Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

governance.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 349 posts

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

#321

Post by bdangubic »

WalterBright wrote: post #183
chasd00 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent of a 16 and almost 14 year old i'm effectively home schooling personal finance with them. My wife and I got none from our parents and were preyed upon constantly. I think I was 45 when i finally got my student loans paid off. My wife did many years in a dangerous, low-performing, HS as a teacher to get hers forgiven. Sending an 18 year old off to college without a solid understanding of finance is like th…

It's a crying shame that public high schools do not teach basic finance, basic accounting, and how a business works. In other words, they don't teach anything about how our economy works.

they do. maybe not where you live but they do. my kid has had personal finance classes since 4th grade

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

#322

Post by wizzwizz4 »

p_j_w wrote: post #318
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA provides examples where private equity has been destructive in the healthcare sector: > A 2024 Review of Financial Studies paper https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474 > found that private equity acquisition of nursing homes was associated with an ~10% increase in deaths, implying approximately 22,500 additional deaths over the twelve-year sample period. I was asking for examples where private equity has made things…

Sorry, I must have misread what you said.

That you did is valuable criticism of my writing. When you get deep enough into "no, you're wrong", "no, you're wrong", it becomes virtually impossible to keep track of who's saying what, unless people actually state their claims explicitly… which I didn't.

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

#323

Post by WalterBright »

bdangubic wrote: post #321
WalterBright wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a crying shame that public high schools do not teach basic finance, basic accounting, and how a business works. In other words, they don't teach anything about how our economy works.

they do. maybe not where you live but they do. my kid has had personal finance classes since 4th grade

I attended 4 different public schools growing up, and none of them did. I see that some today do.

But I still see college graduates ranting on X who clearly do not understand compound interest on their student loans.

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

#324

Post by bee_rider »

sejje wrote: post #306
bee_rider wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to invent a new special type of debt for student loans was a political decision made by our representatives. To the extent that the voters/taxpayers are responsible for anything: this is our shared mess. I mean, the whole premise of representative democracy is that we’re responsible for the messes we send representatives to make. If we don’t want that responsibility, I guess we’d have to look at alternat…

I accept responsibility, let's fix it.

I’d probably pause loan repayments (no need to dig a deeper hole), make student loans dischargable via bankruptcy, wait a bit for the market to figure itself out. Once we’ve figured out what the value of each degree is, we can refund the difference to everyone who’s paid.

There’d be a bit of fudging as we’d need to adjust for inflation and the reputation of colleges fluctuate over time, but this seems like the fairest way to do it.

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

#325

Post by Spivak »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #292
Spivak wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so broadly the solution you're proposing is subsidies. University will be cheaper from the perspective of the student but we don't actually undergo any meaningful cost cutting it's just the money comes from somewhere else. I don't know about you but I don't think this actually solves the problem of the cost of university ballooning out of control and becoming unaffordable to almost every American if they had t…

I'm not proposing a solution, I'm describing the current reality.

Forgive me, are you not proposing to roll these subsidies out everywhere? Because yeah, someone can afford their tuition on minimum wage if they get a full ride scholarship too but that's hardly a solution to the student loan crisis unless we're handing them out to all our undergrads.

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

#326

Post by nobody9999 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #302
bpt3 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. What are these repeated bailouts by taxpayers that you mentioned? And you can't think of any way that the federal government providing retail banking services could possibly go wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_failures_in_the_U... https://americandeposits.com/insights/brief-history-us-bank-... >In response to these significant failures, the FDIC took historic action to restore faith in the banking system and protected all deposits – even those above the traditional limit. However, it is important to note that the FDIC limit did not change, nor did the standard process for protecti…

>The act of maintaining a central database of funds so that individuals can transfer money to one another is a relatively simple and cheap problem, one perfectly suited to be provided by the government. It should be infrastructure, just like printing money is infrastructure under the purview of the government.

You mean like FedNow[0], which many banks are eschewing in favor of services life Zelle[1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedNow

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelle

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

#327

Post by AnthonyMouse »

46493168 wrote: post #319
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make it dischargeable only after 7 years of nonpayment You don't really want to give people an incentive for nonpayment. > do means testing Bankruptcy already does that. But what are your "means" the day you graduate from college and haven't yet found a job, or temporarily take a low-paying one on purpose to meet the eligibility requirements? You would need something like, deferred payments while you're unemployed…

The questions you have are best put to a judge. The law is not meant to cover every possible permutation of circumstances and motivations. If student loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy, lenders will price it in or refuse to lend without a gurantor.

> The law is not meant to cover every possible permutation of circumstances and motivations.

This isn't a permutations issue. We know the specific shape of the problem: 18 year olds from poor and lower middle class families don't typically have existing assets with which to secure a loan, so if they can't secure it with their future earnings, they can't get one, and then they can't afford to go to college.

> If student loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy, lenders will price it in or refuse to lend without a gurantor.

That's the problem. The inability to discharge them allows the borrower to get a much lower interest rate than they otherwise could for unsecured debt issued to someone with minimal credit history, or find someone willing to loan them the money to begin with.

It was set up this way so that people could go to college.

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

#328

Post by pas »

advisedwang wrote: post #194

I'd like to see more public banks. Municipalities, and even states, are holding balances in commercial banks but there's nothing stopping them holding this in their own bank to direct capital for public benefit. California has a law allowing it, although despite a campaign in LA I don't know if it's been used. North Dakota has a state-wide public bank. It works!

how would it be less conservative with capital allocation?

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

#329

Post by pas »

Galanwe wrote: post #280
thelastgallon wrote: post #75

Pension funds should have a rule -- invest in technologies, industries and companies that create a deflation (by technology, scale, efficiency, etc). This will create better outcomes for pensioners. If they invested in cheaper housing, healthcare, pensioners can live without the constant fear of running out of money. The absolute first thing to invest in is clean energy which can be super cheap to zero to actually ma…

I don't know where you are from, but that is the case for most european countries. I would be surprised if it were not also the case in the US? Usually it's not implemented as a rule though, but rather by creating tax cuts for certain kind of investments. E. G. In France you get tax cuts if you invest in green energy, housing in poor neighborhood, and a trillion other subcategories.

nowhere near enough, unfortunately

> For example, EU pension funds allocate just 0.02% of total assets to VC, compared with almost 2% for US pension funds. And this percentage is applied to a much larger asset base: over 140% of GDP in the United States compared with around 30% in the EU.

> In Europe, approximately €11.5 trillion is held in cash and deposits. This is one-third of households’ total financial assets. In the United States, the figure is around only one-tenth.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2024/html/ecb.sp241...

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

#330

Post by pas »

joejoe638 wrote: post #28
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning people from owning business? This is just a boogie man media term. There are good owners/investors and bad.

Private Equity doesn’t “own” business in the sense most people understand it. PE is finalisation of business, its ownership is far more similar to a mortgagee than an owner in every sense of the word.

it seems you are mixing up leveraged buyouts with PE

PE is investing. Limited partners give pool some money, the manager is the general partner, they also put some money into the pool, to align incentives, and that's it.

Everything else is not PE itself, but whatever strategy the fund has, or whatever deal some traders have came up.

Post reply on HN