There is a lot of blame to go around but It would be nice for people to actually realize what is obvious post-factum was not really obvious at the time. I had friend who was VP at JPM and prior to crisis when all the banks were posting record profits Jamie Dimon started unwinding some risky positions and taking write downs, there was a lot of heat from shareholders and if it was someone of lesser statue that person most likely would back down or even get ousted.
Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
261–270 of 304 posts
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a real misunderstanding of how markets work. An index fund invests in everything, market-cap weighted (usually). This means that your investment merely reinforces the prices already determined by the other participants in the market . There are still huge numbers of active managers, not to mention quants and others. They, collectively, determine the prices of assets. When you invest in an index fund, you're j…
> basically. It doesn't cause amazon to rise in price. Yes, it does - you cannot add capital to a market without raising the market cap. It doesn't cause it to raise higher or faster than it's index peers, but it absolutely does cause it to rise.
You most certainly can. The market cap (current price) is not a function of the amount of capital put in. You can put $1M into a company and have a market cap of $1B or put $1B into a company and have a market cap of $1M.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#263Earlier 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.
Please don't add a personal attack to a nasty comment.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#264Earlier 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…
i don't see anything here that contradicts the parent.
which is to say, preventative and maintenance care are important, and i don't see any of that in what you described. parent's talking about emergency care. you're describing emergency care.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess my thing is more of a reaction against paternalism and the infantilization of the public. I do think there need to be much more in the way of bank regulations. I don't think the public ought to absolve itself of all responsibility because of the absence of some regulations. I just don't think it's healthy or necessarily leads to better decisions being made in the future. I want an informed public, not a delud…
I agree with you about protecting the public, no one needs to be coddled. But when parties enter into a transaction, there should be repercussion in the case of fraud. That never happened. One party in a transaction was lied to and there was no repercussion to the other party. Also, thanks for taking the time to respond, really enjoy debating this topic. Wish it could be in more real time.
Individual loan applicants weren't defrauded though (in most cases). They knew what the monthly payments were and what would happen during possible interest rate adjustments.
It shouldn't have been a shocker to anyone making 2k a month that a 1.9k/mo mortgage was pretty risky.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess my thing is more of a reaction against paternalism and the infantilization of the public. I do think there need to be much more in the way of bank regulations. I don't think the public ought to absolve itself of all responsibility because of the absence of some regulations. I just don't think it's healthy or necessarily leads to better decisions being made in the future. I want an informed public, not a delud…
Statistically, you can't have that. No matter what you want, a sufficiently motivated conman will be able to find the dumbest person, for instance by the methodology used by Nigerian-prince scammers: put out bait that's bad, to pre-screen for people dumb enough to be that kind of deluded. Then you can say 'oh, that scam was so obvious that people ought to have seen through it!' but it was explicitly designed to be ob…
If people are stupid enough to enter into mortgages with payments they can't afford then they shouldn't be allowed to enter into any kind of legal contract. No credit cards, no payment plans, no cell phone plans, no insurance, nothing. Honestly, they shouldn't even be allowed to choose what they eat since they aren't certified nutritionists.
Your comparison to Nigerian scammers is irrelevant because there is nothing legitimate about a Nigerian prince scam, it's just stealing money. Millions of people have mortgages they can afford and pay for them just fine.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#267Earlier 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…
i don't see anything here that contradicts the parent. which is to say, preventative and maintenance care are important, and i don't see any of that in what you described. parent's talking about emergency care. you're describing emergency care.
> you're describing emergency care
Everything is emergency care, if you wait long enough.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#268The 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…
> There's a lot of people that ended up bankrupt, in a bottomless depression, turned to drug abuse or committed suicide.
Ain't this what Americans say when describing Communism?
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investing in total market index funds is literally investing in the economy as a whole. (Or as much of a whole as the index represents.) So while yes, they will crash with future market crashes, of which there will be many in each of our lifetimes, historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered.
"historically in the U.S. so far the market has always recovered." This is sorta enshrining survivorship bias in your premises - take the largest economy around today and point out that every time it's crashed, it's recovered. Well, if it hadn't, there wouldn't be anything to point at. There are actually plenty of examples - even among European settlers of the Americas - where the economy did not recover. The Contine…
But you are comparing with fledgling/emerging markets. Samples of failures at this point to scare people should be declines of economies established for more than a hundred years. The falls of empires, etc. Those are what are relevant to the current US investor.
Re: Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
#270Earlier 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…
The issue with that is that it represents a breakdown of property rights. I'd like, but don't know how, to find a less judgmental way of putting that point because from what I've heard the US healthcare system is unfair and unpleasent. That said - what you are describing is in a strictly literal sense theft. This quickly comes back to grandparent's point that the terms 'we' and 'survive' need to be more established.…
Healthcare billing is too broken for me to endorse blindly paying things. Routine care, co-pays, planned procedures, sure, pay your goddamn bills. Get hit by a car, loaded into an ambulance, and stuck with a $15k bill that your insurance company refuses to pay because it's "out of network"? Tell them to pound sand, they have no right to extract your life savings in rents simply because they happened to be the hospital closest to the relevant ambulance.
Yes, it's technically "theft", but the property right being violated has no business being granted in the first place.