impose a national rent/mortgage holiday, for which the rentiers would need in turn to be compensated, and hey presto money shoveled to rich people.
Trump proposes $500b in direct payments to taxpayers! Less than $200/person! Yet the NYT leads with the aggregate number which sounds so darn big! Exclamation points!
Oh shit. I'm supposed to be better at approximate math on the fly like that. Between $1,000 and $2,000.
29 I don't think you need assume rentiers are made entirely whole, in that scenario. A smart plan probably has them eating some of it, but not so much it threatens those businesses. And they'll accept it, as it's cheaper that trying to find new tenants in a falling market.
Utah just had a minor earthquake
5.7, respectable but not catastrophic. The waves didn't really travel strongly to the east. I went through Whittier back in '87 (5.9) and this didn't feel even close. Supposedly the west side of the valley got rattled good.
34:. Up here it wasn't bad. Didn't realize it was a 5.7 till later. The kids were pretty freaked out at first.
Chinese international students, facing a fresh virus crisis and a wave of racism, are flocking home. Unless something significantly changes, the number of new international students on campuses this fall will be close to zero. That's going to be a devastating financial blow for Western universities that have become deeply dependent on Chinese student recruitment. An American degree is also going to look like a less attractive proposition in a more xenophobic China.
It's certainly going to drop local rents.
Watching a Newsom livestream. He said, among other things, California unemployment insurance applications are up to 80,000 a day, and there's a hospital that went to the LA garment district to hire seamstresses to sew masks.
American Apparel is back selling surgical masks using ads with bottomless models.
34: 5.7, respectable but not catastrophic. The waves didn't really travel strongly to the east. I went through Whittier back in '87 (5.9) and this didn't feel even close. Supposedly the west side of the valley got rattled good.
Looking at the USGS "Shakemaps" (Mercalli scale which is actual motion at surface) you can see that the Whittier one had serious shaking over a much wider area (and I think slightly higher intensity in the most affected are but that really does not show on the map, got that from reading). Whittier Shakemap and SLC Shakemap at the same scale.
It was a 5.9 vs SLC 5.7 but it really is the nature of the surface geology and soils and how it is connected to the shake area that tends to matter the most (for instance Mexico City getting hammered in quakes centers 100+ miles away, and the Mission District in SF/Oakland getting slammed in moderately distant Loma Prieta quake in 1987).
I am not familiar enough with the respective surface geologies to really say anything, but from the maps in the Whittier one the main shaking was cenered down on the flats rather in the more sparsely populated "Hills" where it was centered, while in SLC the most shaking occurred in a very sparsely populated area SE of the lake (though some of it is in West Valley City).
I was also going to not that the SLC was on a normal fault (vertical motion sort of like a "slump" while the Whittier one was likely a strike/slip (lateral motion), but actually it seems that Whittier was a thrust fault (basically a normal fault in reverse)
Iberian Fury and I are about to make an offer to buy an apartment. Any suggestions for how much we should now underbid because of the impending Coronavirus recession? It feels kind of shady, because our own financial situation is unaffected and as secure as any -- she just got tenure at a flagship gov't institute -- but OTOH the real estate market in Vienna has been incredibly overheated lately (such that the ECB, OECD, etc were concerned) and the current owner bought like 10 years ago.
Anyway, my current thought was to see how housing prices reacted to the Great Financial Crisis, and look at how the local real estate price index has developed over time, and, I dunno, collect underpants & profit somehow. But if anyone actually has real knowledge about this sort of thing, I'd love to hear it!
That depends on why they are selling. If it is for purely financial, postponeable reasons, they make take it off the market. It if it a divorce they probably want to get rid of it as soon as possible and you have a reasonable chance of beating them down.
Divorce, empty nest. But I'm not sure how urgent -- it's been on the market since summer; if he was desperate, surely he'd have taken an offer by now. I'm actually not seeing it online right now, although I just talked to the broker yesterday and he would have said something if it's not available.
Ironically, I am a natural experiment - I just received a £2,400 cheque from the government (the Student Loans Company worked out it had overcharged me for years).
