9 ms·

Advocating for an increase in foreclosures (increase the homeless population) and an increase in “acquired immunity” (read: let COVID run rampant and employ who

Advocating for an increase in foreclosures (increase the homeless population) and an increase in “acquired immunity” (read: let COVID run rampant and employ whoever survives) is incredibly ghoulish. It’s made even more shameful by its casual tone and tongue in cheek decades-old pop culture title. This article openly and unequivocally advocates for human misery and death in order to avoid upward pressure on wages.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
He's an analyst trying to reason about the near term future of the global economy, backing up his arguments with data. That's his job. Your ascribing malice and ill will to observations of someone who's not making decisions is a little bit silly.
- newbie789 5y ago
  If my job were to be to subtract all traces of humanity from language about things that directly affect countless people, I’d consider that to be ghoulish even though I was receiving a paycheck. The idea that my pointing out that something somebody said was distasteful is “a little bit silly” on the grounds that the author was paid to write those words seems… ghoulish?
  - xfhgjxcfgh 5y ago
    You might want to avoid medical textbooks.
    - newbie789 5y ago
      I’ve never read a JP Morgan medical text book, but that’s a salient point.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    How is not foreclosing on seriously delinquent US homeowners and letting people go about their lives and jobs (aka COVID run rampant) in the US any worse than not building housing for homeless people in Mexico and India and not making it a priority to vaccinate the entire global population on our own dime? Why is it so evil to not give thousands of dollars to US people - but it's fine to do to non US people?
    - newbie789 5y ago
      What? Edit: I will clarify that I’ve obviously not brought up other countries covid responses. I’m literally asking why this completely new equivocation could possibly deserve my response. It’s a confusing question to me, so I’ll clarify: I do not care for this thought experiment. I did not solicit it nor will I help you out with your unrelated rhetoric.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    Sounds like you're just addicted to excessive political correctness and are shocked when it's absent from a report that has no place for it. The author's job is not to express moral stances that you agree with, but to provide accurate fact based estimates without ceremony, which they do well here.
    - newbie789 5y ago
      This is a fascinating opinion that I’ve seen various forms of. I suppose it is objectively a fact that the author believes that increasing the supply of homeless people and allowing for the spread of a pandemic will help increase financial returns for some stakeholders. Stating the ” fact“ that one believes that human life and dignity should rightly be traded for cash does not make it an objective statement that’s somehow elevated above having an obvious moral stance. Does the author have a crystal ball that shows various timelines, and he’s objectively reporting exactly what is shown? Or is this a human person with an opinion on the future from a specific viewpoint that’s necessarily influenced by his worldview?
      - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
        > Stating the "fact" that one believes that human life and dignity should rightly be traded for cash does not make it an objective statement that’s somehow elevated above having an obvious moral stance. The author is not advocating for what should be done. He's describing what he expects to happen, based on what X policy changes will affect Y result.
        newbie789 5y ago
        You’re of the opinion that the author does have a crystal ball and is objectively relating what can be known about the future(s)? And he’s doing so in such a careful manner that he’s painstakingly taken immense care to ensure that his musings are not interpreted as prescriptive? That’s not my interpretation
        jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  - kristjansson 5y ago
    I have trouble understanding what you'd prefer. Should this analysis be more concerned with (non-financial) human impacts? More concerned with impacts on the most affected/least privileged? Should it have been written by someone else? Should it not have been written at all? Should there be no demand for it?
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  He's just following orders!
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  You think a JPMorgan analyst writing a report saying foreclosures are good for the economy doesn't have mal intent? This is like the purdue memo that says oxycodone isn't addictive.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    On one hand, yes you are right. There is consolidation bonzanza waiting to happen in housing, which honestly I am not even mad about because homeownership is a disgraceful sham and national institutional investors might be less NIMBY. On the other hand, keep in mind that kneecapping demand is orthodox macroeconomics since the 1970s for very stupid reasons. Finance people are pretty good at unlearning stupid ivory tower econ, cause stuff like "flows before pros" vs "the market efficiently allocates goods" is their day job, but sometimes it's hard to let old habits die out. (And the textbook stuff is a nice salve for feeling better about the impacts of the job, too.) See https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/inflation-expectations/ https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/inflation-expe... for a sketch of how normal macro is bullshit. If I sound too conspiratorial, here is https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021062pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021062pap..., a paper from a well-credentialed macroeconomicist at the fed whose sick of the bullshit. There's been good empirical work for years, and now the theory damn is finally breaking. Now, to sound much more conspiratorial after all, you can also read a prediction of the trend until from...1943. https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf Rock-bottom interest rates, UBI vs jobs guarantee, a breakdown of the full employment consensus (as occurred in the 1970s), it's all there.
