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Reopening America: Three ways to preserve jobs

Reopening America: Three ways to preserve jobs

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4 years ago

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By Marcela Escobari, Ian Seyal

Reopening America and the WorldThe United States has experienced many more job losses than other high-income countries due to a significant freeze in economic activity that has been compounded by a decades-long deterioration in labor market arrangements. Reopening promises the opportunity to reemploy millions, but it will be a high-wire act, phasing in business activity without stoking the virus beyond health systems’ capacity.  

Try as they might, early evidence is showing that local leaders’ pronouncements will not flip a restart switch. As we wait for a vaccine, only a cohesive national strategy to test, trace, and isolate will foster trust and rebuild consumer confidence. Yet, though the pace of reopening may not be a matter of local leaders’ decree, there are policies they can implement to limit job losses and maintain workers’ attachment to their jobs. Doing so will reduce human and economic costs during the reopening. And maintaining links between workers and employers will make for a speedier recovery by reducing the costs of rehiring and retraining. 

For individuals, the importance of employment to their well-being cannot be overstated. Long-term unemployment is associated with less success finding a new job, sustained earnings losses in the future, and worse health outcomes. Beyond the individual, children of the long-term unemployed are more likely to have worse educational outcomes and diminished future earnings. And beyond the household, detachment from work costs the broader economy, not only in lost wages and output, but also as unemployed individuals’ skills decay, while workplace technology advances.  

Skills decay is particularly risky today as new customer and company behaviors harden— for example, consumers preferring online shopping or companies adopting remote work. These accelerating trends increase the need for reskilling, especially digital fluency. Workers who stay employed can adapt with their employer and keep skills current with shifting trends. Though as the economy sheds millions of workers, we risk firms automating existing roles rather than innovating to augment workers’ capabilities, resulting in a recovery punctuated by more robots and fewer workers. A proactive policy could change that calculus.  

Reopening promises the opportunity to reemploy millions, but it will be a high-wire act, phasing in business activity without stoking the virus beyond health systems’ capacity.

THREE POLICY TOOLS  

Three policy tools can strengthen the ties between workers and work and increase the functioning of labor markets: work sharing, strategic employee sharing, and portable benefits. Their implementation requires tight collaboration between government and the private sector. With federal incentives as an impetus, this collaboration can build a foundation of trust as we move from stopgap measures to lasting policies that bolster worker security and shared talent development.  

Work sharing  

Work sharing allows employers to reduce workers’ hours without greatly reducing their pay or benefits as government takes on a portion of the expense. Work sharing exists in the U.S. but could be more widely adopted to stave off further job losses. The trailblazer here is Germany with its Kurzarbeit system. Whether such an expansive system can be wholly transplanted to the U.S. is debatable, but the German scheme’s efficacy in response to previous crises is clear-cut.  

In the U.S. before the novel coronavirus, work–sharing had been wildly underutilized. Twenty-six states had work-share programs in place before the pandemic, but uptake was limited due to lack of awareness and the administrative burden of participation on companies. Yet the COVID-19 crisis has the potential to spur a dramatic change; the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provides incentives for states with existing infrastructure to expand their workshare systems and for the remaining 24 states to establish temporary or long-term programs, as well as $100 million in grant funding to support implementation. In Colorado, participation jumped from 10 to nearly 900 companies in a month as a result of legislative action, the state’s sector partnerships, aggressive outreach, and a responsive labor department.  

But compared internationally, the uptake in work sharing in the U.S. is still paltry. Other countries have used work sharing since the 2008 recession, so they were well positioned to rapidly expand the program as part of their COVID-19 stimulus packages. In Europe, nearly 39 million workers have remained attached to their employers during the pandemic thanks to work-sharing arrangements. In contrast, just over 120,000 workers in the United States were receiving work–sharing benefits at the end of April. This could help explain why unemployment rates in countries like Austria and Germany have increased by 50 percent and 10 percent, respectively, since January, while the U.S. has seen a jaw-dropping 310 percent jump.  

