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Femtosecond posted:Probably one of the most significant causes is No One Has Any Money which is filtering down into less discretionary spending, thus killing retail and restaurants. I do have to stop you right there. People have shitloads of money. Barring the pandemic stimuli it's never been higher! 
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Apr 19, 2024 21:10
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Femtosecond posted:Probably one of the most significant causes is No One Has Any Money which is filtering down into less discretionary spending, thus killing retail and restaurants. PCE is like... flat at worst in recent months. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1ksi8
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Apr 19, 2024 21:13
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i think they're perseverating on the grand 2008-2019 issues, just like peeps perseverate a lot on flint's water crisis, which they'd substantively fixed by 2019 we got some new issues. two of the world's biggest wheat exporters killing each other, contagion and like, anti-contagion from chinese mass-unemployement-without-technical-recession, etc etc bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 21:14
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Small office buildings seem very vacant around here, while actual retail space seems ok. Although yes, a lot of health care. Instead of a cell phone store and a bank branch on every corner, we got an urgent care. Soooo many loving urgent cares, its insane. Profit margins must be ridiculous, just like when a cell phone store only had to sell like 2 flagship phones a day to justify that lease.
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Apr 19, 2024 21:37
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And just to add to that, people also are confident that they've got money, in specifically the way we measure that: consumer confidence https://www.conference-board.org/topics/consumer-confidence It could be higher, but it's also been a lot lower. However, people are anxious about the future  and that affects spending too. We've been below the 100 mark since mid-2021. I think this is reflected in comments on somethingawful.com. Posters are confident that the future is bad, and so they are sure this must be reflected in how much money people have, even though it presently isn't. People have generally been thinking the future is worse since 2014, even though things insisted on not getting worse (economically) for another six years and then only got worse due to something practically none of those consumers actually guessed was coming. e. More people think we have a coming recession than not, still, but the percentage has been dropping.  The numbers for people's expectations about spending on retail-level services like restaurants and beauty services seem pretty flat to mildly negative, with large majorities expecting more of the same, but marginally more pessimists than optimists. 
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 21:38
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Baddog posted:Small office buildings seem very vacant around here, while actual retail space seems ok. Although yes, a lot of health care. It’s state-specific but urgent cares are frequently a corrupt enterprise parasitizing the nonprofit hospital system. If you’re seeing a lot of them you’re probably in a jurisdiction where it’s especially easy to do.
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Apr 19, 2024 23:18
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Agronox posted:I do have to stop you right there. People have shitloads of money. Barring the pandemic stimuli it's never been higher! That’s interesting. Canadian spending has been pulling back severely, so much so that people are worried about recession. Potentially a difference could be in how indebted Canadians are and the 5 year terms of mortgages exposes people to interest rate inflation faster than the USA’s 30 year terms. The notion that “no one has any money” is something I’ve heard first hand from two friends with retail businesses. Just sales way down. Googling around looks like others have noted the gap between the USA and Canada. https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/proof-point-why-has-u-s-consumer-spending-been-so-much-more-resilient-than-canadas/ So if folks in the USA are still spending but stores are still closing it suggests at other problems. Maybe just pandemic hangovers that have rendered some businesses so indebted and structurally unsound that even a “return to normal” isn’t enough. (This is what I think has killed many restaurants around here). Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 23:31
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Agronox posted:I do have to stop you right there. People have shitloads of money. Barring the pandemic stimuli it's never been higher! This is one statistic that I definitely need to know whether it's measuring mean or median. Because "more money in fewer hands" is the gut experience of the economy that I'm trying to check against the data.
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Apr 19, 2024 23:43
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Aren't fast food franchises tempering expectations in the face of fewer people affording their inflated menu prices? Seem to remember that coming up a couple times in the past quarter.
