Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment (opens in new tab)

Roughly 1 in 3 american households are behind on their housing payments.

Most states (and all federally backed mortgages) have temporarily suspended evictions so the short answer is that people in financial distress dropped that expense, which is usually the single largest on most people's budgets (for low-income people this can often be 50% or more of take-home depending on the city - yes, the rule of thumb is that it shouldn't be higher than 25% but you simply can't find affordable housing in a lot of areas).

However that one eventually is going to come due because the federal mortgage eviction moratorium doesn't prevent you from going in default on your mortgage, it only prevents evictions. The 3-month timer is still running and as soon as the moratorium on evictions is lifted, they can kick you out immediately. So as soon as that lets up in a month or two there's going to be a massive surge in evictions in states that do not go out of their way to keep evictions suspended.

(and in fact this is probably a snowballing problem, the longer this crisis goes unchecked and the worse the economic pain gets, the more people that will be in default and the bigger the difficulty of getting "back to normal". Furthermore at some point that shit starts rolling back uphill economically, banks turned your mortgage into financial products and you not paying is cutting off the income of someone else, and in fact there is an eventual risk of a 2008-style crisis occurring on top of all the current problems if we get into a situation where people are defaulting en-masse.)

25% of folks in NYC, the largest rental market in the US, haven't made rent payments since March. NYC has put a hold on evictions, but their owed rent is still building up. The majority of Americans weren't able to cover an unexpected $500 expense before the pandemic hit. The full depth of how bad this is going to get hasn't hit most people nor has it hit the markets.

I can really only give my personal viewpoint of it. But for me personally I just have not been paying my mortgage only because I was lucky enough to have a government backed mortgage loan where I could tell the bank "tough shit" until the end of the year.

Also there have been temporary measures in place for things like utilities, ISPs, mobile phone plans etc. where people will keep accruing obligations on their bills without the services being cutoff. However it seems that those programs are about to come to an end. Locally where I live the utility service here said they will start doing cutoffs in August.

So I think it's a mixture of some amount of savings, some access to credit, and then a kicking of the can down the road for a few months. So my guess overall is that basically we are simply delaying the problem in a bunch of different ways. But at the end of that delay is going to be a lot of economic hurt when those bills actually come due.

People are coasting on tiny savings, eviction freezes, not paying bills, and moving in with their friends or families. Or at least my friends anyway.

The fall/winter is going to be an absolute disaster because you can’t fix anything about the economy without getting the pandemic under control, which a large percentage of our leaders in the US have decided they have no obligation to do.

I have no data to back this up, but I would guess with interest rates at record lows and massive amounts of stimulus money with nowhere to go, getting a personal loan is rather easy right now...

My daughter has been waiting since March 19th for her EDD benefits. When EDD sent her the initial paperwork (after she signed up online), it had a different social security number listed for her (she typed in her correct social security number online).

The letter stated that she needed to provide proof of her social security number.

She has tried to do that for four months now. She has called them, written them snail mail letters along with proof that they have the wrong social security number, and numerous faxes. They keep telling her that the ID fraud department will eventually reach out to her. It has not happened yet after all this time. We have even reached out to the California Governor's office for help. Nothing has worked.

If she did not currently live with me and have me financially support her through all of this, she would be broke and possibly homeless.

A buddy of mine got his too within days, I wait since early May.

The EDD (California) did process millions of applications (or so they claim), but more than a million are still outstanding.

The problem seems to me to be in their mission objective: they view every applicant first and foremost as a potential "wellfare queen" and attempt to prove that as a fact (17 years ago, in the aftermath of the Internet bubble burst, I lost my job as well, applied for unemployment insurance benefit and the phone interview I went though was as bizarre as unpleasant -- I didn't get to the phone interview this time 'round).

I wished they would rather operate like the IRS: after preliminary, automated checks using tax records (was the person employed by employer as claimed, is that person now employed?) hand out the money and perform selective, random in-depth audits asynchronously.

This is the same question I have. Other family members and friends have all received theirs. He's much younger than me, working entry level jobs, filed all of his taxes, etc. I just looked up some news about it, apparently about 30-35 million(estimated) checks have not been sent out.

My GF has yet to get hers or her tax return. The stimulus check went to an address from 2 years ago and she would be on hold for hours just trying to get her address updated and stopped calling. There's maybe $3k just sitting out there but the Treasury can't get it to her. This is why I vote blue, we need to adequately fund our government systems or face issues like this.

Do you live in the same state? That is probably the difference :)

Not discounting what you said but the 30% thing is bad but a bit of a poor statistic in that usually the number is about 20%. This is because it’s not 30% can’t pay rent but 30% didn’t pay on time. By the end of the month the number who had paid was like 92% vs 96% a year ago.

So yes bad but less bad with context and certainly something that is a leading indicator of something very very bad.

Trump messed up a ton in this crises, and has a lot to answer for. This is not one of them.

