Anticipating vaccine, forecast expects recovery to begin in spring 2021

Plus if say you're a chain restaurant right now, the future probably looks bright. You had the credit to weather a year of takeout only. Meanwhile three of the four family restaurants nearby that you competed with are dead and gone.

Basically very few folks who trade on the S&P went out of business, but a lot of their competitors did. Sure you'll have an entire cohort of newly impoverished that can't spend, but a bunch of your competitors went away. Going to be one of those summers where my ETFs are going up at the same time the food pantry is seeing record usage.

Much of the country is, economically, doing great: they're still employed, they've been saving a ton of money because they're working from home, not traveling and not going out as much, and their home equity and stocks are doing great.

Much of the country is doing horribly: their industries have been decimated, they're unemployed and way behind on rent.

However, when a vaccine comes out, there will be huge pent up demand from the first group to go out and spend money, which will largely end up going to people in the second group. Small businesses have been killed but I think new businesses will open very quickly once the pandemic is over.

1) A decline in consumption across the board due to loss of income and certainty for future;

2) A shift of consumption from the "traditional physical" businesses to virtual or remote or delivery businesses.

So the end result is that some niches of economy are harmed very much and some niches of economy are not suffering at all or even having a boom, as the change in habits is a very large impact.

And the key aspect that explains this apparent disconnect is that most of the "losers" of economy are not traded in the stock market and most of the "winners" are.

If your local cinema goes bankrupt and people switch to Netflix instead, the stock market cares only about the latter. If you buy less stuff in your local corner store and have Amazon deliveries instead, the stock market sees only the Amazon's growth in revenue and ignores the loss of revenue of the non-publicly-traded store. If a company rents less office space and instead invests in various services and software for remote work, the owner of that now-empty commercial space isn't publicly traded but the service/software providers are. Etc.

So stocks go up, not because a company is making more money today, but because people think it will make even more money in the future (than is already accounted for in today’s price).

- “over the last decade, as the Federal Reserve and government have pumped more than $36 trillion into the economy”

- “for each dollar of economic growth since 2008, it required $12.67 of monetary stimulus”

- “during the last decade, economic ‘growth’ was a function of population growth“

All the paper pushers, software engineers (after years in the industry I can confidently say that many SE jobs are BS jobs - you may do something but that something is still BS) and useless managers just switched to WFH and tried to maintain a veneer of activity with BS Zoom meetings.

On the other hand plenty of cashiers, waiters, janitors... all lost their jobs.

I think a better sign that many jobs are BS jobs is that it seems many companies did not register a drop in productivity as a result of people working from home. Likely that these people weren't producing much value before.

On the contrary, I'm still employed, and it's much easier to argue I have a bullshit job. I don't want to go into too much detail but will just say my job only exists due to the absurd complexity of the US healthcare system.

We haven't noticed the loss of capacity to provide these services because there is a corresponding drop in demand. However, the drop in demand is due entirely to a temporary public health crisis. All else being equal, people much prefer to be able to take advantage of these services, and we are poorer as a society if they are not available.

[0] Although, in many cases, the decline could be seen before an official policy was implemented due to individual consumer concerns.

And a lot of necessary things are being skipped for a limited time--like schooling--that are unsustainable in the long term. You can skip an oil change, but that doesn't mean your ICE car doesn't need one.

All I can think of are retail and hospitality employees whose jobs are normally very much useful. Cooks. Waitresses. Sales assistants. Tour guides. Bus drivers. To name a few.

It is never going to stop if people not doing bullshit jobs means they do not get money. We need a system for this. People should chill, lay back, let the automation tool do its job. People should not worry about not being able to do bullshit jobs for money. :/

Yes, the system didn’t “break”, but that’s because most gov’t used debt to backstop the pain and in the case of the US, printed more currency.

Both of those measures come with a price and you can’t keep it up for long.

Maybe instead of telling people what jobs are needed you'll let them to decide?

This article is wildly optimistic.