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Apr 19, 2024 23:51
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most fast food restaurants are commercial reits in disguise. obviously the purpose-made commercial reits are eating poo poo and dying
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Apr 19, 2024 23:56
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:PCE is like... flat at worst in recent months. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1ksi8 I'd that adjusted for inflation because otherwise it just looks like x=y
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Apr 19, 2024 23:57
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most fast food restaurants are also franchised, meaning a local or regional landlord is attempting to extract a profit despite the franchise radically restricting their ability to change how their restaurant operates. They tend to have some small amount of control over prices (the cost of an item isn't necessarily the same in all of a given franchise, although the existence of things like a "dollar menu" shows that sometimes they do not) and of course their lease or rent costs are highly variable. But when we say, broadly, that "restaurants are closing" that has a lot of factors involved. One big one, recently featured on john oliver, is the delivery app grift, which has and continues to put an insane squeeze on restaurants. Opening a new restaurant is also capital intensive and borrowing costs are high. There's always been high turnover because restaurants are extremely risky investments, especially in the first three years: IIRC non-franchise? restaurants have something like a 75% failure rate in the first three years, with by far the most common reason being undercapitalization as the foundational reason (failure to advertise, weather the initial slow period, have money to adjust labor and menu and maybe seating etc. in response to actual vs. anticipated customer patterns, etc.). So we expect restaurants started two years ago to fail a lot and maybe fewer prospective restauranteurs can raise reasonable startup money given much higher interest rates? Or less attractive margins to potential investors? Discendo Vox posted:It’s state-specific but urgent cares are frequently a corrupt enterprise parasitizing the nonprofit hospital system. If you’re seeing a lot of them you’re probably in a jurisdiction where it’s especially easy to do. Also we're at the peak of boomers needing health care and urgent care is one of the first and most important outpatient landing zones for the elderly who aren't quite sick enough to keep in the hospital but aren't nearly well enough to be home. I had reason to visit an urgent/acute care facility where my wife's stepmom was staying a few months ago and it was at least 95% elderly patients. And yeah it was murderously expensive. I believe MediCal was paying on the order of 1k a day? For a very shared room (3-4 patients per room), lovely meals, PT and OT 3x a week, and round the clock care mostly by medical assistants who aren't nurses but supervised by a nurse, with a very small number of actual doctors on staff. Situated in the shittiest industrial part of town, of course.
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Apr 20, 2024 04:21
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A lot of people keep going on about how 'Everyone's going so well but they just have bad vibes about the economy!' but I'm pretty sure you can square that circle with how even people who have relative financial stability now are well aware they are one bad day away from losing it permanently. One medical bill, their landlord deciding to sell, car accident or natural disaster and their savings and security are gone. The idea of 'they're still spending their pandemic stimulus!' is a complete joke and anyone entertaining it should be permanently discredited.
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Apr 20, 2024 09:23
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A lot of people keep going on about how 'Everyone's going so well but they just have bad vibes about the economy!' but I'm pretty sure you can square that circle with how even people who have relative financial stability now are well aware they are one bad day away from losing it permanently. One medical bill, their landlord deciding to sell, car accident or natural disaster and their savings and security are gone. It's entirely fine and doable to be upset about and fight against inequities which result in economic precarity without also forcing an awkward and ill-fitted reinterpretation of the data to raise urgency.
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Apr 20, 2024 10:31
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Femtosecond posted:
I'm picking this out but this sentiment is up there with "kids never have been so disrespectful" as far as things people have said for time immemorial. There's TV shows from the 50s where people say things aren't as good as they were and I definitely remember boomers in the 90s telling me businesses can't make money anymore because of Clinton. People will always think their businesses should be doing better if only it weren't because of <external factor>. I'm also getting less confident in a lot of confidence scores from the general public as we are in Total War mode when it comes to politics, which isn't unique historically but it's unique to the past few decades. I think folks used to be more willing to say "I don't like the president but I do think we're in a healthy economy and things will be fine" than they are today. A lot of folks right now are desperately trying to will a recession into reality so they can say "I told you so" about Biden, and honestly if Trump wins it'll just flip. But people don't actually act like they Believe what they say though. A guy I work with says he is certain we're hurdling towards massive financial ruin, everything is on the brink, bank runs are inevitable but then goes and buys a $50k lake pontoon boat. Oh yeah, that'll be what you need when money becomes worthless.