I will probably save quite a bit but on the other hand I might...buy some stuff? and you know, it's like £2,400 better than the counterfactual
Tyler Cowen's list of policy prescriptions has landed in the inboxes of local officials across the country, and its got a bunch of libertarian ideas like payroll tax cuts and "wage reduction."
I'd very much like to some lefty think tank disseminating something like this, except with ideas more along the lines of how we can FDR this shit.
Not policy prescriptions per se, but I found this DeLong post sort of interesting.
(He labels it "Bloomberg BNN talking points", but I think he does do commentary on Bllomberg so they are his thoughts.)
Especially the first few bullets:
At the moment, we have a huge negative supply shock
But as people lose their jobs as a result of this negative supply shock, it is going to turn into a demand shock
And we also have a very powerful distribution shock as well
We want to offset the demand shock without overdoing it
We want to let the prices of goods and services in high demand rise to encourage people to produce more of them
Hence an interesting policy problem:
The right inflation rate for the next 3 months is not 2%
The right inflation rate for the next 3 months is 2% + (share of the economy in high demand) x (how much prices need to rise to boost supply of commoditeis in high mand)/4
The right monetary policy is... stimulative, but uncertain...
The right fiscal policy is... stimulative, but uncertain...
The right distribution policy is... massive boost to unemployment insurance: 100% replacement for those who lose their jobs
The right lending policy is... lend enough on easy enough terms that businesses stay afloat, but not enough that stockholders make out like bandits--they are risk bearers, aren't they?
It does seem to me that the financial "fixes" really do need to be staged, especially given the uncertainty about both disease trajectory and governmental/societal response. Right now the major issue to me are mitigating critical supply chain disruptions, and keeping the people (and companies) most bashed in the uneven distribution of impacts afloat. (And it may be that it is easiest just to helicopter drop despite the "unfairness" of that.) Cowen has a lot of never waste a crisislonger-term stuff in there (and as you say libertarianish).
I did like this piece by Reed Hundt.
"This Is the Stimulus We Need Right Now. It's Not $1,000 for Every American."
Did not agree 100% but a thoughtful look.
Is a Hundt a hound or a hunt or a hunting hound?
Hence an interesting policy problem:
The right inflation rate for the next 3 months is not 2%
The right inflation rate for the next 3 months is 2% + (share of the economy in high demand) x (how much prices need to rise to boost supply of commoditeis in high mand)/4
The right monetary policy is... stimulative, but uncertain...
The right fiscal policy is... stimulative, but uncertain...
And you may ask yourself... how do I work this?
And you may ask yourself... where is that big automobile?
You may tell yourself... this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself... this is not my beautiful wife
You should have known...they're mine.
On a national level, I think printing a lot of money and spending is the way to go. We can argue about the details.
It would have Trump's head on it.
I think that an unwillingness to be the guy who mints the coin was Obama's ultimate failing.
They've closed the coin loophole, but if that were still on the table Trump would be all over it.
My understanding is that it was closed as part of one of the budget deals, but a quick googling finds no evidence of this, so I could be wrong.
They just used a regular coin and some glue.
Gluing a coin to the sidewalk is a classic trick, but seems cruel when new unemployment claims will probably hit 2 million this week.
Is it naive of me to think that the Met of all places could be expected to rally the funds to keep its musicians fed?
62 I know, incredibly cruel and callous and short-sighted. This all going to be over in a few months to a year.
Is it naive of me to think that the Met of all places could be expected to rally the funds to keep its musicians fed?
I had the same thought. here is a story. It's depressing.
New York's Metropolitan Opera -- the largest performing arts organization in the United States by budget -- has laid off all of its union employees for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, NPR has learned. The layoff includes all of the opera's orchestral players, chorus singers and stagehands.
...
Musicians and other employees of performing arts institutions across the country are expressing concern that management at their organizations will follow the Met's lead and also lay off their workforces.
As one Met employee told NPR on Thursday, "When we struggle, everyone struggles." The Met's annual operating budget is over $300 million, but it has a relatively small endowment of just $284 million. A study released Wednesday by the advocacy group Americans for the Arts indicates that the country's nonprofit arts organizations are already in "economic freefall" because of coronavirus-related issues. According to the group, losses already total some $3.2 billion.
It seems like the arts might be the sector getting hit hardest of all by this. We are going to lose a lot of cultural institutions.
