Can I Sign Hawaii Banking Word

Can i industry sign banking hawaii word myself

for this year's primary election registered registered voters who need to watch out for their ballots driving by arriving by mail in late following the instructions prior to elections well aloha and good morning it is wednesday august 5th i'm ryan kalesuji joined by yunji de nies this is spotlight hawaii brought to you by the office of elections we know that elections is coming up and again we want to thank the office of elections of course for allowing us to have this conversation as we spotlight some of the headlines and newsmakers in hawaii of course something that continues to be on top of everyone's mind is the coven 19 pandemic and this month we are focusing specifically on the economy and its impact and today angie we have a special guest to speak directly to the economic impacts of the copa 19 pandemic that's right we've invited paul brubacher to join us this morning he is the principal of tz economics that is a hawaii economics consultancy his background in research on the hawaii economy and financial risk stems from a 25-year affiliation with the bank of hawaii he also served as the bank's chief economist so he knows a thing or two about hawaii's economy and we're so happy to have him with us today he's also brought some slides with him so he's really going to help us to get a deeper understanding because we've been talking so much about the economic pain and impact um but what is behind those unemployment numbers and you know i know that you don't have a magic wand but how can we get out of it so good morning paul thank you for being here um sort of broad basis how are we doing uh not so good in hawaii we were doing great uh at the end of may we had contained the initial uh surge introduction and then community spread of the novel coronavirus and taking it down to zero uh right before memorial day but it's been creeping up for the last couple months and we're it's it's taken off hard right now so we're going to have to uh you know change our behavior and get back to some serious mitigation such as we had back in april so we're looking right now and like we said we we are going to have some slides and if you have questions put them in the comments we are so lucky to have paul with us today because a lot of business leaders in our community pay big bucks for his analysis but we are bringing it to you for the great local price of free 99 we're so happy to have that um but we're looking right now uh you talked about the cases hawaii really is in a second wave and you see that in this first slide you gave us well there's a debate about whether it's a second wave or not but it looks like one to me and the point is that the first one we knew came from travel related introduction people coming home from the mainland and bringing it with them that's not the case now now it's just it's taken off from within the community uh as a result of large parties and you know people gathering for holiday events and whatnot so we've got to figure out how to get the thing back get the genie back in the bottle okay now a lot of people of course were very concerned with the reopening and the fact that we delayed it but um it turns out that deferring reopening actually helped our economy in a way can you tell us about that yeah so this the the slower and more um uh measured your reopening so you you know if you set it up with the uh sort of benchmarks that you if you achieve a certain benchmark you can go to the next stage and so on you can see all over the world where this has been successful and even in a few states uh particularly uh in the in the northeast in states like you know large states like new york and and smaller ones like rhode island where they um had a terrible experience in the initial wave in march and april and um really learned from that experience you know not to screw it up um by the way we also learned this from the 1918-1999 influenza pandemic where there were double waves in many u.s cities as a result of reopening prematurely or giving giving in to popular calls for relaxation of social distancing and mask wearing measures and whatnot so it's not as if we haven't learned it from history or from other countries and states experiences uh ryan has a question that we want to bring in uh that asks when will the economy start to turn around what sort of things do you think will need to be implemented in order for the state to sort of rebound from this of course tourism and lifting that 14-day quarantine is something that will help what other factors do you think will help to maybe jump start the economy yeah it's pretty basic everybody it the the epidemiological problem is the economic problem right you don't solve the economic problem until the epidemiological problem is solved until we mitigate and contain spread transmission of the novel coronavirus and we had done so in may and in hawaii we have failed since may uh to maintain uh the level of mitigation we we had already achieved so we're gonna have to start over again now that may not involve as draconian a form of shutdown as we had to impose initially because we're all accustomed to mask wearing and social distancing and and more rigorous hygiene uh so i think most people and i have taken that uh into account it's just a few people on the margin that you know they can't handle or i don't know whatever they're it's it's coming from a small part of the population that isn't adhering to those basic uh social behavioral rules but the answer to the economic recovery question is the answer to the biological risk management question which we know involves expat more testing more rapid testing more extensive testing um contact contact more effective contact racing i would go as far as smartphone tracking and um um and then a third thing i can't remember but yeah testing tracing and uh something else i can't remember um well i mean the the all the