Wolf Richter with Jim Goddard on HoweStreet.com Radio
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The entire west coast is quickly rotting. Will slide into the Pacific Ocean soon.
California tumbles into the sea
that’ll be the day I go back
to Annandale…
I’ll be heading back to Atlantis. No, wait …
No S Dan reference without sax in background….
I live there, and it doesn’t look that way from where I am sitting.
On the positive side, if the West Coast scoots out far enough into the Pacific, we’ll be closer to my in-laws who live in Japan and are getting older :-]
As an old buddy of mine used to say California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska need to separate from the north american continent and form The Greater State of Pacifica.
Would be one of the biggest economies on Earth and socialist paradise. :)
Be in a boat when that happens…..
Warren Zevon sang about that in the late 1979s.
Question for anyone. Some of us are looking for solutions to the un-housed crisis around the country that many are blaming on sky-rocketing housing prices. Is anyone aware of any city policies that have managed to reduce the number of homeless people in their communities?
had ”the dream” over and over when living in what would be in the high end of one of the nw usa estuaries/fiords/etc., when most or all of CA west of the coast range dropped into the Pacific,
kept getting a short wave msg from SF, in spite of it mostly being under a lot of water;
”we” built a boat and went down and found the transmitter antenna was just above the water, and the people transmitting were below but had been prepared,,, and, of course, being dream land, they were ”fully realized” folks who had lots of helpful information and would work in our fields to feed themselves and many others due to their continuation of their physical fitness regimes in spite of being so far under water…
gotta have fun with ”IT” no matter what it is or becomes!!!
I’m not sure what will happen, when people eventually have to accept, that unemployment in the USA is way over 20 million….
Brady Boyd
You’re stealing a famous quote by former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater who once said after losing every state in the NE to LBJ:
“They should saw off the Northeast US and let it float out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Later Geo Will said of GHW Bush, “he wants to Commander in Chief of a few New England states, and Bill Clinton wants to be governor of all of them..”
1) I visited Walmart today, between 5:50 AM to 7 AM, but the store had only few customers.
2) Many department stores, mom & pop and restaurants already have been closed. They will not see a dime.
3) Online shopping will be up, – possibly : 20% to 25% Y/Y, – but clicking online is probably peaking, hitting fatigue.
4) The Personal Saving Rate was the highest ever in Apr @33.7%, but down to #2, below 1975 @17.3%. What made 1975 the current #1 and why?
5) WFH and furlough will eliminate buying gifts to people u used to see and worked with. Face masks reduce shopping excitement, increase loneliness.
6) Consumer Sentiment peaked in Jan 2000 @112 when the Nasdaq was hiking on the dotcom trail.
7) After the dotcom collapsed consumer sentiment was down to 77.6 in Mar 2003. In Apr 2020 it plunged to 71.8. The recovery is not much better.
8) Confusion and chaos at the top and a new anti Xmas sentiment will not induce spending.
9) Ads Removal will slow sales.
RE: #4
1975 was the baby bust due to women entering the workforce in record numbers. It was the low point in births, in the US at the time, due to the expansion of the two income family.
Inflation Stepped in ad sucked up the rest of those benefits and gave us unsupervised or stranger care kids to boot.
1973 was when Roe passed, it took a couple years to really have an effect on young women’s employability. Another social outcome of law change.
Who cares about consumer sentiment? Retail sales is way up. Americans buy things, full stop.
Also the guys measuring consumer sentiment are probably the same ones doing the whole polling thingy.
@Monkey – and they do the housing surveys for the National Association of Realtors.
Leading indicators vs Lagging indicators…
#3, well that’s all well and good, but Amazon Prime deliveries on two of my recent orders have taken 5 days with several notices of them being late. One other recent order never got delivered and Amazon refunded me (case of Propel water). And it’s not even near Xmas. I have to ask myself why pay for Prime when this is the service I get? I’m not 500 miles in the woods living in a shack.
