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America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

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Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#261

Post by gs17 »

Spivak wrote: post #134
p_j_w wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your solution means that only the wealthy can attend university, someone who grew up poor wouldn’t stand a chance.

Your argument is basically that current university costs are intrinsic and can't possibly be reduced but we know that isn't true. We have not two generations ago people paying for their college tuition with money from their part time jobs. My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor. Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a goo…

>This doesn't have to be ruinously expensive.

Having been the "single dude", the issue is not that they are paying lecturers too much for this service, doubly so for adjuncts.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#262

Post by gs17 »

lokar wrote: post #241
Spivak wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is basically that current university costs are intrinsic and can't possibly be reduced but we know that isn't true. We have not two generations ago people paying for their college tuition with money from their part time jobs. My grandpa paid his way to a PhD as a line cook. Got no financial support from family who were only slightly above dirt poor. Like I don't want to be completely reductive but a goo…

My PhD program, in CS (top 20 school), for an American, was basically free back in the early 2000s. At times it seemed like there were more fellowships than students. I'm not sure if that has changed.

My CS PhD was not only free, I got a decent stipend, and that's still common, but it often depends on grant funding, which has been less stable lately.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#263

Post by YetAnotherNick »

munk-a wrote: post #90
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SVB bailout There wasn't any bailout at all. This entire thread is so confusing. But yes they got 2 days or something of deposit freeze IIRC.

My apologies on the imprecise language - maybe "extension of FDIC account insurance beyond the standard 250k limit to depositors" is better terming? SVB came out of this broke - as they should for such mismanagement - but the concern is that depositors were made whole beyond the amount usually insured by the FDIC.

No, not only there was no extension, there even wasn't 250k given by FDIC. Absolutely no taxpayer money or even FDIC money went into the collapse.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#264

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tartoran wrote: post #216
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can I, as an 18 year old, sign for a loan that _cannot_ be forgiven, graduate into a crashed economy, and still be held accountable for choices that impact me when I only had a small part in them? Because you took the money promising to pay it back, spent it on something you wanted, and now it's gone and someone has to pay the money you spent. It's like saying why can I, as an 18 year old, purposely drive a car…

> Because you took the money promising to pay it back, spent it on something you wanted, and now it's gone and someone has to pay the money you spent. How are they supposed to pay it back with a crashed economy? Look, I get it with personal responsibility and all that but these people were following the rules, did their part and now are burdened to their death while Big Co gets bailed out over and over and never lear…

Bailing out corporations went very poorly. They reinflated the housing bubble like they wanted to see how big they could make the balloon this time. I mean look at this:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1M8KZ

The peak in 2007 was the massive housing bubble that crashed the whole economy. Where are we now?

The only reasonable way to solve that is to stop bailing out corporations.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#265

Post by BobaFloutist »

angmarsbane wrote: post #248
BobaFloutist wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that you can't (default) discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy is that your degree can't be seized and sold off, so there's a pretty weak incentive to not declare bankruptcy as soon as you're handed your degree.

What if a degree could be seized? For example, what if bankruptcy courts could require a debtor to stop "representing themselves" as having a degree as a condition for discharging debt. If a court revoked a degree, it would effectively reset the graduate to the status of a dropout removing a significant amount of the degree's value (I know knowledge has its own value, but credentialism is a big part of a degree's val…

I don't think that would fly, since it would provide no benefit to the owner of the debt and would just be enormously punitive and feel pointlessly cruel.

It would be like if instead of a foreclosure they just took a bulldozer to the house, then salted the earth with asbestos and lead so nobody could ever build a house there again. What's the (acute) benefit in just destroying the value? Plus, it turns the four years into a complete waste of time, no matter how hard you worked to get the degree, just because you couldn't find employment after.

I know we're talking about tweaking incentives to make it not worth it to game the system, but this would also screw over people that found themselves in that position through no fault of their own, plus it would waste all the time and work of everyone that taught that person and contributed to their education (even though they got paid, people largely aren't in education for the cash).

