Zombie The Coronavirus Financial Thread (Personal, Local, National)

You get it all. $2400 for two adults, $400ish unemployment per week for 39 weeks, $600 PUA per week til 7/31, and a PPP loan that can be forgiven too!

 

For some unemployed people. My brother-in-law and his wife are unemployed, applied for that benefit and still have not gotten it as of last night. Show them the money.

 

and with that higher priced consumer goods. Don't think those costs of higher wages wont be added to the costs of goods they sell.

So in the end the working man pays....

 

This statement concludes every pitch, proposal, demand, suggestion, idea, bill or law the government has ever produced.

 

dude...my kids down in your neighborhood all had good jobs...they need rent money and car payments....it's not like they can even go out and spend money ..nothing is open. We've wasted trillions of dollars all your life on weapons development...way more than the bailout for destitute pay check workers in the country....people like me made out.....I was already retired...that check pays my property tax in November...my daughter in law is due to have a baby in 3 weeks....she has lost about 8k in salary starting in March....the 1200 is hardly putting her over the top...empathy....look it up

 

I don't think people have considered how weak the US dollar is going to become by the end of this....the numbers aren't telling the whole story. That 600 bucks might not have much buying power down the road.

 

It will still have more buying power in Canada! lol

 

That's not actually how it works. Companies don't keep prices lower out of good will and then only reluctantly raise prices when wages/expenses go up. If they can sell the product at that higher price, they'd do that from the start, regardless of where their expenses are. If they can't sell the product at that higher price, they don't magically become able to when their expenses go up.

It's not entirely that simple due to elasticity of demand, but it's mostly the case. When wages go up industry-wide, there's a small effect on price, but the vast majority of the new expense is eaten by the company, not transferred to the consumer. The industry simply becomes less profitable until they find new innovation to reduce their non-salary expenses or to improve their product.

 

Thank all the QE!

600 dollar Federal kicker is temporary anyway

 

Hmm, Not so sure that's correct based on how taxes work....


https://taxfoundation.org/labor-bears-corporate-tax/

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/111314/what-causes-inflation-and-does-anyone-gain-it.asp


I do believe that when a company takes on additional costs to produce goods, regardless of what the goods are or the additional costs, they do get passed on to the consumer through increased sales prices.

No, its not a dollar for dollar translation, of course not. but goods g up typically it seems.

 

It has a lot to do with how expenses go up. When it's unexpected and/or immediate, prices tend to rise. When it's phased in or something the industry chooses to do over time, very little of it goes into increased prices:

https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/does-increasing-minimum-wage-lead-higher-prices

 

fair enough. Seems this would be an immediate and large increase of costs, mostly across the board, at the moment, no?

 

I'm not sure. I think it depends on the speed of the opening. If things are opened slowly, the economy won't need everyone back at work immediately--if it's true that a large portion of the workforce doesn't want to go back to work (which I think is a dubious claim, even if some are doing better on unemployment), that's theoretically something companies can see coming and plan for over the next year.

I think workers being slow to return to work was always a possibility due to perceived health risk, so it's probably something companies have been thinking about for a while.

 

I read that probably 27% of the businesses that shut down will not be able to reopen. This virus killed businesses and the ones that will reopen that rely on crowds for success may slowly drop off and fail as well. Tourist industry is going to take a huge hit as well. We're probably witnessing a transition in the work force towards even more robotics...people will have to have steady incomes to pay for the robotics but work as we've known it through the industrial age is going to change in my view.

 

The only way we can compete with China on Manufacturing is to advance with robotic everything. Then we will need a UBI probably since there are people who will be essentially useless in society.

 

And it sounds like the pandemic is still just beginning.

 

We can't compete with China for manufacturing. The US has been migrating away from manufacturing for decades. The only reason it's a hot political issue is because a lot of towns and cities in battleground states have depended on it for jobs--but if you're proposing replacing them all with robots, even that goes away.

 

one thing about Chinese manufactured goods.....a lot of their trinket, junk toy market is going to dry up...I don't think we're going to see consumers wasting much of their expendable money on crap like they used to. I think that'll happen here too...international trade is going to go into a long sleep from my view. China has a long history of building a bunch of stuff really quickly and not maintaining what they build. I think more americans will want to put their money into what Jefferson said Americans value more than money....land, tools, seed, livestock. This was a wake up call for folks who rely on shopping for sustainance