Well that’s an easy one! It’s because shacks get priority service.
An order of $25 will get you free shipping. I also noticed many product suppliers on Amazon are giving free shipping on one time orders below $25. Times must be getting rough, even for online retailers.
Getting free shipping is the easy part. The hard part is getting the deliveries when they said you would.
Am I a bad person for saying “Happy Holidays” or should I just assume that every single person I meet is a Christian?
Most people (I assume you’re in the US?) celebrate Christmas in some form or other, whether they’re Christian or not, and many people of different faiths are on record stating that being wished a happy Christmas in no way offends them.
After that, are you a ‘bad person’ for wishing someone ‘Happy Holidays’?
Of course not, it just makes you sound (to my ears at least), a bit wet.
People celebrate Hanukkah, yuletide (pagan) and the new year, among other holidays, at this time of year. If happy holidays makes one sound a bit wet, perhaps you’re the one who’s actually a bit wet.
Yup, no trips to the beach, no Thanksgiving, no parties at home allowed, but you can go to restaurants and bars with more people in them? Does that make epidemiological sense?
Sure, it’s the sales, liquor, payroll, Healthy San Francisco surcharge for the homeless, taxes.
No financial parasitization is possible off people eating at home, since there’s no sales taxes on food in California.
There must be pressure from on high as well since Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities get a temporary reprieve when businesses reopen.
Always enjoyed the articles.
Wolf sounds like a cheerleader for work at home.
Characterizing employers as “Dictating” your social life comes off as a personal opinion and not a fact. Being exposed to fellow colleagues at work creates a social life….. It develops organically. Humans crave team work, I love getting together with my crew from work. Human interaction at all levels feed our souls. This idea that you go create your own social life is true at Martini, gym, church, flyfishing clubs etc, but the workplace is where you bond, develop, bounce ideas, etc.
Just ask my son how he likes his RE finance class on Zoom.
Most students HATE this and crave the classroom interaction with other students and instructors.
Brave New Wolf.
Humans are social animals. Just ask my depressed daughter that is getting screwed by the little soviets of California.
Keith Matthews,
Yes, in terms of kids and young people (students), this Pandemic with its remote learning has largely been a catastrophe. Kids need to learn how to socialize, and school is part of that. College without all the massive socializing that is going on there is not college. But that’s a different topic, and not part of my discussion.
But then, there are many people who never go to college, and they figured out how to socialize without college just fine.
And unlike work-from-home, schools and colleges will likely return to some form of on-site normal after the pandemic.
And yes, some people cannot get their own social life together. For them, in-office work is great so that the company can hand them their social life. That’s exactly what I said.
Over time, this will likely work out for everyone, with people who like to rely on the social life that a company dishes up gravitating to in-office jobs, while those that want to control their own social life gravitating to jobs where they can work mostly from home.
See, you have a choice. You can choose what kind of job you want – work at home or work in an office. Which is the great thing, and which is what I said. And lots of people will choose to work from home and gravitate to those jobs that offer it.
For companies, work from home comes with huge cost benefits, and they won’t even ask employees what they think about it. They make their decisions, and you have to live with them or get out.
I agree, also any bad habit picked up from campus socializing will not rear its head. A lot of the socializing/employee traits companies desire, will gladly be provided during employment and on the job training.
With respect to “bad habits picked up from campus”, be sure to differentiate between socializing and socialism.
I wonder if the South Americans and Africans will come to American colleges. I don’t wonder about the Asians.
It also depends on who you work for and the work place culture. I once worked for a guy that loved to put up little plaques of quotes all over our staff room, and would hold court with his opinions every lunch hour. I just started to take a walk at lunch or ate on the job to get away from it all.
Work is work. What I do and how well I do it has been, and always will be, important to me. Who I worked with not so much, especially if you work with some distasteful personalities. The last thing I want to do is socialise with someone I have worked with all day and all week; and talk shop on my time off. There is so much to do and so little time in our personal hourglass, imho. And yes I did enjoy the Friday after work brewskies and wings with some of the guys. We didn’t talk about work, though, ….just enjoyed each other’s company and had some laughs.
