Tag: economics

This relaxed response to the US economy hitting historical debt heights tends to remind me of Goldman Sachs telling everyone that the US economy was recession-proof in December, 2019:

Economists and deficit hawks have warned for decades that the United States was borrowing too much money. The federal debt was ballooning so fast, they said, that economic ruin was inevitable: Interest rates would skyrocket, taxes would rise and inflation would probably run wild.

The death spiral could be triggered once the debt surpassed the size of the U.S. economy — a turning point that was probably still years in the future.

It actually happened much sooner: sometime before the end of June.

The problem with debt crisises is that everything is always fine right up until the moment that it isn’t.

How can “gig economy” corporations expect to survive if they have to obey the laws? Obviously, they can’t, as Uber and Lyft flee California due to their inability to continue abusing their drivers:

After a California court’s preliminary injunction required Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers as employees, both companies threatened to shut down their ride-hailing services, with the latter confirming the move.

Lyft will suspend its transportation activity in California at 11:59pm local time on Thursday, the company announced in a blog post. “This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips,” the company – valued in the billions of dollars – lamented.

“We’re personally reaching out to riders and drivers to share more about why this is happening, what you can do about it, and to provide some transportation alternatives,” it added.

The drastic move was prompted by a preliminary court decision last week that required Uber and Lyft to stop classifying their drivers as independent contractors.

If your business model is dependent upon breaking either the employment or the consumer laws, it isn’t a sustainable one, no matter how heavily Wall Street may be willing to invest in it.

Gig economy gigs lower the price of labor, which in the USA has remained flat since 1973. It is as deleterious as the doubling of the female workforce and the mass immigration that are the two primary contributors to the low price of labor that has rendered US society unstable and destroyed the middle class.

The important thing to remember is that consent does not define morality. The prostitute consents to sell her body, the debt-slave consents to sell his labor, and the defrauded consents to invest his money, yet we find these practices to be both morally wrong and illegal. California gets many things hopelessly wrong, but its strong legal protections for employees and consumers against the rapacious predators of the financial class is not one of them.

And if you think Uber is a fine capitalist corporation being abused by the socialists in the California legislature, I suggest you look up the documents related to Abadilla et al v. Uber Technologies, Inc. and you will rapidly learn otherwise. I don’t know much about Lyft, but Uber is an abusive, lawless, and hypocritical organization that mandated independent arbitrations for its drivers, then spent FIVE YEARS in a futile attempt to prevent more than 12,000 of those drivers from exercising their only remedy against the corporation’s mistreatment of them.

In fact, this decision to flee California is a consequence of the two corporations’ long-running attempts to avoid the arbitrations they mandated. Sound familiar?

In combatting these individual arbitration claims, the ride-share companies adopted several tactics including: 1) delay the arbitrations by not paying the arbitration initial filing fees, 2) challenging their opposing counsels’ qualifications, and 3) offering incentives for employees to drop their arbitration claims.

Don’t be surprised when Patreon suddenly announces an “unexpected” relocation to Utah.

Or maybe not. Remember how I pointed out that there was going to be a crash this year? Now consider what Goldman Sachs was saying at the end of December:

Just months after almost everyone on Wall Street worried that a recession was just around the corner, Goldman Sachs said a downturn is unlikely over the next several years.

In fact, the firm’s economists stopped just short of saying that the U.S. economy is recession-proof.

An analysis Goldman conducted of the current potential risks to growth show that they are mostly muted. The report found that the pillars of the “Great Moderation” that began in the 1980s — low levels of volatility marked by sustainable growth and muted inflation, interrupted only by the financial crisis more than a decade ago — are still standing.

Investors could be excused for getting a little nervous over such calls, as optimism also was heavy in late 2007, just as the economy was about to enter the worst of the financial crisis.

So much for those “mostly muted” risks to growth.

Banks are flat-out refusing to provide business loans unless the government fully guarantees them so they aren’t subject to any risk. It’s interesting, though hardly surprising, to see that the loan guarantees are actually making loans harder to get.

I own and operate a consulting company the end goal of which is to set up & provide loans through multiple funding channels to franchisees of large and small chains nationally. The chains I work with many of you will be familiar with —dominos, jersey mikes, massage envy, European wax center, the joint, club Pilates, jimmy johns, wingstop, Orangetheory, moes southwest.  And many others.  Point is I have BROAD spectrum national exposure to many industries

The banks I work with are SBA, conventional lenders who service smaller loans under 2mm and generally smaller operators of these franchise systems, and then larger banks who provide loans to larger operators from 2-50mm.  I’m short — 20+ banks across ALL spectrum of SME lending

I fund 400-500mm in loans per year through these banks. In February we were on pace to fund well over 500mm and potentially 750mm — growing exponentially year over year.  STIFF DRINK TIME.  Since April 1st we have funded 5mm total through only 2 banks.  Let’s dive in as to why.

