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> The economic contraction was due to governments instructing people to shut their businesses down and simply lifting those was all that was necessary to revive

> The economic contraction was due to governments instructing people to shut their businesses down and simply lifting those was all that was necessary to revive the economy. Governments told people they couldn't go to work. Two thirds of the country live paycheck to paycheck. In order to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads many had to go deep into debt and/or eat into their savings which weren't always so great to start with since around 25% of Americans have no savings at all. Forcing a great number of people into huge amounts of debt and desperation was bound to slow spending long after the bars reopened, and to add to that you had many households where breadwinners were suddenly dead or unable to go back to work either due to illness or unexpected childcare expenses since schools weren't able to perform their role as babysitter while parents worked all day. Some financial support was (and still is) needed for families who suffered heavy economic losses because of the pandemic and the restrictions it necessitated. Consumer spending was doomed to suffer for a whole lot of Americans. Even after the restrictions were lifted it's pretty hard to stimulate consumer spending when people are trying to dig themselves out of a hole and avoid eviction. All of that was at least somewhat offset by the desperation of the wealthy to get back to spending on the goods and services they were denied while the nation was locked down though. People who were able to stay employed and had large sums of money in the bank throughout the pandemic were very quick to get back to spending. Unfortunately, most Americans didn't come out of the situation in such great shape. After all of the emotional trauma they were every bit as desperate for some familiar comforts and a return to normalcy but they were forced further into debt to get them.

inspector-g 4y ago
Then this leads me to wonder if interest rates are too coarse-grained for what would have helped folks the most. I don’t know what would have been a finer-grained approach, but universally lowering interest rates had a huge effect on other areas (like home purchases) which were not in dire straights like “keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads”
boc 4y ago
Totally agree. I think it's still worth reminding everyone that over a million Americans died from Covid-19 (and counting), and the response was way better than the response to the last major economic crisis. Overheating the economy vs starting a depression in the middle of a pandemic? I'll take the current course every time. Inflation isn't the end of the world, and benefits indebted actors (anybody with substantial fixed-rate debt).
- briandon 4y ago
  Deaths attributed to covid were almost entirely "with covid" and not "from covid". The average age of the fatalities was at or above the average age at which people ordinarily passed pre-covid and nearly all suffered from multiple serious comorbidities that would have been sufficient in themselves to precipitate one of any number of individual health crises that would have led to their passing. Much of the government response, particularly at the federal level, was aimed at terrorizing the public and, when they came online, coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The government also financially incentivized refusal to treat covid in its early stages (allowing the patients to either recover on their own or, for elderly and already chronically ill, to become sicker), place patients on ventilators, and prescribe dangerous experimental treatments like Remdesivir that contributed to the death tallies. The federal government's meddling in some states' distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments was especially pernicious. Lawsuits targeting hospitals, local and state governments, and the federal governments for their conduct (everything from propagandizing to causing or contributing to deaths as in the use of Remdesivir) during the pandemic are in process throughout the United States now.
  - electrondood 4y ago
    1.5m excess deaths in the US alone. "from COVID" or "with COVID," however you want to slice it. The obvious factor is the global pandemic from a novel airborne virus. The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - briandon 4y ago
      Setting the injections aside for a moment, let's consider other pandemic-era government actions, like the non-pharmaceutical interventions. None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid. Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses. And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours. And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case". During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction. I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.
parkingrift 4y ago
The personal savings rate and unemployment rate disagrees with your assertion. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PMSAVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PMSAVE The actual reality is that the vast majority of people kept working but didn’t have enough ways to spend their money. Then the Congress started mailing massive checks to people regardless of need and the Fed cut rates. Surprise surprise… people spent every last dollar they had saved and borrowed 7x their income. On houses. On new and used cars. On electronics. On home improvement. On anything and everything they could find. And that all caused inflation. Unemployment was transitory and mostly recovered by the end of 2020. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE And now we shall pay the price.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Unemployment was transitory and mostly recovered by the end of 2020. That's cold comfort to the majority of americans that don't have enough savings to last to "the end of 2020".
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    Majority? By the end of 2020 the unemployment rate had dropped to 7.5%. Evictions were illegal. Unemployment benefits were padded an extra $500 PER WEEK. Stimulus checks were sent. Almost no one was struggling to pay bills by the end of 2020. This is a made up sob story that didn't play out at all in reality.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/42-percent-of-americans-have-increased-their-credit-card-debt-during-covid-19.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/42-percent-of-americans-have... 10 million jobs were lost in the pandemic. Over 1/3 of US workers were forced out of their job. (https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/us-workers-changing-jobs-covid-pandemic-workforce/ https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/us-workers-changing-jobs-covi...). The jobs all come back now that things are reopened and people are starting to spend again, that was to be expected, but that doesn't mean people didn't struggle while they were unable to work and recovery takes time (https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/05/poll-49-of-americans-who-lost-pay-in-covid-pandemic-still-havent-recovered/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/05/poll-49-of-...). Stimulus money went mostly to help recover savings or pay off debt while lower income households depended on that money for essentials (https://abcnews.go.com/Business/majority-pandemic-stimulus-checks-savings-paying-off-debt/story?id=76944917 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/majority-pandemic-stimulus-c...) Wealthy people did alright during the pandemic because they couldn't spend the money they had. They had no choice but to save it and savings went up. Poor people were just plain screwed by the pandemic and are still recovering. In fact we haven't even seen the full fallout of that because evictions were delayed (not made illegal), and we still face a looming eviction/homelessness crisis which isn't what you'd expect if everyone was rolling in money thanks to the pandemic. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/07/us/evictions-crisis-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/07/us/evictions-crisis-us.ht...) In fact homelessness is already on the rise which disproves that practically no one is struggling to pay their bills. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/homelessness-surging-in-many-cities-in-amid-end-to-covid-assistance https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/homelessness-surging-in-...) How the pandemic played in out in reality was very different for the wealthy than it was for many many others.
voisin 4y ago
> since around 25% of Americans have no savings at all. Maybe this is the problem that should be tackled between recessions.
- vibrio 4y ago
  I’d also like that to be a different state , but how would the best way to tackle it?
  - voisin 4y ago
    The short answer is discipline, which at this point might need to be imposed by regulating debt to be more difficult to come by, or by forcing further savings via payroll deductions or something along those lines (like Singapore). If you want to build a financially resilient population it requires top down solutions - it won’t just arise.
    - vibrio 4y ago
      As is always the devil is in the details, but regulating debt to be more difficult to come by or forcing savings seems like it would be broadly politically unpopular and would likely have significant unintended economic consequences. This is surely a challenging problem.
themitigating 4y ago
Not everyone was forbidden to go to work and many who were switched to working from home.
adrr 4y ago
That’s why the feds backstopped unemployment and airdropped stimulus checks. Dropping the interest rate was unnecessary and caused more harm to vulnerable class than good by increasing inflation. This recession caused raising interest rate will wipe out the vunerable class once again while upper income classes won’t even notice except in their portfolios. We see this currently with luxury spending still elevated while other sectors are seeing softening demand.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > Dropping the interest rate was unnecessary and caused more harm to vulnerable class than good by increasing inflation. If the fed's interest rate shenanigans are to blame for inflation, why is it affecting every other country in the world too?
  - adrr 4y ago
    Because other national banks did the same thing. EG: National Bank of England dropped their rate to 0.1%
dandy23 4y ago
But we didn't need lower interest rates. Support for the poor or laid off, in terms of a check, yes.

