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I was gonna say that this is a joke thread. But you post is in keeping with the spirit. The guy who votes no on everything but voted for the Trump tax cut. Yes. Thomas Massey... Paragon of fiscal responsibility! LOL!!! He voted for less taxes being paid. He would vote for less taxes for individuals as well. You’re making a false equivalence and then drawing your own conclusion. That’s the joke. What’s even funnier is you’re saying a congressman is an asshole for upholding his oath to obey the constitution... I see. it's not fiscal irresponsibility when you cut taxes. lol

I was gonna say that this is a joke thread. But you post is in keeping with the spirit. The guy who votes no on everything but voted for the Trump tax cut. Yes. Thomas Massey... Paragon of fiscal responsibility! LOL!!!

Remember those days when America used to be a superpower?

From what I've read, 74 is probably the worst other than the great depression. A brutal, prolonged downturn plus inflation. But even then, I don't think it actually hit 50%. Ignoring the pandemic and unemployment, this is a pretty good bear market. Get the pain over with quickly... LOL, if you ignore the unemployment and the negative GDP. The economy looks pretty good anytime.

Massie was right about a lot of his justification. I would link his tweet but my company has now blocked twitter to save bandwidth.... No, that guy is just an asshole. Read the tweet too. Btw, when John Kerry and Donald Trump can agree on one thing. You know it's true....

50% drawdowns in the US are extremely rare though. How many since 1900? Great depression, DotCom, GFC. Any others? Off the top of my head there was also 72-74. That was one brutal, nasty bear. Talk to old timers from back then. They will tell you stories of desperation. I'm not sure if 62 was a 50 but it was a nasty one as well.

I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I also think Castanza has a point about Americans not wanting to stay more than a month or whatever. What I'm saying is that it's pretty clear what's going to develop. That's what I mean by it's scary and the US will fuck it up. So a few more weeks will pass and the US is gonna start printing 2000-3000 dead per day. By contrast Iraq war i think was less than 5000 total. At that point the military talk is gonna start to emerge. People will start talking about declaring war on the virus, blah blah blah. But since shutdown is pretty much the only thing that works they'll do something along those lines. But they won't call it shutdown. They'll call it freedom isolation or something like that. You also don't need 100% compliance but enough people will comply for it to work. You basically get to to the same end, only it takes longer and the economic damage is greater. Problem is that at this rate 1 week costs a hell of a lot of money.

That's pretty much just part of the US stupidity. China did it and it worked great. But the US can't copy China cause it's the US, blah blah. It's had a 2 month head start on China. Did it find a solution. It just crossed its fingers. Is it working on a solution now? No. It just crosses it fingers harder. Meanwhile pretty much anyone that knows what they're talking about just says that shutdown is the only way.

Some of the ideas are very scary. What this has shown is that if you don't lock it down and lock it down good then it turns into a horror show. See Italy and Spain. NYC is not at that point but it will get there. In Europe France is next and the Netherlands and the UK after it. Do you think the economy will go on its merry way and people spending and supporting small businesses while you you have a horror show going on? How is the economy gonna work nicely when you have a seized up health care system? The real nightmare scenario is that the US will fuck it up. And by all measures it looks like the US will fuck it up. It'll cost even more money. The more that you don't keep it under control the more money it costs too.

Yeah got it. Sorry, I thought you were trying to say something else.

Well you're not at 18,000 on the dow. You're at 22. But if you know how to buy the dow at 18,000 right now do let me know cause I'm definitely interested.

I'm not. I'm just saying that. That's where we are right now, and 23% is far from 40%, and we never got to 40%.

LOL!!!

We're actually 23% down. Not a lot priced in.