As European firms tentatively open their doors, many will be able to avoid rehiring and get back to business swiftly, assuming demand still exists. Importantly, prolonged use of work sharing risks the propping up of so called “zombie firms,” which are no longer competitive but manage to subsist on public dollars. Accordingly, the CARES Act plans to cease federal reimbursement of employee wages and benefits through work share programs at the end of 2020.  

Strategic employee sharing  

Work sharing is also expensive. To stretch state funds, local leaders can pull other levers, particularly invoking their convening power to match workers who may be temporarily furloughed with temporary opportunities for employment. This is a kind of pseudo work sharing, in a business-to-business form, known as strategic employee sharing.  

For example, Macy’s has furloughed tens of thousands while Walmart is hiring on a similar scale and looking for similar talent. One such in-demand occupation is stock clerks—individuals who move products from the warehouse to store shelves. It would be in everyone’s interest to allow thousands of Macy’s workers to temporarily work for and be paid by Walmart, helping to meet Walmart’s surge in demand. Seeing opportunity, many companies have already opened exchanges, creating direct lines of partnership.

Data on similarity of jobs and transferability of human talent can help mediate these arrangements. For example, our new research on job-to-job transitions can identify occupations that frequently transition to become stock clerks (retail salespersons, cashiers, and janitors) for any given metropolitan area. Using job posting data for an additional layer showing which occupations may be in high demand, we observe a 58 percent increase in demand for stock clerks and a 24 percent drop for retail salespersons. Employers in need of stock clerks could source them from shrinking occupations. (In Figure 1, we show this transition for stock clerks.)

Figure 1. Occupations that frequently transition to stock clerks

Figure 1. Occupations that frequently transition to stock clerks

Source: Brookings analysis of CPS, Emsi, and Burning Glass Technologies data.
Note: Change in job postings compares the first two weeks of March to the first two weeks of June.

This presents an opportunity. Local leaders can assist companies by coordinating among them and their sometimes competitors to create new hiring structures, smooth points of friction, and ease regulatory burdens. (In Figure 2, we show the top five industries employing stock clerks. Department stores’ declining demand makes them prime candidates for employee sharing to booming warehousing and storage facilities.) Ideally, strategic employee sharing can lead to more modern employment arrangements in which workers gain the stability of full-time employment, while companies are able to flexibly meet shifts in demand by quickly staffing up and down.  

Figure 2. Top 5 industries that employ stock clerks

Figure 2. Top 5 industries that employ stock clerks

Source: Brookings analysis of CPS, Emsi, and Burning Glass Technologies data.

It’s worth noting that such arrangements can give companies an additional leg up from an already advantaged position in a slack labor market to collude and pay lower wages, circumstances that have drawn the attention of antitrust enforcement agencies. Instead, creating these structures deliberately and iterating on them over time to align interests can build trust among firms, workers, and government—leading to more stable and productive work arrangements.  

Portable benefits  

Work sharing incentives are meant to be temporary and with regard to unemployment, strategic employee sharing is more of a quick fix than a solution. The reality is that many firms will fail. Knowing this, policy can protect workers as they transition from one job to the next or provide comprehensive benefits when people are forced to cobble together multiple part time jobs. For this problem, portable benefits would offer a solution.  

Portable benefits decouple benefits from a specific employer, instead allowing workers to accrue them as they switch from one job to the next, as is increasingly done in the modern economy, particularly by gig and contract workers. Such a scheme could also protect workers through spells of unemployment and could have prevented an estimated 13 million workers from losing their healthcare in recent weeks.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST  

A lot depends on trust. To reopen, workers must trust that employers will provide for their safety. Employers must trust government to set clear, fair rules and to alleviate economic shocks. State governments must trust the federal government to set health guidelines and to keep unemployment and work sharing schemes liquid.  

Partisanship, polarization, populism, and class divides all tear at trust. So, we need policies that can help weave it back together. Work sharing, strategic employee sharing, and portable benefits can build trusting relationships among employers, workers, and government that can ratchet up over time to improve pay and job quality, as well as earnings and productivity.  