SBA banks — they have lending limits to 5mm.  Congress has authorized them to go to 10mm in the CARES Act but they have ignored it.  This will become important later.   They currently have guarantees from the govt at 80{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} – pretty good right? DOESNT MATTER THEY STILL WONT LEND

In fact they are pushing the government to guarantee 90{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of the loans (and likely on their way to 100{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} — see my prior posts on the de facto nationalizion of the banking system).  In short SBA has SHUT OFF BORROWERS waiting for more from Uncle Sam.

Current excuses ARE PLAYING BOTH SIDES (and this applies to all banking segments). A chain with increased sales since pandemic — no loan. “We want to wait to see if sales increases are sustainable” Doesn’t matter that sales are up.  They may not be “sustainable”

On the other side for businesses with sales down — “well we just aren’t comfortable sales will rebound and we have concerns over COVID”.   So sales up = no loan.  Sales down or flat = no loan.  Operator size IRRELEVANT.   Are some banks lending? Yes. This is 75-80{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of SBA banks. They are also being EXTREMELY selective on industries they will do.  If you are an industry with “large public gatherings” you better pray to Santa Claus for money.

On to conventional banks.   Little known fact is that 50+{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} have LEFT THE FRANCHISE LENDING SPACE ENTIRELY.  Of the remaining 50{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} — 90{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of those are not taking new clients.   And they are not lending to their existing clients generally.

This is just one of the many reasons that a debt-based economy is a very, very bad idea. It’s the exact opposite of antifragility.

Paul Krugman admits that he may, perhaps, have been a little incorrect about that whole global economy thing, at least in the short term:

Concerns about adverse effects from globalization aren’t new. As U.S. income inequality began rising in the 1980s, many commentators were quick to link this new phenomenon to another new phenomenon: the rise of manufactured exports from newly industrializing economies.

Economists took these concerns seriously. Standard models of international trade say that trade can have large effects on income distribution: A famous 1941 paper showed how trading with a labor-abundant economy can reduce wages, even if national income grows.

And so during the 1990s, a number of economists, myself included, tried to figure out how much the changing trade landscape was contributing to rising inequality. They generally concluded that the effect was relatively modest and not the central factor in the widening income gap. So academic interest in the possible adverse effects of trade, while it never went away, waned.

In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed.

There’s been a lot of this going around. Leading globalists such as Kissinger and Fukuyama have published learned tomes explaining why globalism has “unexpectedly” failed. Of course, it never occurs to them to admit that nationalist skeptics like me were correct all along, hence these revisionist self-critiques that are primarily intended to salvage the tattered remnants of their award-winning reputations.

In the meantime, I will patiently await my Quasi-Nobel Prize in Economics for creating the Labor Mobility proof of the impossibility of free trade.

And I will also fisk Krugman’s entire column on the Darkstream this weekend.

Hertz is bankrupt despite owning one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world:

What one world war, one Great Depression and numerous oil price shocks couldn’t do, the coronavirus did in less than three months and late on Friday, auto rental giant Hertz which was founded in 1918 when it set up shop with a dozen Ford Model Ts, quietly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection struggling under a massive debt load after its business was brought to a grinding halt during the coronavirus pandemic and talks with creditors failed to result in much needed relief.

The company had a total of 568,000 vehicles and 12,400 corporate and franchise locations worldwide at the start of this year.

Last night on the Big Bear’s stream, we talked about deflation, and how the debt portion of the money supply is much larger than the cash + bank accounts percentage of it. Printing the latter doesn’t help if the former is vanishing at a faster rate.

The Hertz bankruptcy is a good illustration of this. While the corporation still has more than $1 billion in cash, that’s only four percent of the total debt it owes. And that’s why simply giving it more money to service its debts isn’t going to keep it alive for long, as the only thing that will allow it to continue operations is the bankruptcy court agreeing to wipe out a significant percentage of its $24.4 billion in debt.

And that is, as Zerohedge noted, a deflationary bomb, given the size of the company and the price-depressing effects of the liquidation of its vehicular assets. Speaking of those assets, it’s interesting to note that Hertz actually listed more assets than debts on its bankruptcy petition, which would seem to indicate that it’s not actually bankrupt, but actually suggests that the real total value of its assets are less than recorded.

