CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Wrong question, fraudulent insinuation.
Another Republican President, Another Recession.
- Thread starter hanimmal
- Start date
maxamus1
Well-Known Member
Lol, so don't have any examples just claims got cha. And not quite sure how that was fraudulent insinuations when it was a question asking when have you experienced it or how it has held you back.
Seeing as how you claim its so bad here in the US I'm sure you have an example from personal experience to share.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
You are saying that for racism to exist, I must experience it directly. This is the dishonesty.
Wattzzup
Well-Known Member
Are you claiming it isn’t?
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-health-business-prices-66e5f5612c0a56c18ac218425e2cd20a
Employees at a fast-food restaurant in Sacramento, California, exasperated over working in stifling heat for low wages, demanded more pay and a new air conditioner — and got both.
Customer orders poured in to an Italian auto supplier, which struggled to get hold of enough supplies of everything from plastic to microchips to meet the demand.
A drought in Taiwan magnified a worldwide shortage of computer chips, so vital to auto and electronics production.
The global economy hadn’t experienced anything like this for decades. Maybe ever. After years in which ultra-low inflation had become a fixture of economies across the world, prices rocketed skyward in 2021 — at the grocery store, the gasoline pump, the used-car lot, the furniture store. Chalk it up to a surprisingly swift and robust economic recovery from the pandemic recession, one that left suppliers flat-footed and hampered by COVID-19 disruptions.
U.S. workers, having struggled for years to achieve economic gains, secured better wages, benefits and working conditions — and the confidence to quit their jobs if they didn’t get them.
Global supply chains that ran efficiently for years broke down as factories, ports and freight yards buckled under the weight of surging orders.
Propelled by vast infusions of government aid and the widespread distribution of COVID vaccines, the economic bounce-back was as startling as the fall that had preceded it. Policymakers, business owners and economists were caught off-guard by both the speed of the recovery and the new COVID variants that threatened its durability.
They had never, after all, had to manage the unpredictable fallout, economic and otherwise, from a global pandemic.
BACK FROM THE BRINK
In the spring of 2020, the global economy appeared to stand on the brink of a catastrophe. The sudden and blindingly fast spread of COVID-19 infections forced lockdowns, frightened people into hunkering down at home, paralyzed travel and ordinary business activity and led employers to slash tens of millions of jobs.
In June that year, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the global economy would shrink 4.9% for the year, the first drop in worldwide economic output since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
But the governments of the wealthiest nations, scarred by the achingly slow recovery from the financial crisis just over a decade earlier, poured money into rescuing their economies. The United States was particularly aggressive: It supplied $5 trillion in COVID-related stimulus aid to individuals, businesses and municipalities this year and last.
“The U.S. has been a total outlier globally,” said Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, a global trade group for financial companies.
“We had the deepest pocketbook of any country. We have this exorbitant privilege” — the ability to run up debts to pay for COVID relief without having to pay high interest rates to do so. Global investors regard U.S. government debt as perhaps the safest investment around; their purchases of U.S bonds keep American interest rates low.
So despite immense federal spending and surging inflation, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note — below 1.4%, as of early Friday — remains lower than it was before the pandemic.
In the United States and elsewhere, stimulus aid is widely credited with helping stave off disaster. Though the global economy did shrink in 2020, it did so by a less-than-expected 3.1%. And the IMF expects growth to rebound to 5.9% for 2021. That would be the fastest calendar-year expansion in IMF records dating to 1980.
Beginning earlier this year, vaccines accelerated the return to something much closer to ordinary pre-pandemic life.
“We got this scientific miracle,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “We had a vaccine that was available six to nine months earlier than anybody had really believed in 2020 ... What that meant was that the second half of 2021 saw basically a general reopening in all of the advanced economies, and that was certainly was a massive positive surprise.’’
COVID UNCERTAINTY
Still, the virus itself has continued to complicate anyone’s ability to forecast where the economy was headed or to determine what to do about it. A wave of infections over the summer, for instance, sent Japan’s economy into a nasty tailspin: It shrank from July through September at a 3.6% annual rate.
Likewise, America’s recovery lost momentum once the highly contagious delta variant erupted over the summer. Growth slowed to a 2.1% annual rate from July through September, sharply down from a 6.7% rate in the April-June quarter and 6.3% in the January-March period.
