541–550 of 584 posts
I simply don't understand why leveraged buy-out(LBO) is allowed in the first place. It is like paying for the company with the money from the company you are buying.
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We need to figure out how to effectively organize boycotts, and find a way to actually incentivize participation. I'm spitballing here, but what if we created a browser extension that gives users the option to block various monopolistic/oligarchic tech platforms. If the browser navigates to a blocked platform, we show a "consider these alternatives" page instead. Competitors to the monopolies could offer incentives (…
I was working on something adjacent to this for a little while. It was a Chrome extension which allowed a user to upload a list (pluggable community-maintained lists, akin to ublock). It would light up when a user was on a site in the list with details about the site, the ownership/board, recent news, etc. It also had a space for recommended alternatives. I built it because I was tired of giving money to companies wh…
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Vaccines for respiratory illnesses are bad. Even Fauci admitted so. Why do you assume good intent from the United States government when the FDA is bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies.There was so much money to be made on specifically covid vaccines. I am not anti vax in general.
The flu vaccine has saved countless elderly lives. You don't assume good intent from the US and its institutions, fine, but other countries also rolled out vaccines, are they all bought and paid by pharma companies? Is that really the argument?
I simply don't understand why leveraged buy-out(LBO) is allowed in the first place. It is like paying for the company with the money from the company you are buying.
That's the exact same concept as a mortgage. But instead of securing the loan with the equity value of the house, you are securing the loan with the cash flows of the business. It's hard to see what's wrong with this. In an analysis of "European companies around their buyout event in the period 2000 - 2008," private equity was found to "select companies which are less financially distressed than comparable companies…
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There's $32trn of them: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL594090005Q Who do you think is buying .. everything? They're holding substantial fractions of both the whole stockmarket and national debt.
I do not know anyone other than teachers, cops, or firemen that have pensions and all of those are grossly underfunded (see city of Chicago). Now... if you mean IRAs then yeah... that's 99% of all private "investors" EDIT: I forgot all about State and Federal pensions.
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The pre 1980s standards were ridiculous though. However, even if the US moves to some 3 quarters of the way towards now would be a huge improvement. The "consumer harm" standard is idiotic.
Would you share a more detailed argument? Right now we only have adjectives: "ridiculous", "idiotic". The US economy generally did very well with those standards, maybe the best it ever did, especially considering distribution of benefits.
Summary of the old regime: Mergers that lead to 5+% market share were blocked.
Then the "consumer harm in terms of prices" was adopted. Which swung the pendulum the other way. That is the fundamental economic policy now. Which has lead to abhorrent results.
I wrote a comment on previous post that was about how consumer harm standards have warped the discussion on tariffs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096236
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Huh? Don’t many jobs still have gold plated pensions? Like millions upon millions? They need to be paid out somehow.
Government jobs, yes. Of which there are more and more every year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT
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The flu vaccine has saved countless elderly lives. You don't assume good intent from the US and its institutions, fine, but other countries also rolled out vaccines, are they all bought and paid by pharma companies? Is that really the argument?
Yes exactly. They are great for immunocompromised people. Much less so for healthy people. Which is why it should have been an option and not mandatory.
Just look at measles, to stop spreading it to children who cannot take the vaccine due to other health issues you need almost every children that can be vaccinated to be vaccinated, otherwise the disease spreads.
It's not a really hard concept to grasp. It was crisis time, you don't get to play with lives at that point due to your individualistic convictions.
The irony is that PEs exist largely because of pension funds. So to sum it up (not so nicely) we are transferring value from our current standard of living to pay for retirement checks for our old folks. Pensions fund a significant part of PE and they do so because they need around a 7% return in order to look solvent. If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone w…
I always fancied the idea of 'dedollarizing' retirement. When you turn 65/70/whatever, your pension/IRA/401(k) isn't paid out as a monthly cheque, but instead as a lifetime lease to an apartment in a retirement complex with subsidized services, and a relatively tiny cash stipend. The quality of life remains comparable, except we've removed the ceremony of passing most of the money through the hands of the pensioners…
I’m sort of kidding about the PE here us particular. But institutions that aren’t run by people who personally care about services tend to be really bad at maintaining things like food quality or ventilation or furniture or any of the hard-to-measure attributes that make for a nice housing situation.