The stock market has a fairly direct reverse correlation with interest rates. So when interest rates go up, the stock market goes down.
The p/e ratio is a measure of earnings per dollar of capital. If you invert it to the e/p ratio you can directly compare to interest rates. So a 5% interest rate is comparable to a p/e ratio of 20. So when the interest rates goes up, the "natural" p/e ratio for stocks goes down, thus deflating the stock market.
I'm going to appeal to authority here. The economists who wrote freakonomics surely controlled for that. They are the ones who published the abortion dropping crime paper.
You misread what I was saying.
I am not saying abortion doesn't have an impact, but Roe vs Wade did not. There were a lot of abortions prior to the legalization in the US. I am not positive, but it may have been legal in some states just not nationally (didn't want to look it up to confirm).
This is why the date of legalization of abortion did not seem to have an impact in Europe and also why restrictions on abortion in some countries did not have an impact.
This is racial discrimination for the Right Reasons, apparently. As long as everyone agrees on when we can and cannot discriminate by race, it should go very well.
I'm not convinced that our society has had that wider debate. I myself am not convinced that these "Right Reasons" are good and fair, even if they are so widespread.
There certainly are good reasons to discriminate based on race, this just happens to be one where there’s a wide variety of opinions about whether the reasons are just.
I'll be straight - the only reason I can think of to discriminate based on race is for medical reasons - and that is by their doctor to diagnose specific illnesses. Can you give some more good reasons?
I think you’re on the right track. I replied to a sibling comment with some other good reasons for discriminating based on race. Basically, race is a pretty good shorthand for a shared experience of a group, and there are genuine instances where that shared experience can be leveraged to do good things.
Discrimination is absolutely never the answer. Inequality is a hard problem to solve but that doesn’t mean we should take the lazy route and embed discrimination into all areas of life.
You cannot solve discrimination with discrimination. Democrats have been trying the lazy route for 40 years with no progress. Perhaps we would have been better off trying to solve the root causes instead of uselessly chasing quick fixes?
Discrimination itself is not something that needs to be “solved.” Unjust discrimination, yes, for example instances where that discrimination actively harms, as first or second order effect, without sufficient remedy. But there are quite a few instances where discrimination is warranted, and just. For example, when recruiting for medical studies where the disease being studied is common in one race but not another; in acting, where the character being portrayed is of a particular race and that characteristic is essential to encoding that character’s motivations; in certain public interaction roles like therapy, community organizing, policing or public health outreach, where the target demographic is a traditionally underserved minority. The there are situations where the selection of an individual puts no others at any disadvantage, such as the selection of a Supreme Court judge. In those situations, there is neither justice nor injustice in racial discrimination: it is simply a matter of what set of experiences the President wishes to see on the bench.
All races of people are equal in there inherent value as individuals, but they are not equal in their experiences, situations, or needs. To deny the common experience of racial groups in order to optimize for “discrimination” is naive. Discrimination is not inherently unjust, it is a consequence of a universe which has finite resources in time, money, attention, and power.
The government backs up assets overvalued by the banks and corrupt rating agencies. They make out like bandits, nobody goes to jail, housing becomes ever more unaffordable, but it somehow is "for the people". I'm sure the wealth distribution in real estate is pretty skewed too, with top 10% owning most of it, but it is "for the people". The wealthy get all the money, but somehow the working class is told that this is all done for them.
The majority of the money by total value in the whole housing crisis was taken by the people that took loans, i.e., got money, and did not repay them, causing the crisis.
Lehman didn't crash, wiping out investors, because investors took money and didn't repay it. The system crashed because everyday people took out loans and didn't repay them.
Sum up the values and then tell me who made out like bandits.
Yes but the majority of the fraud that led to the financial crisis was due to the way the banks fraudulently combined sub-prime mortgages into mortgage backed securities and the ratings agencies looked the other way.
There was rampant fraud in the mis-representation of assets used to back asset-backed loans. The system didn’t crash because everyday people took out loans. It crashed because of the incredible amount of fraud that went into baking a mortgage backed security.
TL;DR: It wasn’t the regular people applying for loans that caused the whole thing to collapse. It was all the fraud used by bankers to justify lending to people who probably shouldn’t have been given mortgages in the first place.
>the majority of the fraud that led to the financial crisis
Really? How exactly do you measure "the majority?"
All the borrowers that took money they were not going to pay back was exactly the root cause. Had they not borrowed, then not paid, there would have been no crisis. They first lack of payment wasn't because a bank forgot to pay. It was because a borrower that signed for a loan did not pay.
And guess what - there are still tons of mortgage backed securities, yet now that more people pay, there is not continual crashes. The ratings agencies still work, the banks still work, but more people are denied loans. So the problem wasn't that MBS automatically fail, or ratings agencies are completely incompetent.
We just stopped letting people access loans like drunken sailors.
The borrowers were not experts in the detail of the mortgage markets. They took loans that were offered to them by industry actors who knew or should have known that the sub-prime loan applicants were a bad risk, but let’s give them a pass on that because who could have predicted a real estate crash right?
The real fraud was not writing these loans to less credit-worthy borrowers. It was the mechanism used by Wall Street banks to combine these sub-prime mortgages into mortgage-backed securities.
Not only did the bankers often mis-represent the composition of their MBS, they also employed massive amounts of leverage based on the fraudulent ratings they knew they were getting from the credit rating agencies, no questions asked.
The leverage involved in MBS is what makes them an attractive financial product to municipalities and governments since this extra leverage is what made the impressive promised returns available on such a “safe” asset class.
However, since the Wall Street Banks lied about the quality of the mortgages, the resulting MBS were massively over-levereged. This is why Ryan Reynolds explained in The Big Short, it only required a small % of mortgages to default to create a cascade of failures.
Tl:dr It wasn’t the fact that banks lent to less credit-worthy borrowers that led to the 2008 Financial Crisis, it was all the fraud that went into the construction of the mortgage-backed-securities (MBS)
Maybe you imagination is limited. China has done this precisely. They have kept the virus in check while limiting international travel and while being the world's factory. You open up when enough of your population is vaccinated.
I wonder why you feel that it is fine to say "too late" for this measure that obviously works. Do you also say too late to lockdowns, vaccine mandates, restaurant and schools closures, and mask requirements. If you don't, then maybe spend a moment thinking if your epidemic response is guided by your political allegiances
China is an authoritarian state that can almost anything it wants to do to limit the freedoms of its population. That same tactic won't work in (real) democratic countries, especially after 2 years of lockdowns.
A 14 day quarantine isn't a lockdown, even NZ is getting sloppy with virus measures. If the people there get tired of it there is nothing the government can do to stop them. In China you will get quarantined forcefully by the police state, and if you don't like it you can go to prison or get disappeared if you raise to big of a commotion.
New Zealand has cases, so what exactly is your point? The initial argument is that locking borders could prevent the spread of a highly contagious virus into a country. It cannot.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/79991021385159065...