What would it take for the U.S. to enter a recession?
 

I think that it was Dave Ramsey that said the definition was simply six months in a row of a decline of GDP. Meet Kevin did a bunch of talking and math and said that if every man, woman, and child spent an average of $87 less monthly the GDP would shrink enough to enter a recession. What do you guys think? Was the punchline buried so far this was clickbait? Is he wrong? Should I get a Spongebob piñata for Xistday? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqeFtih1bdI

Then they would pull an Obama, increase government spending to make it "technically not a recession".

When it should have been classified as a depression? Who reclassified a hurricane into a superstorm? President Obama had a stimulus bill that only directly helped taxpayers when they filed taxes, while W. sent checks, but everything that W. did was bad?

Politics are fun. Hairy Reed said that old people love junk mail, "It's sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they're part of the real world" https://thehill.com/blogs/floor-acti...al-reform-bill

Yes anything w and orange man does is bad.
Even if Obama did it.

I didn't get a check from W, but I did see the "only helps you when you file" bump. The IRS' guidance was for companies to reduce witholding to match the change. If your company didn't reduce witholding, you'd simply see a larger return when you filed. If they did, you saw a bit extra in each paycheck. I'm going to guess the checks were sent to people who made little enough that the result would have been a check anyway.

Giving money directly to the poor is the best way to get money flowing in the economy. People with more money would throw it at savings or debt instead of buying things with it.

Allegedly about 75% of Walmart's inventory comes from China, although as far as I can tell, a union came up with that number. News sites may have used that statistic, though. https://www.americanmanufacturing.or...america-pledge

When I go shopping, I try to find the best-looking cashier, although that is often me. However, I think that the only manned register in the Show Low Walmart is for cigarettes.

I never need help finding anything. On the rare occasions I tried asking for help I always regretted it. My only option is self-checkout, so when poor people go to Walmart, we finance the stockers and self checkout supervisors, with a large amount of money going to China?

Our only option for food is Safeway, which supposedly pays less(!), although at least they almost always have human cashiers, and if I needed help finding something, I would have confidence in the employees.

Everyone wants a better supermarket to move into the old Kmart.

Xist- You ever think about starting a response to Youtube videos, video channel?

Giving money to the poor is the best way to get it in the hands of drug dealers.

I have all kinds of opinions, but people rarely seem to care about them--except to refute my sources without providing their own. I rarely care enough to go on rants like Shouty and if, for example, I responded to someone else's video, I would want to say "I like a, b, and c, but I disagree with x, y, and z."
I do not know how many people want to watch someone attempting to be calm and rational.

Or just complain about what went wrong when I finally got around to working on projects.

“Giving [people] more money would do absolutely nothing ... probably all it would do is give drug dealers more money and give pubs more money”--Anne Ruston, Australian social services manager. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...-minister-says

They did not provide any counter-arguments, just that pepper were offended.

So the money would immediately go to small businesses.

Pubs are perfectly legal tax paying ones, more and more weed dealers are becoming that every day. If we overwork the meth dealers they'll just blow themselves up cooking it more often. Sounds like win-win to me.

Around here it would be bathtub meth dealers.
Most cooks blow them selves up trying to extract anhydrous ammonia, here its too easy to get.

According to It might feel like 2008, but here's how it's different we technically might not have a recession, "Assuming the number of cases peak in the next few months and abates by summer, [Diane Swonk, chief economist of Grant Thornton] says any downturn is likely to last six months or so."

They said the Great Recession was "set off by an overheated housing market."

According to this, the average home value peaked on 2006-11-01 at $216,003.80 ($275,038.77 in inflation-adjusted dollars). As of 2019-07-01, it was $271,768.42.

So, home prices may be as high, but it is entirely possible this is reasonable thirteen years later.

The article says that foot traffic to Walmart was down 16.5%, but was that nationwide or what?

A Walmart employee said that they were staffed for Black Friday and, as I mentioned elsewhere, their parking lot was packed yesterday.

Household debt was 134% of GDP in 2007 and Americans only saved 3.6% of their income.

It is 96% and 8% respectively now.

Nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs in 2008. Unemployment more than doubled to 10%.

They say that it could go from 3.5% to 3.8 - 4.1%.

The Great Recession lasted 18 months. This may only last 6 months, which wouldn't qualify as a recession.

The stock market plummeted 57% in 2018. The S&P 500 has already dropped about one-third of that.

