If my job were to be to subtract all traces of humanity from language about things that directly affect countless people, I’d consider that to be ghoulish even though I was receiving a paycheck.

The idea that my pointing out that something somebody said was distasteful is “a little bit silly” on the grounds that the author was paid to write those words seems… ghoulish?

Sounds like you're just addicted to excessive political correctness and are shocked when it's absent from a report that has no place for it. The author's job is not to express moral stances that you agree with, but to provide accurate fact based estimates without ceremony, which they do well here.

> Stating the "fact" that one believes that human life and dignity should rightly be traded for cash does not make it an objective statement that’s somehow elevated above having an obvious moral stance.

The author is not advocating for what should be done. He's describing what he expects to happen, based on what X policy changes will affect Y result.

No, I don't think he is clairvoyant. He is making a forecast, a prediction about what might likely happen in the near future.

So the phrase “will require” is descriptive and not prescriptive?

That’s news to me because I was of the opinion that the future, having not happened yet and has such has never been observed, cannot be objectively described.

This whole premise of “It’s not his opinion, his brain is just so big that the awful things he outwardly advocates for should be considered facts about the future, which he’s capable of observing and commenting on due to his aforementioned big brain.” is nakedly designed to carry water for people that have semi-psychopathic opinions.

For example, the opinion that there won’t be enough boats on the ocean unless the homeless population increases definitely sounds like some sort of superstitious hokum, but because it’s on a bank website it’s to be treated as if it’s as logically consequent as the laws of thermodynamics.

This is beyond silly. It’s slapstick.

> So the phrase "will require" is descriptive and not prescriptive?

In this instance yes, I think so.

So the accusation that the author is advocating for the things he describes (and thus morally bankrupt) comes down to the words "will require" in the lede? "X will require Y" is another way of saying "X won't happen until Y" and doesn't indicate favor for the cause or the effect in question.

And I'm not saying it isn't his opinion. Obviously these are his opinions. There is a difference between having an opinion on what you think will happen and having an opinion on what should or ought to (rightly, justly) happen. In the body where he elaborates on his predictions in the lede he actually uses the words "will probably require", indicating he is not certain what will happen but describing what he thinks is most likely. So there is no confusion here that he is sharing opinions on future events, and not describing what will certainly happen like some sort of psychic.

This is a fascinating word game!

He doesn’t actually think that in order to increase returns it’s a good idea to increase foreclosures and allow further spread of a pandemic. He doesn’t actually want or openly advocate for these measures. He’s just a big brained genius that’s doling out little gems of the future to us plebs out of the kindness of his heart, free of charge.

In order to maximize the philanthropic value of this stoic and unbiased gift to the reader (which I’m assuming is for a regular Joe who would never consider taking any of this as advice?), he’s chosen the notably objective and not-profit-driven community information sharing website, jpmorgan dot com

For whatever reason I’m unable to respond to the response to this, so I’ll put this here:

> Bankers generally put out analyses like this to convince would-be clients that their firm can make them money by making smart predictions about the future.

This is starting to sound like something from a fever dream. I pointed out that this man is advocating for increased homelessness and preventable death on the premise that increased homelessness and death will create more profits for existing and would-be customers of JP Morgan.

So far, the responses have been: 1. No he isn’t advocating for death and homelessness at all 2. He just thinks it’d be profitable and is sharing his objective opinion in such a way that should not be construed as advice for existing or possible investment banking clients.

And now… 3. He’s not advocating for increased homelessness and death, but if he were to come off that way it’s because -while he’s NOT giving advice- he’s written a form of advertisement that looks like advice to institutional investors in order to attract clients that would take his advice, which is entirely different from what’s been written in the article.

It’s not an article advocating for homelessness! It’s an ad for a service that may or may not advocate for homelessness after you pay them! It’s entirely plausible that the author tells his clients to reduce foreclosures!

