Why most of your rents are doing fine.

Today's article from a market watch commentator.

"We have a forest fire and are borrowing trillions from future generations to Venmo people sitting at home as the inferno in their neighbor’s yard rages.

Personal income was 7.3% higher in Q2 versus Q1 because of stimulus payments and extra unemployment benefits. The personal savings rate hit a historic 33% in April, the highest by far since the department started tracking in the 1960s.

Do the 89% of people who still have their job need additional stimulus? It appears, as is the case the last several decades, that the only bipartisan action is reckless spending that flattens the curve for rich people while throwing some funds at the neediest for optics."

It's the website of an professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business. It's a passage from an article comparing America's involvement in/approach to/rationale behind/economic impact of WWII, vs America's involvement in/approach to/rationale behind/economic impact of Covid.

I thought it made some interesting points, but then I got distracted. :)

One interesting date point it had was that there are about 129 million US households, and about half of them households have an occupant which works for a company that employs at least 2500 people. So, the first reason why it's interesting is that if I work for a company that employs 10,000 people, there are 9,999 other households that have a person who work for a company that employs 10,000 people as well. (Presuming that multiple people from the same household don't work for the same employer.)

But at the same time--- there are 2.1M people employed by the federal government. So that's an automatic 2.1M households employed by the federal government. There are 142.5M civilians employed by the military. Walmart employs 1.5M.

But ultimately, in order to be classified as large, a company has to only employ 500 people.

As of 2010, there are about 16,000 companies that qualify as "large" (aka 500 people+), let alone your giant behemoths like Apple/Microsoft/Exxon/Walmart/Uncle Sam, which employ 2500+.

Out of those 16,000 companies of 500+, there are 34 metropolitan areas that have at least 100 of them. NYC is at the head of the list, with 1271 large businesses of over 500 people, followed by LA (717), Chicago (648), and so on.

Megabusinesses employ 2500+. As of 2010, there were 1,346 of them in the US. (And as of 2010, there were only three cities that had more than 50 of them in one place: NYC (134), LA (81), and Chicago (58).)

So--- with so relatively few companies that operate at the 2500+ employee scale, especially at the national level, despite the number of people who are employed by them, I found it interesting that the writer chose to develop his ideas of megabusinesses adopting their employees' households for two-week periods... and I also thought it was an interesting illustration of his NYC-centric bias in play. (Because with so few megabusinesses in play in the first place, who except someone from NYC/LA/Chicago would spend a chunk of their blog post what-iffing about having Walmart/FedEx/UPS/Amazon/GE/PepsiCo/AT&T/Starbucks be responsible for 2 weeks' worth of groceries in each of their employees' pantries, providing them with broadband, giving them smartphones with apps, scheduling stuff for their kids, and making sure each household's goodies come only if they wear their masks like good children. :P

I liked him better when he was talking about the WWII stuff, before he veered off on that tangent. :)

Thought that civilians-employed-by-the-military number was a bit weird. It was a Bureau of Labor Statistics number, but it looked like a big chunk of the middle was taken out in the bit I glanced at. :P

What it should have said was,

In 2017, civilian workers outnumbered military personnel nearly 110 to 1. But what distinguished the groups even more was how differently people are distributed among occupations.

There were about 142.5 million U.S. civilians employed in 2017, compared with 1.3 million active-duty servicemembers in the U.S. Armed Forces.

In actuality, it looks like there are 330,000 civilian employees of the military.

Yup! Deanna got the same email I did this morning.

Scott Galloway is highly regarded in the area of market trends, branding, and how society reacts.

The main point of his article was how our parents and grandparents banded together and did without for the sake of WW2, compared to the bickering over masks we have now.

He showed stats about how many Americans died in each war going back to the civil war and how we are rapidly approaching that daily death rate, while arguing about masks.

He also shows how the crisis is making the rich richer.

He's a super brainiac and I can barely keep up with him in his YouTube videos, but he makes me think and I like that!

I was just reading yesterday that the US has been at peace only 16 years out of its 242-year history.

After 35 years of Hennie Pennie-- all the stats and notes and this and that-- how has it affected what YOU'RE DOING?

Do people sit back and say __ "ya know the unemployment rate was 9.6% this month so I'm not buying investment property"? OR "ya know the national debt is 1 gazillion dollars so I'm not borrowing money for this home i want to buy"?