Here you go buddy. Back to 1800. UK_Debt-to-GDP.xlsx

Well, simply the number is good. There are roughly 152 million jobs non-farm jobs in the US. Out of that about 17 million are in leisure and hospitality. With maybe 30% of US economy offline and maybe 70% of leisure and hospitality offline a 3 million print is good, REALLY GOOD. But we also don't know. You could have a temporal issue and next week's number comes in at 6 or 7 million. Who knows. As for EMH, I can't help you there buddy. If that thing were true we wouldn't have stock market crashes. Good luck with that one.

I think you'll get your chance again chrispy. It's never straight down. My guess is that we have a negative day tomorrow as the boys won't want to go long and strong into the weekend when they could get hit with some horrible numbers out of Italy and Spain. France and NYC are probably gonna come online pretty soon as well.

Well done! That looks like a 33% return over 8 days. I just saw that ZBH traded at present levels in 2014. Then, they say markets are efficient. Thanks I wish I got more. I caught a good bid for like 5 seconds. It closed up like 8% from my fill price on that day and it was a crappy day.

The claims number was actually really good. I thought it would be at least 5 million. Think about it. There's almost 17 million jobs in leisure and hospitality alone. The problem with jobless claims is that it's a weekly number. So there's also next week. I think that market has been pretty optimistic about this whole thing. Posting highs when this thing was starting and ignoring it for a while. If you think about it we are now about 23% below a pricey peak, and about 10% above the end of 2018 freakout. With a guaranteed recession to come. It somehow doesn't feel like a screaming buy.

You're absolutely right. But like the post-GFC period, government debt to GDP will presumably jump higher again. The question no one seems to know is how high that ratio can go. Indeed, is it even a relevant metric? My understanding is that the last time debt to GDP was this high was post WWII: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-to-gdp [i believe the U.S. government also has much higher off-balance sheet liabilities now than it did then.] Debt/GDP fell quite quickly for various reasons, including, I believe, a few bouts of high inflation: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi (Of course, high real GDP growth, helped higher population growth rates than we have today.) So, today we appear to be going toward higher government debt to GDP ratios than we had post-WWII, higher off-balance sheet government liabilities, with significantly lower population growth. I don't know where all of that leads, but I don't think it's ultimately headed towards a free lunch. If you want to go through history, I think Britain is the best example. It had debt to GDP ratios higher than this for most of its history.

ZBH

3.28 million is actually not a bad number,

I fully agree with you on the simplicity of bills. Sadly we don't live in that environment. But c'mon, this is a 2 trillion dollar there's room in there for everyone's hobbies - Republican and Democrat. Usually those are pretty cheap too. But they wanted a 500 billion fund with no oversight to be used at the discretion of the Treasury - read "Trump". Now seriously, I don't care who you are lefty, righty, republican, democrat, agnostic, stoner, libertarian, extraterrestrial you can't tell me with a straight face that you trust Trump with 500 billion, no strings attached. Start at 2:30 and see just a glimpse of all the add-ons. And no, I don’t trust Trump with 500B and I also don’t like the anonymity that was proposed for companies. I looked at it, and as I've said they've included some hobbies and the price tags are pretty small. Pretty much standard stuff, par for the course Washington DC stuff. The anonymity for companies I suspect is the same idea as the stronger banks taking tarp money in to provide cover for the weaker banks and that all banks access the discount window now. Well back then and now it wasn't such a bad idea to have banks well capitalized (better than the alternative). But you can't have every company take a bailout in order to provide cover in this case. Not practical. That being said, I don't like the idea either because then you rely to the Treasury to monitor compliance and they're not really good at it. So yeah, it sucks.

Great question, with no obvious answers. Assuming there is some limit here, the other alternative is an effectively slow motion default via inflation. But where on whom an increased tax burden would fall is unclear. Well the thing is that it is nothing magical about war time deficits. Deficits are deficits. The economy doesn't care about your intentions. So if you can do it in war-time you can do it in peace time as well. In fact war-time deficits are the worst. In that case you're literally setting money on fire. In this case people are actually gonna benefit from it.

I like RioCan and Granite.