    - estaseuropano 5y ago
      Home ownership used to be one of the few accessible investments that directly benefit less well off people. Rather than throw rent money in a black hole they build equity. How is that a sham?
      - californical 5y ago
        Housing cannot by definition be a good investment, without becoming gradually more scarce and unaffordable in the future. Keeping housing affordable means that it should grow with inflation, approximately. A good investment should outpace inflation.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  It's bad on descriptive grounds. There is no "wage price" spiral going on. Labor is weak no it's not the 1970s. There is simply supply bottlenecks, or rather: increased demand is auditing our practices and finding the weakpoints we already had. This is a good thing. (Unless you are a lazy capitalist that just wants to maximize your effort/investment to profit ratio.) We should continue to hold up demand until the bottle necks are fixed. (This is not a "beatings will continue until moral improves" situation.) We should be thankful increased demand as clarified what investments are needed. No surprise, it's unsexy things like 200m fabs not whatever trendy shit gets the money in the asset bubble we've had the last decade. If we do anything beyond prop up demand and enacting environmental regulation, it should be puncturing the stupid asset bubble like China is doing with real estate. Getting all that crypto money to seek returns elsewhere would be a good thing.
- paganel 5y ago
  > global economy, backing up his arguments with data. That's his job. Your ascribing malice Only thinking about the economy while ignoring its societal by-effects is malicious by definition, unfortunately there's no need to "ascribe" anything. Time and again people tend to forget this. Related to this I highly recommend Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation" [1] which sort of addressed this phenomenon back in the 1940s: > On a broader theoretical level, the Great Transformation argues that markets can not solely be understood through economic theory. Rather, markets are embedded in social and political logics, which makes it necessary for economic analysts to take into account politics when trying to understand the economy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book...
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    What is the definition of maliciousness that you are thinking of?
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I would not ascribe malice to these people but cold heartedness and lack of empathy. One common pattern is that they usually advocate tough measures for others but not for their own class. In 2008 all financial guys suddenly told us that they need bailouts when for decades they advocated for large scale layoffs, reduction of social systems, keeping wages low and other stuff because it was “creative destruction”. But when this destruction reached themselves they suddenly needed bailouts and of course we were told it would have been immoral to take away their million dollar bonuses. A lot of these analysts are psychopaths who are capable of only looking out for themselves.
lmm 5y ago
You don't see the houses that aren't built, or the lives that aren't lived. This guy isn't advocating for an increase in net human misery, he's advocating for dropping our crazy societal focus on the misery we can see (and imagining that wage increases would simply materialize from nowhere is the height of that) that ultimately makes us all worse off.
- newbie789 5y ago
  >You don't see the houses that aren't built, or the lives that aren't lived. You see houses that don’t exist and lifetimes that aren’t lived? That’s amazing. I personally don’t think “misery” falls into the category of “crazy societal focus”.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    It sounds like you’re trolling, but assuming not, the houses that doesn’t exist is a reference to underdeveloped housing, which has the effect of driving up rents or driving people to live in less desirable areas. Less desirable areas doesn’t mean what you might imagine (less fun), it means worse schools, worse jobs, and so on, and at least for that person. That all has societal effects including impoverishment and shorter healthy lifespans.
    - estaseuropano 5y ago
      Please do look at ypur own argument and think it through in practical terms. One has to be a blind free market believer to think that higher foreclosures decrease suffering. Yes market forces may drive more houses to be built, but that means years on the street for some poor soul. In addition.rents have already risen massively pre-covid, so likely lack of housing is not the factor - lack of affordable housing is the issue. To accuse another of trolling just because you are unable to think beyond the abstract is pretty childish.
      - californical 5y ago
        Why would rents rise if there’s nobody to pay the higher rent? Rent has been increasing because there is a bidding war among potential renters. Lack of housing in general is what causes a lack of affordable housing.
saxonww 5y ago
Where did he advocate for an increase in foreclosures or acquired immunity? I didn't read either of these things in the transcript, and rereading doesn't seem to hint at it, either (to me).
- newbie789 5y ago
  I’d suggest searching the terms “foreclosure” and “acquired immunity” in the text. If you find it to be up for interpretation, I’d love to see your take.
  - chrisjarvis 5y ago
    >Even so, given the high degree of Delta variant contagiousness, a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity should drive down pandemic measures substantially by November. I didnt find this distasteful.
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    I see lots of text describing trends and making predictions, but not any text about whether those trends are good or bad (at least in the moral sense)
  - saxonww 5y ago