The facts that he’s stated his opinion, is in a position to be taken seriously and is published by one of the biggest corporations on the planet are all coincidental and any criticism of his position should not be taken seriously due to the fact that he could be… what? Lying?

Again, this is some slapstick nonsense. The sheer amount of words people come up with to avoid saying “I literally don’t care who lives or dies, or human dignity so long as my portfolio performs well “ is astonishing.

Treating these sort of prescriptions (which is what this is, full stop) as some sort of magically objective, academic collection of facts is a form of mental gymnastics to create some distance between yourself and what happens to people in the name of your 401k.

“It’s just an objective forecast!” is a binky to soothe a guilty conscience.

The "whatever reason" is a built-in HN mechanism to limit daft subthresds like this one.

Again, and one last time, he is not advocating for what society should do. He is predicting what it will do, which is what an insight is. That is the service he provides to his customers: predicting the future. His customers want the best guess for what the future holds because knowing that is the best way to make money, or at least not lose it.

You keep conflating predicting what will happen (foreclosures, immunity via vaccination or infection) with advocating for what should be done (kick people out, get everyone sick) and then attacking a strawman.

Bankers generally put out analyses like this to convince would-be clients that their firm can make them money by making smart predictions about the future.

I don’t know why HN is acting so strange regarding replies today but here we go:

> Again, and one last time, he is not advocating for what society should do. He is predicting what it will do,

To mirror your language: Again, and for one last time: The intended audience is, by your own admission, possible banking clients. “Institutional investors“ is a category of organizations that have the ability to ramp up foreclosures and/or reduce COVID measures in their businesses.

Perhaps there is some difficulty distinguishing between some random nobody tweeting “lol I think foreclosures are good” and a banking professional “suggesting” that “maybe if the homeless population increases along with fewer Covid concerns, my clients as a professional would make more money. Wink wink!” on an enormous and well-respected platform.

I’m always curious about people that go out of their way to defend big, awful organizations and their terrible agendas. When I was younger, I intuitively guessed that the folks defending the banks were the lavish, decadent rich people. Oddly enough I’ve found that that’s not normally the case, the biggest cheerleaders for this sort of godawful naked “fuck the poor” rhetoric are the aspirational “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Good tidings!

> I don’t know why HN is acting so strange regarding replies today

It's a speedbump. You have to wait a few minutes before replying to a reply. It encourages reflecting on what the other person is saying instead of launching into what you already wanted to say.

> The intended audience is, by your own admission, possible banking clients. “Institutional investors“ is a category of organizations that have the ability to ramp up foreclosures and/or reduce COVID measures in their businesses.

I don't admit that. We disagree on who the intended audience is. It's not decision-makers looking for a policy recommendation. It's investors who want to know what will happen to their investments.

> I’m always curious about people that go out of their way to defend big, awful organizations and their terrible agendas. > cheerleaders for this sort of godawful naked “fuck the poor” rhetoric are the aspirational “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Surprise surprise, people on HN will give you push-back when you say something outrageous. Maybe you'd find better luck somewhere like r/wallstreetbets where you'll get many upboats for saying something along the lines of "Bankers, evil bastards, amirite?"

> It's not decision-makers looking for a policy recommendation. It's investors who want to know what will happen to their investments.

Ohhh. Your position is that the intended audience is your everyday Joe looking out for their retirement.

Who amongst us hasn’t taken some of our paychecks, put it into a Roth IRA and then immediately rushed to read the words of… uh, Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy at JP Morgan Asset Management?

Your position is fascinating because now the goalposts have moved from “he’s not advocating for homelessness and an unchecked spread of a pandemic” to “actually it doesn’t matter whether or not he’s advocating for homelessness and an unchecked spread of a pandemic because his intended readers are incapable of facilitating what he’s advocating for.

Under this assumption that nothing he writes could possibly be seen as bad. He could in theory instead of advocating for people being forcibly removed from their homes and thrown into abject poverty, advocate for just straight up shooting poor people in their faces. I mean surely the intended audience doesn’t have a gun!