However, they say that situation is "clearly deteriorating."

They say that banks are in a much better situation now and should manage fine.

The Fed's rate was 5.25% in 2007 and they slashed to nearly zero. Right now it is between 1 and 1.25%, giving them a fraction as much room.

It says we shouldn't need anything like President Obama's stimulus bill.

Bernie or biden.
With biden you get the signature Obama "it's technically not a recession" economy, send US jobs to China. But it sure feels like a recession.
With bernie, it will be like this all the time, no toilet paper, no bread, no baby food then eventually no food, no jobs.

Obamas stimulus package turned out to be a Chinese stimulus package. When the checks dropped Walmarts sold out of flat screen TVs.

Seems to me we never left the recession

Depending on how you want to chop up the demographics top 2 reasons I can find for all ages are the massive numbers of baby boomers who have retired for good and for ages 25 to 55 it's supposedly due to increased numbers of people with criminal records getting under the table work and aren't counted as the labor force.

Looks like all it took was a virus and we ran out of toiler paper, bread, and all the jobs got cancelled with Trump.

Things sure do move fast.

A recession is 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. It really is as simple as that.

1Q2020 will be negative. 2Q2020 looks like it will be much, much worse. We are likely in a recession right now but it won't be officially declared until July 2020.

How long it will last depends on how well the world and the US government reacts to the current crisis. So far it isn't looking good. We squandered 2 months of advanced notice that this was coming. There still isn't a coherent plan of what we will do, how we will distribute needed resources, how we will keep companies and more importantly people financially afloat going forward. Right now there is no coordinated response and it is left to every State, City, Company, Individual to try to muddle through the best we can.

This morning I watched the head of FEMA tell states to buy any medical supplies they can on the open market. It really is everyone for themselves.

The difference is this time people had enough money to buy all the food in the store.
China knew about this in the middle of November.

No they didn't, the November 17th was retroactively estimated through testing done later. https://www.livescience.com/first-ca...rus-found.html

Doctors first suspected a new disease late December. It takes more than one case of pneumonia to suspect a new bug is going around.

It's very important people remember the timeline correctly to judge their own government's response and how it should have been different if at all for future improvement. December 31st is when the WHO was notified about a new virus, January 7th is when the genome was sequenced, and lab proof of human to human transmission was January 20th. Those are the dates from which response time should be measured.

From what I've read, January 7th should've been the moment where everyone around the world should've gotten at least some test kits and protective gear production ready (highly probable that the virus is infectious), and somewhere before the 20th, someone should have looked at the ramp up in pneumonia cases and decided all large scale gatherings in Wuhan should've been cancelled. Losing 1 week like that translated into about 5x the cases.

Border closure to China on Feb 1st should've also come with mandatory fever screening for all arrivals from anywhere, regardless of residency/citizenship status. At the time, it was unknown that asymptomatic carriers were so widespread, but symptomatic carriers were allowed to walk in.

The moment community transmission was detected in Italy and the US, that should've been the signal to quarantine every single arrival from outside and lock down every big city, given Wuhan hospitals were already overrun and deaths skyrocketing. Italy's early cases were imported from Germany, not China. A lot of visitors to Italy imported the virus into the US.

And unfortunately it is absolutely necessary that the government proactively and forcefully takes these measures. Word about a new disease was spreading on the internet since the last week of December, yet here we are in late March and there are still idiots running around crowded public places. The longer there are any people in non-compliance with quarantine measures, the longer the economic pain lasts.

Applying 20/20 hindsight the way you did doesn't make the future response better.

What do we do now? Quarantine everyone not absolutely necessary?

Test everyone?

Yes. The longer we wait the worse it will be.

Quarantine is a mitigation strategy, not a long term solution. There's no chance people can or will subject themselves to this for a year or more.

Yes, it is a mitigation strategy to slow the pace of infections so we don’t overwhelm our health system and to buy us time to get ready. We should expect several waves of this.

If the virus doesn't mutate quickly enough and can't reinfect people and can't lay dormant, quarantine will burn the disease out without herd immunity or vaccine. Unfortunately, there are indications this isn't the case.

What do we know about it? Turnip kept saying that it would die off over the summer, which has been known to happen, but Arizona is pretty warm, and we have hundreds of cases!

There is also the entire hemisphere and all of the cases there...

If it did go dormant, even a little, wouldn't it just return in the fall?

