31–40 of 214 posts
Meh. What do we need economic growth for anyway? Producing and throwing away another hundred million tons of food every year? New phones every six months or once a quarter? A third car? More shoes? We have enough of everything and much more, there is absolutely no need to grow western economies any further.
Summary: > In short, the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers from other industries. The finance sector then lends the money to businesses, but tends to favour those firms that have collateral they can pledge against the loan. This usually means builders and property developers. Businessmen are lured into this sector rather than into riskier projects that require high R&D spending and have less collateral t…
Can't say I agree with these statements. I would wager that the scale of money a rapidly growing finance sector is using is more important than an unsubstantiated claim of industry brain-drain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bankers are middlemen and gatekeepers. Unlike pool cleaners, doctors, cooks and gardeners.
Not always. Finance is a pretty big industry and its hard to make a sweeping generalization like this. For example, let's look at your checking account. A banker's not a middleman here - they're providing a service that allows you to keep you money safe for free while they invest it and assume the risk. Seems like a good service to me.
Yes, he is. He takes your money and lends it out to others, whom he charges for the privilege. That's how fractional reserve banking works.
Of course, these days since interest rates are zero, that's not really a profitable line of business. It's mostly used to upsell the more profitable products like mortgages or credit cards.
> In short, the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers from other industries. The finance sector then lends the money to businesses, but tends to favour those firms that have collateral they can pledge against the loan. This usually means builders and property developers. Businessmen are lured into this sector rather than into riskier projects that require high R&D spending and have less collateral to pledge.…
Reminds me of a story. One of my local universities (top 3 in the country) had a chemistry lab competition and invited high schools from local cities to participate. My younger sister was selected to be part of her school's team. So she went and won the competition. The deen of science was so impressed by her performance that after the reward ceremony he invited her to enrol in the science program. She replied no and…
> In short, the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers from other industries. The finance sector then lends the money to businesses, but tends to favour those firms that have collateral they can pledge against the loan. This usually means builders and property developers. Businessmen are lured into this sector rather than into riskier projects that require high R&D spending and have less collateral to pledge.…
Reminds me of a story. One of my local universities (top 3 in the country) had a chemistry lab competition and invited high schools from local cities to participate. My younger sister was selected to be part of her school's team. So she went and won the competition. The deen of science was so impressed by her performance that after the reward ceremony he invited her to enrol in the science program. She replied no and…
FWIW, the English term for a head of an academic department is spelled "dean", which is pronounced the same as "Deen", common as a person's name.
Basically bankers are like lawyers, gardeners, cooks, doctors, pool cleaners etc: service jobs to help other people get things done. When you elevate the sector to have implicit value you get a terrible distortion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_sector_of_the_economy
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't say I agree with these statements. I would wager that the scale of money a rapidly growing finance sector is using is more important than an unsubstantiated claim of industry brain-drain.
Totally agree. When the finance sector grows, demands for return interest on capital investment intensifies, acting as a gravity-well for capital away from development. Firms like Goldman make every investment require higher and higher returns at a greater and greater scale. Money chasing money. Casino economy. Instead of opening a new line of business, your profits must be funneled into paying back on that loan at h…
The economics for Fiber Optics looks good in almost all situations in the US if you look at a ten year horizon. In the short term, however, Verizon can make more money by building an LTE infrastructure that costs more and does less and will be thrown away in five years and has 15x the OPEX of an optic fiber network.
Today interest rates are crazy low and you'd think a company like Frontier would do this and know that that they won't be overbuilt in the flyover states and will pay a great dividend year after year for decades, but they don't.
But just watch, once interest rates are crazy high you'll see companies scramble to get money.
Meh. What do we need economic growth for anyway? Producing and throwing away another hundred million tons of food every year? New phones every six months or once a quarter? A third car? More shoes? We have enough of everything and much more, there is absolutely no need to grow western economies any further.
We don't have nearly enough health. The ability to spend more on medical research is enough reason all by itself to keep the economy growing.