    OK. I read the entire article, so I was able to see those terms used in context, which I think is key to understanding what the author is trying to say. The discussion around acquired immunity also includes vaccinations, as in "...will require increased global vaccination and acquired immunity" in the very first sentence, and "...a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity" later in the section discussing COVID. Vaccination was mentioned first both times. I am not sure what you're seeing here, but I am reading an acknowledgement that some people will not get vaccinated, not advocacy for non-vaccination or anything like that. The discussion around mortgage foreclosures is a little less clear cut, to me, because it's commentary on data that may not show the whole story, and it assumes a familiarity with the subject that I don't have. I still didn't read anything close to "we must foreclose on mortgages and increase the homeless population," which I think is basically your take. Instead, I read an analyst commenting on data that appears to show the labor pool being impacted by ongoing COVID-relief policies, noting that COVID concerns may be trending down (again based on data), and then suggesting that we may need to walk back the relief policies to help address the labor shortage.
CivBase 5y ago
> Advocating for [...] an increase in “acquired immunity” (read: let COVID run rampant and employ whoever survives) is incredibly ghoulish. He doesn't advocate for that anywhere. He only mentions that it is playing a part, in adition to vaccinations, in building up global immunity. This is a simple truth. He does not glorify it or advocate for it.
- newbie789 5y ago
  I interpreted the words “less… concern about COVID” as being serious. It’s entirely possible that those words were incorporated as some sort of joke or gesture though, I suppose
  - CivBase 5y ago
    Here's the full quote.: > less community spread and concern about COVID My more charitable interpretation was that less community spread would result in less concern.
intended 5y ago
Are you making an issue of not being happy with the tone, into one of implied motives. I read those sections, I've reproduced them below as well, and I can't find any advocacy there. Matter of fact, the use of emotional terms tends to be meagre in such articles - however they use the term Horrific to describe the mortality rate of COVID in America. ----------- The federal foreclosure moratorium officially ended on July 31. However, we don’t anticipate a sharp rise in new foreclosure filings due to a CFPB rule issued in June that established procedural safeguards that have to be met before foreclosures can begin (hurdles are hard to meet and include provisions that a property has to be abandoned, or that the servicer hasn’t heard from the borrower for an extended period). The new rule expires in December 2021, after which normal foreclosure patterns might resume. Foreclosures fell close to zero in the US once the moratorium was put in place. The second chart shows the gap between the MBA definition of delinquency which defines deferred payments as delinquent, and the Fed definition which does not. See appendix for a discussion of homeowner vs renter treatment. As for COVID, concerns may dissipate in the next few months. As we explained on our August webcast, this fall was going to be a very bad one in the US. Even so, given the high degree of Delta variant contagiousness, a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity should drive down pandemic measures substantially by November. The latest infection and hospitalization data from Hotspot states, horrific as they are (i.e., the world’s highest reported mortality rate) are beginning to roll over; mortality should follow. For anyone that disbelieves COVID mortality data, see the sixth chart below: there has been another surge in mortality from all causes in the US relative to seasonal trends. If you can think of another reason for this other than COVID, please let me know. The biggest risk to this outlook is fading immunity of vaccinated people; we will know over the next couple of months how this plays out in the US. Booster shots in Israel appear to drive antibody levels up substantially, and also result in Pfizer efficacy vs severe infection that rises above 90% again.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Comments like this remind me that people map their own mental model of the world onto text-based communication when interpreting other peoples meaning or intent. I didn’t read it at all like this.
wonderwonder 5y ago
This is interpretation is very much a stretch. He is simply stating a fact. To get the supply chain fixed you need to reduce the spread of covid, only way to do that is with... " increased global vaccination and acquired immunity". If you are dead, you don't really fall under the "acquired immunity" umbrella he is calling for, you are just dead. More dead people would lead to a reduction in labor and put more strain on the supply chain which is the opposite of what the author wants. The world has to continue to run and it needs to run on hard data, not on messages drafted to support feeling's. Covid was and is rough on everyone but people running businesses need to be able to make predictions and those predictions must be based on unvarnished facts.
mkr-hn 5y ago
There was probably a way to bring this point up without alienating everyone. It is ghoulish if your framing is accurate, but now everyone's focused on you rather than the point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
stonemetal12 5y ago
Foreclosures are a necessary evil. Without the ability to foreclose how do you prevent people from taking loans in bad faith? The only way would be to not give loans in the first place.
asoneth 5y ago
The alternative is to maintain the foreclosure moratorium and lockdowns indefinitely, correct? This will eventually have the long-term result of causing more human misery. Whether we are actually reaching that tipping point as the author claims is a great question that deserves honest debate. But tarring one option as ghoulish in order to shut down debate makes it harder to have this discussion. Objecting to the lesser of two evils because it is still evil doesn't result in better outcomes.