practices that i was just talking about masquerading social justice and hiding but we're just we're not we're we're not a point where we're able to um identify trace and track the spread of the virus and we need to be able to do that particularly if we're going to reopen tourism maybe it's first of all it's not about tourism you guys it's about air travel okay everybody getting on the plane getting off the plane in hawaii we need to know is not going to be a carrier now the blunt instrument you know like the dumb way to do that is to make them sit in a room for two weeks after which if they're not sick god's your uncle but there are better ways to do that like testing them at the airport or some combination you know between those two extremes the 14-day quarantine i'm trying to fit in the window here and you know testing everybody that gets off a plane which is fine with me um right it has got to be some protocol that would allow us in an environment in which uh morbidity and mortality have abated on the mainland in these western states and southwestern states where it's gotten out of control this summer when that moment comes we can we can move forward with that tourism protocol air travel protocol the there have been a lot of business leaders um who have uh and business owners who are really pushing for more laxity in uh in openings um and the lieutenant governor himself on this program has said that for every month we delay reopening tourism we delay economic recovery by six months now as an economist do you agree with that premise no i mean if we look at new zealand look at taiwan look at vietnam has 95 million people 650 coveted cases and no deaths ever so there's a way to do this and you don't have to wait six months if you get the mitigation in place and are and are able to sustain it now every country that's achieved what america has not but also like everywhere in europe everywhere in east asia basically will face the same reopening problems and is facing them i mean you know the flare-ups and guacamole uh uh on the hot spots but that's better than what we've seen across the western and southern united states where the surge in in cases and now hospitalizations and deaths and the deaths are going to continue rising in the west for another two weeks um that's a that's a different kind of thing that's you know people being idiotic um so yeah these other places have shown us the way it can be done and if you do it right it would take six months but you'd have to do it and then keep it in place for the six months or a year until vaccines are available you know one of the things that this has taught us is just the buying patterns of people and you've provided some interesting slides that help to highlight those sort of numbers and the way in which people are spending money uh during this time if we can take a look at this first slide that sort of breaks down uh just the food and consumption and where they're being consumed yeah i do want to emphasize that um uh ryan and yunji can make these data available too i mean the whole slideshow can be made available and all the links are at the bottom of each slide so you go check it out we have these amazing high frequency daily data that are being made available by you know web scrapers and google with its mobility data and whatnot these are data on um credit and debit card transactions by the type of establishment uh you know where the transactions took place you can see the surge upward in um in food at home or you know groceries and food store activity uh transactions and then the drop the simultaneous drop after the end of march in dining out now now some of that's coming back to um you know what was the case pre-covered 19. a really interesting question is will it ever go all the way back and this brings up another subject that i think is important to try to think through as you as you look down the road to the prospect of recovery which is that whenever there's a large exogenous shock in the economy there's always a possibility that things you think were only temporary changes turn out to be permanent changes uh like um and it's not just the idea that maybe people won't eat out as much as they used to or were actually were back in january and february as a benchmark um it may be that the way they eat out differs in the future i think it's going to be way more app-based for example so um i'd be looking at if you're in business or if you're thinking about changes in the employment landscape in the near future i'd be thinking about how the structure of economic behavior changes among consumers and households and how businesses can anticipate and respond and get ahead of and be leaders in uh moving us in those directions well on that topic um and let's let's get to this one question from joey because i think it actually ties into that well and he says small businesses will not sustain through another lockdown many businesses have already shuttered their doors for good how do you prevent further economic devastation a vaccine is at least a year away how do we continue to allow businesses to function in this current environment when you talk about those shifts and those changes how many of these businesses have shut for good yeah well the answer uh that's two questions but the answer to the first question is um you mitigate the spread of the coronavirus and we're not doing that in hawaii so you can't have business if everybody's being getting infected by going around let me put this in perspective a little hawaii right now is running about a hundred cases per million persons if you normalize the data per day about 100 cases per million per day we were at zero at the end of march the peak numbers in new york were about 500 to 550 cases per day uh back in early april okay as one benchmark italy peaked in march april at 200 cases per million per day okay so those are sort of you know from you know the anyway the worst once you over 500 