Just how F*cked is our economy and what comes next?

I realize that posting this in the political forum turns it into an opportunity to find politicians to blame for everything. And such a discussion can go on for a very long time while producing nothing of value and presenting no solutions.

The thing is, regardless of who can be selected as the cause, there's a real possibility that a depression, a really long one, is on the horizon. My biggest concern is not the food supply, but the rest of our infrastructure. If utilities fail, chaos will ensue. And like it or not, we still have power plants burning a mile long train of coal daily. Without them, we're in the dark in a big way.

This is also a prime event for seizing control from the people and turning them all into serfs. (A reminder to stock up on aluminum foil).

I heard all kinds of stories about the "Great" Depression from my grandparents. One described having only cornbread and buttermilk for breakfast and lunch. In the 60s my parents split and I often had rice and toast for dinner, so I know a little about how it feels to be hungry.

My concern with the economy is that it relies on a precarious balance as it is. Thanks to "Just in Time" logistics we have a system that can collapse substantially in a matter of weeks. And that method of supply was brought about because of inventory taxes. Otherwise businesses might be inclined to maintain more product locally as opposed to a line entry on a spreadsheet. Instead they do everything they can to keep the stockroom as empty as possible, particularly near the end of their fiscal year.

Maybe Corona has been a wake up call for enough people to mitigate the worst possibilities. But I'm more inclined to think that the wealthy will continue looking out for number 1 and are already walling themselves away from the rest of us. We'll be left with Hoover sandwiches, Hoover blankets and Hoover towns.

 

Both answers to the questions in the thread title are uncertain atm.

 

I read that this will be 4 times worse than the financial catastrophe of 2008. Don't know what they are measuring x4, but still... This is going to be pretty awful. Everyone will lose their job, the stimulus money will fail to stimulate the economy, and people will lose their homes as banks foreclose on their mortgage and landlords evict everyone after the shutdown ends. I feel like it's going to be really bad.

 

people are gonna die, Buck. I can't let that happen

 

Climate change, pollution, bat viruses....

These are all effects, the underlying cause is the human population

If there was only 1 billion people on the planet, what the human population was around 1800, all those problems would disappear overnight, but that's the long term



In the short term, the longer everyone keeps their borders closed. The more likely some regions will cut themselves off from the rest of the world

If the NAFTA countries just decide fuck everyone else, we aren't paying back your debt, we don't really need you for anything, Mexico is our new China....then what happens

There are two quick and easy ways out of the financial mess, either every country gets together and just wipes each others debt...which they are not going to be able to agree on..or they just cut themselves off from countries they owe most of their debt to

Or, the second way is internally, to eat the rich, and after the top 1%, the next rung on the ladder is to raid all the superannuation and assets of all the wealthy boomers

Everyone at the moment seems to think their governments have a bottomless pit of money and those governments are impervious to being over run

Somewhere like the Phillipines, they are only one bullet away from being a military junta. Duterte is a boomer himself, have the military, made up of 20/30 somethings run around shoot mostly 20/30 somethings that are going to break containment ....to protect him...that's his plan?

 

Simple, it's the number of years Trump will have been in office!

 

small businesses will take the biggest hit. I have a friend who owns an Irish pub. He says he is not sure he will reopen.
If you regulate how many people can be in an establishment like this. . . . . well, people will not stand in line for a beer

 

I see them willing to do exactly that all over the place. They line up at ball games, grocery stores, liquor stores and keg parties.

The problem with a pub is operating costs creeping above revenue. I used to have a lot of clubs and liquor stores as clients and the array of successful ones is very interesting. You look at some and they're just a dirty hole in the wall with a pool table, but they're packed with people. Then you have these gleaming corporation-designed artificial "neighborhood" pub chains and they can't create a genuine regular customer base because the surrounding homes change hands every few years.

One of the reasons I got out of that sort of work was because the caliber of the managers I was encountering went down the toilet in only a few years. Where I had grown accustomed to people with hospitality management degrees, I was now dealing with a fast food shift manager who was handed the keys to a bistro. I went from getting checks early, to having to make a dozen or more collection calls a week, impinging on my ability to develop new business.

Regardless, people do wait in line for beer!

 

awful, that.