kspacewalk2 5y ago

He's an analyst trying to reason about the near term future of the global economy, backing up his arguments with data. That's his job. Your ascribing malice and ill will to observations of someone who's not making decisions is a little bit silly.

newbie789 5y ago
If my job were to be to subtract all traces of humanity from language about things that directly affect countless people, I’d consider that to be ghoulish even though I was receiving a paycheck. The idea that my pointing out that something somebody said was distasteful is “a little bit silly” on the grounds that the author was paid to write those words seems… ghoulish?
- xfhgjxcfgh 5y ago
  You might want to avoid medical textbooks.
  - newbie789 5y ago
    I’ve never read a JP Morgan medical text book, but that’s a salient point.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  How is not foreclosing on seriously delinquent US homeowners and letting people go about their lives and jobs (aka COVID run rampant) in the US any worse than not building housing for homeless people in Mexico and India and not making it a priority to vaccinate the entire global population on our own dime? Why is it so evil to not give thousands of dollars to US people - but it's fine to do to non US people?
  - newbie789 5y ago
    What? Edit: I will clarify that I’ve obviously not brought up other countries covid responses. I’m literally asking why this completely new equivocation could possibly deserve my response. It’s a confusing question to me, so I’ll clarify: I do not care for this thought experiment. I did not solicit it nor will I help you out with your unrelated rhetoric.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Sounds like you're just addicted to excessive political correctness and are shocked when it's absent from a report that has no place for it. The author's job is not to express moral stances that you agree with, but to provide accurate fact based estimates without ceremony, which they do well here.
  - newbie789 5y ago
    This is a fascinating opinion that I’ve seen various forms of. I suppose it is objectively a fact that the author believes that increasing the supply of homeless people and allowing for the spread of a pandemic will help increase financial returns for some stakeholders. Stating the ” fact“ that one believes that human life and dignity should rightly be traded for cash does not make it an objective statement that’s somehow elevated above having an obvious moral stance. Does the author have a crystal ball that shows various timelines, and he’s objectively reporting exactly what is shown? Or is this a human person with an opinion on the future from a specific viewpoint that’s necessarily influenced by his worldview?
    - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
      > Stating the "fact" that one believes that human life and dignity should rightly be traded for cash does not make it an objective statement that’s somehow elevated above having an obvious moral stance. The author is not advocating for what should be done. He's describing what he expects to happen, based on what X policy changes will affect Y result.
      - newbie789 5y ago
        You’re of the opinion that the author does have a crystal ball and is objectively relating what can be known about the future(s)? And he’s doing so in such a careful manner that he’s painstakingly taken immense care to ensure that his musings are not interpreted as prescriptive? That’s not my interpretation
        jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
- kristjansson 5y ago
  I have trouble understanding what you'd prefer. Should this analysis be more concerned with (non-financial) human impacts? More concerned with impacts on the most affected/least privileged? Should it have been written by someone else? Should it not have been written at all? Should there be no demand for it?
d3nj4l 5y ago
He's just following orders!
colinmhayes 5y ago
