156 karma · joined September 6, 2010
Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee conforming mortgages that they securitize against default. They might ultimately be backed by the US Treasury and thus US taxpayers (if not in theory, then in practice).
However, when inflation is high, the burden on the borrower of paying off their fixed-rate mortgage goes down (as their income increases faster over time). Therefore, the borrowers are less likely to default during high inflation. Thus, having the GSEs guarantee these mortgages is not a subsidy that protects middle class borrowers from inflation. High inflation essentially eliminates the need for the guarantee by itself.
"In September 2014, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct. In April 2016, BP agreed to pay $20.8 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in United States history."
[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/Deepwater-Horizon-oil-spill
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
Actually, it's the other way round: you can only have accurate price discovery if people can take both long (buy) and short positions (short sell). If shorting is restricted, price discovery is much less likely, since only current owners of the shares can sell them. That's like only allowing current owners of the shares to buy more of them.
1) hash of concat(ip & helo & m_from & m_to) 2) time
1) "The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate". From the article: "The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated." You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely), thus confounding the relationship between vaccination levels and reported Covid cases.
2) "And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people". From the article: "The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab [Pfizer] was 42%, but increased to 58% with time." Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
You don't have to trust the stock broker. If they go bankrupt or steal your money, you'll get it back through SIPC insurance (https://www.sipc.org/)
> I don't trust corporate executives to have my best interests.
You don't have to trust corporate executives to have your best interests at heart, only that they have their own best interests at heart: corporations pay executives with stocks and stock options, thus aligning incentives between executives and shareholders.
> I don't trust corporation revenue numbers because they are inflated by artificial currency supply and manipulation (e.g. corporations feeding off of debt-fueled shell companies to generate fake revenue).
You don't have to take corporate revenue numbers on trust, since they are audited. Yes, sometimes things slip through the audit, but you can just buy a well-diversified portfolio, such as an index fund, to largely eliminate the effect of outliers.