This part is extremely concerning:
- Spain, Germany, France and the US all have more cases than Italy when it ordered the lockdown
- An additional 16 countries have more cases today than Hubei when it went under lockdown: Japan, Malaysia, Canada, Portugal, Australia, Czechia, Brazil and Qatar have more than Hubei but below 1,000 cases. Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark all have above 1,000 cases.
A couple thoughts:
Office is going to suffer less, just because their tenants are going to have at least some ability to weather lean times and still make their rent payments. And a lot of retail is bundled with office and not much of a money-maker anyways. Plus a lot of standalone retail is anchored by grocery stores or Walmarts that are probably doing OK business. Also, a lot of retail stock now was probably bought at pretty low prices, so less of a debt service load.
Hospitality is unambiguously fucked. Owners of hotel buildings can probably just mail the keys into the bank now and let them figure out what to do. Hotel management companies are an interesting population too. The people who employ the maids and the front desk clerks normally don’t own the real estate. Are those operators still showing up to work? How are they going to cover their payroll costs? In theory, the owner has to reimburse all those costs, but if the owner is bankrupt and revenue doesn’t cover wages…
However, this isn’t necessarily an apocalypse. Banks and insurance companies can access federal liquidity support to hold all those assets on their balance sheet until this is over, at which point they will at least be viable assets that can operate normally. The priority has to be protecting the physical and organizational capital from falling apart. There’s an enormous difference between a crisis that wipes out all the owners but leaves all the pieces in place to get back to work in six months and one where we’re picking up the pieces from scratch and trying to reassemble a functioning ecosystem from a bunch of empty buildings and 30% unemployment. From that perspective, real estate owners can get fucked–the priorities are to protect the banks and the tenants. When the crisis is over, the tenants can reopen, the banks can sell the assets in bankruptcy, and the losses end up where they end up, starting with the developer capital.
Under-development real estate is a huge issue. Developers are not going to put money in the ground in the face of 3 million new unemployment claims in a week, and lenders are going to use every dirty trick they can think of to avoid funding draws under construction facilities. To make things worse, the speculative capital in a development deal is less disposable than in a stabilized asset. Office landlords are, by and large, interchangeable. But convincing someone to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in someone else’s half-built, unproved vision for a building is much different, especially if the economy is shit even after it returns to normalcy. There’s a huge risk of half-built buildings being written off–and we’re still going to be in a housing crisis unless coronavirus mutates into something deadlier.
Unless you’re into epidemiology or virology, I’m seeing a diminishing return in reading anything about coronavirus now.
It’s not going to change my current behavior of social distancing, handwashing and all that. It’s only going to cause anxiety at this point.
I mean I’ll keep track of what’s going on here and in America but these scare articles or more positive articles about projections and outcomes are causing a rollercoaster of stress and anxiety. The whole predictions thing reminds me of this:
I didn’t learn anything substantially new, but it’s a good distillation of what we’re dealing with. I think everyone here who’s been following this wont be too shocked by it.
I don’t think you really know much about my life, how seriously I’m taking this, or what precautions I’m taking, tbh.
Cuomo has executive order that New York is in PAUSE
Policies
Assure
Uniform
Safety for
Everyone
He really doesn’t want to call it a lockdown
But 100% of nonessential workforce must stay home
Yeah, that UBI plan is awful. The bolded part is clearly deplorable, but the cutoff at $99,000 income is insane. So a couple making $99,500 with two, three, four kids doesn’t get shit? What if one or both parents just got laid off or had their income slashed?
And how do they calculate people’s income? Tax returns? I haven’t filed my 2019 return yet and it’s easily going to be a lot lower than it was in 2018 or 2017.
Thank the gods we faded this Stephen Moore idiot
It’s unfortunate that Trump will never be impeached for putting his election over the health and safety of the people.
Shitty Gubmint Acronyms
New York, CT, PA, DE and NJ all coordinating on state-level policies
Going for a walk or run in sparsely populated places is pretty safe imo.
If the virus is incredibly easy to transmit it’s probably a lot less deadly than people think. Probably millions, maybe tens of millions of people have already had it in the last few months.
7,102 confirmed cases in the state 4,408 in NYC
Cuomo claims New York now resting more per capita than South Korea. Maybe he means per day.
Seriously, have you people never heard of the common cold before? These respiratory viruses are really fucking good at their job.
I think so, too, especially with how many people experts figure already have it and have zero to mild symptoms.
The problem is, it seems like if you get hit hard, shit goes downhill fast and you’re in deep fucking trouble.
I am happy to say that my boomer parents (technically, my dad is not a boomer - he turned 76 yesterday) are not the olds that aren’t heeding advice. They are staying inside. My mom went to pick up a prescription and that’s it. Talked to my dad yesterday and he’s already getting bored, but he’s not stupid. I told him he should get into video games.
They were ahead of the senior citizen curve. They were supposed to come visit last weekend, but early in the week, they decided to cancel even before I told them to.
Low odds x 350 million people x number of brief encounters = lots of infected people
Agreed to some degree. When they noted it probably began as far back as November in China, I figured it had to be in the US and other places before February.
FYP