"The government-run National Flood Insurance Program is, for now, virtually the only source of flood insurance for more than five million households in the United States. This hurricane season, as tens of thousands of Americans seek compensation for storm-inflicted water damage, they face a problem: The flood insurance program is broke and broken.
The program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been in the red since Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005. It still has more than a thousand disputed claims left over from Sandy. And in October, it exhausted its $30 billion borrowing capacity and had to get a bailout just to keep paying current claims."
NPR Planet Money did an episode on this: "The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is $30 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury. If it were a private company, it would be bankrupt. And instead of preventing risky behavior, the NFIP may be encouraging it. Among the NFIP's many problems are houses that flood again and again and again. Throughout the program's history, one percent of homes have been responsible for more than 25 percent of the claims. The NFIP can't drop these homes."
The questions typically are (1) Can you find an instrument that lets you bet on the mispricing (2) do you have the wherewithal to stay solvent for the arbitrary period of time it takes for the market to correct.
Individual investors typically cannot access the right instruments (typically weirdly structured long term options). Typical institutional money managers cannot because their measurement typically penalizes continuous money loss. Lots of them however may have spotted the opportunity.
They can - just buy an put on the ETF via your favorite neighborhood broker like schwab, etrade, etc.
Getting authorized for options trading on your account is pretty straight forward and serves as a last fair warning of how much money you're likely going to lose :)
EDIT: to clarify, most of the "exotic" stuff like VIX and XIV (was) are ETFs that are accessible by "regular" investors and hide away the complexities of properly structuring the underlying position to get the exposure to certain aspect of the market. This opaqueness is what makes them so dangerous IMO.
Andrew Gelman once mentioned that Black Swan events are actually routinely _overpriced_ via the Longshot Bias. [1] He had talked about this in the context of the recent Leicester FC win and the odds on that team. [2]
tldr;
* The Global Short Volatility trade now represents an estimated $2+ trillion in financial engineering strategies that simultaneously exert influence over, and are influenced by, stock market volatility
* Since 2009 Global Central Banks have pumped in $15 trillion in stimulus creating an imbalance in the investment demand for and supply of quality assets
* Last month Austria issued a 100-year bond with a coupon of only 2.1%(6) that will lose close to half its value if interest rates rise 1% or more.
* Amid this mania for investment, the stock market has begun self-cannibalizing... literally. Since 2009, US companies have spent a record $3.8 trillion on share buy-backs financed by historic levels of debt issuance.
* Every decline in markets is aggressively bought by the market itself, further lowing volatility.
* Volatility is now at multi-generational lows...
Volatility is now the only undervalued asset class in the world. Equity and fixed income volatility are now at the lowest levels in financial history.
Without his tweets, we'd only know about how crazy and unbalanced he is via the "biased" and "corrupt" and "failing" media... with Twitter, we get to see it directly from his keyboard, thus leading to better debate about his fitness to serve.
That being said, it's a double standard, most ordinary people would have been banned before they tweeted half-way down the first column of what's in that ad...
What were the racist comments about Mexicans? I know he made some comments about illegal immigrants, but most Mexicans in America are not illegal immigrants.
> So far he didn't cause something worse than, or similar to, what's going on in Libya and Syria
So you're saying that because the US is not physically on fire with untold civilian deaths due to violent uprisings and political unrest, everything must be "alright?"
> or introduce policies like the Affordable Care Act
Shame on those who would like all citizens of their country to have the same access to healthcare that wealthier citizens have!
> He's doing better than the previous cabinet
Care to elaborate? He's avoided doing anything about any of the actual real issues affecting this country and the world (e.g. climate change, opiod crisis, resurging racism/white supremacy, sexual assault, and the list goes on). In fact he's made a lot of those worse since taking office. Meanwhile, he would rather focus on other "important" issues like contradicting himself, engaging in shouting matches with DPRK, tax reform that benefits his family and friends with deep pockets, spending an unspecified amount of tax payer money on a useless border wall, talking about (but not actually doing anything to) improve infrastructure, and trying to deny healthcare to folks that do not have it.
>> So far he didn't cause something worse than, or similar to, what's going on in Libya and Syria
>So you're saying that because the US is not physically on fire with untold civilian deaths due to violent uprisings and political unrest, everything must be "alright?"
I suspect he's referring to the USA's usual military aggression towards other countries. Unlike just about every president before him, Trump (for all his many many many faults) hasn't attacked another country (yet). I'd wager that, so far, Iraqis and Afghanis think Trump is better than Bush II!
The mainstream audience is trying to get their heads around this new asset class and when reputable and respected members of the financial industry say anything about cryptocurrency, it is likely to get a lot of pageviews.