Overall, though, the economy has recovered with surprising vigor. In June 2020, with the economy still reeling from the pandemic, the Federal Reserve’s policymaking committee forecast that unemployment would average 9.3% in the final three months of the year and 6.5% at the end of 2021. In reality? The jobless rate plummeted from 11.1% in June 2020 to 6.7% by year’s end. It’s now at a near-fully healthy 4.2%.
Flush with government payments and, in many cases, savings accrued from working at home and from stock-market gains, people in rich countries were sitting on larger piles of cash and spending a lot of it.
Capital Economics calculates that households in advanced economies like the United States and the European Union were holding “excess savings” at mid-year of $3.7 trillion — the amount above what they would likely have saved if the pandemic had never happened.
OVERWHELMED
In some ways, it’s been too much of a good thing.
Robust demand, especially for autos, appliances and other physical goods, overwhelmed global manufacturers. Factories couldn’t obtain enough raw materials and parts. Ports and freight yards were swamped. Companies grappled with shortages of everything they needed, notably workers.
That was particularly true at many restaurants. At the newly re-opened Gotham restaurant in Manhattan, for instance, patrons are unable to find handcrafted chocolates, once a big draw for the holidays, or grab a burger or order oysters. Gotham couldn’t find enough employees to make the chocolates, work the grill or shuck the oysters.
“We worked to bring the restaurant back to life,” said Bret Csencsitz, the new owner of the restaurant. “The demand is there. The product is superior. Yet I don’t have enough people to make the business what it needs to be and what it should be.”
The restaurant was also hampered by shortages of basic supplies like ceramic plates and glassware. Food costs fluctuated wildly. Halibut, which cost $14 a pound one day, was $24.99 a week and a half later.
Across the Atlantic, MTA, an auto components manufacturer that endured Italy’s first lockdown in February 2020, reopened within a week and ended 2020 with unexpectedly healthy business. But the recovery bred new troubles.
“Everything is lacking,” said Maria Vittoria Falchetti, the company’s marketing chief.
“Plastic is lacking. Metals are lacking. Paper is lacking. Microchips — don’t even mention. Also, we are struggling with a big increase in prices in these materials, and also energy,”
In Asia, manufacturers of everything from toys to cellphones suffered from a global shortage of computer chips and surging costs for components, raw materials and shipping.
Kaixiang Electric Appliance Co., which makes LED lamps and flashlights in Ningbo, south of Shanghai, paid 20% more in 2021 for labor, materials and complications resulting from shipping bottlenecks.
“The current delay in delivery is about one or two months,” said Susan Yang, CEO of the 80-employee company.
“The sharp rise in sea freight has eaten into manufacturers’ profits and ours,” said Max Chen, general manager of Makefigure Co., a toy exporter in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. “If we want to stay in the business, we need to lower our profit expectations and develop new clients.”
The supply chain problems have been compounded by what Kirkegaard of the German Marshall Fund calls “idiosyncratic things.”
A drought in Taiwan curtailed production at water-dependent computer chip plants. A February deep freeze shut down petrochemical plants in Texas. A huge container ship got stuck in the Suez canal for a week in March and cut off shipping between Asia and Europe.
THE PAIN OF HIGH PRICES
A MADE-IN-AMERICA LABOR SHORTAGE
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Since unemployment times out quickly, this tells us nothing about how many long-term unemployed are succeeding or failing to get placed.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
It also doesn't tell us about how many people stubbed their toes.
But if you wanted a better idea of things like Job openings for people looking for work there is a lot: "The United States had a near-record 11 million job openings in October"
Or what the number of jobs added since the pandemic hammered our economy, vs where it was (showing that so far this year there has been a major improvement in our economy): "Employers have added 18.5 million jobs since April 2020, still leaving the U.S. still 3.9 million jobs short of what it had before the pandemic."
Something else it doesn't tell us is how many of those remaining 4 million jobs that we are still short are planning on coming back into the labor force, nor how many of the almost 1 million deaths from the virus is from that number, how many people are having long haul issues, finally retired after holding on to their jobs after the 2008 crash drained their retirements, etc.
One thing I would love to see with the jobs that we need more people in is how long term trends of not working hard to train more non-white men has really put us in a bind with the careers needing people are ones that have traditionally been one that are not very diverse.
Imagine how much better off we would be with trucking right now how much better off we would be if we had a army of black and hispanic women with the correct licenses/training to drive them.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
I concur with that last paragraph. It’s what a civilized society would do.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
It is a bummer then that our planet has not really ever had a civilized society then.
