Economy – Everett Leader Herald

The Collapsing Stock Market

Many of our readers have IRA’s and 401K’s and investment accounts at financial firms.

During the past two months, we have witnessed the steady decline and volatility of the stock market and the inevitable impact it has on our investment accounts.

The good feeling caused by our investment accounts being flush with money have been replaced by the exact opposite situation.

Our investment accounts are declining, and precipitously.

What to do?

Many people sell when they shouldn’t and end up suffering horrible losses that take years to replenish.

Yet all of us need money, and this requires having money on hand to meet obligations.

How long can we watch our accounts disappearing before we have to take action – whether we regret it or not?

With the stock market tanking dramatically, and with talk of a recession, and with the reality of inflation at its all-time modern high, the market bust is a real time, heavy duty problem that burdens the minds of everyone that has something to lose.

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Politics pulling budget strings more than economy

Everett City Hall. (Photo By Jim Mahoney)

Mayor keeps raise while continuing to slash jobs, pay from behind closed doors

BY JOSH RESNEK

The mayor is determined to cut every city employee salary and job that he can except for his own because the city is facing a financial crisis.

At a time when the city is facing financial hurdles caused by the Coronavirus, when long lines form several times a week at the city’s free food distribution centers, the mayor has decided to keep his own salary increase and to make cuts to many other city employees relying exclusively on their city salaries and health insurance.

Against this backdrop of shoot from the hip cuts and layoffs to stem a widening cash deficit, Everett remains a city without a budget, unlike most cities in the Commonwealth who have budgets.

The FY2021 budget or continuing resolution or draft spending plan or whatever you might call it, is readily available on the website of most municipalities in the Commonwealth.

Not in Everett.

One month into the fiscal year and the budget document is as elusive as the Easter Bunny in January.

The Mayor’s policy of opaque city budget economics is in full force.

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Facing an uncertain economic future

Screen Shot 2020-05-01 at 1.23.33 PM.png — Spring blossoms at the Massachusetts State House. (Photo by Jim Mahoney)

Everett is not alone in the national struggle to preserve our economy, to reopen it and for it to begin heading down the road to recovery.

We all want to be where we were before the Coronavirus and our reaction to it was to shut down the economy and our society and to employ social distancing.

At this moment, the city faces major hurdles in meeting its financial obligations. Without tax income pouring into the treasury, the city is a reflection of our private financial lives, all of which are in a state of ruin until we figure out how to get out of this and back to normal.

There will be a new normal. Things will not naturally go back to the way they were anytime soon.

What Everett’s leaders must be focused on is how to reopen the city’s public schools in the fall if this is possible. At the same time, everyone must understand that the city cannot pay School Department salaries as they exist today if the budget won’t allow for it – so adjustments in employment at the School Department are inevitably likely to be made.

It is simple math.

You can’t pay salaries if you don’t have the cash in the city treasury.

This implies that the state will need to supplement all city and town budgets with cash from its Rainy Day Fund in order to sustain present spending and to honor contracts for the coming year.

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— Eye on Everett —

Screen Shot 2020-04-09 at 8.53.49 PM.png — (Photo by Josh Resnek)

Looking outward

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By Josh Resnek

This coronavirus epidemic/pandemic and its immediate fall-out will last a long time.

There is no way it wont, despite everyone wanting to get the country’s economy up and running again.

We are in for a very difficult social and economic period. We are at the beginning of it right now.

Whether you are oblivious to this climactic moment when our society hangs in the balance, or whether you are at home shivering with fear about the uncertainties of the future, this is for sure: all our bubbles have burst.

This moment in our lives is historic and dangerous, fraught with perils of every kind, but powered mainly by a deadly virus, unprecedented but similar to catastrophes that have befallen mankind throughout the course of known history since the beginning of time.

Here is what’s coming in the short term.

In fact, the moment is upon us and devouring us as this is being written.

Thousands of Everett residents are already without jobs, without businesses, without savings accounts and without health insurance in a very short time.

Cash disappears at a much more rapid rate than it multiplies.

This closedown is a monster movie featuring, a Frankenstein, a Godzilla and King Kong all put together with a huge cast of flesh eating Zombies.

No matter who you are, from the richest man or woman in Everett, to the poorest, your business, your property, your home, your bank account, your retirement and IRA, everything about your economic life has undergone a seismic event.

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Gasoline prices have plunged

Drivers need to use common sense

By Josh Resnek

With the collapse of the world economy due to the Coronavirus, the price for a barrel of oil has tumbled to a near all time low for the modern era.

Because world use of oil has plunged as the world’s economies closed up, less and less crude oil is needed although more and more crude oil is coming into the marketplace.

When supply far outstrips demand, prices come down.

It is the way of the capitalist world.

Quick translation of the above: the price for a gallon of regular gasoline has come down dramatically and will continue to fall for the next few weeks unless something dramatic happens in the international marketplace.

In Everett, the price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Tuesday at some stations was as low as $2.19 on Broadway, and at $2.49 at the Citgo about 20 yards down the street.

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