860,000 Unemployment Claims Filed Last Week

You limp along, your life a wreck, and then you die. Worked for everyone in the Dark Ages.

How are their portfolios doing?

QAnon says: The Deep State is propping up the stock market to help Trump.

Pass it on.

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Your answer is yes. Not only sectors that are doing well, but those with wealth can help them also.

Why? Forgetting the morality of it all (which I don’t, but which the question implies we might should): if they are not helped, they are going to beat down your door, particularly if they can’t feed themselves and their families.

Guillotines. No, seriously.

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Oh, that’s so sad!

Here’s another thing to think about, separate from the employment issue. What is going to happen to commercial real estate markets? I drive around my city, looking at all these food service businesses clawing to survive, and wonder how many will be shuttered in the next year? (in addition to those already closed). Retail, office space, none of them have yet faced their reckoning. There are so many facets of the economy that are still finding their level, the ā€œnew normal.ā€ For many sectors of the economy it takes a full year to normalize the impact of an economic shock. Music venues, movie theaters, the list goes on.
What will that landscape look like 12 months from now? My guess is there is a huge fallout coming in that market space, one that may never be replaced. People working from home, companies deciding they don’t need all the office space they once had, retail continuing to suffer…
Employment statistics are more or less a current indicator, or lagging by only a month or so. There are many other sectors of the economy that haven’t yet shown the full weight of the calamity.
Further, consider that the only thing that kept this from being a full blown economic catastrophe was the Federal aid money (i.e. household incomes actually rose through April/May due to checks & increased benefits). It doesn’t look like that is coming again, at least to the same magnitude.

So there is a lot of economic impact that hasn’t actually registered yet. 2021 will be brutal unless there is a MAJOR aid bill coming, and whoever is the next President is gonna have a big mess to fix. The question is… will that President be up to the challenge??

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I’m sorry for your sister. Sad to say, very few people are really secure these days. Any job can go belly up with hardly any notice. Your sister’s story is another sad chapter in this ongoing tragedy.

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They were liquidated despite the tax penalty to purchase food.

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People are going to have to get out of the mindset of what we’ll be experiencing in a year so far as businesses, the economy, and what used to be ā€œnormalā€. Projecting a year forward after Katrina or Fukushima or Chernobyl would have been an exercise in futility, so devastating and lasting were those disasters. This pandemic rivals all those combined. This is generational. 12 months is a blip in the recovery and return to a vibrant life again.

Your question should be ā€œWhat will that landscape look like a decade from now?ā€ Or possibly a generation from now. Infants will be graduating college before we’ve fully clawed our way out of this hole.

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It looks so bad that it’s difficult to comprehend that we’re still in the ā€œstanding on the beach watching the tide recedeā€ stage of the coming tsunami.

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Agreed. I think we’ve experienced but a small fraction of the total pain and distortion this will finally encompass.

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I was laid off from my writing-editing job in 2008. Bad age, bad field, so I never got laid back on. Struck out for greener pastures, but I’d had some experience in learning new skills and reinventing myself. For most people, that’s hard to do after doing one sort of thing most of your life. I saw a show about coal miners in Appalachia, and how there were job retraining programs but it was too unfamiliar and different a prospect to be anything but daunting. People who were capable of imagining and doing something different had mostly moved away. I might have once tsk-tsked at people who just couldn’t think what to do about their situation, but having been there myself and feeling marooned, I’m much more sympathetic.

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Fair enough and true. My point was only that we won’t really be able to begin comprehending this until 12 months from now. Whereas far far too many people believe spring 2021 is gonna be like spring 2019.