But we are getting close, we finally have one major political force in our nation that is full tilt trying to make that happen for the first time ever.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
I believe that we are not currently a sapient species. We are in the stormy interstice between animal and sapient. “Not there yet.”
What really scares me is that we are closing in on technology to shape our natures. The image of a toddler with an Uzi keeps coming to me.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Im a lot more optimistic about our species, mainly because I look at us as operating at about whatever super small percentage that makes up the Wealthy White Heterosexual Male population (vs everyone in our species being able to succeed and lead our society) over the last couple thousand years.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
There will come a point, perhaps in our children’s lifetimes, when the feedback loop will start up: between who we are and what we can do. I figure this will be a phase transition or singularity event, depending on choice of nomenclature.
It will leave us more profoundly changed than fire.
GreauxFast
Active Member
sort and sweet genius….how is this a Republican problem when all three branches of government are controlled by Democrats?The Republicans seem to love dumping a recession on the American economy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/02/another-gop-president-another-recession/View attachment 4521334
President Trump did not create the coronavirus, but his failure to act swiftly and implement extensive testing and contact tracing left us with one option: extreme social distancing. And naturally, social distancing meant the economy ground to a halt. In that sense, the recession is a product of Trump’s mismanagement and willful ignorance. And that recession will be frightfully severe.
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
The Post reports: “More than 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week — a record — as political and public health leaders put the economy in a deep freeze, keeping people at home and trying to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.” The magnitude of the job losses so far — and there will be more to come — is staggering. (“The past two weeks have erased nearly all the jobs created in the past five years, a sign of how rapid, deep and painful the economic shutdown has been on many American families who are struggling to pay rent and health insurance costs in the midst of a pandemic.”) The number of claims so far, more than 10 million, is likely understated “since a lot of newly unemployed Americans haven’t been able to fill out a claim yet.”
As businesses find they can no longer hold out, declare bankruptcy or shut their doors, more people will lose their jobs. Employees asked to take pay cuts one month will find that their employer in a month or two can no longer keep them on payroll at all.
In looking at the political implications of this horror show, one need only recall the 2008 Great Recession. The causes of that financial collapse — e.g., unregulated financial instruments, negligence from ratings companies, lender deception, the Federal Reserve’s failure to act — were complicated. Nevertheless, the politicians who resisted warnings (from then-Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, among other people) and favored a Wild West deregulated financial industry have unique culpability. And the party in charge at the time — the Republicans — bore the brunt of the voters wrath at the polls. Do we imagine this domestic debacle will play out differently?
Trump and his Republicans are vulnerable on three counts: failure to act to head off the pandemic, failure to respond adequately to the crisis and corruption in the response (in an administration already infamous for corruption and self-dealing).
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), among Trump’s most fervent enablers, picked a poor time to declare that the federal government should stop helping. The Post’s Robert Costa reports that McConnell delivered a “sweeping dismissal” of the call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for a fourth stimulus package:
In her initial written response, Pelosi said, “The victims of the coronavirus pandemic cannot wait. It is moving faster than the leader may have suspected, and even he has said that some things should wait for the next bill.”
At her weekly news conference, she was even more emphatic, both on continuing to fund the recovery and on clamping down on corruption. She urged more money for equipment for health-care responders and other “front-line workers,” funds for states to manage unemployment insurance claims and a major effort on infrastructure (including water, broadband and community health-care centers). Reacting to the unemployment claims, she asked, “Does that just not take your breath away?” As for McConnell, she said bluntly, “We’ll have our bill.”
The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.
Perhaps most important, Pelosi will set up a House select committee to oversee the entire coronavirus effort, much like then-Sen. Harry Truman did for World War II funding, to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Have we progressed to the really stupid questions?
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
You mean how is the mess that the Democrats are cleaning up another Republican economic led disaster once again in their first term a Republican problem?
Easy. Trump and the Republicans shit policies led to us having a worse economy in Trump's first three years in office (giving tax cuts to the rich, picking stupid economically stupid trade wars with our allies, shutting down the government twice, etc all costing our economy trillions in economic activity) than Obama's last three years, and then when shit really hit the fan with the craptastic handling of the pandemic, doing nothing and dumping the mess on Biden and the Democrats.
And surprise surprise the Repubcalins and Trump are now pulling the same shit the Republicans did with their "Tea Party" troll after crashing the economy in 2008 to brainwash their cult into believing that somehow it is the Democrats fault.
Herb & Suds
Well-Known Member
Nazi party has obstructed the Americans at every chance