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Remember the Good Old Days, Way Back in March 2020?
From an editorial in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. Emphasis added.
Published in GeneralThe latest data from a monthly survey of small businesses comes as a jarring reminder of what life was like back in the halcyon days of … March. On Thursday the National Federation of Independent Business will release last month’s polling of 627 of its members. A majority of the responses, the NFIB says, arrived before the coronavirus clampdown.
Fifty-four percent of the surveyed companies said they were hiring, or trying to hire, and 24% said their No. 1 problem was finding qualified workers. Overall, 35% of the businesses said they had job openings that they were unable to fill. The labor pinch was especially sharp in the construction industry, with unfilled jobs at 56% of companies…
A net 31% of the businesses reported giving workers a raise, with a net 16% intending to do so in coming months. A net 9%, seasonally adjusted, planned to create new jobs. That’s a reasonably good number, though it’s down 12 points from February, perhaps reflecting hesitation as the coronavirus spread. Now many of those employers will have to cut pay or lay off workers. The latest monthly report from the payroll processor ADP, which covers the period through March 12, shows a drop in private nonfarm employment of 27,000.
This has been such a difficult situation.
I’ve been skeptical of the lockdown efforts from the start, but I must concede that no one had — or has — sufficient information to make a good projection. I’ve been very concerned that the lockdown efforts will do little except postpone the inevitable, in which case we will inflict enormous economic damage for little ultimate benefit. It is difficult to evaluate this hypothesis, too, given the available information.
I’m hoping that this shutdown will turn out to be like stepping on a garden hose while the water is running. The water pressure is still there, it’s just that the flow is being obstructed by an external force. Once the obstruction is removed, the flow will resume, even more strongly than before. If there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the economy before the shutdown, then theoretically something like that could happen.
It’s probably a naive hope, but I’ll cling to it as long as I can.
I see phrases like this in today’s news:
“offering voluntary buyouts to all 161,000 employees”
That is scary, very scary.
This is why the Wuhan flu has to be hyped, why we have to be quarantined, why there is uniform media disapproval of everything the administration does. There’s no good faith. They want a crisis so that the halcyon days of last month will be forgotten as fully as Mr Obama’s tepid response to SARS.
I think it will be years before restaurants recover and that movie theaters, already primed for a shakeout, will lose a few thousand screens.