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Old 02-11-2018, 08:23 PM
 
30,876 posts, read 36,850,201 times
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Originally Posted by CamillaB View Post
Or are disabled through no fault of their own, are born with or acquire a physical or mental disease that affects their ability to be perfect like all the rich people, are victims of crime or of unscrupulous people or the greedy and psychopathic who systematically target the afflicted.
But surely most of the non-stock owning half of the population does not fit any of the above.
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Old 02-11-2018, 08:24 PM
 
30,876 posts, read 36,850,201 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CamillaB View Post
Or are disabled through no fault of their own, are born with or acquire a physical or mental disease that affects their ability to be perfect like all the rich people, are victims of crime or of unscrupulous people or the greedy and psychopathic who systematically target the afflicted.
I know someone who works for very low wages part time. She rents a tiny room. She has over $10,000 in a stock mutual fund after 2 years. Took 20 years of nagging on my part. But now she can't believe she didn't start sooner.
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Old 02-11-2018, 08:32 PM
 
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Originally Posted by craigiri View Post
Rand - wasn't she a fiction writer?
Wasn't she a confident/friend of Greenspan when the Great Recession happened?

The Era of Trump is nothing new. Many people have always marched behind the mantle of Fiction.
No, she wasn't a "confident' of Greenspan. However, she was a confidant.

I find people who are sloppy in their spelling are sloppy in their facts / knowledge of other things as well.
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Old 02-11-2018, 08:42 PM
 
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Originally Posted by artillery77 View Post
While I agree there is no legal barrier to market entry, there is an underlying issue at play that has merit. People should buy stocks with money they can afford to lose. I've known several people that catch a break or get a small bonus and they'll ask me....I have $2000 that I don't need to spend, I want to invest it for 10 months. How much can I get....

They're just hitting the point of temporary surplus. They'll need the money again. It's not in their best interests to invest because that $2000 could be $1600 when they need the money back. According to Murphy, that will be nudged right between two weeks where it was at $2200.

So it is hard for someone who's basically at their earning potential, and maybe their surplus is $25 a week. It's easy to see how the saving isn't getting them anywhere. Easy to rationalize how they'll never be the rich aunt, but could remember to buy a little one a present.

I've got a relative that's a lifer at a non-union grocery store. What's awesome about this store is that they give all of their employees a retirement contribution regardless of the employees putting anything in, and it's % wise, a decent amount. They also have an additional match. When they first put it in, she said her colleagues mostly didn't trust it, but of course they'd take free money, so they had to go through the exercise of saying where they wanted it allocated. The most popular option was cash holdings. She didn't know, so she put it all in the first fund listed. The next year she put it in the second one listed. Finally by year 4 she wanted someone to look because she said....I really have no idea what these are. So I just try them to see how they work. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong...please look.

Lucky for her, the first ones were different stock funds appropriate for her age. And they started growing. And since everyone knew what the company paid in, they'd compare...and her amounts were bigger...plus she could get more.

Suddenly that extra $25 has a place to go where it WILL matter. Forced involvement forced her to seek advice on how to do it. As she saw the rewards of investing and the balance getting bigger, she got excited, as we all do and she got motivated to try and capture the entire match amount.

Now I doubt she's going to have a balance when she retires that will shock and awe the world....she'll never be in the 10%....but she'll have enough, because her consumption is very low. She won't need a million dollars to retire.

At any rate, while I'm usually conservative sounding on this board, but there's a very real way employers can help their employees start saving. The important number here is hopefully 80% of Americans have retirement plan assets of some kind. Hopefully we don't lose too many in the market gyrations to come.
I am more in favor of universal 401ks than universal health care. The money should go into cheap, index based target date funds like the federal government has for its employees. This would not be that hard to implement. The basic structure is already there--or could be.
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Old 02-11-2018, 08:44 PM
 
30,876 posts, read 36,850,201 times
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Originally Posted by freemkt View Post
I presume she doesn't live in a place where rents are going up 10% per year.
Maybe you should consider moving where she lives.

Oh, that's right. You enjoy complaining and trolling for sympathy more than actually taking constructive action.
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Old 02-11-2018, 08:51 PM
 
30,876 posts, read 36,850,201 times
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Originally Posted by jetgraphics View Post
FEDERAL RESERVE & MONEY MADNESS
https://www.federalreserve.gov/relea...nt/default.htm

Dec. 2017 . . . M1: 3,614.3 . . . M2:13,845.0 (in billions)


https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm
Q: How much U.S. currency is in circulation?
A: There was approximately $1.59 trillion in circulation as of November 15, 2017, of which $1.55 trillion was in Federal Reserve notes.
Federal Budget (2017): $3.65 Trillion


NATIONAL DEBT
U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time
As of Jan.23, 2018, the debt is in excess of $20.61 trillion dollars (not dollar bills)
(Dollar bills are debt / IOUs, denominated in dollars, and are part of the national debt)

Recapping: The national debt, in dollars, is 169 times greater than all the world’s gold bullion, stamped into coin.
The federal budget, in dollar bills, is 2.3 times greater than all the circulating dollar bills.