He could advocate for incest to keep family money in the family. That’s not abhorrent, it’s how the Hapsburgs did things, so it’s an objectively normal thing to say!

From your position, there’s literally nothing that he could have said that you’d dislike. The level of fealty that temporarily embarrassed millionaires give to the people that don’t know that they exist is frankly phenomenal. JP Morgan isn’t going to pay you to defend them from an inconsequential internet stranger, but you post like you think they will.

Edit: The part of this that’s so incredibly comical, bordering on farcical is the motion that the “intended audience” of ‘Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy at JP Morgan Asset Management‘ does not include any any people that could be in a position to set policies regarding foreclosures.

In order to believe that you have to simply believe that nobody in the banking industry talks to one another or reads anything related to their industry.

It’s like a panicked lie from a toddler or a dog caught eating trash: The only option is to invent a new reality, whole cloth, on the spot and update it as needed.

Still running with the strawman that he's actually advocating anything, I see.

You might want to avoid medical textbooks.

I’ve never read a JP Morgan medical text book, but that’s a salient point.

I have trouble understanding what you'd prefer. Should this analysis be more concerned with (non-financial) human impacts? More concerned with impacts on the most affected/least privileged? Should it have been written by someone else? Should it not have been written at all? Should there be no demand for it?

What?

Edit: I will clarify that I’ve obviously not brought up other countries covid responses. I’m literally asking why this completely new equivocation could possibly deserve my response. It’s a confusing question to me, so I’ll clarify:

I do not care for this thought experiment. I did not solicit it nor will I help you out with your unrelated rhetoric.

You think a JPMorgan analyst writing a report saying foreclosures are good for the economy doesn't have mal intent? This is like the purdue memo that says oxycodone isn't addictive.

On one hand, yes you are right. There is consolidation bonzanza waiting to happen in housing, which honestly I am not even mad about because homeownership is a disgraceful sham and national institutional investors might be less NIMBY.

On the other hand, keep in mind that kneecapping demand is orthodox macroeconomics since the 1970s for very stupid reasons. Finance people are pretty good at unlearning stupid ivory tower econ, cause stuff like "flows before pros" vs "the market efficiently allocates goods" is their day job, but sometimes it's hard to let old habits die out. (And the textbook stuff is a nice salve for feeling better about the impacts of the job, too.)

See https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/inflation-expe... for a sketch of how normal macro is bullshit.

If I sound too conspiratorial, here is https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2021062pap..., a paper from a well-credentialed macroeconomicist at the fed whose sick of the bullshit. There's been good empirical work for years, and now the theory damn is finally breaking.

Now, to sound much more conspiratorial after all, you can also read a prediction of the trend until from...1943. https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf Rock-bottom interest rates, UBI vs jobs guarantee, a breakdown of the full employment consensus (as occurred in the 1970s), it's all there.

Home ownership used to be one of the few accessible investments that directly benefit less well off people. Rather than throw rent money in a black hole they build equity. How is that a sham?

Housing cannot by definition be a good investment, without becoming gradually more scarce and unaffordable in the future.

Keeping housing affordable means that it should grow with inflation, approximately.

A good investment should outpace inflation.

I commented this previously, but simply owning-and-then-selling a house should not be a good investment. What you do with it is supposed to make it a good investment.

This idea that investing means squatting valuable assets needs to die.

Save on rent, farm, rent to others, make a shop... preventing others who would put the land to better use is doing more harm than good.

So if you turn your house into an apartment, you should come out ahead, but this only works if enough population growth (including immigration). Still a pretty bad investment.

There are increasing returns to density, but they don't show up quick enough to defeat NIMBYism on the margins. The margins, of course, are where NIMBYism thrives. No one likes moving!