You think a JPMorgan analyst writing a report saying foreclosures are good for the economy doesn't have mal intent? This is like the purdue memo that says oxycodone isn't addictive.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  On one hand, yes you are right. There is consolidation bonzanza waiting to happen in housing, which honestly I am not even mad about because homeownership is a disgraceful sham and national institutional investors might be less NIMBY. On the other hand, keep in mind that kneecapping demand is orthodox macroeconomics since the 1970s for very stupid reasons. Finance people are pretty good at unlearning stupid ivory tower econ, cause stuff like "flows before pros" vs "the market efficiently allocates goods" is their day job, but sometimes it's hard to let old habits die out. (And the textbook stuff is a nice salve for feeling better about the impacts of the job, too.) See https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/inflation-expectations/ https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/inflation-expe... for a sketch of how normal macro is bullshit. If I sound too conspiratorial, here is https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021062pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021062pap..., a paper from a well-credentialed macroeconomicist at the fed whose sick of the bullshit. There's been good empirical work for years, and now the theory damn is finally breaking. Now, to sound much more conspiratorial after all, you can also read a prediction of the trend until from...1943. https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf Rock-bottom interest rates, UBI vs jobs guarantee, a breakdown of the full employment consensus (as occurred in the 1970s), it's all there.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Home ownership used to be one of the few accessible investments that directly benefit less well off people. Rather than throw rent money in a black hole they build equity. How is that a sham?
    - californical 5y ago
      Housing cannot by definition be a good investment, without becoming gradually more scarce and unaffordable in the future. Keeping housing affordable means that it should grow with inflation, approximately. A good investment should outpace inflation.
Ericson2314 5y ago
It's bad on descriptive grounds. There is no "wage price" spiral going on. Labor is weak no it's not the 1970s. There is simply supply bottlenecks, or rather: increased demand is auditing our practices and finding the weakpoints we already had. This is a good thing. (Unless you are a lazy capitalist that just wants to maximize your effort/investment to profit ratio.) We should continue to hold up demand until the bottle necks are fixed. (This is not a "beatings will continue until moral improves" situation.) We should be thankful increased demand as clarified what investments are needed. No surprise, it's unsexy things like 200m fabs not whatever trendy shit gets the money in the asset bubble we've had the last decade. If we do anything beyond prop up demand and enacting environmental regulation, it should be puncturing the stupid asset bubble like China is doing with real estate. Getting all that crypto money to seek returns elsewhere would be a good thing.
paganel 5y ago
> global economy, backing up his arguments with data. That's his job. Your ascribing malice Only thinking about the economy while ignoring its societal by-effects is malicious by definition, unfortunately there's no need to "ascribe" anything. Time and again people tend to forget this. Related to this I highly recommend Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation" [1] which sort of addressed this phenomenon back in the 1940s: > On a broader theoretical level, the Great Transformation argues that markets can not solely be understood through economic theory. Rather, markets are embedded in social and political logics, which makes it necessary for economic analysts to take into account politics when trying to understand the economy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book...
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  What is the definition of maliciousness that you are thinking of?
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I would not ascribe malice to these people but cold heartedness and lack of empathy. One common pattern is that they usually advocate tough measures for others but not for their own class. In 2008 all financial guys suddenly told us that they need bailouts when for decades they advocated for large scale layoffs, reduction of social systems, keeping wages low and other stuff because it was “creative destruction”. But when this destruction reached themselves they suddenly needed bailouts and of course we were told it would have been immoral to take away their million dollar bonuses. A lot of these analysts are psychopaths who are capable of only looking out for themselves.