your toes arizona florida louisiana this mississippi today is is punching out um hit or breach 500 cases per million per day uh from mid-july to the present okay how long did it take arizona to get from 100 to 500 cases per million persons per day three weeks hawaii could be there at the end of the month arizona did that without opening school i'm just saying so the question is how do we get businesses to revive and stay open the answer is don't let's go from 100 cases per million to 500 cases per million in the next three weeks that's that's literally what we're on the verge of right now either we deal with it like this week or next or we're toast and the question is academic there was a second part of the question though that i thought was also important i can't remember well um let's go back to it sorry a vaccine is at least a year away how do we continue to allow business to function in this current environment yeah so um yeah you've got to keep you've got to keep mitigation in place you've got to you know and it's important to start to cut you know familiarize yourself with yourselves with the numbers so for example you hear this number testing positivity rates okay hawaii went from one percent of tests turning out positive to five percent in the last month or so arizona peaked out at about 25 percent one quarter of all tests in arizona a couple weeks ago we're coming in positive that's way too high you know five percent is about where you should start to worry so and hawaii's there right now because things take off by themselves after that point that's what you have to be concerned about and these other threshold thresholds i mentioned like i think germany's threshold for air travel is 50 cases per million per month so for example well the europeans won't even let americans travel to europe that's how bad america is but arizona was at 500 they're down to maybe 350 right now cases per million per day um you know those with those kind of metrics then if you're in business if you can see the metrics evolve you can think about where we might be going you can start to make plans right now i we're going the wrong direction so near-term planning over the next month just to be realistic you have to you have to plan for something worse happening than already has in the last month or so do you think shutting down the bars is problematic wait a week wait two weeks what happens when the hospitals are full and nobody was even talking about that like yesterday and today there's a story in the paper that says next week we max out and you just gotta stay home bro so yeah these things happen really quickly we've got to figure out how to get the numbers back down and to keep them there and it probably involves a combination of much more rigorous we have a very socially cohesive community in hawaii we hang together we help each other out we got that going for us let's not blow that by um uh what's the right word tolerating a few bad actors that can't keep it in their pants you know i mean so shame them publicly whatever it takes but let's get down there and that and that's also a leadership thing be a leader in your community and you'll be a leader in your network you know what i mean um help people understand the right thing to do for other people's sake so that we literally build the recovery ourselves i want to get back to some of these more economic slides that you have provided for us uh taking a look at some of the uh graphics that show the impact the impact of the economic set and stop and and what this could mean for the unemployed the employment market here in hawaii yeah we're looking at uh people in numbers running from 30 to 40 to 50 000 per week filing claims for unemployment at the at the peak of the initial jolt uh late march early april is when it peaked and then you can see the flames coming down and the problem is that they've settled in to a number between five and ten thousand per week and it was essentially zero before march right and what that tells you is that we're sort of stuck in this kind of low-level equilibrium trap like a a bunch of the people you know a hundred thousand or two hundred i mean crazy numbers of the initial uh persons who lost employment remain unemployed that's that we need that recovery we were just talking about to get them back to work um but in addition each week week after week we're churning out five or ten thousand more persons uh who for o e reason or another their employers the businesses that they run aren't able to keep going and that's why these questions about recovery are really really important but again the answer to the economic problem is the answer to the biological problem one comes before the other and um we you know got shot at doing it and we did it before here in hawaii let's talk about this slide i think this is really important to see because on its face it looks like oh this is good then they're you know the unemployment numbers as difficult as they are they are receding to some extent but what what is the what is the true unemployment rate because this doesn't necessarily capture everyone that's out of a job well so there are actually several versions of the answer to that question so let me highlight three the first looking at this is sort of what's called the you three the measured unemployment rate which is a person's out of work and looking for work and by definition people who aren't looking for work because they have been assured by their employer by the hotel which they were whatever they'll be called back to work that they're basically furloughed but they will be called back to work uh in the future are are waiting for that call and uh they turn out not to be included in these unemployment statistics it's more complicated than that because of the way unemployment is measured but by definition the headline unemployment rate is persons out of work and looking for in the last four weeks so the actual number of people