#662

Love that they call them “power centers”

(Imagine it’s a time period thing? Like everywhere that has experienced massive suburban growth in eg the sunbelt since the mid 1990s, especially as Wall Mart has grown, probably has that type of development)

#663

Yeah, I’m just thinking about my wife’s hometown (a town / suburb / conurbation of a mid-sized city), there were malls they went to, but most of their shopping was to go to the supermarket at a retail park, then maybe walk around the edge to a giant Barnes & Noble or Marshalls (Tk Maxx style place) or something. But you also had small indie places in these complexes, little coffee shops or barbers, as well as cinemas and things.

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#664

yikes

I mean, the fed have printed a LOT of beer tokens but even so

#665

let’s remember that the point where things really went… (is the phrase ‘tits up’ no longer ok? I am assuming not) let’s say “very fucking wrong” in the late noughties was actually Lehman Bro’s going down, which happened a really long time after things were going quite badly wrong

so why did Lehman Bro’s go down?

aah yes, the fed decided that they didn’t fancy bailing them out

at some point, surely the same will happen again, for now there’s a willingness to do whatever it is (mainly print and loan money) to keep things somewhat stable… but that’s not gonna last forever

maybe the market is betting on Trump getting re-elected and not shafting the large companies that make up the S&P 500?

#666

Words struggle to describe how much I hate these retail parks (or whatever we’re calling them). Car-centric, bland, identikit atmosphere vacuums. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: At least indoor malls have some sense of vaguely human scale going on in comparison - as in you still drive there, but you walk from shop to shop. These fuckers are so big and anti-pedestrian that it’s often logical to drive from one shop to the other within the same retail park. Flatten them all.

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#667

I think it was probably because they decided to adopt accounting practices such as booking printer paper as capital investment.

Like Carillion in the UK, they were dead, and the withdrawal/ refusal of Govt. Support was always going to come at some point, it was more the when then the why.

#668

my point was that the central banks propped the system up for quite a while after it was clearly fucked… and then when they decided not to, that was when things really fell of the cliff

surely the same will happen this time

edit: so I guess the question I was asking wasn’t

it was

#669

Is this right?

The central banks reduced interest rates in the period between the credit crunch (August 2007) and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, but they didn’t make that many big interventions then.

Not doing enough in this period is one of the reasons why the GFC was so severe, and why the interventions in the immediate period after Lehman Brothers collapsed had to be so large.

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#670

the interventions just seem small now cos what followed was so big

#671

Oh yeah, they’re grim as fuck. At least here they’re still mostly “out of town” shopping, in the US it feels like they are the town in some cases. The car centric living there is staggering, I couldn’t do it

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#672

But the point is that they didn’t suddenly cut off support.

#673

You’d love Tamworth.

The town centre is pretty much dead and instead there’s about half a dozen separate but adjacent retail parks, just off the A5. Pretty difficult to walk from one to another as well because of how it’s laid out and how busy the roads are. There are/were plans to build another as well.

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The place is an absolute horror show.

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#674

:open_mouth: :cold_sweat: :see_no_evil:

Have never had the ‘pleasure’. Only ever went to the ski slope during my Brum years.

#675

Worst I’ve seen in Britain I think is Stoke, obviously it’s a weird set up anyway because it’s a conurbation of several towns, but I spent a week working there without a car and spent the whole time dodging across dual carriageways. And that was with the staying in Newcastle under Lyme which seemed relatively intact.

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#676

Basingstoke is really bad for this too.

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#677

People literally will not learn their lessons from 2008

“Investors’ ravenous appetite for higher-yielding assets is boosting some of the riskiest classes of bonds that have so far trailed behind a broad rally in corporate debt.”

https://www.ft.com/content/aef7be8f-3c81-4f9e-971c-e4a4b738f738

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#678

there must be some really big companies out there that are loaded with debt who won’t survive the next couple of years

gonna be bad

#679

Building the case for a new round of austerity part #12422

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#680

they do mention that borrowing costs are low

but there’s no fucking way the tabloids will set the narrative as being around that fact

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#681

When do you reckon we’ll see the first household budget comparison?

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