Comments by "Jeremy Barlow" (@jeremybarlow2291) on "Uneducated Economist" channel.

  1. Who is buying a refrigerator right now? Who is buying new shirts or pants? If you have extra money and your clothes are tattered, you might buy clothes right now to last for a few years, but aside from food, most goods are overproduced today and will be for a long time unless the USA adopts some kind of UBI or a worker retention payment plan like most European countries adopted with the government paying wages while people stay home. Most places will not reopen even when they can because no one has any fucking money and if they do, they are not going anywhere to risk getting sick, especially because they just lost their health insurance.
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  2. And that is only because the workers needed to get food to stores like the slaughterhouse and meat packers are getting sick and the plants need to shutter to keep the workers and food supply healthy or the pickers are unavailable to work because the border is closed. People will always need food it is a true necessity. Because of that any disruption causes price increases. Add to it the fact that plenty of people have become preppers. I mean we have stocked up on flour, yeast, pasta, beans, rice, canned meats, canned veggies, and frozen meats, breads, cheeses, butter, and dough. We have two freezers full of perishables and a few huge pantries filled with durable foods. We are also growing a garden with beans, potatoes, carrots, the typical garden perishables like cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, but also onions. Why? Because food is likely to get scarce in the next few years. We also have ammo stocked up for home defense, but mostly to be able to hunt small and large game. One deer for the freezer this winter will make a lot of meals. The fishing poles are ready if needed too. It is a good time to be a country boy.
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  3. You missed a small piece of the leveraged buyout equation. The vulture capitalists spin out a small profitable portion of the company, leverage the unprofitable portion of the company and saddle it with a majority of the debt, leaving the profitable part nearly debt free, then file bankruptcy on the unprofitable part -which may have been profitable before the leveraged buyout, and then destroy the lives and jobs of those workers by selling off the burdened part of the company that wasn't spun out and they keep the crown jewels of the company without ever having risked a dime of their own money.
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  4. Despite the late winter here in Northern NY we have spent the last two months getting our garden ready to grow. It snowed here yesterday and it snowed here Friday and Saturday and Sunday too. There was thick frost on the ground this morning. Mom Nature ain't cooperating, but we have a lot of beans, a lot of rice, and a lot of pasta and canned goods stored in the pantry along with two chest freezers full of meat and cheese and butter. We have ammo for the rifles and shotguns too and fishing poles ready too. I would say we and by we, I mean me and my neighbor have both been getting ready for lean times.
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  5. I think decentralized cryptocurrencies created within the open source community if social organizers with a humanist bent take the lead in a next gen coin could actually lead the way out of the looming depression through an intelligent deployment of worker and consumer Cooperatives and mutual aid organizations fundamentally organized around block chain currencies and timesharing in the hour for hour work exchange ie non-monetary barter system.
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  6. Bitcoin and gold rallying make sense. The US dollar is set to collapse and lose its status as the world's reserve currency. All of the indicators are there. The only shoe that needs to drop is Saudis pricing oil in gold, Bitcoin, or Euros. My gut tells me the Saudis will price in a decentralized currency with no inflationary pressure like Bitcoin.
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  7. 50% of the restaurants in my hometown have reported that they are closed permanently. This includes Denny's and Bob Evans. Red Lobster has shown no attempt to re-open. Before this all started the TGIFriday's had went out of business literally in February. Two of the local non-chain diners are gone for good. The Lonestar Steakhouse is not even attempting to re-open. Olive Garden is running. Texas Roadhouse stayed open for takeout throughout the whole thing and has re-opened with an outdoor tent and at 50% capacity inside. The mall is where most retailers are located and NY will be back into lockdown along with the rest of the country again before that opens up, so the economy will be gone by the time this is all said and done. I mean one of the anchor stores went bankrupt already during this, 3 of the other anchor stores were already bankrupt and gone from the mall. That leaves Burlington Coat Factory and Dick's Sporting Goods as the only anchor stores. You may consider Best Buy a 1/2 anchor store in my humble opinion, so there's is going to be nothing left, aside from the theater and the odds of that business coming back without a vaccine is slim and none. We are in deep shit.
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  8. Literally half of the restaurants in my town are permanently shuttered, the owners went bankrupt. 3/4 of the retailers are permanently shuttered. The hospitalization numbers are at 100% capacity or near 100% capacity in many states that opened prematurely. The same thing I said about permanently shuttered shops in my hometown is equally true in numerous cities and towns all over the world. I watch on the ground reporting from Expats living all over the planet on YouTube. This economy is completely buggered worldwide. There is nowhere to work. The stores they all closed. The restaurants closed. The factories in my hometown have either shuttered or laid off 1 to 2 shifts and none of them were running 4 shifts before this all started which is what is needed to stay open 24/7/365. I have been to a few of the restaurants that remained open and even with only 50% seating they can't fill the seating they have, and in February when I went to these restaurants you had to wait in your car because there wasn't enough capacity in their lobby to wait for a seat. Even the parking lot traffic at Walmart is 1/3 what it was in February every time I go by it or go to it and that is pretty much the only store still open. Absent demand for goods and services, there are not going to be any jobs for people to go to and there is no demand.
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  9. I think anyone who has a home who still has a job has already taken their house off the market. Anyone who has no job and has a house is probably trying to figure out how to keep it by renting out rooms or the whole house for part of the month on AirBNB or by just becoming a landlord and maybe becoming a van lifer. If I were on unemployment right now, I would be trading in my old car for an older van if I owned a house and I would move into the van and rent the house to keep the assets because this is not going to be a quick recovery. I would economize my life. I think this type of stuff is happening because there are plenty of rational economic actors. There are also plenty of people who are selling out of their houses already at whatever the market price is today to economize, but I would bet given the 2008 crisis that most of the people who own a house today are not amongst the unemployed. Most of today's home owner class are in essential jobs and/or government employees, or in positions that easily transitioned to work from home. There are not a lot of fast food workers who became unemployed, and there are not many of them who are homeowners. Those who are are the last to go as key managers. Same for groceries and Walmarts. Do you think the people working at Hot Topic own a house? Hell no, hell to the no. What percentage of wait staff at the Texas Roadhouse own a home, I would bet less than 10%. How about the ticket taker at your local theater? I would again bet less than 10%, maybe key managers in a chain, or someone whose spouse is the primary breadwinner who is still employed at an essential factory or as a trash man. The people who will be selling homes are the mom and pop landlords who bought too high, and the Wall Street investor class will gobble up those bargains they have been positioned to do so for a long time. I predict a housing contraction is more likely in this environment. Just my two cents, fiat. Rents will fall, but housing is going to be in short supply for buyers.
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  10.  @bonniejohnson1518  the circumstances in 2008 were different, the Hedge Funds and REITS were overleveraged. They are not today. In 2008 everyone and their brother including bad credit risks owned a home. They don't today. Consolidation of ownership means the rental market has more robust owners, it also means that the homeowners are better credit risks. This is going to make for a market in stasis.
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