I really don't know. McConnell is doing his usual routine of ignoring whatever the Democrats suggest because it's somehow not a serious suggestion, and every other Republican Senator is saying "This is a great day. We avoided going further in debt." or "It's not the place of the government to do anything related to the economy. The economy is made up of businessmen with supply and demand. That's how the economy works". Just like any other year.
Without the stock market crashing they are unable to detect any problems that need to be solved. What do they think their job is? This has not been clear for a long time.
I've been saying all year that everything will be as bad as it could be until the administration changes. I am never surprised that the Republicans are fucking something up. Even so, I am occasionally surprised at how low the bottom is. I didn't expect that they'd take out mail infrastructure.
I just keep hoping that a Biden administration will have learned some good tactical lessons from Trump. Flood the field with (progressive) extreme measures, so many that any one of them gets lost in the crush and have as little care for what the opposition thinks as the Trump administration has had.
Back in February I joked that the stock market's crash was saying "um, guys? Guys? Maybe you need to do something about the global pandemic?" The best thing for public health right now would be a 20% drop.
Look at the performance of the four Republican questioners at the big hearing with Fauci, Redfield and Giroir on July 31. I haven't read the entire transcript but here it is. Some of their efforts at playing the blame game are correct, but note that they have no interest in either making a plan for the future, or recognizing that anything has been done wrong in the past or present.
Steve Scalise: The Chinese are to blame. Nevertheless, America's response to the virus has been outstanding. Look at all these plans we have (points to stack of paper). Look at all this money that has been spent, thanks to our great public-private partnerships. Look at the brave decisions to block flights from China and Europe. Also, Democratic governors are to blame for not protecting people in nursing homes.
Jackie Walorski: The Chinese are to blame. Not just for the obvious reasons, but I believe they are hacking into our researchers' computers.
Blaine Luetkemeyer: The virus makes it dangerous to reopen schools? Kids in school face danger every day! For example, playing football. Also, the deaths are being overcounted, and in fact more people have died because they avoided medical care due to scare tactics from the media, than have died from the virus. Hydroxychloroquine works when combined with zinc.
Jim Jordan: Democrats are to blame. The virus is now spreading because of the protests the Democrats have organized. People are allowed to protest, aka burn down buildings, but aren't allowed to go to church. It's ridiculous!
Fascism plus essential oils would probably be the best Republican platform possible.
What I can't figure out is why they aren't doing anything, even ineffectual that Trump could claim as a victory. More check with his name on it?
I've been to Four Corners, but not the rest of Utah.
Scalise made the most arguments at the hearing. The other three seem to be complete morons, but he is good at arguing "The media says we didn't do anything. But we did something! Look! And we don't get credit for it!" But even then... how do you know this was the right thing to do? Isn't there some evidence it wasn't? Isn't this a great responsibility on your part, that you want to get right?
Everyone in the Republican Party just wants to outsource decision making to corporations because they think that's where the smart people are. All they need to do is make sure the corporations are happy. Since it's not profitable for corporations to control a pandemic, and also there are some coordination problems, we have a problem.
I was genuinely shocked that the Senate went on recess without passing a stimulus bill.
This was surprising to me, too. Back in 2009, I thought that the unanimous Republican willingness to destroy the country was a function of having a Democratic president. Turns out that they are willing to drive the nation into a ditch even when it hurts them politically.
The Republican Party is the party of principle!!
6: Ezra Klein called around. It seems to a combination of "Trump can and will effectively punish any dissenters" and "We already have a playbook for this, if he loses we're well positioned to revive the Tea Party and say we're debt hawks again and come back in 2024". (The latter being the drum I've been pounding.)
6: That was my subconscious reasoning, I think: clearly this stands to benefit them, so they'll get something through.
I assumed the stock market would at least drop a little when they failed to pass anything. The last financial crisis and crash were because banks were wiped out by correlated asset drops. A perfect way to achieve that again is to have 50% of people simultaneously unable to pay rent and mortgage. But no, indexes heading to new records today. I guess the assumption is if banks fail and the market looks weak then the Republicans will pass something.
I switched 15% of my retirement account to cash on Friday to hedge a bit.
I think it's possible that the entire U.S. economy is now a pump and dump operation.
That makes me think of drinking alcohol while breastfeeding, and I can't figure out how it applies here.
I keep hearing about how most stocks aren't going up, but the biggest companies are going up enough to make the whole index go up, because
A) they get most of their revenues from the rest of the world, where there is less of a financial disaster
B) unlimited lending from the Federal Reserve
C) they are internet companies
D) they can buy up the assets of all the companies that go out of business, at bargain prices, especially real estate
A common type of stock fraud is to buy a bunch of shares in a shitty company, talk it up and make fake revenue projections, then sell the shares to rubes at inflated prices before running away. That's what I mean.