The 12-year period of credit disinflation appears to be over as the global economy is finally beginning to visibly deflate despite the best efforts of the central banks:

Canadian inflation went negative for the first time since the 2009 recession after the coronavirus lockdown put the brakes on the world economy.

Consumer prices dropped 0.2 per cent in April from the same month a year earlier, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday from Ottawa. That’s down from a 0.9 per cent annual rate in March and 2.2 per cent in February.

The report adds inflation to the list of economic indicators showing an historic impact from the coronavirus pandemic. Collapsing gasoline prices have pulled inflation lower over the past two months, but weak demand should keep inflation at extremely low levels for an extended period, and could even spur worries about deflation. That will keep pressure off the Bank of Canada to ease up on accommodation efforts any time soon.

From March, prices fell 0.7 per cent, matching the largest one-month drop since 2008.

Deflation is actually good for consumers and the real economy, since their money is worth more, but it is very bad for those who are dependent upon living off the debt of others. Which, of course, is why the banks and the financial elite have been desperately fighting to delay the deflation and credit crash that has been inevitable since 2008.

Debt jubilees are coming. Intellectuals of both the Left and the Right are already calling for them. In fact, one of the primary reasons behind the systemic overreaction to Corona-chan, as well as the constant goalpost-moving concerning the lockdowns, may be the cover provided for the ongoing economic crash.

Just months after almost everyone on Wall Street worried that a recession was just around the corner, Goldman Sachs said a downturn is unlikely over the next several years. In fact, the firm’s economists stopped just short of saying that the U.S. economy is recession-proof.
– December 31, 2019

The hilarious thing is that the downturn had already begun. This sort of thing is why I meant it very literally when I wrote the chapter entitled “No one knows anything” in RGD.

It is also why destroying your nation simply because the economists tell you that doing so will make everyone rich is a horrifically bad, horrifically stupid idea.

The China-China-China crowd has been predicting the collapse of the Chinese economy for years. But is it actually as vulnerable as they believe? More than a few international economists simply don’t buy that assumption:

RT talked to economists to find out if Beijing may have foreseen the economic crash and about the Chinese government’s response to it.

“Nobody, including Beijing, could have foreseen the depth and gravity of this pandemic, specifically the cryptic transmission parameters by which the Covid-19 virus spreads. It is truly a once-in-100-year pandemic event,” said Sourabh Gupta, senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies.

According to him, China was better prepared because “it is in a much healthier fiscal position compared to most advanced economies and many emerging economies too.”

Gupta explained that the central government’s debt level as a percentage of GDP is fairly modest, which means there is ample space on the government’s balance sheet to ramp up policy support. Also, consumers’ debt levels relative to income is modest, so they are not overleveraged either and can open up their wallets.

He was echoed by Andrew Leung, international and independent China strategist, who said “China is always very long-term strategy-minded” and is better prepared for any crisis thanks to its state capitalism. “The state can direct massive funds and mobilize businesses and people more effectively than the West. The same capability was demonstrated during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and the world financial crisis of 2008-09,” said Leung.

According to Temur Umarov, an expert on China and Central Asia at Carnegie Moscow Center, every country is in a different economic situation, so their response to the coronavirus pandemic also differs. While numerous economic stimulus packages were announced by some countries, China has focused on recovery of domestic consumption, as well as on help for small- and medium-sized businesses, he said.

All the analysts agreed that neither China nor other countries could have foreseen the magnitude of the current crisis.

“There is a tsunami of negative views about China as a result of the spreading coronavirus crisis. America’s bad-mouthing has also helped. But China remains by far the second-largest economy, bigger than the rest of the BRIC countries combined,” said Leung. He noted that many more countries have China as their largest trading partner than the United States.

I think the Chinese economy is better poised to survive the crisis simply because it is less financialized, which is another way of saying that it is less fictional. And I would remind those who cite the failed predictions concerning Japanese preeminence of the 1980s of three things.

1. The US economy of 2020 is not the US economy of 1985. The USA of 2020 isn’t even recognizably American anymore.
2. China is not Japan.
3. The Japanese economy of 1985 was very heavily financialized. Most of its massive real estate wealth was as fictional as the Silicon Valley wealth is today.

Oil prices have gone negative in Canada:

And there it is… May WTI just traded below zero for the first time ever (trading below NEGATIVE $40 per barrel)… There was a small bid right into the settlement at 1430ET leaving the May contract to settle at negative $37.63.

Interesting times, my friends. Very interesting times.