subjectHarold

Okay, that isn't the point...but that is what you said: "why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force"...how else is this supposed to be interpreted? Because of someone's ancestors, this group shouldn't own property. If you want to make a different point, then make it.

And it isn't random. You can acquire this property if you want. But be aware, you seem to be expecting to acquire the "entire society's wealth"...most of this land isn't that valuable and that land that is requires work (which is why it is valuable).

Again, I don't understand what your point is here beyond anger that someone else has something you want?

EDIT: Are you actually familiar with the population distribution and density in Scotland? A good chunk of this land is just agriculture and rough grass that has few economic uses. This isn't land that anyone wants to live on. The main concern of the govt, as I understand it, is to encourage forestry (which will mean more large owners, not less).

Ignoring the fact that a lot of the land has changed hands since then (the issue is concentration not identity of owners...a dangerous conflation): are you saying that a morality test should be applied to the family tree of all property purchasers?

I am sure this is attractive to you because you are a member of the "virtuous class" no doubt, but have you checked your family tree? How far back? What genetic crimes prohibit property ownership? Class traitor? Rightist? Capitalist Roader? Perhaps religion?

And why do these people still own land? Presumably you aren't personally being pressed into involuntary labour, so why do you as someone who is doing "all the work" still have nothing? These inbred landowners are presumably so feckless they would take anything (certainly, lots of these estates go for sale every year).

If you are a tenant farmer, you aren't being "oppressed" by not someone not selling you land. If you offer me £20 for my house, are you being "oppressed" if I don't sell it to you?

The Church of England, Anders Povlsen, and others have all acquired huge amounts of land recently (that is why there is so much complaining about landowners from England who only come up to shoot). There is tons of forestry to bid on, and if you offer the right price then you will find willing sellers...if you offer the right price.

...yep, and the fact that the population of Scotland is tiny and over 50% of that population live in the Central belt.

Afaik, the only solid evidence against is an apparent lack of "participation" from local communities on land use. Unfortunately, this is an issue that applies as much to council as private landowners in Scotland and also tends to elicit opinions on what "should" be the case, rather than what is actually possible (i.e. people who live in the middle of nowhere complaining about the lack of economic development, complaining that the landowner isn't selling them a house at a cheap enough price, complaining that the landowner only comes up from England to shoot, etc.)

There has been an abundance of loose reasoning on that is justified only by the perception that of unfairness (and, unf, a bit of light bigotry about the English). One of the sources for the rather brief Land Commission report was some political theory on power and participation (https://landcommission.gov.scot/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/R... - Section 5 - I studied Politics postgrad btw, theory shouldn't be used this way...it is basic). Madness.

The reality is the opposite. In the long-term, you are screwed with this voting structure. This structure exists because right here and now, Zuckerberg looks like a good choice. Over the long-term, bad things happen. Human nature is what it is, and the company will be unable to respond (just based on what he has already done, he looks like a below-average manager).

Also, most institutions aren't particularly short-term in their outlook (if you are an institution buying a stock that has a valuation like FB...you have to be taking the very long view). Where the short-term "meme" comes from is analysts (whose bark significantly outweighs their bite) and the pressure that failing companies get to preserve shareholder value (and the real-world evidence here is that managers win close to 100% of the time and take shareholder's money down with them).

In my experience, I have seen countless companies decimated by unaccountable managers (no super-voting shares to my recollection, just weak oversight). I am not aware of any public company harmed by short-term thinking. The only possible exceptions are private equity (but for different reasons, still terrible) and acquisitions...but in the latter case, this happens for a ton of other reasons too. In most cases, there is no pressure.

Tbh, I don't even understand the logic...you can invest heavily, and that isn't showing up on your income statement immediately. It is true that most investors don't understand the difference between ROI and marginal ROI (these situations probably represent a good chunk of my lifetime returns) but companies feel limited in what they can disclose (and I have had conversations with non-US companies to that effect) and, in the end, the market always works it out.

She pissed off most of the staff. She introduced a weird iteration of "fire the bottom performers every year". She bailed out Dan Loeb (who had hired her but changed his mind after she refused to do almost anything she promised). She didn't get a particularly good price in the eventual sale. She got paid hundreds of millions for nothing (her pay alone was ~5% of the eventual sale price...one person). Terrible acquisitions. Terrible hires. She also appears to have rubbed almost everyone she met up the wrong way (I know people who met her and got a bad impression, imo she came across very poorly to investors and was preoccupied with perception/spin...I believe she gave an interview a few years ago in which she even blamed Carl Ichan...truly odd).

