Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Mar 16, 2020 12:49 pm

Broad notes: Despite the predictably halfwit press coverage, this is really a completely separate phenomenon from the nCoV pandemic; some drivers are certainly coming from inside the nCoV dynamic, but most of them are pre-existing conditions. All of them are being aggravated by the dual supply/demand implosion that is cascading from Asia to the rest of the world. The situation is sprawling and complex, but everything is downstream from oil, USD and consumer demand.

Massive market corrections were long overdue, the global economy has been slowing down / stagnatingprior to the nCoV and oil shocks, and Barack Obama did not preside over anything resembling a "recovery." In many ways what is happening right now is a continuation of the 2007-09 "Global Financial Crisis" -- RI megathread is here, and full of valuable history.

The circumstances may be surprising/unexpected, but the crash itself is absolutely not. Much has been made, especially in QAnon circles, of the parade of high profile CEO resignations at the beginning of 2020, but it's worth noting that parade began in 2019, a record year that already had observers agitated.

The biggest x loudest headlines are coming from stock market crashes; which seem to happen every other day now. However, that's also probably the least significant aspect of the current crisis, since a majority of Americans own no stocks, and a majority of those who do only hold them through pension plans they have effectively zero control over. As we saw in the last big crash, pension plans / "institutional investors" were the dumb money that got burned first when the leveraged debt bubble popped. Little fish are essentially a moat around ruling class capital.

Speaking of little fish, we're comprehensively fucked. Many if not most of us will not have jobs a month from now. Large sectors of the US/EU economy are already effectively destroyed -- the retail / service sectors cannot work remotely so they're faced with layoffs and bankruptcy. Bars and restaurants are low-margin businesses and will not be able to weather weeks, let alone months, of no income.

Via: FT

If housebuilders led America into its last recession, restaurants, casinos, hotels, cruise ship operators and airlines are leading the way this time. And after just four weeks in which US equity markets swung from hitting highs to pricing in the reversal Mr Singerman fears, the impact is starting to show in the real economy.

...the greater toll may be in industries that have nothing to do with global supply chains, economists believe. Ioana Marinescu, a labour economist at the University of Pennsylvania, predicted a collapse in what she called “human contact industries” such as restaurants, bars and theatres.

Those industries also tend to be dominated by smaller businesses with less cash on hand and less access to credit, she notes. Restaurants in particular have a high failure rate at the best of times. “We can expect those businesses to fail,” she said.

The food services industries alone employ 12m people in the US, up 30 per cent in the past decade.


More background: US Employment - Wikipedia

Transportation and shipping have both been hit early due to supply chain stoppages. Most airlines are facing Chapter 11 status by May, and ship crews & dockworkers are either standing idle or laid off.

Via: FT

“The world is shutting down,” said Patrick Berglund, chief executive of Xeneta, an Oslo-based provider of data on container shipping rates. “We are super worried about what is happening. What is different [from previous shocks to global trade] is that usually it’s just a corridor or two. Now it’s worldwide. Everyone is panicking.”

The Baltic Dry index — which tracks the cost of shipping bulk raw materials such as metallic ores, coal and grains and is therefore seen as a forward indicator of global economic activity — has fallen 80 per cent from a recent high last September.


Over the past two decades China has become a central driver of the global economy (and input source for global supply chains) and they took the brunt of the pandemic first. Analysts are still trying to get a handle on precisely how bad things are, and those numbers will shape everyone's models of what to expect for the rest of 2020. That's not necessarily a good thing, and may not provide much value in terms of accurate projections.

Basic rule of thumb: everyone around the world is taking double-digit hits to their GDP this year. Analysts won't admit to this yet because they're still talking their books.

Via: FT

China’s industrial output contracted at the fastest pace on record in the first two months of this year and urban unemployment hit its highest rate ever in February, as the coronavirus brought the world’s second-largest economy to a standstill.

Industrial output tumbled 13.5 per cent in the first two months of this year, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday. This would represent the largest contraction on record, according to Reuters data. The urban unemployment rate also surged to 6.2 per cent in February, the NBS said.

The latest economic data also showed that China retail sales plummeted 20.5 per cent year on year in January and February and fixed asset investment fell 24.5 per cent, down from 5.4 per cent growth when the data were last reported.

