maxamus1
Well-Known Member
Why is it the same 6/10 people on here spewing ignorance and doing nothing but complaining about white people and america. If you don't like it why not leave? Seriously.
Another Republican President, Another Recession.
- Thread starter hanimmal
- Start date
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Because I would rather stay, after undoing racist Dixiecrat garbage.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
When claiming fact cite.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
You have the right to say stupid things but I have no obligation to act on them
maxamus1
Well-Known Member
Every time you speak I cite.
maxamus1
Well-Known Member
But that won't happen. You keep claiming racism is so profound, when have you truly experienced it or has it held you back?
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
And yet no visible citation. Citations are the badge of the intellectually honest.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Wrong question, fraudulent insinuation.
maxamus1
Well-Known Member
Lol, so don't have any examples just claims got cha. And not quite sure how that was fraudulent insinuations when it was a question asking when have you experienced it or how it has held you back.
Seeing as how you claim its so bad here in the US I'm sure you have an example from personal experience to share.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
You are saying that for racism to exist, I must experience it directly. This is the dishonesty.
Wattzzup
Well-Known Member
Are you claiming it isn’t?
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-health-business-prices-66e5f5612c0a56c18ac218425e2cd20a
Employees at a fast-food restaurant in Sacramento, California, exasperated over working in stifling heat for low wages, demanded more pay and a new air conditioner — and got both.
Customer orders poured in to an Italian auto supplier, which struggled to get hold of enough supplies of everything from plastic to microchips to meet the demand.
A drought in Taiwan magnified a worldwide shortage of computer chips, so vital to auto and electronics production.
The global economy hadn’t experienced anything like this for decades. Maybe ever. After years in which ultra-low inflation had become a fixture of economies across the world, prices rocketed skyward in 2021 — at the grocery store, the gasoline pump, the used-car lot, the furniture store. Chalk it up to a surprisingly swift and robust economic recovery from the pandemic recession, one that left suppliers flat-footed and hampered by COVID-19 disruptions.
U.S. workers, having struggled for years to achieve economic gains, secured better wages, benefits and working conditions — and the confidence to quit their jobs if they didn’t get them.
Global supply chains that ran efficiently for years broke down as factories, ports and freight yards buckled under the weight of surging orders.
Propelled by vast infusions of government aid and the widespread distribution of COVID vaccines, the economic bounce-back was as startling as the fall that had preceded it. Policymakers, business owners and economists were caught off-guard by both the speed of the recovery and the new COVID variants that threatened its durability.
They had never, after all, had to manage the unpredictable fallout, economic and otherwise, from a global pandemic.
BACK FROM THE BRINK
In the spring of 2020, the global economy appeared to stand on the brink of a catastrophe. The sudden and blindingly fast spread of COVID-19 infections forced lockdowns, frightened people into hunkering down at home, paralyzed travel and ordinary business activity and led employers to slash tens of millions of jobs.
In June that year, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the global economy would shrink 4.9% for the year, the first drop in worldwide economic output since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
But the governments of the wealthiest nations, scarred by the achingly slow recovery from the financial crisis just over a decade earlier, poured money into rescuing their economies. The United States was particularly aggressive: It supplied $5 trillion in COVID-related stimulus aid to individuals, businesses and municipalities this year and last.
“The U.S. has been a total outlier globally,” said Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, a global trade group for financial companies.
“We had the deepest pocketbook of any country. We have this exorbitant privilege” — the ability to run up debts to pay for COVID relief without having to pay high interest rates to do so. Global investors regard U.S. government debt as perhaps the safest investment around; their purchases of U.S bonds keep American interest rates low.
So despite immense federal spending and surging inflation, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note — below 1.4%, as of early Friday — remains lower than it was before the pandemic.
In the United States and elsewhere, stimulus aid is widely credited with helping stave off disaster. Though the global economy did shrink in 2020, it did so by a less-than-expected 3.1%. And the IMF expects growth to rebound to 5.9% for 2021. That would be the fastest calendar-year expansion in IMF records dating to 1980.
Beginning earlier this year, vaccines accelerated the return to something much closer to ordinary pre-pandemic life.
“We got this scientific miracle,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “We had a vaccine that was available six to nine months earlier than anybody had really believed in 2020 ... What that meant was that the second half of 2021 saw basically a general reopening in all of the advanced economies, and that was certainly was a massive positive surprise.’’
COVID UNCERTAINTY
Still, the virus itself has continued to complicate anyone’s ability to forecast where the economy was headed or to determine what to do about it. A wave of infections over the summer, for instance, sent Japan’s economy into a nasty tailspin: It shrank from July through September at a 3.6% annual rate.
Likewise, America’s recovery lost momentum once the highly contagious delta variant erupted over the summer. Growth slowed to a 2.1% annual rate from July through September, sharply down from a 6.7% rate in the April-June quarter and 6.3% in the January-March period.