Most people are, I think, quite forgiving when it comes to failing in these situations. The issue often is that some people, most in my experience, have no idea how to behave when things go wrong (and, given enough time, something will always go wrong).

Just to note first about the other answers: the EU Parliament is really not very important. Most decisions are made within the Council, which as said elsewhere, votes based on population weight. The Parliament does seem to exercise real power over the Commission but beyond that...not much.

Germany is influential because they have a large population i.e. high vote weight in the Council AND they lead a bloc of other nations with similar values (Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.).

It is worth noting though: the UK leaving the EU will likely change this (they usually voted with Germany and had a 13% weight of the EU population). Germany will likely retain some moral leadership but, at the very least, a blocking minority vote (35% of population and 4 members) is possible (the most likely scenario is a France/Italy combination with two other minor members).

...why do I care about push notifications? By "customers love that feature" you mean, you like that feature. Most people aren't interested in having an app at all but the ones that are just want to be able to look at their balance, make payments, and cash cheques.

If I want to see if I have made a payment, I just open the app...which takes 10 seconds instead of a 5 second push notification.

Most UK banks offer apps, Monzo is not doing anything particularly new. Their success has been in convincing investors that the competition is "ossified" whilst dropping tons of their money and failing to actually gather deposits.

You can buy £400bn of deposits with Lloyds for £40bn (and get paid 5%/year for the pleasure). Or you can pay £1bn for a loss-making company with £100m in deposits...it is pretty simple.

Cool, you wrote a paper in law school. I wrote two dissertations at UG and PG level.

Monetary policy is essential, none of the things you mention are more important. Why? Because the boom can't occur without monetary policy (this is usually not obvious to people who have only looked at US financial history where capital markets are developed).

Lots of reasons are given ex-post to rationalise these movements i.e. changing technology "caused" the Canal boom...but technology is always changing. And human nature is certainly interesting...but it is an invariant (just like technological change). The enabling factor is always money. Btw, this isn't to say that, for example, regulation wasn't a factor in 2008...it was but the thing is that regulation is always a problem because when money gets loose then regulations follow.

Examples of booms without bubbles: post-WW2 in the US, financial conditions were stable in the few decades (not strictly true but for our purposes) because the the main concern of monetary policy was government finance. Another example: Japan 1960s-1992, MOF had total control over lending so no bubble (only popped when they lost it).

In these cases, you need to really understand how money is being created and intermediated. If you understand this then you understand why bubbles do and do not occur. If you look at unimportant things like technology, you only have reasons why bubbles do occur (this is the kind of terrible history that you presumably learn at law school).

You also picked one of the absolute worst examples to demonstrate your point. The Greenspan Put was vital, "irrational exuberance" and the contrast between that approach and that of a McChesney Martin (for example) is important. Even just the change in policy under Greenspan...really bad example. I tried but was unable to think of an actual example...

No-one cares about Bitcoin. We are talking about financial history, not Beanie Babies.

Yeah buddy, that isn't right. That is comprehensive income (most of the financial websites just report the simple line items, which are usually right but very wrong when they are misleading).

For HK stocks, you get the press releases/filings from: http://www3.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/advancedsearch/s... - and this is the annual report, http://www3.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/SEHK/2019/0311/L...

As said though, I have no idea if I am looking at the right company (you sometimes find that there is a holding company or a stock with a similar name or something). Pretty sure it is the same Meituan...but maybe not (and if it is, I still don't understand the losses they booked to equity).

Monetary policy is everything. Read financial history.

VCs aren't some unique species that have cracked investing. Human nature is the same as always: people will do stupid stuff. If someone turns up with a check for $100m, you don't check to see whether you can invest it safely. You become a true believer, you gather assets, and if you weren't a true believer at the start you will be after you make enough...it always ends badly but this is why cycles happen.

In fact, the last cycle has been particularly unusual because we have actually see the bad firms driving out the good ones (I don't know about VC but it is happening everywhere else). And this is definitely due to monetary policy.

You are right. At the level of the investment, people aren't saying we should seed this company because of monetary policy...but no-one says this in any bubble. Rather what happens is that the demand for securities goes up and finance finds ways to fill this demand. Human nature being what it is, this always ends badly.

To say this another way: people will find endless ways to rationalise a bad decision. And if someone is paying you to make bad decisions sound good...well then, what do you think will happen?

