Job growth revised down by 911,000 through March, signaling economy on shakier footing than realized
Job growth revised down by 911,000 through March, signaling economy on shakier footing than realized
I posted this a few months back and it is still anecdotal but in the Houston metroplex I have noticed a significant amount of commercial for lease signs and it seems to be increasing with time. That is concerning because commercial real estate is often built on credit (mortgages) then the tenant's payments go to pay the loans. When occupancy goes down, the ability to pay that loan goes down until its unsustainable and it goes into default.
If you default on you home loan of say $300,000, its your problem and the bank has recourse and gets your asset. When a commercial loan of $5,000,000 defaults and no one was renting it already, the bank gets the asset but it's not "worth" anything other than the building/land and it is harder for the bank to recoup that value.
When that happens en-masse, that's a problem for the bank... Which makes it a problem for the economy, and it becomes a problem for all of us. This has been going on for a while and no one is doing anything about it. The cliff looks to be approaching.
People have been doing something about it. That's what all the weird return to office intiatives were about. City governements are scared that the downtowns will spiral into collapse so they coerce all the companies that still have downtown offices to get their employees back and spending money at restaurants and such. If the restaurants go out of business and store fronts sit vacant, then there would be no reason for companies to pay a premium for downtown office space and the whole thing collapses Detroit style. Commercial real estate failed to price in remote work, and the covid shutdowns made it obvious just how overpriced and overleveraged it all was.
I've noticed the same. But weirdly they are also building more industrial buildings, just in different areas. I assume because it's cheaper to build a new building than to deal with an old 40 year old one.
Online shipping has been killing brick and mortar for years, and the pandemic stepped that into high gear.
It's going to be a global quagmire. France is basically underwater and the EU probably isn't strong enough to bail them out. China still has property finance problems, even if they did a good job keeping it out of the news.
Stagflation.
Learn about it. Educate yourself and prepare accordingly.
This is gonna suck immensely. For all of us. Unless you're on the top line of our K shaped economy. Ask your parents or grandparents about it.
I’m pretty old and had not heard of it. From Wikipedia:
The term arose from the economic recovery post the COVID-19 pandemic,
Good info. Thanks. But I think he meant to ask the oldies about stagflation.
There's a difference between stagflation of the 1970s and what's happening now.
In the economics of spherical chickens in a vacuum, stagflation should be impossible according to the Keynesian models. If people have jobs, they have money, and that causes inflation. If people don't have jobs, then they don't have money, and inflation should come down. They're counter-cyclical. A situation where you have high unemployment and high inflation shouldn't happen.
What they missed then was a single commodity--oil having a manipulated price due to OPEC--causing both high unemployment and high inflation.
The really big problem was what to do about it. The US wasn't able to strongarm OPEC into dropping oil prices. If the Fed were to raise interest rates, that would bring inflation down, but make unemployment even worse. Drop interest rates, and unemployment comes down, but inflation goes through the roof. What the Fed ultimately did under Volcker was to say fuck it, we're raising interest rates until inflation is under control, then back it off to bring unemployment under control. It was tough medicine, but it did work. Probably saved capitalism at a time when the Soviet Union still could have won the cold war. Not that the hardcore libertarian capitalists ever gave him credit for it.
The difference now is that we have a very clear reason why it's happening: Trump's tariffs. Unlike the situation with OPEC, the US has complete control over that factor. There would need to be negotiations with other countries to drop reciprocal tariffs, but since tariffs hurt in both directions, most are going to be amenable.
All we have to do is get rid of the insane idiot in charge of things.
Most of the time span for the report came before President Donald Trump took office, indicating the jobs picture was deteriorating before he began levying tariffs against U.S. trading partners.
Meaning those numbers are old af and it’s a lot worse than that.
I just got my tariff and duty bills in at my job for late august. Many of the aluminum parts we sell are 50% more now. I just lost THOUSANDS on already processed orders because of these illegal tariffs.
I really wish all the business's would sue the nazi regime for these tariffs as they are illegal and never approved by congress.
All of us are about to see some CRAZY price hikes on aluminum and steel products. Hope you all have been saving since November when we all knew the US was done for.
I just saw some bubbleheaded dumbass on Faux talk about how we have to "dig out from four years of Biden being feckless" or some such craziness.
I mean, I guess we should all thank our lucky stars that only a certain set of special people can see what a hot mess the Biden economy truly was, even if normal people could see all the stats for themselves...it must be a special vision they have, much like RFK being able to see "mitochondrial challenges" in others.
Also, if Kamala had won, we might have had a genocide in Gaza or something, I'm told, so there's that...
Cause they're also trying to combat inflation caused by tarrifs.
While lowered interest rates can make money cheaper and spur the economy, tariffs are causing inflation to tick up again. So we've got a slowing economy with rising inflation, basically a position the Fed is I'll equipped to deal with.
In summaru everyone who's not wealthy is in for a fun time regardless of what they do.
Not "than realized" but "than lied to"
Anyone else looking sideways at this? Trump fires the chief responsible for jobs numbers, and now they've suddenly got "new data" to argue that it's all actually Biden's fault? Looks like cooking to me.
I don't trust a single goddamn thing that comes out of the pedo nazi's fascist regime.
100% same. I stopped using .gov sites when researching anything.