Yeah, shit is gonna hit the fan over this in terms of domestic turmoil. All those people who took PPP loans and Silicon Valley VCs getting bailed out who railed against student debt relief, it's just mind boggling. Just wait until student borrowers start getting squeezed and the Supreme Court nixes the debt relief. This is not good for long term political stability.
PPP loans were designed to be forgiven from the start. They were loans only in the technical sense. It was a mechanism for the government to allow companies to continue to pay employees during the pandemic lockdown, instead of firing them. Complaining about PPP loan forgiveness is disingenuous.
As for student debt relief, there's a huge difference between someone depositing money in a regulated major bank and expecting that Federal regulators were doing their job and that their money would be safe, vs. someone taking out a $100,000 loan for their own benefit and expecting the government to essentially pay it off for them.
> expecting that Federal regulators were doing their job
Regulators set a framework that an industry should follow. It is incumbent on industry players to act in good faith and not operate on edge case regulatory compliance. It is not on the regulators that an agent lobbying against the very regulations for stress testing their balance sheet then turns around and does something dumb. Analogously the USDA and FDA aren't not doing their job if a food or pharma manufacturer intentionally labels dog food for human consumption and ships it.
This type of accounting is criminal and needs investigation. So what if your cash isn't performing to make target yields. Its on you to responsibly manage it if that is your stated mandate. And fed rates didn't balloon overnight. J Powell forecasts weeks in advance.
This is not on the regulators. The bank should have operated with a better risk profile. And all these disruptive companies need better financial sense than to be storing their >250K assets in a savings and checking account. I don't know what that answer is I haven't had the privilege.
So what if Stripe recommends this bank to all their clients. Seems like their incentives need investigated. What did they have to gain by funneling a clientele to their bank.
This isn't on the Fed or Treasury or SEC. Though their response may create future problems arising from this assurance.
>As for student debt relief, there's a huge difference between someone depositing money in a regulated major bank and expecting that Federal regulators were doing their job and that their money would be safe,
I've made a couple posts about this already but I don't see how people don't see the optics of the situation look incredibly bad. First off student debt is a special kind of debt, you can't bankrupt it and this has led to several adverse affects, namely skyhigh tuition prices and zero due diligence. You can't say in one breath that CEOs of tech businesses are completely helpless to audit whether their bank is trustworthy, and in another say 18 year olds should have understood the risk they were getting into.
To you it's "disingenuous" but to everyone else it just looks like the haves play by a different system; rig the system against the have-nots, and then tell the have-nots they should been "more responsible".
None of the SVB customers signed up (or paid premiums) for unlimited depositor insurance. Nonetheless they will now receive that, paid for by a new assessment (tax) on other banks and their customers.
WRT student loans: I am not clear why the law cannot change to allow them to be discharged in bankruptcy like every other debt. It seems to me that would make things better for everyone. I do not thing people w/huge student loans would all just a. immediately declare bankruptcy, and b. get their debt forgiven.
Federal student loans can’t, absent unusual circumstances, drive anyone into bankruptcy. The government offers income contingent payment plans. You only have to pay if you make enough income. The same thing that happens in a restructuring bankruptcy, which most people have to use after bankruptcy reform, already happens with student loans automatically.
This is also why it is so nuts to suspend payments for three years “because Covid.” Anyone that suffered financially already had their loan payments adjusted down and if you didn’t suffer financially why can’t you pay your loans?
Making student loans bankruptable has less to do with protecting students and more to do with 1.) reigning in tuition costs and 2.) forcing lenders to consider risk.
The fact that an 18 year old can get any amount of money, no questions asked, means that institutions have all the incentive to charge whatever they want - their customers will pay almost any price.
There are no lenders. That’s been gone since the Obama administration. It’s almost entirely direct government loans now. If you want them to consider risk or limit the lending amount you need to change the law.
Biden’s forgiveness notably does not come with any such legal change that would plausibly make the problem better in the future. It’s purely a one time sop to constituents.