I don't know, I think it would be too much of a bummer to work.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#266

Post by bpt3 »

lokar wrote: post #221
bpt3 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I read the Matt Levine article on this and a couple other pieces, and I'm not getting the impression Levine or other mainstream economists think this is a good idea as it currently stands? I don't necessarily think they are suggesting its clearly bad either, but it didn't seem as positive on it as I was expecting from your comment. Can you provide some more information, because I'm not really seeing the value in b…

When you deposit money in a US regulated bank, there are basically two places that can end up: - on deposit at the Fed, in the account of a Fed member bank (which could be your bank, or a bank your bank has an account at) - loaned out by your bank (or again, a bank your bank uses) The Fed, so far, has refused to allow new member banks (eg that could deposit at the Fed) that don't intend to ever loan out deposits. The…

Yes, I understand all of this. What I don't understand is why the Fed "putting their finger on the scale" (which I don't dispute they are doing, as it's part of their job) is a problem, and I still did not really pick up on Levine arguing for or against this, just saying (this is me paraphrasing, not intended to be a direct quote) "we could operate differently in theory due to all these alternative lenders that now exist in parallel with the traditional, regulated banking system, which would have some benefits and some drawbacks."

I can see some upsides (in addition to matching bank creditor and debtor duration expectations), like the implication that it would be easier in some sense to safely manage large amounts of cash because said cash is invested in T-bills instead of who knows what, but there are some obvious downsides as well concerning risk management. To quote Levine directly here, "How will the NDFIs find an extra $100 of loans to make? One obvious possibility is by making much worse loans. Another is by making fake loans."

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#267

Post by array_key_first »

gruez wrote: post #226
rurp wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee pensions are a tiny portion of overall government spending. There are any number of ways to handle a modest increase in costs there.

>There are any number of ways to handle a modest increase in costs there. So the "we'll find 'efficiencies' somehow" argument that every opposition party trots out when they're campaigning?

Well we tried the "burn it all down" approach with DOGE and the BBB and we got... -2 trillion in savings? Really? Wow, okay.

The truth is nobody wants to solve the deficit. It's a self eating beast at this point and simply cutting funding for a bunch of shit won't solve it. A lot of these things are fundamentally the federal governments concern, whether people admit it or not.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#268

Post by lokar »

gs17 wrote: post #262
lokar wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My PhD program, in CS (top 20 school), for an American, was basically free back in the early 2000s. At times it seemed like there were more fellowships than students. I'm not sure if that has changed.

My CS PhD was not only free, I got a decent stipend, and that's still common, but it often depends on grant funding, which has been less stable lately.

Oh, yeah, I mean by free, "net free", like the stipend cover almost all my expenses.

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#269

Post by steveBK123 »

ecshafer wrote: post #256
epistasis wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, most of SVBs customers were those who had almost zero business finance experience. There were lots of startups but there were also lots of normal businesses and non-profits in the Bay Area that used SVB. Perhaps the slow depositors should be punished for not being sufficiently sophisticated, or as quick as the Thiel-backed startups that got the bat-signal to do a bank run. But the "moral" value of letting all…

> Indeed, most of SVBs customers were those who had almost zero business finance experience. There were lots of startups but there were also lots of normal businesses and non-profits in the Bay Area that used SVB. The thing is that you don't need to be a financially sophisticated. Why are they making companies without talking to a CPA? They can get an account with PayChex and they will literally handle everything rel…

They disrupted financial sophistication

Re: America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

#270

Post by isleyaardvark »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #127
cj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing student debt to be canceled during bankruptcy would be a good first step (possibly even better than canceling student debt across the board). To your point, making it easy to cancel debt teaches borrowers that debt isn’t a serious thing. Requiring someone go through bankruptcy (and all of the associated negatives on your credit score, etc) seems like a good tradeoff. Allows you to get out from under the debt…

People who start lobbying for it quickly discover that 87% of people who petition for their student debt to be cancelled in bankruptcy get it ( https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/29/bankruptcy-student-loan-borr... ). I support removing the special treatment entirely, but ultimately most student debt holders don’t go bankrupt.

> Still, few people pursue the option because of a “pervasive” myth that the loans can’t be included in the proceeding

It also says nothing about whether the person actually goes bankrupt, just which debts are discharged, which is one of the key parts of the bankruptcy process. Certain debts are discharged because the person can’t pay them back, which is the point of going into bankruptcy court.

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