Market stalls risk closure after egregious rent hike.

in greenwich •  4 years ago 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/19/londons-greenwich-market-stalls-face-closure-following-huge-rent-increase

This is the danger.

As revenue falls, rentiers increase rents. While its hard not to feel sympathy for the Greenwich Hospital Trust who are a charitable organisation, the expectation that we are all in this together is not, in fact, the case. Every group is a special interest group, that expects others to pay the price.
I talked a lot in the early days of the crisis about cascade failure, and maybe you can see some of that here.

The hospital sees diminishing rents as a problem it can solve by putting up rents, just as surely as we will pay for Eat Out to Help Out in increased taxation at some point. If you now only sell a thousand games instead of ten thousand games, you have to sell them for more, just at the time that your customers expect to buy them for less.

The danger to our economy was never the lockdown. That was an unmanageable, unmitigatable sudden shock, that we all had to pay. But now...

Nobody is making any money, so lets put up prices so everybody makes even less money quicker. There's a point where the rubber band cannot stretch any further. When the quarterday hits in September and furlough ends, its an economic bloodbath of a magnitude that you cannot conceive.

But here's the thing, the market traders here also imagine that they are a special interest. That their situation is unique. We all of us live in our own tiny socioeconomic bubble, and there is pain coming down the pipe. If we don't start thinking beyond our own tiny bubble of consciousness, that cascade failure will wipe us all out economically.

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!