Btw, just generally, I think VCs are less sophisticated than the average investor. The current environment has just been very forgiving. I don't think we will see anything like this again (if central bankers lose control which seems inevitable), literally firms with billions in cumulative losses trading for $10bn+. These IPOed firms will probably destroy hundreds of billions in capital alone.

I am confused. Is Meituan's ticker 3690? This looks like the company referred to and the actual operating loss is 11bn RMB (so about ~$1.5bn)...which is a lot but revenue doubled, and this is kind of a scale-ish business...so?

The number quoted by Bloomberg (quoting from Nikkei) is comprehensive income including the conversion of pre-IPO securities...so not really reflective of operations.

What is kind of staggering is the cumulative losses to equity ~170bn RMB or $25bn. And presumably, there are options and all sorts. Tbh, I am not even sure how this number is correct given the business isn't even ten years old...I don't look at HK companies very often (and I am aware funny stuff happens in HK)...but how the equity account be wrong?

pg.3 - this section also references, amongst others, this paper by the same authors: https://economics.mit.edu/files/15254

No, the reason why was France pegging to gold at a very favourable rate in the 1920s. The UK, obviously, was not short of colonies but got absolutely rolled in this period because they pegged to gold at their old rate instead of devaluing. This led to huge unemployment issues (even before the GD). Germany suffered because they were heavily reliant on flows of US capital causing bank failures (there was a tremendous boom between 25-29).

The economic effect of the Autobahn is massively overstated (I would actually look to Wages of Destruction by Tooze here). Public works were important but it is as important to look at how this was all facilitated.

The reason it only shows 26-39 is that Nazis came to power in 1932. The worst year in the GD was 1931-32, other countries were not moving out by 1933, most didn't move out decisively until WW2. The UK isn't a good comparison (the UK was still way ahead of most other nations at this point, Germany wasn't particularly similar).

It is definitely possible that without Schacht, the boom wouldn't have occurred. The constraints on resources were massive and required the invention of a range of complex economic devices to manage. Even at the time, there was the same backwards thinking about this: Germany must have managed to do this because they had the resources. No, they had no resources. What they did was very unusual. The only comparison that occurs is the international monetary co-operation in the 1960s to maintain the $ peg to gold...and even then, the level of sophistication required was nowhere near and the results achieved far less significant.

I would read the article and the source it links to again. If you do, it answers most of your questions.

Yes, the performance of the German economy was considerable. But the point with Schacht for all economic historians is that the German economy was operating under immense constraints. And what impresses is the way Schacht created endless devices to keep production growing despite these challenges.

And yes, they did measure things the same way. The way of the world today is to look at historical statistics and assume that no-one had a clue about economic policy before the 1980s (Germany was actually one of the most earliest adopters of stats in policymaking). But if you actually look at the primary sources, it is apparent that there was actually a great deal of knowledge. And, in some ways, that understanding was far more deep than today (as it was often based on practice and experience). As the article says, Schacht is an example of this.

More broadly: the job of the economic historian is not to work out whether things were "good or bad ideas". Historians realised many decades ago that the answer to these questions is subjective. You have to look at these decisions within the conditions that existed at the time.

Link to trailer (I think) mentioned in article - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZXqkgFegLQ

Lalalala....ACTION! Supa Kicker!

The passion is inspiring.

EDIT: Vice also did something on these guys (it seems all the BBC does these days is recycle content) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy0OOVTmsJI

I am not - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/talk-ba...

Which is exactly my point. The post I am replying to said:

workers might be much happier in countries where they can work without the possibility of being fired at any moment

The reason why this is an issue is nothing to do with actually being fired, it is due to the difficulty of getting rehired...which is a bigger issue if labour markets don't function (and in most European nations, as the higher unemployment has risen, the more desperately the privileged few have clung onto their protections worsening the issue).

This is why Denmark went the other way: the logic for inflexible labour markets is only consistent when labour markets are not flexible. Remove that and target spending where it is actually needed i.e. on meeting the needs of the market.

The idea of stronger safety nets is also not particularly true (the idea of strong/weak never made sense to me). Social security is not universal as in the UK or US, it is based on contributions. And the reasons unions work, again in contrast particularly with the UK, is that they collaborate with employers (Denmark's union participation rate is anomalous but even compared with somewhere like Germany).

Okay, what other concerns does he mention? All he says is that being fired is difficult...which he then suggests is important because you can then be rude to your boss. No other reasons are used to support this idea.

What part is inaccurate?

Denmark? Probably the weakest hiring/firing laws in the developed world (in terms of employee protection) and, last I checked, one of the happiest countries in the world.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Like most sciences: a theory is put forward, and then you test it with empirical data.

