Russia’s expansionist policy, on the other hand, continues to cast a long shadow across Europe. The country has a long history of conquest, but for centuries, its vast dominion resembled a loose federation of fiefdoms, not a single state; it wasn’t until the emergence of the USSR that a cohesive national identity — along with a renewed focus on global expansion — started to take hold. Through various machinations, the USSR soon ended up annexing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and seizing military and political control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and other neighboring states. For decades, the residents of these lands suffered repression and economic hardships — and were barred from leaving the Soviet-controlled world.
Readit NewsIf the bonds were worth 80 cents on the dollar than they just traded 80 cents on the dollar for 99.9 cents on the dollar. A good deal if your balance sheet is in such poor shape.
They are only losing .1% of bond value instead of the difference between face and market value.
If the fed values those bonds at face value (rather than what the market would pay today) and allows the bank to borrow money using those as collateral, then a bank could simply borrow from the fed using the older less valuable bonds as collateral and then buy new more valuable bonds.
The bank could then default on the loan and forfeit the original less valuable bond.
This would effectively be the fed giving free money to the bank.
i went thru a bunch of that 20 years ago after stumbling on antiwar.com.
i think hayek and i prob have diff views on how to use state power.
https://chomsky.info/20210916/
Friedrich Hayek, the moral leader of neoliberalism, visited and said he was impressed by the freedom under Augusto Pinochet and said he couldn’t find a single person in Chile who didn’t think there was more freedom under the Pinochet dictatorship than under Allende. Somehow he couldn’t hear the cries of anguish from Via Grimaldi and other torture chambers.
if i had to put a number on it, prob 95% of people in the upper 10% of income/wealth in america believe all the standard myths about capitalism and free trade and competive advantage, etc. and 99% of VC-types.
chomsky always says how the countries that do best mimic what we do instead of what we tell them to do.
there's a reason people like matt y and ezra k and myriad others get so highly paid -- they have to write and speak complete nonsense on a daily basis. they prob even believe what they're saying sometimes. how could they not? the cognitive disonance would be too much for anyone.
One good place to start might be the work of Friedrich Hayek.
If you are like me, you might start to have a more nuanced view than “It’s not true!!”.
Hayek for example despite being in many ways the father of this work was very explicit about the role of government and the many areas he considered government intervention essential.
Stock performance (and any investment) is driven by both cost of purchase and underlying performance. Cost is driven by human psychology as much or more than business fundamentals.
As a result, poor stock performance is in some way an indicator of future improved investment performance because it corresponds with lower purchase price but as you note, deterioration of economic performance is absolutely not an indicator of improved future economic performance.
I was thinking the opposite: that the model of saving for retirement via investment accounts requires good returns in the early part of your career, so the smaller amounts of money you can afford to put away for your relatively smaller early career salary can compound over your career length to be enough for retirement.
I did what seemingly no other publication reporting on it did: signed up for Klarna, bought one item and used this bot.
I was... not impressed?
Klarna's "AI bot" felt like the "L1 support flow" that every other company already has in-place: without AI! Think like when you have a problem with your UberEats order and 80% of cases are resolved without a human interaction (e.g. when an item is missing for your item.)
I walked through the bot's capabilities [1] and my conclusion was that pretty much every other company did this before (automating the obvious support cases.) The real question should have been: why did Klarna not do it before? And when it did, why did it build a wonky AI bot, instead of more intuitive workflows than other companies did?
My sense is that Klarna really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue. But at its core, Klarna is a finance or ecommerce-related company: an not much to do with AI (even if it uses AI tools to make its business more efficient - regardless of whether it could use non-AI tools to get the same thing done)
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/klarnas-ai-chatbot/
The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort.
The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.