Market are all messed up.
Taiwan government has this scheme in which you sign the deed over to your house, they give you money to live in it as long as well, you live. But when you kick the bucket, they get the house.
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I’m meeting my sister-in-law (who’s in finance) tomorrow to sort out some of this with Fubon Financial (?): I have no idea how this is going to go. I may be on a similar timeline to you - I was a brilliant investor who mostly cashed out right before the crash in 2008, and I need to start building that stuff up again. (OK, I was buying an apartment that year, and the timing was a fluke).
I’m just going for simple index funds. No way I’m going to pick and choose stocks. Vague approach is that whatever I put in now, I don’t want to get back for a couple of decades (apart from balancing over from stocks to bonds as the years go by). We’ve been meaning to get around to this for a few years now, but always felt prices were too high to justify buying. Of course, doing so right now is a gamble, but what the hell, and it’s not as if I’m putting a massive amount of money in - the big thing is to set it up so I can transfer X amount into index funds (or something similar) per month. There is an app for that. My sister-in-law knows how to use it. I hope I am capable of learning.
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Brace yourself for another dive today.
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Buying an apartment is what made me cash out as well. And also at about the same time. Ready to get back in. Soon. Next week.
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Make this happen
‘Deutsche Bank’ is 
ed?!
These expire July 15th, 2020.
If expiry is reached without a pandemic they pay out 7% a year for time held. If pandemic happens they expire worthless. I guarantee $DB is leveraged to the tits with their $44T in derivative exposure like a bunch of fucking retards thinking they Hoodwinked a ton of third world countries. So I guess we have a singular binary event with an expiry date determining the collapse of db and the rest of the world with it in a Cascade of defaults. Was this crash destined for us?
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I don’t know but I like the sound of devalued Euro I guess.
The whole idea sounds bloody stupid.
- It’s an encouragement to poor countries (ie., extractive, corrupt governments) to just sit on their ass with their hands held out whenever an emergency hits
- It’s morally dubious, since the issuing agency is basically gambling on someone else’s potential misfortune
- It depends on the issuing agency to be honest about the statistics
If I put my conspiracy-theory hat on, I’d wonder if China informed the WHO that they were planning to start a low-level global pandemic for political gain. With their insider information, the WHO then issued worthless bonds to gullible first-world banks in order to enhance the damage dealt to Western financial systems on behalf of the Chinese State.
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Don’t start that. My theory is far more cynical and it involves orchestrating an election loss for a certain leader, among other things.
I wasn’t being serious, but yeah … there are all sorts of dark possibilities here. I’m trying to stay with the rational view (ie., “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence”), but governments absolutely can be malicious, so who knows?
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Another 5+% dive in oil prices after USA announced flight ban for Europe.
Russia is twitching uncontrollably.
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As I said in the other thread from my PAD teacher’s explanation of the US parties:
Cutting payroll taxes will only drive up the national debt, leaving the US government with less money than they had at the start of the year. What does that accomplish? He wants to cut payroll taxes in lieu of cutting entitlements. When the budget needs to be “balanced” next, they’re going to realize the US lost trillions from the payroll tax cut and…cut entitlements anyway, times 2 now, because there will be less money in the pot from doing whatever it takes to handle COVID19 and payroll tax cuts.
It’s times like this I’m glad I’m not paying into social security, cuz I ain’t got a snowball’s chance in (notDante’s) Hell of getting anything I’ve contributed to the US government through taxes with this level of money mismanagement.
Americans don’t need more money in their pockets to spend on a fourth toaster, another new iPhone, or a night out. They need affordable health care and mandatory PTO so they can be treated promptly and afford to self-quarantine if they get COVID19 instead of going to work and taking public transit and spreading it to everyone else!
He wanted to do both…but the Dems shoot it down. Payroll taxes are theft on productive people working, and even worse penalty for self employed people…right towards SS and medicare. It is even more messed up to make productive young people pay into SS when we know we will never see a dime we put into it.
All these securities on sale if only I had money to buy them
You’re still young. You can buy them during the next crisis!
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Are they though? Sure, young people can be pissed as heck that we will never see any of it, but why is that? It’s because of mismanagement of all retirement funds of all forms, across the spectrum of various retirement funds, and across the world. (I might need to stop listening to the Rich Dad, Poor Dad podcast. There’s a lot of brainwashing but an ounce of reality in there).
We don’t have SS in our future because it wasn’t funded properly and adjustments weren’t made for the baby boomers that are all retiring now. The point of having 100% of the working population pay into SS is so that 100% of the working population can then be given that money back when they are old and should be retiring. It’s called paying it forward. You put the money in when you’re young so you can get the money back when you’re old. It’s no different from investing in the stock market or real estate as a plan for retirement financing – the government is doing it for you, requiring both you and your employer (which is yourself if you’re self employed) to contribute.
Unfortunately, now a huge percentage of our population is getting old and retiring, and young people make up less of the population by percentage and make less money (adjusted for inflation) than the retiring population did in their working lifetimes. So now SS benefits have to be cut over and over to balance the budget. When we’re old, we won’t get them because the government hasn’t been responsibly planning for the future generations of retirees by refusing to put the needed quantity of money into the pot, not because they are “stealing” from our paychecks out of spite.
And Medicare brings me right back to what I was saying about Americans needing healthcare that they can afford. COVID19 is going to explode across the US because too many Americans don’t go to the doctor for fears of the cost, which even most billing departments are unable to tell you before you go in and a bill is mailed to you months later.
Cutting the money that goes into Medicare would solve a lot of problems if they simultaneously cut 100% of Medicare, effective immediately. We’d wipe out 70%+ of the old people in next few months and not need to pay them SS anymore. Then we’d have a balanced budget and we will still be able to collect our SS benefits when we’re old!
Gaining votes!
Will it destroy the ACA? That’s a key aim of the administation.
Yey! Destroy the ACA and have even less insured Americans spreading flying AIDS around. I never thought I’d plan on retiring in Taiwan, where the pollution sucks but I can sleep well at night knowing I won’t ever have to worry about the financial cost of medical care.