I get the impression the fed is normalizing the crisis in an effort to avoid rocking the boat. Similar to how they downplayed and trivialized the US real estate bubble for years before it occurred.
Below you can see fed chairman Ben Bernanke downplay the significance of the housing bubble from 2005 until the crisis finally hit hard in 2008.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ79Pt2GNJoHistory could somewhat be repeating itself here.
What are you saying exactly? The bubble keeps inflating for 2-3 more years and then comes the blood?
This is really a bad news for the big population of people that became jobless because of this pandemic. The government must do something about this for those individuals are really pitiful to think that their suffering would last for a long run.
Mixed feelings. I was actually quite sick of perverse incentives like giving jobless people $2,400 extra per month on top of state unemployment benefits, paying them ridiculous amounts of money to stay home and not work. I know several people who took a multi-month paid vacation (or worked under the table while pocketing the money) courtesy of the American government. I know homeowners who took the unverified COVID-19 forbearances and deferments on their mortgages and are hoarding all the cash or even investing it in stocks. I also know a self-employed renter who is fucked now because he lost all his income, didn't qualify for unemployment benefits, can't find full-time work, and there is no financial relief for renters like there was given to homeowners. It's really screwed up in the US because self-employed people pay double the payroll taxes but generally can't draw unemployment benefits if needed. It creates perverse incentives against running a small business and in favor of working for all the corporate giants who are monopolizing the economy.
These bureaucratic measures pile money on people who don't need it while letting so many slip through the cracks. I'm much more in favor of universal measures with minimal means testing (the closer to UBI the better) or otherwise
severely limiting entitlements and tax subsidies and forcing everyone to compete in a competitive market, including homeowners. If poor renters don't get bailed out, homeowners certainly shouldn't be getting bailed out! The banks should foreclose on mortgagees in default, the housing market should dump due to strong supply, and responsible people who can actually afford to own a home should get their shot to do so at more affordable prices. In a free market where the housing market weren't artificially propped up, renters would also pay much lower rents. The entire system is obviously skewed to screw over people who don't own property.
Either give us a free and competitive market, or make entitlements universal, I guess that's my position. What we have now (especially after the COVID-19 bills) is the worst of both worlds: an un-free, un-competitive market that heavily favors corporations, the wealthy, and current property owners at the expense of everyone else.