inspector-g 4y ago

Then this leads me to wonder if interest rates are too coarse-grained for what would have helped folks the most. I don’t know what would have been a finer-grained approach, but universally lowering interest rates had a huge effect on other areas (like home purchases) which were not in dire straights like “keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads”

boc 4y ago

Totally agree. I think it's still worth reminding everyone that over a million Americans died from Covid-19 (and counting), and the response was way better than the response to the last major economic crisis. Overheating the economy vs starting a depression in the middle of a pandemic? I'll take the current course every time. Inflation isn't the end of the world, and benefits indebted actors (anybody with substantial fixed-rate debt).

briandon 4y ago
Deaths attributed to covid were almost entirely "with covid" and not "from covid". The average age of the fatalities was at or above the average age at which people ordinarily passed pre-covid and nearly all suffered from multiple serious comorbidities that would have been sufficient in themselves to precipitate one of any number of individual health crises that would have led to their passing. Much of the government response, particularly at the federal level, was aimed at terrorizing the public and, when they came online, coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The government also financially incentivized refusal to treat covid in its early stages (allowing the patients to either recover on their own or, for elderly and already chronically ill, to become sicker), place patients on ventilators, and prescribe dangerous experimental treatments like Remdesivir that contributed to the death tallies. The federal government's meddling in some states' distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments was especially pernicious. Lawsuits targeting hospitals, local and state governments, and the federal governments for their conduct (everything from propagandizing to causing or contributing to deaths as in the use of Remdesivir) during the pandemic are in process throughout the United States now.
- electrondood 4y ago
  1.5m excess deaths in the US alone. "from COVID" or "with COVID," however you want to slice it. The obvious factor is the global pandemic from a novel airborne virus. The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - briandon 4y ago
    Setting the injections aside for a moment, let's consider other pandemic-era government actions, like the non-pharmaceutical interventions. None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid. Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses. And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours. And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case". During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction. I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.