of numbers of people who are involuntarily out of a job um are higher than the 14 that we see here they you know they could be in the range of 20 to 25 maybe a version of unemployment in the sense that they are underemployed i mean they're productive resources in our community who could be more fully engaged in productive activities so there's a little new hero paper about this to remind people that there are other measures of unemployment and then i do want to emphasize the historical context here um you know hawaii's had some big beat downs uh but none recently uh like this now you could go to individual islands you know hurricane iniki for the island of kawaii was as bad as this coronavirus is for the state as a whole and we shouldn't forget that that that you know one place you know lower puna got wiped out although don't build your house on a live volcano let me just say that um after world war ii in the post-war demobilization it turns out hawaii experienced an economic downturn just as bad as the one we're going through today in the late 40s you know 1946 through 49 and what i think is really important to remember about that moment in history is that the people who came back from the war and built this the modern hawaii to build the state of hawaii you know the catch a wave crowd the greatest generation those dudes um you know my parents you know your grandparents i mean those people came from that adversity they came from world war yo and built the economy we have today so while we're stuck in this rut and it's gnarly let me tell you try to remember that not too far down the road is going to be an opportunity to do everything better faster maybe cheaper uh and for the greater benefit of more people in our society then was the case six months ago and try to keep that in mind while we go through the hardship i want to bring it i want to bring in another question this one from teach in a way asking what do you predict for the residential housing prices for the next six months do you foresee that being also impacted by this and we also of course we know that hawaii has some of the house the highest housing costs uh in in the nation and what what impact do you think this will have on those prices yeah well okay first of all housing is expensive in hawaii because it's hawaii okay if if if housing were cheap then everybody would try to come here which would bid up the price of oh wait that's what we have right now okay so so housing is never going to be like way cheaper it could be a little cheaper if we did a bunch of housing policy that we're not doing but let's leave that for another discussion meanwhile the question is really asking about you know where look like look at the stock market look at gold prices look at home prices what's going on there and the answer is so far they've remained relatively stable they didn't fall off the cliff like stock values did and then bounce all the way back when it turned out you know nobody's eating out so what are they doing with the money they're they're putting it in the stock market they're creating it on robinhood on his smartphone i don't know what's going on but the u.s savings rate just went up by multiples overnight and that's a lot of that's going into these asset markets like stocks where the prices that have fallen are being bid that up bid back up that never happened in housing for one thing what are you gonna do shelter on the beach right so you know there's a there's a reason why people want to keep a roof over their head during a novel uh during the trump pandemic but houses also are assets that let's face it they'll live longer than we will they'll be around for way longer than we are and as long life assets you have to think of the price today as reflecting the future value of those housing services over time and those haven't gone away one caveat is there's a little bit of weakness right now that i see on oahu not as much on the neighbor islands but a little bit of weakness in the condo segment on oahu in terms of valuations coming under a little pressure but i think that's mostly because the city banned vacation rentals 30 years ago nobody knew and uh last year they decided to hire ice to enforce the on undocumented vacation rentals remember that like one year ago and so you know you're you're illegal and but i've been operating for 30 years yeah you're still illegal and because that volume went away when tourism went to zero a lot of those units are just held by small investors who with no cash flow no income have to get rid of those prop have to exit from those properties so there's a little bit of that to me it looks like it's showing up in the condo segment on oahu but you know basically home values are fairly stable and they look like you know if things work out the way they're supposed to which is we mitigate the current surge um we figure out how to keep the economy going without reigniting flare-ups in the in the coronavirus and at some point we get the vaccination and as long as enough of us get vaccinated and let the antibacters go drink the kool-aid then we should be able to go back to a new normal uh with you know plenty of upside for people who are creative and i can think about different ways to do things in the way we've done it in the past and in that kind of a world the value of housing the value of productive assets will uh continue to remain strong so you know we were all concerned about housing um but it turns out uh values have held up pretty well um you know we spent the last month talking to politicians who are running for honolulu mayor and you know every 201 all talked about diversifying the economy to that end betty ann clark has a comment she says time to be more self-sustaining islands let's invent some local factories and produce something on our islands we have been talking about diversifying our economy for a really long time i see you're shaking your head it you know to what extent this