lmm 5y ago

You don't see the houses that aren't built, or the lives that aren't lived. This guy isn't advocating for an increase in net human misery, he's advocating for dropping our crazy societal focus on the misery we can see (and imagining that wage increases would simply materialize from nowhere is the height of that) that ultimately makes us all worse off.

newbie789 5y ago
>You don't see the houses that aren't built, or the lives that aren't lived. You see houses that don’t exist and lifetimes that aren’t lived? That’s amazing. I personally don’t think “misery” falls into the category of “crazy societal focus”.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  It sounds like you’re trolling, but assuming not, the houses that doesn’t exist is a reference to underdeveloped housing, which has the effect of driving up rents or driving people to live in less desirable areas. Less desirable areas doesn’t mean what you might imagine (less fun), it means worse schools, worse jobs, and so on, and at least for that person. That all has societal effects including impoverishment and shorter healthy lifespans.
  - estaseuropano 5y ago
    Please do look at ypur own argument and think it through in practical terms. One has to be a blind free market believer to think that higher foreclosures decrease suffering. Yes market forces may drive more houses to be built, but that means years on the street for some poor soul. In addition.rents have already risen massively pre-covid, so likely lack of housing is not the factor - lack of affordable housing is the issue. To accuse another of trolling just because you are unable to think beyond the abstract is pretty childish.
    - californical 5y ago
      Why would rents rise if there’s nobody to pay the higher rent? Rent has been increasing because there is a bidding war among potential renters. Lack of housing in general is what causes a lack of affordable housing.

saxonww 5y ago

Where did he advocate for an increase in foreclosures or acquired immunity? I didn't read either of these things in the transcript, and rereading doesn't seem to hint at it, either (to me).

newbie789 5y ago
I’d suggest searching the terms “foreclosure” and “acquired immunity” in the text. If you find it to be up for interpretation, I’d love to see your take.
- chrisjarvis 5y ago
  >Even so, given the high degree of Delta variant contagiousness, a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity should drive down pandemic measures substantially by November. I didnt find this distasteful.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  I see lots of text describing trends and making predictions, but not any text about whether those trends are good or bad (at least in the moral sense)
- saxonww 5y ago
  OK. I read the entire article, so I was able to see those terms used in context, which I think is key to understanding what the author is trying to say. The discussion around acquired immunity also includes vaccinations, as in "...will require increased global vaccination and acquired immunity" in the very first sentence, and "...a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity" later in the section discussing COVID. Vaccination was mentioned first both times. I am not sure what you're seeing here, but I am reading an acknowledgement that some people will not get vaccinated, not advocacy for non-vaccination or anything like that. The discussion around mortgage foreclosures is a little less clear cut, to me, because it's commentary on data that may not show the whole story, and it assumes a familiarity with the subject that I don't have. I still didn't read anything close to "we must foreclose on mortgages and increase the homeless population," which I think is basically your take. Instead, I read an analyst commenting on data that appears to show the labor pool being impacted by ongoing COVID-relief policies, noting that COVID concerns may be trending down (again based on data), and then suggesting that we may need to walk back the relief policies to help address the labor shortage.