parkingrift 4y ago

The personal savings rate and unemployment rate disagrees with your assertion. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PMSAVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PMSAVE The actual reality is that the vast majority of people kept working but didn’t have enough ways to spend their money. Then the Congress started mailing massive checks to people regardless of need and the Fed cut rates. Surprise surprise… people spent every last dollar they had saved and borrowed 7x their income. On houses. On new and used cars. On electronics. On home improvement. On anything and everything they could find. And that all caused inflation. Unemployment was transitory and mostly recovered by the end of 2020. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE And now we shall pay the price.

gruez 4y ago
>Unemployment was transitory and mostly recovered by the end of 2020. That's cold comfort to the majority of americans that don't have enough savings to last to "the end of 2020".
- parkingrift 4y ago
  Majority? By the end of 2020 the unemployment rate had dropped to 7.5%. Evictions were illegal. Unemployment benefits were padded an extra $500 PER WEEK. Stimulus checks were sent. Almost no one was struggling to pay bills by the end of 2020. This is a made up sob story that didn't play out at all in reality.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/42-percent-of-americans-have-increased-their-credit-card-debt-during-covid-19.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/27/42-percent-of-americans-have... 10 million jobs were lost in the pandemic. Over 1/3 of US workers were forced out of their job. (https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/us-workers-changing-jobs-covid-pandemic-workforce/ https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/us-workers-changing-jobs-covi...). The jobs all come back now that things are reopened and people are starting to spend again, that was to be expected, but that doesn't mean people didn't struggle while they were unable to work and recovery takes time (https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/05/poll-49-of-americans-who-lost-pay-in-covid-pandemic-still-havent-recovered/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/05/poll-49-of-...). Stimulus money went mostly to help recover savings or pay off debt while lower income households depended on that money for essentials (https://abcnews.go.com/Business/majority-pandemic-stimulus-checks-savings-paying-off-debt/story?id=76944917 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/majority-pandemic-stimulus-c...) Wealthy people did alright during the pandemic because they couldn't spend the money they had. They had no choice but to save it and savings went up. Poor people were just plain screwed by the pandemic and are still recovering. In fact we haven't even seen the full fallout of that because evictions were delayed (not made illegal), and we still face a looming eviction/homelessness crisis which isn't what you'd expect if everyone was rolling in money thanks to the pandemic. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/07/us/evictions-crisis-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/07/us/evictions-crisis-us.ht...) In fact homelessness is already on the rise which disproves that practically no one is struggling to pay their bills. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/homelessness-surging-in-many-cities-in-amid-end-to-covid-assistance https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/homelessness-surging-in-...) How the pandemic played in out in reality was very different for the wealthy than it was for many many others.

voisin 4y ago

> since around 25% of Americans have no savings at all. Maybe this is the problem that should be tackled between recessions.

vibrio 4y ago
I’d also like that to be a different state , but how would the best way to tackle it?
- voisin 4y ago
  The short answer is discipline, which at this point might need to be imposed by regulating debt to be more difficult to come by, or by forcing further savings via payroll deductions or something along those lines (like Singapore). If you want to build a financially resilient population it requires top down solutions - it won’t just arise.
  - vibrio 4y ago
    As is always the devil is in the details, but regulating debt to be more difficult to come by or forcing savings seems like it would be broadly politically unpopular and would likely have significant unintended economic consequences. This is surely a challenging problem.

themitigating 4y ago

Not everyone was forbidden to go to work and many who were switched to working from home.

adrr 4y ago

That’s why the feds backstopped unemployment and airdropped stimulus checks. Dropping the interest rate was unnecessary and caused more harm to vulnerable class than good by increasing inflation. This recession caused raising interest rate will wipe out the vunerable class once again while upper income classes won’t even notice except in their portfolios. We see this currently with luxury spending still elevated while other sectors are seeing softening demand.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> Dropping the interest rate was unnecessary and caused more harm to vulnerable class than good by increasing inflation. If the fed's interest rate shenanigans are to blame for inflation, why is it affecting every other country in the world too?
- adrr 4y ago
  Because other national banks did the same thing. EG: National Bank of England dropped their rate to 0.1%

dandy23 4y ago

But we didn't need lower interest rates. Support for the poor or laid off, in terms of a check, yes.