Unemployment is almost all within the remit of the individual states. The government approved additional payments to each state, but the state government is responsible for dispersing and managing the unemployment system.

Neither the US Federal government, nor any state government are bankrupt. Under current law, it is impossible for any of those entitys to declare bankruptcy. There was a proposal by McConnell to allow states to declare bancruptcy; but it was widely ridiculed as a stupid idea (and I doubt seriously considered by him).

"No money" is not a meaningful concept for the federal government. It has two options for what to do with the money supply: increase it, or decrease it. Leaving the money supply unchanged is just a degenerate form of these and generally bad economic policy (deflationary).

Currently, there is a massive drop-off in the velicity of money, which, if not countered, would have a deflationary effect. Increasing the money supply has an inflationary effect to counter this. In fact, the federal reserve has been increasing the money supply to maintain target inflation. Currently they do so by giving money to banks (and recently, by buying bonds directly). Why shouldn't they run their monetary policy by giving money to individuals instead.

We could try taxing the rich a bit more. They're doing just fine.

> Where the hell is anyone getting monies for UBI?!?!?!

In times of crisis like this you just print it and claw it back through higher tax rates .

Money is created by the government, and creating more of it to distributed equally across individuals just redistributes the relative purchasing power from people with more than average to people with less than average.

From the gov's point of view, citizens and companies are shareholders in the "US corporation". Right now, the poor citizens own a 10% stake in the corporation. UBI is about giving them maybe 20%, at the expense of diluting the share of bigger shareholders. The board members don't want to dilute their own share, but if the corporation goes out of business, their own stake won't be worth anything. The absolute numbers are irrelevant: what matters is the stake percentage, not whether it's measured in billions or trillions of shares.

Real interest rates on treasuries are negative. That is, adjusted for inflation, people are giving away money to the government when they loan it money. That's the opposite of exorbitant.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/i...

> You realize that UBI requires monies, right?

Like the $1.5trillion tax cut that had "no major impact on businesses' capital investment"?

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/1-5-trillion-tax-cu...

Yeah, we had $5 trillion to drop on bad market bets. We had something like $10trillion over 10 years to give as tax breaks to the ultra wealthy.

We can deal with a few trillion to establish basic income replacements for general benefits, universal healthcare, affordable college/education, and other programs to better our citizens vs the rich and stock market.

I've heard the following theory:

Most trading volume is algorithmic, so it only takes a small number of real humans doing unusual trading activity for markets to move.

I've phrased it like this because I don't have expertise.

The economic data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL#0 ) is showing deflation. The quantitative easing has so far been deflationary. The Fed can lower interest rates, but it cannot make people spend. People are unemployed and scared, they are not borrowing money, and it shows in the lending data as well (https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/current/default.h...) where we can see falling numbers in consumer loans and credit cards.

I think people have rushed into stocks because they think that that's the safe haven for their money against inflation as they think the Fed is "printing money" and causing inflation, but the data is showing deflation. If deflation continues, bonds would be the safer place to be.

Well, the Fed is buying corporate junk bonds (bond ETFs) through special vehicles. We are not in the Japan territory where their central banks owns 80% of stock ETFs. This is why no one wanna sell any stocks in the states. Just a psychological boost, not direct stock purchases.

this. The cash is basically on fire now with all the money printing. Thus inflated asset prices

Everyone seems to think the stock market going up is always an indicator of an increase in value of those stocks. But there are at least two reasons the price of an asset can increase. One is the asset gains value. The other is the currency loses value. I don't see how anyone can look at the US economy right now, outside of the stock market, and come to the conclusion that more value is being created or profit being made. The unemployment numbers alone tell us there's less being produced, less work being accomplished.

The President is not the government. Democrats have the house. Republicans have a small majority in the Senate.

Majority vote was not the deciding criteria, known to all well before the election. So this is an odd complaint - that somehow the majority needs to decide.

Also, the majority didn't vote for the Democrats either. Of those who voted, 48% voted D, 46% voted R, 3% voted Johnson, 1% voted Stein, misc voted to others.

So would a D win also have been somehow not deserved because they didn't get a majority?

And this is only of those who voted, which is only 55% of eligible voters. So D (and R) both got ~25% of the eligible vote. Some of this is because many people were disgusted by both parties. Trump and Hillary were the two worst Presidential candidates in history, as measured by unfavorability ratings [1]. Had the Dems run anyone with a somewhat normal rating, they would have likely trounced Trump.

We set up some rules that were not entirely unreasonable, and enough people did vote for the outcome that we got that the US does indeed deserve this. And both parties ran record level disliked candidates, so what did you expect would happen?

[1] "Among U.S. adults, Clinton now has a 56% unfavorability rating, while Trump had 63%.

And with registered voters, the two are basically tied: Clinton has 59% unfavorability and Trump has 60%."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...

That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and Eugene, dictate their values to the rest of the state.

Really great thanks.

Politicians aren't stupid, they just play it on camera. Everyone knows how it will play out, but some are selectively ignoring it.