Is This How a Recession Is?

cue the black and white video of the great depression.

not all places are affected the same and its a little early to visibly see what is being affected. give it a year or so and you might better be able to see just how much has been closed and affected. its not likely to be anywhere you ever go because most people don't go to the places that fail (y'know, why they failed) but it may be the place next to somewhere you go or along or just off major roads. as we see the knock-on effect over the next year or two, you may see more houses foreclosed on which, if demand is low, would probably get boarded up.

right now, there are only segments of the economy that are being forced to fail while the others are being held up by a mix of governments and the assumption that the other segments of the economy will rebound in the near term. if things dont improve or get worse, the sickness (the economic one, not the rona) will spread throughout the economy and require either government money on a scale never scene before or a serious realignment of economic priorities. if things do improve, your not likely to see any signs anything was ever amiss unless you work in an industry that was effected or live in an area where those people live in significant numbers.

tldr; too soon to be feelin it

Right now, the government is throwing insane amounts of money at the problem without fixing anything. Can't do that forever. Wait a few more weeks, until the unemployment benefits run out and missing rent and mortgage payments drown the absurdly overvalued real estate market in a surge of foreclosure sales. The rest will follow like a house of cards. Everything secured by real estate goes down next.

I have noticed a marked increase in people begging at traffic lights.

So strictly speaking economically the US just entered recession territory, I do not know much about the NZ situation. This one is a weird one though because most of the time a recession occurs due to an overinflated market crashing or a prolonged economic decline due to stagnancy, this one however was created somewhat artificially, or by choice rather. Instead of jobs and demand disappearing due to market forces it's almost the reverse, jobs and demand were halted creating a dissipation of the the market forces driving them.

I may be wrong but I believe there still is a lot of demand but people have been denied the ability to provide for this demand in many areas (especially small businesses which have been disproportionately affected). I predict that once many of the restrictions are lifted there will be a spike in economic activity which, unless stimulated in some fashion, will dissipate before a slow recovery (3-4 years).

Things will change of course, the real estate market, which in many cities is at insane levels of hyper-inflated demand, will likely shift as many operations have realized that downsizing their office spaces is a very doable economic proposal. Also the acceleration of the closure of many brick and mortar stores will likely occur.

It is a scary place though, the popular industry in the area where I grew up has been hit hard and a lot of my friends who stayed in the area will feel the hurt sooner or later. Where I am there hasn't been a spike in homelessness yet because all evictions have been suspended and I guess there's some housing assistance program (I don't know if it is actually helping). I just try to do little things like giving blood and helping portion/clean produce at my local food bank because it's really the only thing I can do.

It can depend on what has gone before.

In the U.S. the low of the Trump recession is about the same as the high of the Obama administration.

You know why it's not really a recession? Because money was injected to unemployed households and the market didn't crash and wipe out investments and retirement funds. To be clear, the way you beat a recession is to spend your way out of it. Move money around. You don't put it under a mattress, bury it in the backyard, or stick it in a bank. You buy things, spend it.

And that's what people have been doing.

The recession hasn't hit yet, really. It will kind of hit about 3 weeks into August when the boosted unemployment income is gone and people realize that they have to sell off their assets and people have looming foreclosures. They'll stop spending then.

What we have right now is levels of unemployment about half of the depression.

So in one month, it's gonna suck a little. September is gonna get a little worse. November and December is gonna be harsh and will be marked by a lot of suicides. But unemployment won't spike much and we're not going to see a real recession and certainly not a depression.

We'll see lots of house foreclosures though.

It often takes a year or more for the real bad shit to hit. Also, you might just not be affected. In the great depression 3/4 people didn't lose their job.