For their own benefit? Seems like an educated population benefits everyone, hence why we spend a portion of the national and local budgets funding schools kids can go to for free. The big miss in the usa seems to be not extending this idea to higher education - perhaps this is why the usa is so dependant on immigration for jobs that require higher education.
Student loan forgiveness seems to be one way to do that. I don't know why they don't just nip at the bud of the problem and subsidize education from the get go though.
Thinking the young people in the USA have the competency, discipline, means, and determination to even organize, let alone threaten “political stability” is a stretch. This has been happening for 20 years.
The revolution has already happened in the form of quiet quitting, reduced consumerism, forgoing creating the next generation indefinitely. The impact are not felt over night but will eventually be felt decades from now. There is no other way to fight back. You can't vote for anyone that isn
't captured, any form of violence and you will be shot on sight. What else is there?
I'm sorry but if this "revolution" was designed to change behavior, it was an abject failure.
"Quiet quitting" was concocted in a board room to get people to do their jobs and stop complaining. If you're an employer, you want a team of "quiet quitters" who will do their job and nothing else. It's infinitely easier to manage...
>I'm sorry but if this "revolution" was designed to change behavior, it was an abject failure.
Like I said, it remains to be seen. The results of the loss of free extra labor (via quiet quitting), loss of employer power over wages (via a small replacement birth wage) and loss of profits (via less spending) take time to work their way through the system.
The ultimate goal in my opinion is to allow workers barely enough to make ends meet and for them to not have any lasting wealth. Once they reach retirement age they are someone else's problem then(probably just go off and die somewhere).
>"Quiet quitting" was concocted in a board room to get people to do their jobs and stop complaining.
Im really just using the definition to describe the behavior of workers no longer bothering to over work themselves.
>If you're an employer, you want a team of "quiet quitters" who will do their job and nothing else. It's infinitely easier to manage...
Many employers would disagree and say you are leaving extra value on the table.
No. Let me be abundantly clear; quiet quitting is a blessing to employers, by about a mile and a half. It's what they've always wanted employees to do, but now the employees think they're "sticking it to the man" by... doing their jobs???
There is no loss of power, there is no dynamic shift, there is no loss of profits whatsoever.
Many, many, many more employers would say that "quiet quitting" is great, like 100:1 outnumber those who are upset by it.
>but now the employees think they're "sticking it to the man" by... doing their jobs???
I think you got your definitions wrong. The definition im thinking of is skating by on the barest of minimums as to not arouse suspicion. Whether that is doing your job depends on who you ask.
>There is no loss of power, there is no dynamic shift, there is no loss of profits whatsoever.
You are essentially arguing that all the extra effort that employees expended to show that they are "go getters" amounted to no value creation at all. That is absurd just on the face of it.
But lets say you are totally right...then good, its one thing that employees and employers can agree on then. Employees do that absolute bare minimum to not arouse suspicion and employers pay them.
I'm looking forward to the multitude of innovations that employees will come up with to do the absolute bare minimum. Its like the area under a curve. We need to get closer and closer to the bottom of that curve. Thats where my favorite category of American innovation lies. Things such as the mouse jiggler are amateur hour.
Yeah, that's exactly how we called it in the USSR. Employer pretends they are paying, employees pretend they are working. How it's ended is well known.
The US is going through the same extreme as the USSR did, just in the other direction. I'm sure given the nature of extremes there will be some similarities on the journey to the outcome even if the overall outcome might end up being different due to the US heading off the cliff in the other direction.
We definitely have a situation now where employer pays as shit as possible and workers provides the shittiest effort as possible.
Flashpoint events that trigger social destabilizion imo. You never saw protests in the PRC until a bank screwed up, suddenly videos are coming out where a whole lot of citizens with good social credit scores are discovering the revolutionary spirit is absolutely dead in their country (watch the videos, their surprise at being hauled away by whiteshirts is genuine).