CivBase 5y ago

> Advocating for [...] an increase in “acquired immunity” (read: let COVID run rampant and employ whoever survives) is incredibly ghoulish. He doesn't advocate for that anywhere. He only mentions that it is playing a part, in adition to vaccinations, in building up global immunity. This is a simple truth. He does not glorify it or advocate for it.

newbie789 5y ago
I interpreted the words “less… concern about COVID” as being serious. It’s entirely possible that those words were incorporated as some sort of joke or gesture though, I suppose
- CivBase 5y ago
  Here's the full quote.: > less community spread and concern about COVID My more charitable interpretation was that less community spread would result in less concern.

intended 5y ago

Are you making an issue of not being happy with the tone, into one of implied motives. I read those sections, I've reproduced them below as well, and I can't find any advocacy there. Matter of fact, the use of emotional terms tends to be meagre in such articles - however they use the term Horrific to describe the mortality rate of COVID in America. ----------- The federal foreclosure moratorium officially ended on July 31. However, we don’t anticipate a sharp rise in new foreclosure filings due to a CFPB rule issued in June that established procedural safeguards that have to be met before foreclosures can begin (hurdles are hard to meet and include provisions that a property has to be abandoned, or that the servicer hasn’t heard from the borrower for an extended period). The new rule expires in December 2021, after which normal foreclosure patterns might resume. Foreclosures fell close to zero in the US once the moratorium was put in place. The second chart shows the gap between the MBA definition of delinquency which defines deferred payments as delinquent, and the Fed definition which does not. See appendix for a discussion of homeowner vs renter treatment. As for COVID, concerns may dissipate in the next few months. As we explained on our August webcast, this fall was going to be a very bad one in the US. Even so, given the high degree of Delta variant contagiousness, a combination of vaccination and acquired immunity should drive down pandemic measures substantially by November. The latest infection and hospitalization data from Hotspot states, horrific as they are (i.e., the world’s highest reported mortality rate) are beginning to roll over; mortality should follow. For anyone that disbelieves COVID mortality data, see the sixth chart below: there has been another surge in mortality from all causes in the US relative to seasonal trends. If you can think of another reason for this other than COVID, please let me know. The biggest risk to this outlook is fading immunity of vaccinated people; we will know over the next couple of months how this plays out in the US. Booster shots in Israel appear to drive antibody levels up substantially, and also result in Pfizer efficacy vs severe infection that rises above 90% again.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Comments like this remind me that people map their own mental model of the world onto text-based communication when interpreting other peoples meaning or intent. I didn’t read it at all like this.

wonderwonder 5y ago

This is interpretation is very much a stretch. He is simply stating a fact. To get the supply chain fixed you need to reduce the spread of covid, only way to do that is with... " increased global vaccination and acquired immunity". If you are dead, you don't really fall under the "acquired immunity" umbrella he is calling for, you are just dead. More dead people would lead to a reduction in labor and put more strain on the supply chain which is the opposite of what the author wants. The world has to continue to run and it needs to run on hard data, not on messages drafted to support feeling's. Covid was and is rough on everyone but people running businesses need to be able to make predictions and those predictions must be based on unvarnished facts.

mkr-hn 5y ago

There was probably a way to bring this point up without alienating everyone. It is ghoulish if your framing is accurate, but now everyone's focused on you rather than the point.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

stonemetal12 5y ago

Foreclosures are a necessary evil. Without the ability to foreclose how do you prevent people from taking loans in bad faith? The only way would be to not give loans in the first place.

asoneth 5y ago

The alternative is to maintain the foreclosure moratorium and lockdowns indefinitely, correct? This will eventually have the long-term result of causing more human misery. Whether we are actually reaching that tipping point as the author claims is a great question that deserves honest debate. But tarring one option as ghoulish in order to shut down debate makes it harder to have this discussion. Objecting to the lesser of two evils because it is still evil doesn't result in better outcomes.