The numbers were well below analysts’ expectations with many China experts expressing surprise that government officials were willing to report such devastating figures.


Bear in mind, all of those numbers are from February, so they only reflect seven days of the impact from a lockdown that began January 23.

The biggest open question going forward is how governments will intervene on the consumer level. ("Citizens" are an outdated concept, after all.) I mentioned that most Americans own no stocks; more significantly, most Americans own no savings, either, living "paycheck to paycheck," as Senator Sanders keeps reminding us.

Absent something very much resembling a Universal Basic Income, most Americans are going to see their lives destroyed by what's to come. Tax holidays and even debt jubilees will also see much discussion in the weeks (and months (and years)) to come. It might even happen, too, with Mitt Romney saying shit like this:

“Every American adult should immediately receive $1,000 to help ensure families and workers can meet their short-term obligations and increase spending in the economy.”

Here's to optimism.

Via: CNN

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made a joke Tuesday about the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

"I had this nightmare that somehow in Davos, all of us who went there got it, and then we all left and spread it," Dimon said Tuesday at the bank's annual investor meeting. "The only good news from that is that it might have just killed the elite."

Attendees laughed after he made the comment. Prior to his joke, Dimon noted that that he hopes the virus gets contained and "feels terrible" about it.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby semper occultus » Mon Mar 16, 2020 1:29 pm

yep - got to be helicopter money time - best case scenario - we meme Yang back into the race as a 3rd party candidate & get a double whammy of UBI neetbux & finally decapitate the Republicrat swamp-monster :yay
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby brainpanhandler » Mon Mar 16, 2020 4:31 pm

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
User avatar
brainpanhandler
 
Posts: 5088
Joined: Fri Dec 29, 2006 9:38 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Mar 17, 2020 3:29 pm

Via: Bloomberg

The Covid-19 pandemic reflects a systemic crisis akin to the seminal crashes of the 20th century.

By Pankaj Mishra

As global supply chains break, airlines slash flights, borders rise within nation-states, stock exchanges convulse with fear, and recession looms over economies, from China to Germany, Australia to the United States, we can no longer doubt that we are living through extraordinary times.

What remains in question, however, is our ability to comprehend them while using a vocabulary derived from decades when globalization seemed a fact of nature, like air and wind. For the coronavirus signals a radical transformation, of the kind that occurs once in a century, shattering previous assumptions.

In fact, the last such churning occurred almost exactly a century ago, and it altered the world so dramatically that a revolution in the arts, sciences and philosophy, not to mention the discipline of economics, was needed even to make sense of it.

The opening years of the 20th century, too, were defined by a free global market for goods, capital and labor. This was when, as John Maynard Keynes famously reminisced, “the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth.”

This maker as well as consumer of global capitalism could invest “his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.” He could also “secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.”

Such an economically enmeshed world seemed to many the perfect insurance against war — a contemporary version of such optimism was Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Arches” Theory, according to which no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants would go to war.

The First World War not only brought the period of friction-free globalization to a gruesome end. It also cruelly exposed an intelligentsia which had believed in irreversible progress and now was forced to acknowledge that, as an embittered Henry James wrote to a friend in August 1914, “the tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this grand Niagara.”

As with our own crisis, the seminal crashes of the 20th century — the First World War followed by the Great Depression — were harder to grasp because their principal causes were set in motion decades before, and largely neglected by mainstream politicians and commentators.

Democracy, whether as an emotive ideal of equality or as representative institutions based on a widening adult male suffrage, had steadily become the central principle of the modern world, especially as industrial growth generated new inequalities.

Repeatedly frustrated, the aspiration for democracy helped fuel the rise of both left and far-right political movements, pitting them against established ruling elites.

The firebrands found their most committed supporters in the exploited populations of then-rapidly growing cities. Filled mostly with people freshly uprooted from the countryside, sundered from traditional livelihoods, and forced to live in urban squalor, the world’s great cities had started to become hotbeds of discontent in the late 19th century.

The problems of how to accommodate rising aspirations for equality through inequality-generating economies were particularly acute for nation-states such as Germany, Italy and Japan, that were trying to catch up with economically advanced Western countries.

Once the series of economic shocks that began in the late 19th century climaxed in the Great Depression, the elevation of the far-right to power, and intensified conflicts between states, was all but guaranteed.