I agree, work is just part of life, not what your life should revolve around. One of the reasons I hate the office life- which sadly I will be going back after a decade of WFH (don’t ask). One thing I can say, the cultures of the two sides are very different. My WFH employer focused on mission accomplishments, whereas my new office centric model is focused on meetings and babbling about being lonely and looking forward to returning to the office life to make friends. So I guess Wolf is right, and in a year or two, I will be looking for a WFH gig when the Corona virus kerfuffle abides.
In fairness, I am an introverted outlier. I recall a Dilbert cartoon where dilbert and Wally were discussing how covid did not really affect their lives, and I can put myself into that category.
A week as 168 hours. 40 hours of those hours awake would IMHO “Dictate” the week. So not an opinion but a fact
For us introverts WFH is Heaven. Social distancing is a preferred lifestyle not an imposed mandate. The fewer distractions the better. We also don’t miss the many unproductive soul crushing hours in traffic.
Extroverts are always exhorting introverts not to be “miserable”.
Work from home is overhyped. Fifteen years ago many of the large Silicon Valley companies tried it. All of them stopped it. If a job consists of simple clearly defined tasks that never change, requires no judgement, and requires no coordination with others, then it’s a good work from home job.
Or from India….
Anthony A
First they came for the blue collar workers wages….
( Moved thousands of factories to other countries )
Now they come for the white collar workers wages….
( The shell game of work from home…..soon this work will be sent to other countries )
The hollowing out of USA jobs and wages accelerates…..
Many low paid jobs have been designed so people can’t interact. Think of McDonald’s or factory work. We live in a world where the people that rule us have created a system where we are isolated or atomized. This world needs to end.
Different folks, different strokes.
I’ve been working from home for most of the last 2 decades and absolutely love it.
I’m not sure you should paint with such a wide brush. Those “soviets” are trying to stop people from dying in a pandemic. Have you not seen the photos from the pandemic a century ago?
You have to do some basic things: masks, social distancing, washing your hands, testing, contract tracing.
It’s not a conspiracy to deprive you of your “liberty”.
It’s common sense and basic science to save lives.
https://www.influenzaarchive.org/cities/gallery.html
Nice comment
Testing, mask wearing, social distancing, yes.
Contact tracing in the context of the current pandemic hasn’t been applicable for about 5 months. The disease is widespread and half of all people have no symptoms.
Also, basic science is basic science, but business and school closures are not science, they are public policy. NYC schools shut down with community test positive rates of 3%. Indiana is 12%. In most of the EU, primary schools remained open with rates near 20%. There is literally no science to suggest that primary school closures help in the pandemic, and a developing literature from the EU that shows lower prevalence in primary school students and teachers than in the community at large.
So when you talk about “science”, it would be well to acknowledge that scientific knowledge is incomplete, and some of the states that are closing schools based on “science” would more accurately be stated as closing schools because of “teachers union”.
In the closed caption version this states that you are the publisher of Wallstreet.com
That’s funny. Thanks.
Ah yes, the Weapons of Mass-business destruction. Hidden there all along under the mosque of finance. Guess all those generals couldn’t read the clues hidden in the ticker-WMT. #1-Did they introduce robot hours? #2-See intro. #5-There goes fruitcake sales. On the good side, no one will recognize who the cheap a** buying cr*p gifts is due to the mask.
There was an increase in seriously delinquent mortgages. At the same time the nationwide supply of single family homes for sale has been reduced. Stockmarket index PE ratios are high compared to long term averages. Interest rates are low compared to long term averages.
David:
When the delinquent mortgages gets sorted out, then there should be a surplus of single family houses.
My heart goes out to all the small business owners watching their lives destroyed by the virus of bad government and stoopid political decisions.
It didn’t have to be this way. It still does not. However, as in all things political, once ground is staked out no one will ever admit they were wrong, they’ll just double down on the stoopid.