It sort of is, isn't it? The majority of stocks don't pay dividends and their only value is that some time in the future you'll be able to sell them to someone for more than you bought them. They don't really give you meaningful ownership of the company, especially things like tech stocks where there are preferred classes so common shareholders have no power at all. Maybe a small company can be bought by a larger one but that's just a special case of sell for more than you paid. It feels like people saving for retirement buy stocks because they're encouraged to via behavioral and tax incentives, and hope to sell those stocks to younger people when they get old.
I feel like I should take advantage of the fact that I live so close to where Biden and Harris will be making their speeches to go feel like I'm part of some big moment, but there's really no point.
Part of why I was so convinced Biden wasn't going to run was because I thought it would be bad for his family (more coming up about Hunter's personal problems--not the Ukraine stuff--that would be painful to both Hunter and his daughters), but the other part was that he established a policy center named after himself *and* let us name another division of my university after himself, and that's just awkward right now. You're supposed to do after you retire from public life.
drinking alcohol while breastfeeding
Add Kahlúa and you've got an intriguing variation on the White Russian.
19: He's like Cincinnatius, recalled to serve because southern Ohio needs him.
With tech stocks most common shareholders can't influence the way the company is run, but most things that make the voting stock worth more make the non-voting stock worth more. Valuable firms that don't pay dividends tend to eventually pay dividends. For many years people confidently predicted that Microsoft or Apple would never pay dividends, but they are now 2 of the largest dividend payers.
As long as there's no history of tech stocks increasing wildly in value before crashing hugely at a moment of crisis.
The market is much more efficient now. Tech stocks can increase wildly in value before crashing hugely, without ever going public. Look at WeWork.
24: a really important phenomenon of the last 12 years has been extraordinarily rich men with fascist politics yelling that the stock market is going to collapse tomorrow and you should buy bonds and gold, and losing so much of their clients' money they shut down the hedge fund. The public sector counterpart is politicians frantically denying that the interest rate really was that low or that growth was even possible. Trait-negativity in all things is not radical or progressive nor has it been good investment advice and I have no idea why people love it so much.
honestly, if I had to sell investments to Unfogged I would print the prospectus on sheets of Vantablack, the world's darkest substance
17. That's called "pump and dump" in the biz.
Moby is wise.
Afaict it's not even a good-faith bubble -- everyone can see there's gonna be a crash, they're just porking away til the buffet closes, like Homer at that all-you-can-eat place.
The only stocks I have left are ones I'm pretty sure can outlive the United States. If need be.
the theory that I've seen about the stock market which makes some sense but may not be correct* is that the pandemic is shifting people's spending away from the sort of businesses which are not listed on the stock market (small local businesses) and towards national firms which are on the stock market -- so revenues look good.
* I'd love to see an order-of-magnitude estimate for the size of this effect, if it is happening, and I'm not sure how to estimate that.
33: when I noticed I'd copied a data: URI I really wanted to see what the Unfogged comment box would do with it
I copied and pasted it into a Word doc, it's over 8,000 characters long
Yeah, it's the entire image file in a base-64 encoded string, so the href attribute tells your browser to read this string as the file type specified in the URI.
Oh right, of course, thanks for the explanation.
The stock market is highly inflated. Rich people have too much money and everyone else has too little. Since everyone not-rich is broke, there is nothing to invest in. Meanwhile, the stuff rich people buy, like stocks and bonds, gets more and more expensive. It's been like that since the mid-1980s. It is no surprise the market recovered from its COVID shock in 48 hours. Half the US could slide into the sea. The market would drop 90%, then, 72 hours later, recover most of its loss.
Understanding the Republicans is simpler. Republicans are a death cult. They worship death and destruction. There were a lot of metal bands that pretended to do this, but they were just posers. Republicans are the real thing. They were probably hoping that unemployed people would see ttheir $600 check and do a Publisher's Clearing house and race out into the street and get hit by a car.
The stock market is highly inflated. Rich people have too much money and everyone else has too little. Since everyone not-rich is broke, there is nothing to invest in. Meanwhile, the stuff rich people buy, like stocks and bonds, gets more and more expensive. It's been like that since the mid-1980s. It is no surprise the market recovered from its COVID shock in 48 hours. Half the US could slide into the sea. The market would drop 90%, then, 72 hours later, recover most of its loss.
Understanding the Republicans is simpler. Republicans are a death cult. They worship death and destruction. There were a lot of metal bands that pretended to do this, but they were just posers. Republicans are the real thing. They were probably hoping that unemployed people would see ttheir $600 check and do a Publisher's Clearing house and race out into the street and get hit by a car.