I interpreted the parent post to be more as “sound financial strategy to saving” rather than “good investment” (buying for levered appreciation)

Would also note that housing can be affordable nationally, and unaffordable in some markets given the local nature of housing.

> Would also note that housing can be affordable nationally, and unaffordable in some markets given the local nature of housing.

True, but if we don't densify (the natural result of that thinking), we'll condemn ourselves to waste inefficiency low growth and environmental destruction.

> I interpreted the parent post to be more as “sound financial strategy to saving” rather than “good investment” (buying for levered appreciation).

This is still a bit fraught, especially as housing has historically reason too fast. Remember there are net 0 dollars (basically), and saving is a mostly monetary phenomenon. Arguably it's because terrible cost disease in healthcare, education, housing, etc. that people want to save so much in the first place!

In the case when population remains constant, sure, but with a growing population, more housing is always required, thus the value should always increase, no?

Prices increase when you have a shortage. Prices decrease when you have a surplus. We can maintain prices by growing housing stock in line with population. (The same applies to everything else from semiconductors to cars to human labor.)

In California, people used zoning regulations to create a shortage and predictably house prices rose. Some people got richer. Other people got evicted.

Ideally, we'd create a slight housing surplus to reduce prices. As an added benefit, this would reduce rent-seeking opportunities and create a buffer of empty housing stock that would make moving and searching for a new place to live less of a hassle increasing people's mobility.

In a hypothetical world where humans eat something durable like wood, making wood an investment would create a group of people who cannot afford food.

In the real world where shelter is durable, making it an investment creates a group of people who cannot afford shelter.

Homeownership-as-investment is a mechanism to increase one's wealth at the expense of the less fortunate. It is ethically bankrupt.

It is also a disgrace that even though technological progress makes more and more things people need affordable, we use political means like zoning regulations to artificially drive up home prices in order to turn them into a good investment and thus unaffordable for some.

The point is it never should have been that way.

How could foreclosures not be good? If you buy too large a property in too nice of a location, making it too unaffordable for you, then you don’t deserve it. In fact not only do you not deserve it, you should be punished for not considering you could not afford it. You are stealing from others people’s livelihoods. To equate this to oxycodone shows ignorance to the fact that 75% of housing is owned by individual investors like you and I, or your mom and pop, while oxycodone is owned by a monopoly backed by big government.

I'm not commenting on the validity of the memo, only the conflict of interest that prevents the writer from admitting if foreclosures are bad for the economy.

I don’t read this as foreclosures are good for the economy. Rather that (among other things) the distortion created by intervention in housing market has a number of significant implications for other parts of the economy.

I would not ascribe malice to these people but cold heartedness and lack of empathy. One common pattern is that they usually advocate tough measures for others but not for their own class.

In 2008 all financial guys suddenly told us that they need bailouts when for decades they advocated for large scale layoffs, reduction of social systems, keeping wages low and other stuff because it was “creative destruction”. But when this destruction reached themselves they suddenly needed bailouts and of course we were told it would have been immoral to take away their million dollar bonuses.

A lot of these analysts are psychopaths who are capable of only looking out for themselves.

It's bad on descriptive grounds. There is no "wage price" spiral going on. Labor is weak no it's not the 1970s. There is simply supply bottlenecks, or rather:

increased demand is auditing our practices and finding the weakpoints we already had.

This is a good thing. (Unless you are a lazy capitalist that just wants to maximize your effort/investment to profit ratio.) We should continue to hold up demand until the bottle necks are fixed. (This is not a "beatings will continue until moral improves" situation.) We should be thankful increased demand as clarified what investments are needed. No surprise, it's unsexy things like 200m fabs not whatever trendy shit gets the money in the asset bubble we've had the last decade.

If we do anything beyond prop up demand and enacting environmental regulation, it should be puncturing the stupid asset bubble like China is doing with real estate. Getting all that crypto money to seek returns elsewhere would be a good thing.

What is the definition of maliciousness that you are thinking of?

He's just following orders!