So, the economy is totally doomed. I don't know what we're supposed to do with it right now!

 

Oh I don't think it's doomed. But I do think people are going to be far more open to alternate economies. A lot of Americans just discovered the hard way how unprepared they are for governmental failures. And how vulnerable that makes us all.

 

His bar probably seats 75 people max. Would there be a time limit on how long you sit inside? A limit on alcohol?
Maybe you make an appointment, say 9-10.

 

Yea, that does make things weird. Think about how long restaurants have been seating diners in the same section as opposed to all over the restaurant. If you want a secluded table, they act like you're from Mars and some will say "That section's closed". This is another example of the caliber of people you have in hospitality these days. They cram everyone into the same section for the convenience of the servers and so the rest of the place doesn't have to be cleaned as often.

So now, they have to reverse this self-serving bullshit policy and spread everyone apart. As it is, when a restaurant is full, nobody else gets to come in, there's no place to sit. Same thing when you remove tables and chairs to create the distance needed for serving during an epidemic. I assume the servers will be wearing tyvek suits, masks and face shields, of course.

Everyone should walk through a tunnel of disinfectant mist on the way in. Bartenders should maintain a BAC of .05!!

 

I like this question. I've wondered about it for years. So many times we couldn't close the restaurant and start cleaning until the last guest left. And we'd have some stay until well beyond closing and the manager didn't do shit but make us wait.

I never understand people being that vacuous about the world around them. Do they really think the people working there are their servants? They sure seem to act like it. But I see this at lower restaurants as well. When I go to a drive through, I order from the menu. I don't ask to have it rearranged because I know that will only delay it and could lead to my ingesting disgruntled employee bodily matter. So I don't give people who work in hard, low-paying, dead-end jobs additional problems.

But some assholes want their Big Mac rearranged until it's a God damned filet mignon. And the line grinds to a crawl. Or you have the math-challenged who are placing and transacting 5 different orders in one trip. So many people just don't care how they impinge the lives of others. And so needlessly.

 

technically that already existed. my bartender friends say cutting people off is the hardest part of the job.

 

In California, talk is that the servers will be wearing masks, and gloves, and menus will be paper.

at one time, years ago, I admit to being the last customer standing. In regards to be treated like a servant, it's that way in retail. The bullshit line that the customer is always right.

I agree, one of my pet peeves. Hey moron, it's a fast food restaurant.

 

Someone for to vote for "grow lots of pot"

 

I know, but there has never been a time limit.

 

This is a fair example of the kinds of cascading failures I think we're going to see.
Beer may lose its fizz as CO2 supplies go flat during pandemic [Please don't whine because it's from Fox, it's not going to hurt you, I swear]

What's kind of depressing here is the way it exposes the fact that they have to add CO2 to beer because they ferment it at light speed and then heat pasteurize it so that it only just resembles beer, except for the missing bubbles (the whole point to Young Einstein, the Tasmanian). Aside from propelling keg beer to the tap, CO2 does not have any place being artificially injected into beer. It's a travesty (and a tangent, sorry).

Fuel prices will rise again of course. Demand will increase. But, refineries have been laying people off, so what are the chances they can restart and get to full production in any sort of reasonable time? We'll see choke points, like the diesel fuel shortage we had in Georgia many years ago when Sonny was governor. The problem was with a distribution point, and I think a ship was a issue as well. And it happened during a particularly time-sensitive harvest from Georgia's onion, orange, peach and blueberry industries across the state. So what did Sonny, friends to the farmers, do?

He shut down the schools in the whole state, for more than a week. So he and other millionaire farmers could get their crops to market. Compared to the Hai Karate virus, this was a blip. But for school kids it was a vacation, so malls did a little better. Think about how many people were directly affected by a short fuel interruption.

I've heard of the economy described as a long balloon. Squeeze it in on place it bulges in another. But I think it's a condom, and the wealthy live in the reservoir tip.

 

Do they live in the tip or are they all cunts using the condom to shield themselves from poor-people spooge?

 

If we must continue this metaphor, the wealthy are up in the tip. The rest of us are the dick, so the only payoff we get is what sticks to the sides as it's withdrawn. The wealthy get the condom and all the rest of the money shot.