And though insane, we cannot challenge the validity of the public debt, pursuant to the 14th amendment, clause 4.
14th amendment, Section 4. THE VALIDITY OF THE PUBLIC DEBT of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, SHALL NOT BE QUESTIONED.
Are you still sure there is anything that anyone can truly own, denominated in dollar bills (worthless IOUs)?

It's a good question. I'm half thinking Armageddon is around the corner--financial armageddon at least. Everyone points the finger at everyone else. Someone else should pay more tax or take the benefit cut, but never me.
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Old 02-11-2018, 09:19 PM
 
11,337 posts, read 11,005,053 times
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Originally Posted by mysticaltyger View Post
I am more in favor of universal 401ks than universal health care. The money should go into cheap, index based target date funds like the federal government has for its employees. This would not be that hard to implement. The basic structure is already there--or could be.
How about your entire Social Security contribution, and that of your employer, being sent through a trustee to an account that you retain ownership of. So that for your entire working life, ALL of your SS money goes into index funds and stays in your possession throughout your life. And is made available to you upon retirement, in the same way that one begins collecting SS benefits now. Can you imagine the fortune that most of us would gain control of when we reached our elder years?
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Old 02-11-2018, 11:21 PM
 
1,870 posts, read 2,214,128 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mysticaltyger View Post
I am more in favor of universal 401ks than universal health care. The money should go into cheap, index based target date funds like the federal government has for its employees. This would not be that hard to implement. The basic structure is already there--or could be.
How would you figure universal 401(k)s to affect inflation?
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Old 02-12-2018, 09:12 AM
 
Location: Paranoid State
13,044 posts, read 13,824,795 times
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Originally Posted by Quietude View Post
The article is pretty clear in establishing that yes, they are talking about everyone's 401k's etc.
While the article is clear, the underlying research from Wolffe is not intended to posit the conclusion the NYT author assumes. That is to say, the NYT author clearly had a conclusion first, and cherry picked and mischaracterized data to prove her point.

The NYT author Patricia Cohen is not an economist. Her NYT bio says she joined the NYT as the Ideas Editor and oversaw the launch of Arts & Ideas section of the newspaper, and then oversaw the Theater coverage, and has worked as an investigative reporter in the Culture Department. Among the rest of her dubious background, she worked at the discredited left-wing bird cage liner Rolling Stone.

The real insight of the underlying data studied by Wolffe is that portfolio diversification matters. Wealthy people have more assets (duh!), and with more assets you have the opportunity to be more diversified across asset classes. For people in the 99%, it is common for their most significant asset to be the house they own. That's far from a diversified portfolio - and it subjects you to large portfolio risk.

If you have a highly concentrated portfolio (mostly in real estate, and in fact mostly in 1 single house), you are nowhere near the efficient portfolio. That is, you can both lower your risk AND increase your expected return simultaneously. In the real world, the atomic unit of housing is one house - so you can't easily rebalance your portfolio to be less in real estate and more in equities. You can't just sell one bedroom of your house to buy the S&P 500.

So, when the real estate crisis hit, people with non-diversified portfolios concentrated in home ownership were hit harder than people with diversified portfolios (double-duh!).

Wolffe is a decidedly left-wing economist (Editorial Board of the Journal of Economic Inequality, Editorial Board of the Journal of Socio-Economics, Academic Advisory Committee (AAC) of the Center for American Progress’ Economics Program... and even a card-carrying member of the Union for Radical Political Economics! Seriously!)

Wolfe consciuosly skews his own research. He explicitly excludes public sector defined benefit pensions from his calculus. Public sector employers' value proposition to their employees is "don't bother to save for your retirement; you'll receive a gold-plated pension and Cadillac health care for life!" Once you take into account, as Wolffe explicitly declines to do, the assets held in trust for retired and future retired public sector employees in pension plans, the equity ownership position changes dramatically.

And Wolffe knows it.

And Patricia Cohen probably doesn't understand it, and even if she did, she would ignore it because it doesn't fit the thesis of the article that the rich get richer. Afterall a thesis that says "people with diversified portfolios get richer" just doesn't have the same red-meat to left-wing social justice warriors cachet.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Quietude View Post
The NYT is neither given to hysteria nor clickbait BS (playground namecalling by the orangutan-in-chief notwithstanding).
The NYT is not a peer-reviewed academic journal in search of Truth, as this article demonstrates. The NYT is a very partisan progressive publication, and they do not attempt to hide it. They are almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the DNC.
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Old 02-12-2018, 09:26 AM
 
Location: Paranoid State
13,044 posts, read 13,824,795 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lchoro View Post
The money center banks control about 70 percent of total financial assets. They're very highly leveraged as the regulations allow (without accounting for the 2x rehypothecation of collateral in the US).
Do you have a point?

Quote:
Originally Posted by lchoro View Post
That's why the meltdowns occurred
No it isn't. Your post lacks logic, understanding of economics, and fundamental cause-and-effect analysis.

This is an economics forum, not the politics forum where lack of economic understanding is a plus.
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