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Apr 20, 2024 14:05
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I also think the last few years HAVE seen people with the lowest incomes get a lot of gains and help with inequality at that end but I think a lot of people are surprised because they didn't realize they themselves weren't as low on the ladder as they thought. They're not seeing these gains so they assume they just aren't happening.
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Apr 20, 2024 14:10
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multiplicative nature of all economic variables induces insane behavior because peeps can't exponent
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Apr 20, 2024 14:14
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Lockback posted:I also think the last few years HAVE seen people with the lowest incomes get a lot of gains and help with inequality at that end but I think a lot of people are surprised because they didn't realize they themselves weren't as low on the ladder as they thought. They're not seeing these gains so they assume they just aren't happening. It's this. My strong suspicion is that the gains in the economy are so focused near the top that most of the rest of us aren't really having that prosperity reflected in our day to day lives. You can see this in retirement savings data. According to Vanguard the average savings of someone 35-45 is $76k, while the median is $28k. If the economy is doing great but only a fraction at the top (even if it's a relatively large fraction like the upper quartile - you don't really have to just be talking about the 1% here) then yeah, a poo poo ton of people are going to look at things like rising prices of daily goods and their stagnating wage and not really feel like the economy is going great. Wall Street doing great doesn't matter if you don't have any investments. Here's a report from the St. Lous Fed at the beginning of this year that puts some numbers to the wealth gap issue in the US. There are some interesting bits in there about the growth of educational and generational gaps in wealth, but the really stark issue is that 10% of the population of the US has 74% of the total wealth. That's why huge chunks of the country still think that the economy sucks, even if the big economic indicators are doing great. Because for them, people who don't have a poo poo ton of investments, it does.
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Apr 20, 2024 14:34
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So yeah stuff is happening at the top but that doesn't explain why median numbers are also rising. My point is a lot is happening at the bottom too to improve which a lot of people assumed would help them, but they don't see that either.
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Apr 20, 2024 14:37
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Lockback posted:So yeah stuff is happening at the top but that doesn't explain why median numbers are also rising. My point is a lot is happening at the bottom too to improve which a lot of people assumed would help them, but they don't see that either. My assumption would be that people more near the median aren't as affected by those rises. If your median retirement savings goes from $20k to $28k that's good, but frankly it kind of means gently caress all in how you perceive your place in the world. Someone in the top decile is going to see much more apparent growth in their over-all wealth, and frankly they're also much more likely to be paying attention to how their investments are doing than someone in the sixth decile who is passively invested in whatever the set it and forget it option for their 401k is.
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Apr 20, 2024 14:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:My assumption would be that people more near the median aren't as affected by those rises. If your median retirement savings goes from $20k to $28k that's good, but frankly it kind of means gently caress all in how you perceive your place in the world. Someone in the top decile is going to see much more apparent growth in their over-all wealth, and frankly they're also much more likely to be paying attention to how their investments are doing than someone in the sixth decile who is passively invested in whatever the set it and forget it option for their 401k is. One thing to add: keep in mind that with the wealth distribution in the US the bottom half of the population has 2% - two percent - of the total wealth. So even figures that are supposed to correct for this a bit like median wealth are still going to be skewed and there are going to be huge chunks of the population that don't see these gains at all unless it directly translates to pay raises.
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Apr 20, 2024 15:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:You can see this in retirement savings data. According to Vanguard the average savings of someone 35-45 is $76k, while the median is $28k. One can also be better off and know it and feel worse off or actually be worse off in single areas. It’s possible to have had one’s retirement returns and home valuation explode over the last four years, while one’s salary was not keeping up with inflation, while seeing one’s housing costs explode because of a move. Objectively (because I know my billable hours) the income I generate as an employee has increased between 30-70% percent each year over the 2020 to 2024 while raises have been nominal (2-3%). That all feels pretty loving terrible but the metrics of it look okay to good and my net wealth is up substantially. There are also non metric assessments of the economy that are negative. If one asks questions like: Are you more able or less able to buy the specific goods and services you want now in 2024 than before the pandemic in 2020? That answer can be no, at the same time one evaluates one’s self as better off. and that single question informs one’s opinion of the economics. Eg. If a family can’t get childcare and they could four years they’ll say the economy is worse off even if they are otherwise better. This is something the bifurcated pricing hits too. It restricts purchase of some goods to sales periods for price sensitive consumers. The metrics don’t catch that.