In our own conjuncture, all ingredients of the previous calamity are present, if ominously on an unparalleled scale.

For decades now, de-industrialization, the outsourcing of jobs, and then automation, have deprived many working people of their security and dignity, making the aggrieved in even advanced Western countries vulnerable to demagoguery. At the same time, stalled economic modernization or a botched process of urbanization in “catch-up” powers like India and Russia, has created, in almost textbook fashion, the political base for far-right figures and movements.

The financial crisis of 2008, which has caused deeper and longer damage than the Great Depression, may have discredited the globalizing elite that promised prosperity to all, creating broad scope for opportunistic demagogues like Donald Trump. Yet few lessons were learnt from the collapse of global markets as the tide moved faster to Niagara. This is why the crisis of our time is as much intellectual as it is political, economic and environmental.

One sign of analytic deficiency is that the prescriptions for multiple malaises have remained the same in much mainstream politics and journalism: more economic “reforms,” largely in the direction of global free markets, reheated Cold War slogans about the superiority of “liberal democracy” over “authoritarianism,” and aspirations for a return to “decency” and “global leadership.”

These hopes for a return to the pre-2008 political and ideological status quo are often leavened with a heightened, if ineffectual, concern about climate change. Their inadequacy will become clearer in the months to come when afflicted nations as much as individuals are tempted to self-isolate, sacrificing many holy cows to the existential urgency of survival. The coronavirus, devastating in itself, may prove to be only the first of many shocks that lie ahead.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Grizzly » Tue Mar 17, 2020 11:58 pm

Meta, but for the first time in days, I wasn't nervous until I read the following:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/fk6oah/do_we_need_to_start_scraping_knowledge_in_the/

Image

Maybe a back up plan?
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Elvis » Wed Mar 18, 2020 12:46 am

Steve Mnuchin: "We're looking at sending checks to Americans immediately...and I mean now, in the next two weeks."
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7411
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Mar 18, 2020 1:02 am

This is a great beginning! Thank you.

Here is the official Goldman-Sachs line, according to notes from someone who was on the call. (Do I need to say what I think of this?)

Feed back from a Goldman Sachs investor call today (apparently over 1,000 participants). The key economic takeaways were:

50% of Americans will contract the virus (150m people) as it's very communicable. This is on a par with the common cold (Rhinovirus) of which there are about 200 strains and which the majority of Americans will get 2-4 per year.

70% of Germany will contract it (58M people). This is the next most relevant industrial economy to be effected.

Peak-virus is expected over the next eight weeks, declining thereafter.

The virus appears to be concentrated in a band between 30-50 degrees north latitude, meaning that like the common cold and flu, it prefers cold weather. The coming summer in the northern hemisphere should help. This is to say that the virus is likely seasonal.

Of those impacted 80% will be early-stage, 15% mid-stage and 5% critical-stage. Early-stage symptoms are like the common cold and mid-stage symptoms are like the flu; these are stay at home for two weeks and rest. 5% will be critical and highly weighted towards the elderly.

Mortality rate on average of up to 2%, heavily weight towards the elderly and immunocompromised; meaning up to 3m people (150m*.02). In the US about 3m/yr die mostly due to old age and disease, those two being highly correlated (as a percent very few from accidents). There will be significant overlap, so this does not mean 3m new deaths from the virus, it means elderly people dying sooner due to respiratory issues. This may however stress the healthcare system.

There is a debate as to how to address the virus pre-vaccine. The US is tending towards quarantine. The UK is tending towards allowing it to spread so that the population can develop a natural immunity. Quarantine is likely to be ineffective and result in significant economic damage but will slow the rate of transmission giving the healthcare system more time to deal with the case load.

China’s economy has been largely impacted which has affected raw materials and the global supply chain. It may take up to six months for it to recover.

Global GDP growth rate will be the lowest in 30 years at around 2%.

S&P 500 will see a negative growth rate of -15% to -20% for 2020 overall.

There will be economic damage from the virus itself, but the real damage is driven mostly by market psychology. Viruses have been with us forever. Stock markets should fully recover in the 2nd half of the year.

In the past week there has been a conflating of the impact of the virus with the developing oil price war between KSA and Russia. While reduced energy prices are generally good for industrial economies, the US is now a large energy exporter, so there has been a negative impact on the valuation of the domestic energy sector. This will continue for some time as the Russians are attempting to economically squeeze the American shale producers and the Saudi’s are caught in the middle and do not want to further cede market share to Russia or the US.