So next is maybe a major bank failure, or a disease killing a crop or other food that skyrockets prices, or a constitutional crisis following an executive branch election, or a cop killing just the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Then, the protests, then, someone somewhere, probably the PRC, seeing an opportunity for severe destabilizion, funding and prodding extremists groups like the proud boys, then lots of blood, maybe a worker's revolution, maybe a reactionary power grab, idk, just bouncing ideas based on how it's gone before.
Fwiw I think direct action is still a valid option in the usa. The cops murdered a protestor at the cop city protests yes but the direct action is still getting tons of attention and by many measures, working. So, page out of extinction rebellion book, continue putting obstacles in front of the people destroying the environment or implementing fascism. At the very least it'll slow things down.
>So next is maybe a major bank failure, or a disease killing a crop or other food that skyrockets prices, or a constitutional crisis following an executive branch election, or a cop killing just the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Then, the protests, then, someone somewhere, probably the PRC, seeing an opportunity for severe destabilizion, funding and prodding extremists groups like the proud boys, then lots of blood, maybe a worker's revolution, maybe a reactionary power grab, idk, just bouncing ideas based on how it's gone before.
Hasn't the US experienced and weathered all these events?
>Fwiw I think direct action is still a valid option in the usa. The cops murdered a protestor at the cop city protests yes but the direct action is still getting tons of attention and by many measures, working.
You referring to George Floyd protests? Your english seems a bit off so its unclear. If thats the case, the police responded nationwide by refusing to do their jobs. Crime skyrocketed and now progressive DAs are being recalled, people moving to conservatives states and everybody is worse off than before. The many layers of bureaucracy allowed the police to be "reformed" and not actually have to change anything at the same time. Its a serious failure of the US system.
>So, page out of extinction rebellion book, continue putting obstacles in front of the people destroying the environment or implementing fascism. At the very least it'll slow things down.
Please help me understand what if any obstacles have been placed in front of them in recent years? I can't think of any at all. This next election is looking to be a free ride for Biden to be re-elected and at the very worse it'll be Trump again or Desantis. Trump was supposed to be the outsider candidate but it was business as usual(but worse because we also got his loud mouth and racism). (this is coming from a Bernie guy).
This seems to be less to do with cops "refusing to do their jobs," and probably more to do with general economic unrest? I say this because when cops refuse to do their jobs, crime and violence usually go down. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-...
> Please help me understand what if any obstacles have been placed in front of them in recent years? I can't think of any at all.
Not many, that's my point, Americans should take a page from the book of Extinction Rebellion protestors in the UK and begin disrupting operations, or of German environmentalist protestors who actively disrupt for example coal mining operations. Or perhaps the French, experts in civil disobedience. I think the American zeitgeist is generally extremely conservative which is a large hindrance to mass movements, but also it lacks a strong leftist movement, any form of progressivism seems to have been effectively captured by liberals.
I highly doubt any further progress will be seen from attempting to elect progressive candidates in the USA - the bloodletting I've seen between Bernie Sanders supporters and the rest of the country is a great example of why, he's perhaps one of the most milquetoast socialists on earth and yet even the american "progressive" party viciously turned on him. Considering the captured election system, it seems like Americans that are interested in progress and leftist values should instead seek direct remedies.
Jason Calacanis, specifically, was against help for anybody, especially banks (except his buddies's bank when it was their turn to be in trouble). If your position was that no one is to be helped out, asking then, for help when it's your turn is should cause some self-reflection, or as least a bit of cognitive dissonance. Whether he is capable of even that much remains to be seen.
I was observing that ultrarich depositors with billion-dollar uninsured balances who would have lost money due to a reduction in the value of bonds are being made whole by socializing their losses.
While I, someone who is not ultrarich, who is just trying to save for my family, will have to eat 100% of the losses due to a reduction in the value of bonds, and have zero opportunity to have someone else cover my losses.