It's stuff like this that is really scary: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...he-coronavirus

On the other hand, SARS did fizzle out after a minor resurgence in 2004.

It's kind of hard to tell right now.

Have you watched one of his daily press conferences? Trump starts out by bragging how great he, how he immediately took action and how everything is under control. Then the rest of the crew correct his misinformation. Nobody should be listening to what Trump says. Yesterday he said more people will die from a quarantine than from the virus.

The only people I listen to on that stage are and Dr. Fauci and Dr. Adams.

That is more than likely a correct statement.

People are being told their doctor, treatment and test appointments are being cancelled . Plus they are afraid of going to a hospital because they perceive that they may be going to virus rich environment.

Not mention that some cities are on lock down making travel difficult to and from health care.

The media exacerbates the problem.


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What is a scary thought is that the best course of action for the people may not be the politically best course of action. Death from from the WuFlu is high profile, yet death from all other causes, perhaps exacerbated by not getting the same level of healthcare as normal, such as cancer detection and treatment or heart conditions, may increase.

It's entirely possible a directive would be given that will decrease the high profile deaths but increase everything else.

I'm not saying the measures being taken now are inappropriate, only that it's possible they are suboptimally timed, or suboptimally implemented to achieve political ends. I don't think most politicians would be entirely caulous in this regard, but there's even self-interest at play on a subconscious level that causes us to behave differently than if we were being completely objective.

He specifically said more people would commit suicide due to lock downs that would die from the virus if we lift them.

“People get tremendous anxiety and depression and you have suicide over things like this, when you have a terrible economy, you have death, definitely … in far greater numbers than we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”

I completely agree. My father and father-in-law have taken to listening to conservative talk radio since they retired. Everyday they are hearing this isn't a real threat but is really just a conspiracy to take down Trump.

They are not taking this seriously and are still continuing their daily life as normal. My in-laws went shopping yesterday to multiple stores, then visited 3 homes of friends and relatives. They didn't need to go shopping, they just wanted to get out.

Apparently Trump has time to promote books on Twitter in the middle of a national health and economic crisis.

Today:

I'm sure it took Trump 5 seconds to Tweet that. Probably the least offensive Tweet I've heard coming from Trump, though I don't follow him or anyone for that matter.

I'm not depending on Trump to take care of me. That's what local government is for.

Again...

That is more than likely a correct statement.


Stock market crash 1929 and following depression.

https://www.history.com/news/stock-market-crash-suicides-wall-street-1929-great-depression


Suicide Statistics

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

Time will tell since we don’t know the final numbers.

But history say’s it will go up.


As far as your father and father in-law.

To quote Churchill:

A young man who is not a liberal has no heart; an old man who is not a conservative has no brain.

Sounds to me like their cognitive skills are just fine...


:turtle:

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Which media outlets called it a hoax? They all hype, but the biggest media problem was denial.

I can't trust a quote with .... redacted.
Why not both? Or is the virus to clear the street and cover for World leaders disappearing?

This is the media who hold our President responsible for people self-medicating with aquarium chemicals?

Say what? It's times like these that reinforce my excellent decision not to follow news and politics.

Through various podcasts I pick up bits and pieces like emergency funds to people and businesses getting held up over which pork belly spending should be included.

How are we in the year 2020 and still allowing bills to have garbage added? Every bill should address a single issue and it should be illegal to put anything else in it. A candidate should run promising to make this practice illegal. I'd vote for that person almost regardless of anything else.

Batch voting for bills is being lazy.
They should have to yah or nay through every line item.
Then their pay check reflects the % of votes missed.

Heck, they should be required to take a multiple choice test on the bills. If they score below 70% on questions pertaining to if they know what's in the bill, they don't get to vote and their pay decreases proportionately.

All in favor?

The problem is our President speaks in a gibberish and cant complete full sentences.

The Full quote:

"I’m not looking — I’m not looking at months, I can tell you right now. We’re going to be opening up our country, and we’re going to be watching certain areas. And we’re going to be practicing everything that — that Deborah is referring to right here. I mean, we’re going to be watching this very closely. But you can’t keep it closed for the next, you know, for years. Okay?

This is going away. We’re — we’re going to win the battle, but we also have — you know, you have tremendous responsibility. We have jobs, we have — people get tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death. Probably and — I mean, definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus."

Transcript from the White House
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings...ss-briefing-9/