Overall, though, the economy has recovered with surprising vigor. In June 2020, with the economy still reeling from the pandemic, the Federal Reserve’s policymaking committee forecast that unemployment would average 9.3% in the final three months of the year and 6.5% at the end of 2021. In reality? The jobless rate plummeted from 11.1% in June 2020 to 6.7% by year’s end. It’s now at a near-fully healthy 4.2%.
Flush with government payments and, in many cases, savings accrued from working at home and from stock-market gains, people in rich countries were sitting on larger piles of cash and spending a lot of it.
Capital Economics calculates that households in advanced economies like the United States and the European Union were holding “excess savings” at mid-year of $3.7 trillion — the amount above what they would likely have saved if the pandemic had never happened.
OVERWHELMED
In some ways, it’s been too much of a good thing.
Robust demand, especially for autos, appliances and other physical goods, overwhelmed global manufacturers. Factories couldn’t obtain enough raw materials and parts. Ports and freight yards were swamped. Companies grappled with shortages of everything they needed, notably workers.
That was particularly true at many restaurants. At the newly re-opened Gotham restaurant in Manhattan, for instance, patrons are unable to find handcrafted chocolates, once a big draw for the holidays, or grab a burger or order oysters. Gotham couldn’t find enough employees to make the chocolates, work the grill or shuck the oysters.
“We worked to bring the restaurant back to life,” said Bret Csencsitz, the new owner of the restaurant. “The demand is there. The product is superior. Yet I don’t have enough people to make the business what it needs to be and what it should be.”
The restaurant was also hampered by shortages of basic supplies like ceramic plates and glassware. Food costs fluctuated wildly. Halibut, which cost $14 a pound one day, was $24.99 a week and a half later.
Across the Atlantic, MTA, an auto components manufacturer that endured Italy’s first lockdown in February 2020, reopened within a week and ended 2020 with unexpectedly healthy business. But the recovery bred new troubles.
“Everything is lacking,” said Maria Vittoria Falchetti, the company’s marketing chief.
“Plastic is lacking. Metals are lacking. Paper is lacking. Microchips — don’t even mention. Also, we are struggling with a big increase in prices in these materials, and also energy,”
In Asia, manufacturers of everything from toys to cellphones suffered from a global shortage of computer chips and surging costs for components, raw materials and shipping.
Kaixiang Electric Appliance Co., which makes LED lamps and flashlights in Ningbo, south of Shanghai, paid 20% more in 2021 for labor, materials and complications resulting from shipping bottlenecks.
“The current delay in delivery is about one or two months,” said Susan Yang, CEO of the 80-employee company.
“The sharp rise in sea freight has eaten into manufacturers’ profits and ours,” said Max Chen, general manager of Makefigure Co., a toy exporter in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. “If we want to stay in the business, we need to lower our profit expectations and develop new clients.”
The supply chain problems have been compounded by what Kirkegaard of the German Marshall Fund calls “idiosyncratic things.”
A drought in Taiwan curtailed production at water-dependent computer chip plants. A February deep freeze shut down petrochemical plants in Texas. A huge container ship got stuck in the Suez canal for a week in March and cut off shipping between Asia and Europe.
THE PAIN OF HIGH PRICES
A MADE-IN-AMERICA LABOR SHORTAGE
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Since unemployment times out quickly, this tells us nothing about how many long-term unemployed are succeeding or failing to get placed.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
It also doesn't tell us about how many people stubbed their toes.
But if you wanted a better idea of things like Job openings for people looking for work there is a lot: "The United States had a near-record 11 million job openings in October"
Or what the number of jobs added since the pandemic hammered our economy, vs where it was (showing that so far this year there has been a major improvement in our economy): "Employers have added 18.5 million jobs since April 2020, still leaving the U.S. still 3.9 million jobs short of what it had before the pandemic."
Something else it doesn't tell us is how many of those remaining 4 million jobs that we are still short are planning on coming back into the labor force, nor how many of the almost 1 million deaths from the virus is from that number, how many people are having long haul issues, finally retired after holding on to their jobs after the 2008 crash drained their retirements, etc.
One thing I would love to see with the jobs that we need more people in is how long term trends of not working hard to train more non-white men has really put us in a bind with the careers needing people are ones that have traditionally been one that are not very diverse.
Imagine how much better off we would be with trucking right now how much better off we would be if we had a army of black and hispanic women with the correct licenses/training to drive them.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
I concur with that last paragraph. It’s what a civilized society would do.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
It is a bummer then that our planet has not really ever had a civilized society then.
But we are getting close, we finally have one major political force in our nation that is full tilt trying to make that happen for the first time ever.
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
I believe that we are not currently a sapient species. We are in the stormy interstice between animal and sapient. “Not there yet.”
What really scares me is that we are closing in on technology to shape our natures. The image of a toddler with an Uzi keeps coming to me.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Im a lot more optimistic about our species, mainly because I look at us as operating at about whatever super small percentage that makes up the Wealthy White Heterosexual Male population (vs everyone in our species being able to succeed and lead our society) over the last couple thousand years.