Technically the market generally has been looking for a reason to reset after the longest bull market in history.

There is NO systemic risk. No one is even talking about that. Governments are intervening in the markets to stabilize them, and the private banking sector is very well capitalized. It feels more like 9/11 than it does like 2008.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby identity » Wed Mar 18, 2020 1:08 am

Latest from Mannarino, in two parts:

WE ARE IN A WORLD COLLAPSE... ALIGNMENTS MUST BE MADE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0ynP6VtA0Y


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFC0p-Gna4
identity
 
Posts: 707
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2015 5:00 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby identity » Wed Mar 18, 2020 2:07 am

Economic Epidemic: "The Greatest Depression Has Begun"

Latest from Gerald Celente, Trends Journal:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX7C19p7vsw

edit: adding Kitco News interview with GC on march 12th: "it's sheer hysteria"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzL6PgyTwnw

and yet another one from Feb. 26th, on 2020-21 developments:


ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiisJ9qH0Fk
identity
 
Posts: 707
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2015 5:00 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby brainpanhandler » Wed Mar 18, 2020 8:53 am



I'm pretty sure this guy is full of crap and if he is partially right about anything it is by accident.

But he asks an interesting question. One that I have asked myself as well. Why are there so few cases of C19 in Russia?

As of today 147 confirmed cases.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboar ... 7b48e9ecf6

There are of course lots of reasons this might be true, not least of which they are discovering very few (for whatever reasons) and/or reporting very few.
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
User avatar
brainpanhandler
 
Posts: 5088
Joined: Fri Dec 29, 2006 9:38 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Elvis » Wed Mar 18, 2020 7:54 pm

Trump is going to pull the rug out from teh libruls—massive fiscal inputs, decisive controls placed on rentiers, ending the wars (if only optically), and what else?—national healthcare. If Trump does these things he'll be seen as a hero, the one to finally "get things done." After wasting every opportunity, the Democrats won't have a leg to stand on.

https://twitter.com/NathanTankus/status ... 2027936768
Nathan Tankus
@NathanTankus

This is absolutely incredible. Just totally amazing. And hey remember that foreclosure crisis Obama absolutely could do nothing about? Yeah...
Quote Tweet

USA TODAY
@USATODAY
· 7h

President Donald Trump announces the suspension of foreclosures and evictions until the end of April.


Also, expect rationing.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7411
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby semper occultus » Wed Mar 18, 2020 8:49 pm

there’s $250 trillion in global debt right now. Total bank capital worldwide is less than $10 trillion.

So if the coming defaults trigger a mere 4% loss in total debt, it will exceed the entirety of global bank capital.

And this doesn’t even take into consideration the impact of the $1 QUADRILLION derivatives exposure.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/banks-are-going-drown-ocean-defaults
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Grizzly » Wed Mar 18, 2020 10:05 pm

Image

And bring a friend with you...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
User avatar
Grizzly
 
Posts: 4722
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 4:15 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby Elvis » Wed Mar 18, 2020 11:09 pm

Zero Hedge imo is a little kooky on government debt but the rest is compelling. Things will get dicey and require strong management of the economy by governments & their central banks. Money is the least worry, it's about managing the situation. The crazy thing is, Donald Trump gonna enact Bernie Sanders' social safety net and leave the Democratic MOR wondering what the hell just happened. Stupid fools.


semper occultus » Wed Mar 18, 2020 5:49 pm wrote:there’s $250 trillion in global debt right now. Total bank capital worldwide is less than $10 trillion.

So if the coming defaults trigger a mere 4% loss in total debt, it will exceed the entirety of global bank capital.

And this doesn’t even take into consideration the impact of the $1 QUADRILLION derivatives exposure.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/banks-are-going-drown-ocean-defaults
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
User avatar
Elvis
 
Posts: 7411
Joined: Fri Apr 11, 2008 7:24 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Crash of 2020: The Fuckening

Postby identity » Thu Mar 19, 2020 12:28 am

Another Kitco News interview, this one with Jim Rickards, author of The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis; Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis;and The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System.
(Be aware that Kitco is a bullion dealer.)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj3ttaiSgvs
identity
 
Posts: 707
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2015 5:00 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests