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Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

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Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#221

Post by kwoff »

01100011 wrote: post #212
ajross wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who had no health insurance but still got health care This is a harmful myth. It's possible to get emergency care under pretty much any conditions. Everything else isn't available. You can use this trick if you got hit by a truck or had a big infection. It doesn't work to get a hip replacement, or chemo, or post-stroke occupational therapy, or a prosthetic, or a pacemaker, or... That stuff requires insurance…

My ex mother in law was a lazy, morbidly obese dependent of the state who received well over a million USD in care during the last 10 years of her life. Even when her moron of a husband cancelled their insurance policy she still managed to spend months in the critical ICU section of UC Irvine while they cut out a bread loaf-sized section of necrotic flesh and rebuilt her intestinal tract. They didn't, and couldn't, p…

What is wrong with you? You're a horrible person.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#222

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nonbel wrote: post #175
chimeracoder wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But inflation also implies economic growth Inflation does not imply growth in real GDP, no. > which generally raises the value of equity holdings. The impact of inflation is dependent upon asset allocation. Ceteris paribus , inflation hurts debtholders (who, incidentally, tend to be wealthy), and it helps debtors (who, incidentally, tend to be poorer).

Inflation hits prices before wages. Wage increases due to inflation always lag the price increases of the food/shelter/etc people need to buy. Is this controversial?

No, it's not controversial. However, it also doesn't seem to respond to anything chimeracoder said. You sound like you think you're arguing with chimeracoder, but I don't see which point you're responding to.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#223

Post by paulie_a »

crazynick4 wrote: post #104
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #21

The definition of "we" and "survive" needs to be established clearly first and I don't think all those fancy graphs and market trends will define them. There's a lot of people that ended up bankrupt, in a bottomless depression, turned to drug abuse or committed suicide because of the last crisis. Wages are still relatively low while prices continue to climb. Many people are working 2-3 jobs and having trouble affordi…

If you have an extreme health care incident, why pay the bill? Sure it would hurt your credit score not to, but if it's between that and tens/hundreds of thousands, I think it is worth it to take the hit for 7 years. I know health care workers who give this 'unofficial' advice to their patients and I've had friends and family members do the same thing - people who had no health insurance but still got health care and…

Loan officers typically don't even take medical debt into account for mortgages.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#224

Post by jonknee »

hindsightbias wrote: post #58
the_gastropod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what made Bezos so rich in spite of a company that doesn't make much accounting sense? When everyone is betting on his success by blindly investing in index funds. Let's see... AMZN: up 62.93% YTD S&P500: up 6.81% YTD I don't think index fund investors are the cause of Amazon's growth.

[edit - sorry, read that as amzn not causing index growth] FAANG+M probably has a disproportionate impact on the index https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/28/fang-tech-market-concern-vol... >But the Street's favorite stocks have outsized clout in the index. For instance, Silverblatt says the FANG names — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet — equal about 7 percent of the S&P 500. With Apple, they make up abo…

That's simply because they are some of the biggest companies in the world. It's really the other way around, big tech is dragging the indexes up, not the indexes dragging up big tech.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#225

Post by jonknee »

aphextron wrote: post #54
the_gastropod wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what made Bezos so rich in spite of a company that doesn't make much accounting sense? When everyone is betting on his success by blindly investing in index funds. Let's see... AMZN: up 62.93% YTD S&P500: up 6.81% YTD I don't think index fund investors are the cause of Amazon's growth.

>I don't think index fund investors are the cause of Amazon's growth. Sure they are. Index funds are not equally weighted. Practically every tech ETF you can buy has Amazon weighted in the top 10, sometimes over 10% of total assets [0] whereas the average for other securities is below 1% at the most. [0] https://money.usnews.com/funds/etfs/large-growth/invesco-qqq...

