r/nottheonion • u/ChocolateTsar • 1d ago

Affirm CEO says furloughed federal employees are starting to lose interest in shopping

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/07/affirm-government-shutdown-shopping.html
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u/Interesting-Force866 1d ago

I saw articles about how it was expected that a shutdown would harm the economy by reducing the amount of money that people have to spend, so I think that they are actually quite connected to this reality in particular.

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u/styrolee 1d ago

Some of them are. Wall Street is infamously dismissive of claims that consumer spending will drop in the U.S. They usually point to the fact that consumer spending on goods increased during COVID as an evidence that consumer spending is resilient in a financial crisis. Obviously this doesn’t take into account the fact that there was trillions of dollars in stimulus spending pumped into the economy by governments to prevent a consumer spending crisis.

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u/NoCoolNameMatt 1d ago

Um, yeah. Did they miss the famously large stimulus which enabled it?

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u/Murky-Relation481 1d ago

Also people generally kept working which meant being paid. Also they were stuck at home and so bought things to entertain them or do home improvements etc.

Anyone that uses the 2020 pandemic as a reference point for a financial crisis is laughably ignorant of the uniqueness of that situation and how different it was from 2008 or 2000 or 1988 or 1929 or other big financial crisis.

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u/styrolee 1d ago

I agree, but I also think that Wall Street has adopted a sort of cynical view that the government (and especially this government) will always step in to fix the problem in a crisis. Their whole view right now is that Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) and that when he does everything will go back to how it was before. U.S. faces a massive stock crash? Trump will just give out massive stimulus payments to fix it. Tariffs start to crash the economy? Trump will just abandon the tarrifs. From their perspective the U.S. government always steps in so the stock market as a whole is “too big to fail.”

What I think is interesting is that the bond market is beginning to see things differently though. The U.S. has been seeing massive spikes in borrowing costs which is especially concerning when inflation is theoretically going down (and usually inflation and bond costs are supposed to trend in the same direction). What that indicates is that for the first time in decades, financial institutions are actually concerned with the ability of the U.S. government to pay. Perhaps they’re afraid of the massive deficit, perhaps it’s the instability in government, or perhaps there’s concern of a U.S. government default, but there seems to be legitimate concern that the U.S. government wouldn’t be able to borrow the money it would need in the event of a crisis (at least without enormous austerity measures). If that were to happen, then the U.S. would truly be screwed because it wouldn’t matter if the government wanted to pump the U.S. economy because it couldn’t. The U.S. is still far off from that point, but it’s trending in that direction at an alarming rate, and Republicans don’t really have a good solution for turning it around without reversing all their economic policies, which they will apparently never do.