If we are going to turn this crisis into a moment of positive change—bold policies, a new social contract, a more inclusive capitalism—local leaders need to use the opportunity to build trust between government and private enterprise at this time when they need each other more than ever.

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Home buyers must now navigate higher mortgage rates and prices

Rates under 4% came and went during the Covid pandemic, but home prices soared. Here’s what buyers and sellers face as the housing season ramps up.

Published

6 hours ago

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March 17, 2024

By

Springtime is spreading across the country. You can see it as daffodil, camellia, tulip and other blossoms start to emerge. 

You can also see it in the increasing number of for sale signs popping up in front of homes, along with the painting, gardening and general sprucing up as buyers get ready to sell. 

Which leads to two questions: 

  • How is the real estate market this spring? 
  • Where are mortgage rates? 

What buyers and sellers face

The housing market is bedeviled with supply shortages, high prices and slow sales.

Mortgage rates are still high and may limit what a buyer can offer and a seller can expect.  

Related: Analyst warns that a TikTok ban could lead to major trouble for Apple, Big Tech

And there's a factor not expected that may affect the sales process. Fixed commission rates on home sales are going away in July.

Reports this week and in a week will make the situation clearer for buyers and sellers. 

The reports are:

  • Housing starts from the U.S. Commerce Department due Tuesday. The consensus estimate is for a seasonally adjusted rate of about 1.4 million homes. These would include apartments, both rentals and condominiums. 
  • Existing home sales, due Thursday from the National Association of Realtors. The consensus estimate is for a seasonally adjusted sales rate of about 4 million homes. In 2023, some 4.1 million homes were sold, the worst sales rate since 1995. 
  • New-home sales and prices, due Monday from the Commerce Department. Analysts are expecting a sales rate of 661,000 homes (including condos), up 1.5% from a year ago.

Here is what buyers and sellers need to know about the situation. 

Mortgage rates will stay above 5% 

That's what most analysts believe. Right now, the rate on a 30-year mortgage is between 6.7% and 7%. 

Rates peaked at 8% in October after the Federal Reserve signaled it was done raising interest rates.

The Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey of March 14 was at 6.74%. 

Freddie Mac buys mortgages from lenders and sells securities to investors. The effect is to replenish lenders' cash levels to make more loans. 

A hotter-than-expected Producer Price Index released that day has pushed quotes to 7% or higher, according to data from Mortgage News Daily, which tracks mortgage markets.

Home buyers must navigate higher mortgage rates and prices this spring.

TheStreet

On a median-priced home (price: $380,000) and a 20% down payment, that means a principal and interest rate payment of $2,022. The payment  does not include taxes and insurance.

Last fall when the 30-year rate hit 8%, the payment would have been $2,230. 

In 2021, the average rate was 2.96%, which translated into a payment of $1,275. 

Short of a depression, that's a rate that won't happen in most of our lifetimes. 

Most economists believe current rates will fall to around 6.3% by the end of the year, maybe lower, depending on how many times the Federal Reserve cuts rates this year. 

If 6%, the payment on our median-priced home is $1,823.

But under 5%, absent a nasty recession, fuhgettaboutit.

Supply will be tight, keeping prices up

Two factors are affecting the supply of homes for sale in just about every market.

First: Homeowners who had been able to land a mortgage at 2.96% are very reluctant to sell because they would then have to find a home they could afford with, probably, a higher-cost mortgage.

More economic news:

Second, the combination of high prices and high mortgage rates are freezing out thousands of potential buyers, especially those looking for homes in lower price ranges.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal noted that online brokerage Redfin said only about 20% of homes for sale in February were affordable for the typical household.

And here mortgage rates can play one last nasty trick. If rates fall, that means a buyer can afford to pay more. Sellers and their real-estate agents know this too, and may ask for a higher price. 

Covid's last laugh: An inflation surge

Mortgage rates jumped to 8% or higher because since 2022 the Federal Reserve has been fighting to knock inflation down to 2% a year. Raising interest rates was the ammunition to battle rising prices.

In June 2022, the consumer price index was 9.1% higher than a year earlier. 