As was done after the Great Financial Crisis, I hope an intrepid author or two will take the time to put out an honest assessment of what was done, and where we went wrong. I think there are a few of us that would actually read it.
“a few of us that would actually read it”…… there were a bunch of people who educated themselves during the “Great Recession” and yet here we are. There were also a bunch of people who educated themselves during the “Dotcom” bubble yet there we were in the “Great Recession”. Rinse repeat.
The monied interests own the power, and their power now transcends borders.
Well, we could start a Go-Fund-Me for Wolf to write that book. A collective group of mini-patrons . . .
But then he’d be so busy, who would give us this our daily bread of Wolfstreet?
Recollections of the good old days in San Francisco:
Family trips, with several nights at the opera….after the last night (and it could have been Verdi; he’s a personal favorite), leaving the War Memorial Opera House, and heading towards home (home in another state), and hoping that it was not a night with a game at Candlestick Park, with that traffic pouring in to make for traffic congestion.
Those were some of my good old days, never-returning. There will be good days again, not sure when… In the meanwhile, there’s counting the daily blessings…..hey, there ARE some good days. Got sunshine at this moment.
I listened to the full webcast; thanks Wolf. Enjoyed the micro-cap miners’ ads.
Yes I do, check your grammar, because both phrases are used as adjectival modifiers of the noun “Aspects.” Fake grammarians are exasperating.
People are fleeing Seattle because
the government is riding it like they stole it.
They’re playing with other people’s money/lives
like it was a ridiculous videogame; their
“science” is Ptolemaic astronomy, bloodletting.
No matter, they still get a participation trophy.
1) At 1PM I drove to a malls expecting little from this type of black Fri, because the twisted roads to the malls had light traffic, with no bumper to bumper half a mile near by.
2) When I couldn’t find a parking slot near Macy’s, like in the good old days, I started to suspect that I might be wrong !
3) The mall was unbelievable packed. It looks like a smashing success. I was forced to dribble around in a mall.
4) People with face mask, especially young ones, were waiting on lines, to buy x3 and get x3 for free.
5) Sephora on constant max shoppers allowed and I was told to to wait outside, inside a busy JCP, to buy mascara… That’s all I wanted to hear. Pandora was loaded with buyers. The new stores rules slow everything down. There was no room for lookers on this black Fri.
6) People want to shop in the stores, to shop with family & friends, for family & friends, with other people around, for fun fun fun.
7) With less malls around, less dept and chain stores, the ones that are still around are getting real action. Online and in Brick & mortar action ,for those who survived the virus plunge, will get the gold.
Supposedly 6 million people flew for Thanksgiving as well. A million every day.
MonkeyBusiness,
TSA screenings of people entering the security zones at airports was down 60% on average during the week, compared to same week last year. Yes, there were 3 days when screenings hit 1 million. But last year, screenings hit 2.6 million. The media headlines on this topic are always shitty.
Sure, but I think that’s on average 4 to 5% better than similar comparisons on non Thanksgiving periods?
My worry is that the additional load, small as it seems will contribute to more than 4/5% in hospitalizations later on down the road.
Missing the Walmart violence videos this year.
Working at home can suck for employees for multiple reasons beyond the social ones. This is never discussed because it does fit the narrative.
I worked in Dept of Defense as program manager and sys admin for multiple networks. They started this teleworking back in 2000, and it was a complete disaster. Forget the social implications. Couldn’t get my work done because on any given day key personel were at home or on leave. It was impossible to have any productive meetings. The Meeting software never worked correctly. Then they started on line training where you had to take your mandatory courses on line using your home computer and tie up your high speed Internet and your telephone. Give me a break! What was going on here was the government pretending to be giving you a benefit when in reality they were offloading all their overhead to their employees at their personal residences. A lot of suckers took the bait and still are. Now with the pandemic the government is using the crisis to unload even more tasks to the employees at home and NOT paying them a dime in rent, utilities, taxes, Internet access, insurance and maintenance of their home offices.