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Apr 20, 2024 17:50
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Lockback posted:I'm picking this out but this sentiment is up there with "kids never have been so disrespectful" as far as things people have said for time immemorial. There's TV shows from the 50s where people say things aren't as good as they were and I definitely remember boomers in the 90s telling me businesses can't make money anymore because of Clinton. People will always think their businesses should be doing better if only it weren't because of <external factor>. Right like I do not doubt my friend when they tell me the bare facts that they previously sold x and now they're selling (much less sum) y, but yea there can be a variety of explanations for that beyond their pet theory that no one has money. (eg. consumer trends changing) Additionally it's entirely possible for low income persons to be achieving significant wage gains and be doing better than ever before AND for this to have absolutely zero impact on my friend's business, if for example my friend's business is oriented toward higher income people who for some reason have shifted spending around for some reason. For example low income persons could be spending more on better quality more expensive food at the grocery store than ever before but not feeling so flush with cash that they'd go to restaurants, and so yea it seems possible to see both increases in people's discretionary spending and businesses struggling at the same time. Seems to me like the strongest headwinds are against upper middle class people right now, as interest rates spike, borrowing become dramatically more expensive, and severe tech layoffs have put a lid on wage growth. Especially true in Canada where variable rate mortgages are relatively popular and people would have felt higher rates instantly.
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Apr 20, 2024 18:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:If the economy is doing great but only a fraction at the top (even if it's a relatively large fraction like the upper quartile - you don't really have to just be talking about the 1% here) then yeah, a poo poo ton of people are going to look at things like rising prices of daily goods and their stagnating wage and not really feel like the economy is going great. Wall Street doing great doesn't matter if you don't have any investments. However, this is probably the first economic expansion in my life where income gains are accruing more to the lower-wage workers than the higher:  (Note, these are inflation-adjusted, so the guys at the top aren't getting pay cuts, they're just not necessarily keeping up with inflation.) Anecdotally at least this makes sense. I know some people who went from minimum wage plus a bit pre-pandemic to 2-3 times that now. And honestly I agree with the guy up thread that you shouldn't watch what people say, but what they do. Revealed preference shows that people have a lot of money, and they're very happy spending it.
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Apr 20, 2024 21:21
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I still want to see the median version of this data:Agronox posted:I do have to stop you right there. People have shitloads of money. Barring the pandemic stimuli it's never been higher!
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Apr 20, 2024 21:30
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Ditocoaf posted:I still want to see the median version of this data: my dude people are just googling FRED series, you could contribute and search too. here's Real Median Personal Income in the United States (MEPAINUSA672N) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N it's annual, and only up to 2022, and not 'disposable' income. but it also shows a large gain in real median personal $$ from the 1990's or 2000's, or 2010's
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Apr 20, 2024 21:37
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That chart Agronox posted is also telling in that "top fifth" includes not just the top 10% of americans who own 74% of all the money, but also the next tenth down. That second decile is a poo poo ton of upper middle class white collar workers, and those are the people who vote the most and often the people who have the most influence on the national narrative. Ditocoaf posted:I still want to see the median version of this data: Here's the full range of personal income data that FRED has: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/110 I don't quickly see what you want there, but I did find this USA Today article: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll/average-salary-us/ While the language in the text is usually "average" which I take to mean the mean, it does have some state-by-state charts of median wages with year over year changes as of 2023:  and the article also gives us year-over-year median salary nationally by gender:  And this text: quote:U.S. wage growth vs inflation It is a very well-sourced article and I'm reasonably confident that this confirms that yes, actually, at least in 2023, median wages have risen slightly faster than inflation nationally.
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Apr 20, 2024 21:42
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Leperflesh posted:That chart Agronox posted is also telling in that "top fifth" includes not just the top 10% of americans who own 74% of all the money, but also the next tenth down. That second decile is a poo poo ton of upper middle class white collar workers, and those are the people who vote the most and often the people who have the most influence on the national narrative. And none of them consider themselves upper class/upper 20%. They all think they're middle-middle class or even below median.