tourism i'll just let you take it what what what what do you say to betty ann and to and to so and to others like her who say diversifying is the way out knock yourself out what prevented you from building a factory six months ago oh no market for you oh china has better factories than you will ever make in kalihi well there's that you know it's i know everybody says that i mean everybody running for every office says we need to diversify the economy and they've been doing it for 50 years evidently since jack burns invented it i don't know that um somebody told me that once well i won't say his name but another prominent politician a former gubernatorial candidate and somebody whose opinion i respect once told me uh yeah brubaker i'm going to go with jack burns on this and i'm like jack you mean like governor burns from 1962 what um yeah for 50 years all my life people have been telling me we need to diversify the kind like it's some engineering problem we dial with dials around you know we get it more verse and here's the irony tourism what jack burns was talking about he was talking about diversifying the economy through tourism and now we're so look self-sufficiency is the economic development strategy of north korea it's working out great for those guys but here's a here's the bottom line go do whatever you want i have no problem if you want to be self-sufficient in agriculture if you want to make factory here's my favorite one industrial hemp the only problem what industry what industry would you produce for what industry would you produce industrial hemp for right this hemp for some industry i don't know where you can make the rope out of it i'm just saying knock yourself out we may end up with a more diverse economy we may not my sense is that having waited a half century for it to miraculously happen the pattern of economic activity which we see in the data which by the way is pretty diverse i mean we have a small number of exportables but that's normal for every place on the planet and i don't know right i don't know i just yeah i'm sorry we ended up having the argument yeah yeah but we're and we're actually out of time unfortunately so uh we thank you for lucky for your viewers thank you for uh spending some time with us this morning and sharing that and we will provide opportunities for people to see some of those slides in further detail in our comment section so thank you very much for joining us here this morning take care and chance on you guys always good to hear his perspective you know what what i love about paul brubaker is that he's so smart obviously he is a phd and he um you know has has tremendous credentials but he also really breaks it down and speaks you know very plainly um and tells us what you know you may not agree with everything that he says but you definitely know where he stands that's right and you know we want to again we will try to find a way to upload these uh slides uh into the comments section so that you can see in some detail there were some things that we weren't able to get through and there are some very striking numbers when looking at the comparisons with other states as well as some other economic breakdown and what people were spending during this time and uh some of those trends as well so uh it would be a good way for all of us to be able to kind of take notice of that again we will continue on with these conversations directly focused on the economy and next week we will continue to further these discussions with others who are involved in this sector in our community yeah that's right we'll be talking to mayor kirk caldwell on monday and lieutenant governor josh green on wednesday things are happening so rapidly the mayor's saying already today and there's an article about this in the paper today that we could see some further restrictions in the not too distant future and i think that plays in to what paul was talking about when he referenced rivera in the paper as well saying that basically if we continue down this trend hospitals could be full not by the end of the month but by the end of next week that's right so it will uh be timely that we are able to talk to both the mayor and lieutenant governor next week of course we want to we will continue to get updates as we track some of these latest numbers and see what steps the city and state will have to make in order to mitigate some of that as well again we want to remind you this is an important week it is uh the primary election that is happening on saturday if you have not already sent in or mailed in your ballot that you received in the mail it is probably best that you actually drop it off to ensure that it does arrive in time to be counted uh again it is already wednesday and we want to ensure that all votes are counted so there are a number of drop-off sites that have been set up that you can actually physically take your ballot to uh or you could actually vote in person as well if you did not for some reason get your ballot or if you simply even have not registered to vote yet there's still an opportunity to do so that's right uh elections hawaii.gov of course elections.hawaii.gov or you can call that number on your screen the paper also has a great voter guide if you need some more information step by step the bottom line is that we want you to vote no matter your political persuasion the point is to participate now more than ever your voice needs to be heard and then the other side of this is what paul said be a leader in your community wear a mask socially distance wash your hands do all of these basic things um and hopefully we can bring those triple digit daily counts down because if we don't the pain that uh mr brubacher laid out is pretty severe and and some of those slides were pretty sobering that's right so we want to encourage all of you to continue to be safe and we will see you right back here on monday for another spotlight hawaii at 10 30. aloha you