As the Gipper once said “The scariest words ever spoken were:
I’m from the government and I’m here to help you”
Sheesh…in the middle of a pandemic people complain about having a job.
A-Well, yes, that’s a good point but I emphasize the operative word in CrazyHound’s tirade was “worked”, as in past tense. But I get you, believe me, I’m not from the government…..this week.
Internet and office products are agency dependent. I worked from home with two, and one furnished everything but the desk, the other also made me furnish the chair. One even reimbursed my internet. As for meetings, the simplest solution was best, telephone call ins with a shared computer you can link into, software has improved. One issue is classified material, since previous exposures were unclassified, not sure how it would work. If Trump tax reform gets reversed, you should be able to itemize your home office, although I think you would need to WFH fulltime for that. Of course the emp.oyer gets savings by having the emp.oyee work from home, that is their incentive, as well as being g able to recruit from out of the geographical area.
the year 2000 is different from say 2019 (to not have to deal with Covid).
Things that didn’t work in 2000 may work in 2019. For one everybody used an offline email client. Now most used a web based one
“Now with the pandemic the government is using the crisis to unload even more tasks to the employees at home and NOT paying them a dime in rent, utilities, taxes, Internet access, insurance and maintenance of their home offices.”
With the possible exception of greater electricity/gas usage while working from home, these are all fixed costs.
NYer
So what ?
Every day I worked from home I got 1 1/2 hours of my life back (45 minutes each way). For some reason the system at home worked exactly the same as when I was logged on at the office.
I have worked remotely for over ten years and it has been great for my finances and mental health. I’m a lone-wolf type who ass for help when needed but gets the job done the rest of the time. I keep in touch with my team and we all help when one of the pack. It’s great when cross paths at a customer site. Ties strengthen and friendships blossom.
To me, management is like the government, always interfering and taxing my time and productivity. Leave me alone.
The paradigm that us boomers thrived on is dying. We are all becoming small farmers, independent on our land and homes, barn raising when needed. This is the world my children live in. God help them.
“utilities, taxes, Internet access, insurance and maintenance of their home offices”
A portion of these things should be tax deductible. Keep good records and consult your tax advisor.
I agree! The govt is awful.
Let’s disband it instead of fixing it and just live in anarchy!! :)
The Gipper was delusional. In what way was he not part of the government. He was making all those decisions at that time. If he really believed it he would have stepped down.
So pre mobile email devices, Team/Slack, and effictuve video conferencing it did not work. Got it.
I did some remote work in 2001.. everything was done via email, phone, and we were still FTPing files. It was doable if your work was project based.
You can do so much more now.
What about those who has no social life out of office? More importantly: how sick will you get staying at home 24/7 ???
“More importantly: how sick will you get staying at home 24/7 ???”
Statistically, less sick than if you went to the office.
Don’t stay home 24/7. That’s nuts. Lots of things to do.
Vs people coming to the office sick so not to burn time off?
A contrarian! Good show, Wolf!
RightNYer
Total BS
Ever try to use your telephone when it is tied up for an hour and a half with someone in your family taking some on-line training that requires exclusive use of the phone (RJ11 connection) and Internet at the same time. That’s what they wanted us to do. If you figure out a way to do this please let me know. Most of my coworkers put up with this crap and never said a word.
Also the space in my home in a very expensive Washington DC suburb area is for me and my family to use not to lease out to the government for free. I think the government and especially the DOD with their 700 billion annual budget can afford it.
Who still uses a landline? I have a VOIP one, but I recognize I’m in the minority.
There’s just no way I’m going to agree on this.
What is made in Silicon Valley still? Is it all engineering, software development, and social media? That is very easy to move.
As one of the few who have moved into the Bay Area from the East Coast in the last few years, I have come to a few conclusions.
The natural wonders are amazing.