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Apr 20, 2024 22:12
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Lockback posted:And none of them consider themselves upper class/upper 20%. They all think they're middle-middle class or even below median. It’s more complicated when you zoom back to household and then contextualize in region. One can be near that top decile nationally as an individual say 11th to 15th%, then only in top 25% by household nationally if only one person works and then near or just at median household in a particular locations (eg. NYC, SFO, SEA).
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Apr 20, 2024 22:20
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Most of that second decile are still closer to working class than actual wealth (given they still have to work for a living) so frankly, if they want to ID as “not rich” that’s still class-consistent IMHO. A pity so many vote against their own interests as working class.
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Apr 20, 2024 23:54
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Agronox posted:However, this is probably the first economic expansion in my life where income gains are accruing more to the lower-wage workers than the higher: The paper this guy wrote is pretty good, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf Although I feel like perhaps he flips between quintiles, quartiles, and "top 10%, bottom 10%, and middle 80%" to tell a story. Could use a sensitivity analysis in there or something. I do think its probably the bourgeoisie taking it in the rear end lately, not really the "guys at the top" Here's some charts from that paper showing that "non-routine cognitive" workers are making *less* than they were 9 years ago (in real terms)  And sliced a bit differently, college educated workers are exactly back to 9 years ago. 
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Apr 21, 2024 00:18
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It's kinda weird picking that Jan 2020 spot for the starting point, because it makes it seem like some of those lines started out below the other lines when that's not actually what that means, necessarily.
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Apr 21, 2024 01:13
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Lockback posted:And none of them consider themselves upper class/upper 20%. They all think they're middle-middle class or even below median. There's no reason that someone in the upper 20% should consider that a meaningful identifier. Wealth and wages are not linear and expecting people to identify by their quintile is dumb. If you want to group people by similar situation you'd be much better doing it by 50%, next 25%, next 12.5%, next 6.25%, remaining 6.25%. Wouldn't be perfect but it'd equate a lot more better to actual economic effects of where you are.
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Apr 21, 2024 01:36
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Upper 20% sure seems like a significant enough identifier for the folks outside of it. We can get into ridiculous HENRY territory super-quick if we try and carve out thinner and thinner slices of the ultra-wealthy to define as "actually rich" (so that the goons making over six figgies can still identify themselves as proles).
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Apr 21, 2024 02:32
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"petite bourgeoisie" the term you're all looking for is "petite bourgeoisie"
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Apr 21, 2024 02:52
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mrmcd posted:"petite bourgeoisie" the term you're all looking for is "petite bourgeoisie" Given the modern diet, petite is a misnomer
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Apr 21, 2024 03:01
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LanceHunter posted:Upper 20% sure seems like a significant enough identifier for the folks outside of it. We can get into ridiculous HENRY territory super-quick if we try and carve out thinner and thinner slices of the ultra-wealthy to define as "actually rich" (so that the goons making over six figgies can still identify themselves as proles). You could make a similar argument about the second from the top quintile. Still doing a lot better than the other 3; still need to work for a living. Top 20% is right about where you hit mean wealth so everybody would have what people have at that break point if we all had the same. Leviathan Song fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Apr 21, 2024 |
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Apr 21, 2024 03:17
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A lot of people keep going on about how 'Everyone's going so well but they just have bad vibes about the economy!' but I'm pretty sure you can square that circle with how even people who have relative financial stability now are well aware they are one bad day away from losing it permanently. One medical bill, their landlord deciding to sell, car accident or natural disaster and their savings and security are gone. On Average, us poor folk and the billionaires are doing fine and if you don’t believe me I’ll bury you in 20 graphs from the Cato institute.
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Apr 21, 2024 15:57
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https://thehill.com/business/4615452-ftc-votes-to-ban-non-compete-agreements/ Non competes might be dead/might be dead soon
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Apr 23, 2024 22:44
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Hadlock posted:https://thehill.com/business/4615452-ftc-votes-to-ban-non-compete-agreements/ Headhunting/recruiting (especially in sectors like finance) is about to start getting real loving spicy.
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Apr 23, 2024 23:08
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