That's why I said 30% not 80%. I think Trump has a 80% chance of taking the bait, but I do not expect most Dems to be comfortable handing him a W. Fair enough, he sure didn't earn it. But there is a path.
4,897 karma · joined September 17, 2019
> Donald, if you’re watching, we’ll put your name on it. You get to be the American president who finally guaranteed health care for every single American.
That could work. The entire Iran saga and all its fallout happened because Trump wanted to beat Obama's JCPOA. That effort went up in flames, along with prices and the US reputation. The narcissistic injury still burns bright in his conscience. And now Democrats can hand him a W, a legitimate one-up of Obama that requires no bluster or lies.
I'd still only give it a 30% chance of happening, but that's up from 0% a few weeks ago.
The disparity is so large it's dishonest to "both sides" this one. Because with orders of magnitude to separate the severity, it really isn't both sides.
No, you're not being honest. The consistent failing of Democratic attempts to enforce the law is having too limp a wrist. Being too meticulous, forming too much bipartisan consensus, giving too much opportunity for "delay until it goes away." All the way from Jerome Powell through the Epstein investigation to the Jan 6 prosecution.
If that changes -- and to be clear, I hope it does -- it will be a dramatic departure from trend.
Dirtbag USD in Medicare/Medicaid Fraud
-------------- -----------------
Philip Esformes $1300M
Judigeth Negron $ 205M
Lawrence Duran $ 205M
Daniela Gozes $ 50M
Simon Melgen $ 42M
John Davis $ 4M
You had every chance to fix this yourself. In Trump's first term, in between terms, and again in his second term. But it appears you are incapable of self-imposed accountability. Now it's our turn to enforce the law.
Against this backdrop, it takes some truly extraordinary selective attention to be scandalized by the Pelosis managing to beat QQQ by one percentage point last time I checked.
We already tax houses, and by comparison stocks are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. There is no excuse.
As I have grown my small business, I have come to an appreciation for how comically lopsided the tax code is to push all of the taxes out of the invest/return economy and into the work/consume economy. It's really quite something. Anything to avoid the right side of the Kuznets Curve!
The alternative would be to gate everything behind the more sophisticated concepts and limit access to people who had demonstrated competence -- and that's exactly what we do for illiquid markets. It's not like exchange servers turn off at 4pm, if you want to step outside the high-liquidity kiddie pool after-hours and OTC trading exist. However, I am not scandalized that the kiddie pool is full of toys and you shouldn't be either.
> At no point in the cycle is it better to be poor than rich, but the contractionary quadrant is the one where the gap shrinks.
This is completely and definitionally true in the context of trading, but keep this definition on a leash because if you apply it outside a purely financial context it tends to smuggle wealth-weighted objectives into your thinking, and regardless of whether or not you think that's moral you probably want to be aware of it. Example: feeding orphans is zero "value" because they can't pay you but merging the banks into a mega-bank to raise fees and collect bailouts has extreme "value" because it can make a bunch of obscenely rich shareholders even more obscenely rich and they can carve you off a mighty slice.
Due to this mismatch I keep both definitions in my pocket: Wealth Weighted Value for finance, People Weighted Value for more colloquial settings or moral analysis. "Exchange Value" is a good quasi-synonym for WWV if you want something less confrontational.
That is something different: liquidation value. Market cap tells you the sum total of the numbers next to this ticker symbol in everyone's brokerage account. It tells you the collective expectations about future returns and also the wealth effect that people feel based on their ability to individually obtain cash for shares.
It is true that neither of those things is liquidation value, but also liquidation value is neither of those things. If you expect a liquidation scenario, sure, use liquidation value. If you don't expect a liquidation scenario but want to measure collective expectations of and confidence in a stock, use market cap.
Don't let the term "nominal" undersell this: it's nominal inequality that locks working people out of assets and imposes upon them the need to service the (otherwise) exponentially growing profit expectations of their economic complements. At no point in the cycle is it better to be poor than rich, but the contractionary quadrant is the one where the gap shrinks.
I don't think it will be so easy this time around. We probably need to shift liability to the parties able to do something about it (advertising platforms).
And price-rationing is suppressing consumer use of RAM right now. I'm very glad that the people who think that this isn't rationing, or who think that it's maximally enlightened rationing, aren't trying to allocate my food and aren't trying very hard (yet) to allocate my water and electricity.