From the Sierras to Lake Tahoe to Monterey, Big Sur , Yosemite, Muir Woods , wine county among others ,nature has blessed this area like few others. Driving down US1 in Marin County is an adventure by itself.My big issue is that the ocean is cold as heck.
The climate is crazy. You can be in San Francisco and it might be in the mid 60s while 40 miles away in Napa it might be in the mid 90’s.
It never rains from the end of winter until late Oct.The skies are incredibly blue when it is sunny , which is quite often.
It is a great place as long as you have a good deal of money and as long as you do NOT have to commute. Just about everything is very expensive with the exception of real estate taxes.
The basic problem is that there are far too many people.
The state income tax return is stupidly complicated and I have previously filed returns in Mass and NJ.
People seem to waste water in an area which seems to be a long period of drought . Why do I see people watering their lawns ?
Before moving to CA , my impression was that the CA lifestyle would encourage people to be thinner. I am surprised that many are overweight.
My conclusion after talking with many Californians is that few would leave the area .
Mendocino coast.
Yep its a superior life or so many wouldn’t be clamoring to be here
When I was younger my dream was to move to the bay area. It seemed like paradise. When I was older and had my chance, it was much different. I chose Idaho instead.
Working from home is one thing if you are single or half of a couple and your partner is somewhere else during the day. It’s something else entirely if your household includes children, other adults, pushy pets, servants (okay, not really) and so on. Not only do you need dedicated space, but the ability to isolate yourself from the random wants and needs of everyone else in the household.
Maybe it’s because I’m female, but to me the big advantage of working in an office is that I’m NOT AT HOME.
RightNYer
Nov 28, 2020 at 1:39 pm
Who still uses a landline? I have a VOIP one, but I recognize I’m in the minority.
I keep my horse & buggy technology as a backup for major power outages. We have Pepco, the worse utility company in the USA. Has transformers that date back to the 1930’s. The old RJ11 telephone line comes in handy when there is a massive power outage like we have after every major storm here in DC. Dial up Internet works without power to the house. Also use some manual typewriters and a Selectric II that I take to a hotel to operate in a degraded mode. In 2012 was able to continue operations during a 1 week power outage. Never lost a beat.
This pandemic has taught me one thing. You can trust your computers to keep working and producing for you. You can trust the birds and squirrels to keep eating all the food you place out there for them in their feeders. What you can’t trust is the government and the corporate media. Most of what is coming out of them is lies, lies, and more lies.
As an aside note, an interesting quote that I just read in one of my recent European history books that I read when i had nothing to do :
From the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne in June 1914:
” I trust no one. I assume everyone to be a scoundrel, until they prove otherwise. Then I take them into my circle of trust”
Two weeks later he was assassinated, the spark which ignited WWI:
Your workplace observations are prescient. There is a difference between employees who serve their inbasket, and those whose handle day to day operations. These bosses tend to disrupt the work with their all hands on deck proclamations. The Japanese I believe use this worker bee strategy to advantage. If there is a problem everybody flies to the point and they work together. Maybe we are too fragmented. When you get back to your desk the work has been piling up and your contintuity is lost. I remember people who had the discretion, would come in after working hours, to avoid the distractions. In WFH there are personal distractions, and I sure that means catchup work after hours. You end up being your own boss, ergo you deserve more pay not less.
Wolf,
Why do you keep censoring my comments? Does the truth hurt your fragile mind?
Walter Ego,
“Why do you keep censoring my comments?”
Because you keep fabricating what psychological problems I might have because I present data that show what’s going on in the office sector of commercial real estate. It’s all part of your relentless trolling. By hook or crook, you’re trying with all your power to inflate the prices/rents in the office sector of commercial real estate — and that’s the only thing you ever comment on. I don’t know who you work for, and how deep your own money is in commercial real estate, but it’s obvious why you’re doing it.
If you say something reasonable, it passes. If you’re just trolling my site, trying to abuse it for your own purposes with your nonsense, it gets deleted. You’re free to post this stuff on your own blog or on your firm’s website.