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SuperJail Warden wrote:

Article on National Review softly saying we need to think about how Generation Z is being affected by the ongoing crisis just as they enter adulthood. The National Review commentators are having none of it though. As usual.

It's funny how within about 10 years, two "once in a century" economic crisis wiped out Millennials and Gen Z. Meanwhile the boomer president is pointing to the fake numbers on wall street as major success.

That all sounds frighteningly prescient. Having sleep-walked into a health crisis, the government is about to sleepwalk into an unemployment crisis. Britain’s employment rate stood at a record level going into the pandemic, primarily because there were more women, ethnic minorities, older people, lone parents and immigrants in work. These are the low-paid, low-productivity jobs that are most at threat from the coming storm.

Historians may come to view the great financial crisis of 2008-9 and the great lockdown crisis of 2020-21 as a single event. There was no fundamental change to the failed model that led to the banks nearly going bust in 2008, merely a set of sticking plaster solutions, including the creation of millions of insecure jobs.

Last edited by Larssen (4 years, 10 months ago)

Some $4.586 trillion, roughly 75 per cent of the total $6.286 trillion derived directly and indirectly from cares Act money, would go for the ‘care’ of the country’s biggest and best-off companies. By contrast, as unemployment soared, just $603 billion in total was allocated for direct cash payments to individuals and families ($300 billion), extra unemployment insurance ($260 billion), and student loans ($43 billion).

[...]

To ensure that serious superintendence of the Fed’s actions would not take place, the progenitors of the cares Act adopted essentially the same structure of oversight that had been used for the 2008 bailout of the financial sector. As in the case of the earlier rescue, the Act established inspector generals and several boards to oversee the lending. But, as before, these bodies were only authorized to report abuses, not to prevent or rectify them.footnote9 The cares Act rendered any public scrutiny and shaming of the authorities that the official overseers might attempt all the more difficult by granting the Fed the right to hold its meetings in secret and keep its minutes to itself, immunizing it for the remainder of 2020 from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act.

[...]

The equivalent of two and a half times us annual corporate profits, or about 20 per cent of us annual gdp, was authorized to be dispensed without undue surveillance and with no strings attached.

As House Democrat Richard Neal blandly and unselfconsciously explained, the bailout ‘has been described as a stimulus’ but it is ‘more accurately’ for ‘stability and relief’.footnote34 It is better understood, that is, as an instrument for enabling non-financial and financial businesses to continue along the path they had already been taking—to the extent indeed they wished to do so—by placing money in their hands without conditions on how they should spend it, rather than burdened by conditions designed to set them on another path. The policies pursued by the us political-economic establishment were in no way seeking to incentivize American corporations to undertake increased employment and new investment aimed at reviving the economy—a stimulus programme—let alone to induce them to take steps with the goal of revitalizing the economy by undertaking a new wave of statist intervention in the interests of greater productivity and competitiveness—a programme of re-structuring. Neither of these paths was even contemplated, despite the dire condition of the economy and the disaster affecting large swathes of the population.

The persistence of such a hands-off approach to the economy’s leading producers and financiers on the part of the bipartisan political-economic establishment at a time of such profound crisis seems so extreme as to require further explanation. How could they continue with such policies, when the needs of the population are so overpowering and money to deal with them so scarce in general, yet overflowing the pockets of top corporate managers and shareholders? Still and all, in view of the lack of controversy within any section of the bipartisan elite concerning this approach, of how pervasive it has been across the entire ruling class, and how long it has gone unchallenged, the opposite question is perhaps even more apposite. How could they possibly break from it—or, indeed, refrain from extending and deepening it?

Remarkably, even as the Fed was undertaking its massive handout to top managers and shareholders by way of its rescue of the corporate bond market, Congress was making another big gift to pretty much the same people by inserting $174 billion worth of new tax giveaways into the cares Act, directed mainly at large companies and rich individuals. The identical tax breaks had been regarded as too excessive even for Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax-cut bonanza of 2017, but they were now adopted under cover of the pandemic. In the words of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, these ‘bipartisan tax provisions . . . threw a much needed financial lifeline’ to businesses, ‘to give them the best chance to survive’.

With the us economy performing so very badly, as it has been doing for such an extended period, the bipartisan political establishment and its leading policymakers have come to the stark conclusion, consciously or unconsciously, that the only way that they can assure the reproduction of the non-financial and financial corporations, their top managers and shareholders—and indeed top leaders of the major parties, closely connected with them—is to intervene politically in the asset markets and throughout the whole economy, so as to underwrite the upward re-distribution of wealth to them by directly political means. This is, indeed, what Congress and the Fed have accomplished with their large-scale and extended corporate bailout in the face of plunging production, employment and profits. The politically driven upward redistribution of wealth to sustain central elements of a partially transformed dominant capitalist class, as the response to a seemingly inexorable process of economic deterioration, has been at the heart of the politico-economic evolution which has brought us to this point. What we have had for a long epoch is worsening economic decline met by intensifying political predation.

Last edited by uziq (4 years, 10 months ago)

Only 6% of the public want to return to the same type of economy as before the coronavirus pandemic, according to new polling, as trade unions, business groups and religious and civic leaders unite in calling for a fairer financial recovery.

The former head of the civil service Bob Kerslake, the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the heads of the Trades Union Congress, Confederation of British Industry and the British Chambers of Commerce are among 350 influential figures wanting a “fairer and greener” economic rebuilding, and believe there is no going back to the past.

Their call comes as a YouGov poll shows that 31% of people want to see big changes in the way the economy is run coming out of the crisis, with a further 28% wanting to see moderate changes and only 6% of people wanting to see no changes.