Conversation

If hibernating a small business is turning out to be impossible, there should be a way to do a soft-landing bankruptcy via a fast-track online court. Court discharges a fraction of the liabilities, terminates contracts, and lets owner look for alt life with a small starting stake
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I have a feeling this thing is being made worse than it needs to be because we’re not letting business fail efficiently enough. We’re maintaining them on costly debt service ventilators.
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This could also be backdoor Georgism/LVT. For most small businesses, biggest liability is to landlords for lease I suspect. What are typical commercial lease break terms?
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PPP is the wrong priority. Yes people find it hard to bounce back after losing paychecks, but the hidden cost is frozen entrepreneurial drive, locked into keeping increasingly unsustainable businesses on life support. Free the entrepreneurs.
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It feels sort of fair to externalize most of the risk onto real estate owners because a) they are the literal rentier-est of rentiers b) have the easiest path to collateralizing what’s not already owned by the bank for bridge debt to hibernate with.
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And banks can reschedule mortgages more easily than almost any other kind of debt. It’s a good bet that people will find *something* to do with real estate after Covid even if existing uses collapse. Concentrate and dump all Covid risk on those who had it easiest in non-Covid.
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Increasingly convinced that unlike the underlying health crisis, the economic crisis is solvable with sufficient imagination. What’s getting in the way is not the technical difficulty of balancing monetary/fiscal equations but the psychological difficulty of satisfying ideologues
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Far-right Republicans are committed to opportunistic eugenics Moderate Republicans think poor will become dependent parasites. Moderate Democrats don’t want to help businesses Far-left Dems only want transient solutions that they can lock into permanent progressive regimes.
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This problem is only unsolvable if you want it to be version 1.0 of your glorious ideological revolution. If you treat it like a transient long crisis with more-than-palliative solutions that are open for dismantlement once it passes, more creative options become available.
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Covid recovery economic policy solution space is like Berlin in the last days of WW2. The Nazis were still a dangerous cornered threat, but already the B-plot. The A-plot was claiming turf for Cold War and grabbing as many German rocket scientists as possible.
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Here, the transient Covid pain management is already the B-plot. The A-plot is to claim maximal disaster capitalism turf.
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