Normally I wouldn't nitpick, but since you posted that 39% as a hard number, how much of the 61% remaining (the "aid") takes the form of grants, and how much of it is loans?
I disagree with most financial aid and admissions offices, who seem to regard loans as "aid"
Good point! Lowest wage I ever had was $7.40/hr. That was the minimum wage for my state at the time. It was a whole 15 cents more than the federal minimum wage.
15 cents * 8 hrs/day = a whole $1.20 per day above the federal minimum wage. It was awesome.
If hedge funds can't reliably predict a market crash, why do you think a team of accountants at an Amazon office can? And if they could, why don't they exit their core business and get into trading stocks?
The accountants at Amazon have material non-public information that they can't act on for obvious reasons, but if they know beforehand - for instance - that sales aren't growing as fast as they used to, or that luxury purchases are trending downward, they can forecast that their own price might slump in the next few months.
> hedge funds can't reliably predict a market crash
Hedges can predict a recession is coming, just not the timing. They have been saying it for the last 12 months.
> a team of accountants at an Amazon
Amazon hires ex-bankers to work for them. They aren't a team of accountants. It's a cushy corproate job that many bankers take. It's good to do when you don't want to hustle long hours anymore.
> And if they could, why don't they exit their core business and get into trading stocks?
Yes, it seems to me that if interviewers are going to be annoyed about this then they should stop using leetcode and/or using generic interview questions.
Also, I saw an assumption about financial investment being a moral positive slip in there. I've become less convinced of this recently.
At the bottom of an industrial, technological, geographic, or demographic S-curve, opportunities are plentiful to forego consumption today in order to create wealth tomorrow. Investment is useful. Rates of return are positive, incentivizing it. Cool. What happens at the top of the S-curve, though? Those opportunities dry up, relative to available capital. There's nothing inherently bad about this. Quite the opposite, it's a good thing! "Our work here is done." It's a big problem if you make your money by investing, though, and everyone at the top of the social pyramid does, so they exercise their immense political power (they're the top of the pyramid, remember) to ensure that the "growth" continues at all costs. It doesn't matter if it's artificial growth, it doesn't matter if it comes at greater expense to someone else, it doesn't matter if it causes social problems -- they keep pumping all the same because it is in their interest to do so, and they keep pumping until something bursts.
In this framing, encouraging financial investment is not an unqualified moral positive. If financial rates of return are low, I'd expect quite the opposite, with investment in financial instruments as a moral negative while investment in, say, better food or used cars would be net positives.
Morality aside, I'd also expect this dynamic to be reflected in rates of return: if rich people can satisfy all of the market demand for financial investment, the best rates of return will be in non-financialized investments, like buying a new used car to replace an increasingly expensive clunker.
This is one of the reasons certain economists recommend cash payments over benefits like SNAP for poor people. People generally have a good idea of how they could invest in themselves for an immediate improvement in their situation. Be that getting the money for a down payment on a car, house, or apartment; getting tools they need to start side business; taking time off to take a class at a community college; etc.