What do you consider equal weighting? Amazon is the second most highly valued public company in the world, should it be counted the same in the index as Fossil Group (one of the smallest S&P 500 companies with a market cap of $1.15b)? To me that would make no sense and would make you hugely underweight AMZN and hugely overweight FOSL.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#226

Post by [deleted] »

01100011 wrote: post #212
ajross wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who had no health insurance but still got health care This is a harmful myth. It's possible to get emergency care under pretty much any conditions. Everything else isn't available. You can use this trick if you got hit by a truck or had a big infection. It doesn't work to get a hip replacement, or chemo, or post-stroke occupational therapy, or a prosthetic, or a pacemaker, or... That stuff requires insurance…

My ex mother in law was a lazy, morbidly obese dependent of the state who received well over a million USD in care during the last 10 years of her life. Even when her moron of a husband cancelled their insurance policy she still managed to spend months in the critical ICU section of UC Irvine while they cut out a bread loaf-sized section of necrotic flesh and rebuilt her intestinal tract. They didn't, and couldn't, p…

[deleted]

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#227

Post by empath75 »

jandrese wrote: post #115
crazynick4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an extreme health care incident, why pay the bill? Sure it would hurt your credit score not to, but if it's between that and tens/hundreds of thousands, I think it is worth it to take the hit for 7 years. I know health care workers who give this 'unofficial' advice to their patients and I've had friends and family members do the same thing - people who had no health insurance but still got health care and…

It's not just the 7 years on your credit score, it's having collection agencies hound you incessantly. It's having people constantly trying to scam your bank to drain your account. It is legal threats against you, your family, your friends, your employer, etc... You're basically dropping you bloody name to a pool of sharks who have little respect for what is legal or ethical.

I declared bankruptcy 9 years ago and literally none of that happened. I even hired a cheap shyster lawyer. I never got so much as a phone call.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#228

Post by balt_s »

kwoff wrote: post #221
01100011 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ex mother in law was a lazy, morbidly obese dependent of the state who received well over a million USD in care during the last 10 years of her life. Even when her moron of a husband cancelled their insurance policy she still managed to spend months in the critical ICU section of UC Irvine while they cut out a bread loaf-sized section of necrotic flesh and rebuilt her intestinal tract. They didn't, and couldn't, p…

What is wrong with you? You're a horrible person.

That's a pretty unfair moral judgment to throw out; considering that every use of resources involves at least an implicit tradeoff, I'll go ahead and risk damnatio by wondering aloud how many people in poor countries could be saved by the use of a fraction of this resource expenditure.

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#229

Post by nonbel »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #222
nonbel wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation hits prices before wages. Wage increases due to inflation always lag the price increases of the food/shelter/etc people need to buy. Is this controversial?

No, it's not controversial. However, it also doesn't seem to respond to anything chimeracoder said. You sound like you think you're arguing with chimeracoder, but I don't see which point you're responding to.

From a few posts up:

>"This is backwards. Inflation destroys the value of debt. Poor tend to be borrowers and rich tend to be lenders, so inflation is an equalizer."

chimeracoder seemed to be agreeing with this "equalizer" position by saying:

>"Ceteris paribus, inflation hurts debtholders (who, incidentally, tend to be wealthy), and it helps debtors (who, incidentally, tend to be poorer)."

Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

#230

Post by gascan »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #207
TearsInTheRain wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that nuts? Honestly it seems kind of nuts that someone would expect another person to pick up their tab

I honestly feel like it’s nuts that we don’t collectively fund healthcare, precisely because I don’t want to live in a world where I may be ruined by an illness and I am willing to pay to make sure others don’t have to live in that world. However I am specifically a proponent of voluntary collectives for things, as government forced cooperation seems suboptimal and fragile to me.

Aren't these two things mutually incompatible? How do you have universal healthcare that doesn't let anyone be bankrupted by their illness, where participation is also voluntary?

And isn't voluntary collective healthcare just another way to describe private insurance companies, especially HMO's?

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