The causes of the worst inflation since the 1970s were: 

  • Covid-19 pandemic, which caused the global economy to shut down in 2020. When Covid ebbed and people got back to living their lives, getting global supply chains back to normal operation proved difficult. 
  • Oil prices jumped to record levels because of the recovery from the pandemic recovery and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

What the changes in commissions means

The long-standing practice of paying real-estate agents will be retired this summer, after the National Association of Realtors settled a long and bitter legal fight.

No longer will the seller necessarily pay 6% of the sale price to split between buyer and seller agents.

Both sellers and buyers will have to negotiate separately the services agents have charged for 100 years or more. These include pre-screening properties, writing sales contracts, and the like. The change will continue a trend of adding costs and complications to the process of buying or selling a home.

Already, interest rates are a complication. In addition, homeowners insurance has become very pricey, especially in communities vulnerable to hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires. Florida homeowners have seen premiums jump more than 102% in the last three years. A policy now costs three times more than the national average.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

 

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Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

Published

1 day ago

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March 17, 2024

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Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

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“Extreme Events”: US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In “Large Excess Over Trend”

"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"

Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021…

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1 day ago

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March 16, 2024

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"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"

Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021 and 2022 among 15-44 year-olds "in large excess over trend," marking jumps of 5.6% and 7.9% respectively vs. a rise of 1.7% in 2020, according to a new preprint study from deep-dive research firm, Phinance Technologies.

Algeria, Carlos et. al "US -Death Trends for Neoplasms ICD codes: C00-D48, Ages 15-44", ResearchGate, March. 2024 P. 7

Extreme Events

The report, which relies on data from the CDC, paints a troubling picture.

"We show a rise in excess mortality from neoplasms reported as underlying cause of death, which started in 2020 (1.7%) and accelerated substantially in 2021 (5.6%) and 2022 (7.9%). The increase in excess mortality in both 2021 (Z-score of 11.8) and 2022 (Z-score of 16.5) are highly statistically significant (extreme events)," according to the authors.

That said, co-author, David Wiseman, PhD (who has 86 publications to his name), leaves the cause an open question - suggesting it could either be a "novel phenomenon," Covid-19, or the Covid-19 vaccine.

"The results indicate that from 2021 a novel phenomenon leading to increased neoplasm deaths appears to be present in individuals aged 15 to 44 in the US," reads the report.

The authors suggest that the cause may be the result of "an unexpected rise in the incidence of rapidly growing fatal cancers," and/or "a reduction in survival in existing cancer cases."

They also address the possibility that "access to utilization of cancer screening and treatment" may be a factor - the notion that pandemic-era lockdowns resulted in fewer visits to the doctor. Also noted is that "Cancers tend to be slowly-developing diseases with remarkably stable death rates and only small variations over time," which makes "any temporal association between a possible explanatory factor (such as COVID-19, the novel COVID-19 vaccines, or other factor(s)) difficult to establish."

That said, a ZeroHedge review of the CDC data reveals that it does not provide information on duration of illness prior to death - so while it's not mentioned in the preprint, it can't rule out so-called 'turbo cancers' - reportedly rapidly developing cancers, the existence of which has been largely anecdotal (and widely refuted by the usual suspects).

While the Phinance report is extremely careful not to draw conclusions, researcher "Ethical Skeptic" kicked the barn door open in a Thursday post on X - showing a strong correlation between "cancer incidence & mortality" coinciding with the rollout of the Covid mRNA vaccine.

Phinance principal Ed Dowd commented on the post, noting that "Cancer is suddenly an accelerating growth industry!"

Continued:

Bottom line - hard data is showing alarming trends, which the CDC and other agencies have a requirement to explore and answer truthfully - and people are asking #WhereIsTheCDC.

We aren't holding our breath.

Wiseman, meanwhile, points out that Pfizer and several other companies are making "significant investments in cancer drugs, post COVID."

Phinance

We've featured several of Phinance's self-funded deep dives into pandemic data that nobody else is doing. If you'd like to support them, click here.

 

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 16:55

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