The issue, and I think this is something that most economists would definitely dispute, is that there are few real hard and fast "laws" of economic behaviour. And this leaves scope to construct theories and even test theories in a way that is not objective. This occurs in other sciences too ofc but there is far more scope for this in economics.

If we go into the meta: I think all disciplines go through this at some point. History went through it in the late 19th century, and eventually got over it by simply acknowledging that historians are human too. Economics is very far from this point but it will get there. And once it becomes more clear what actual knowledge looks like then I think economics will be on more solid footing (I don't think economists understand that no-one believes their bullshit about objectivity, I really don't and it reflects badly on them).

Also, the OP mentions finance...there is a big difference between finance and economics. First, things that get published in academic finance have an effect on the data. If you publish a strategy that works, returns will that strategy will drop off. Second, there is a lot of self-promotion. Finance is a fast-moving, aggressive field which is great because it leads to high output but a lot of the results can't be reproduced.

This is kind of crazy. Presumably, there is a correlation between going to a good business school and getting a job with a good business (which generates market-beating returns). So you would expect some kind of correlation just because people think MBAs are valuable...but no.

In particular, "Elite MBAs did perform relatively well as CEOs in healthcare and consumer staples". Not significant statistically but the reason this is true is because both healthcare and staples (until recently) have had a killer run.

So I don't think share price performance is the best metric but...even then...you would still expect to see something totally different to the actual results. The stuff that looks at the portfolios of bankers is more understandable...but this has been shown elsewhere (generally, poor fund managers do better).

Yep, that is the point...there isn't a spectrum. Countries that have tried to take the middle ground, like the US, have ended up with a political system that is bought and paid for by casino groups (because they are often the only vested interest in semi-regulated markets, another possible comparison is Hong Kong but that is more complicated). Afaik, the only non-theocracy with regulations that as severe as the US is South Korea (military dictatorship within living memory).

There is nothing immoral about gambling. Smoking and alcohol are infinitely more harmful, are they immoral too? On what basis? If you enjoy gambling, fine...good for you. Addiction affects a tiny proportion of the population, under 1%. And we can reduce this by being adults, and working with operators on harm reduction rather than judging people. The implication that people who gamble or gambling addicts are immoral is quite sad. It is common to most theocracies but these are usually places that will rail against immorality of things like gambling and then drop bombs on their citizens the next week. Moral authorities indeed.

...but that isn't occurring in any regulated markets. The reason that is happening is because, in the US, this is a grey area. The process has been captured by casino operators (btw, a casino operator is one of the largest Republican donors) and, ironically, they have co-opted religious groups who are saying the same stuff as you (religious groups have given up on LV but casino operators like these groups shutting down the competition).

Every regulated market has removed the incentive completely for organised crime. In addition to substantial harm reduction measures that actually make it easier for addicts to get help (where I am, gambling addiction charities are well-funded to an almost obscene level i.e. probably $100m+ in a country with a population of tens of millions) and work with operators to exclude these people from any form of gambling. Again though: this isn't unknown. Lots of countries are doing this, you just need to know about the world beyond your small corner.

And those problems exist whether you ban gambling or not. Do you think that no-one is addicted to heroin because it is illegal? It is kind of farcical.

If you regulate gambling properly, you actually have tools to control harm. If you don't, then you are increasing harm.

Rates of gambling addiction are tiny compared to other kinds of addiction (0.5-1%).

More to the point though, the absolute worse way to help people who are sick is to criminalise their sickness. By legalising gambling you can generate money to invest in harm prevention.

The way the US approached the issue has led to terrible outcomes for gambling addicts, funding for organised crime, and has led to the creation of a powerful lobbying groups (in Las Vegas Sands/Adelson) that obstructs progress.

It is kind of bizarre to see these comments in the 21st century. For the rest of the world, these issues have been solved.

I have quite a few friends who ended up doing this. It isn't easy at all. And if you are just in it for the money, you probably wouldn't get an entry-level position.

That probably sounds slightly crazy but how many people actually do end up leaving and doing something else? Not many. They end up in those jobs because they want the lifestyle, the status, and being "the guy" is critical to their self-image. Faking it would be pointless (it would probably lead to severe unhappiness).

And if you are an employer, your job is to feed into that. I don't think it happens consciously but most of these places have working environments where the stick and carrot are used quite heavily. If you "win", the rewards in status are huge. If you "lose", you will be crucified. And most people who do exit, exit because they lose. Not because they win and decide they have had enough...no-one does that.