It is commonly referred to as a ‘short position’, though it is not ‘shorting the stock’. Equally, purchasing calls* is referred to as a ‘long position’ (as is holding the equity).
edit: smallmancontrov below pointed out that I wrote 'purchasing puts' was long, when I meant to write 'purchasing calls'
It’s all a matter of perspective I suppose, and of course I understand why you say this, but no professional options trader I’ve ever met would speak in these terms.
Even if you're right, but the value goes up before going down, you can lose out with a short, if your counter-party makes a call for collateral you don't have.
In the case of “The Big Short” it did make sense, because the ratings were required by the government, not the purchasers (who often/usually disregarded the ratings for the purpose of valuation), and the sellers paid for the ratings.
Even Trump "mostly adheres to most of the treaties" the USA has signed. The USA has signed a lot of treaties, and violating most of them would take a concerted effort, and quite a lot of time.
Yes, he does. The sad and stupid and novel thing is how fucking capricious he is about that adherence, and how congress has fully kowtowed to him and his minions.
Most other countries have voter ID, and the controversy surrounding it is puzzling to most foreigners. Additionally, parliamentary systems which result in majority governments are much more ‘dictatorship-like’ than the US system where individual representatives retain some autonomy.
A large number of Americans do not have ID's, which is strange to many people. If the need for voter ID and risk of fraud were so great, the efforts would be to make it trivial for these folks to get one, rather than preventing them from voting.
Pharmaceuticals are only a (high) single-digit percentage of medical spending in the USA, and the (likely) reason for the ads is the highly competitive nature of the market. Most of healthcare spending is on labor, specifically doctors and nurses, who are protected by highly effective trade and lobby organizations.
My point stands... as a whole, they (medical industry as a whole, including pharma) are the single largest lobbying group and nothing you've said refutes that. My use of pharma ad spend was an example of how much money they put out as an indication of how much lobbying power all of medicine as a whole has.
While I find your comment enjoyably pithy, in the case of vitamin D, many humans are currently living at latitudes which they are not suited to (skin being too dark to generate enough vitamin D given the insolation), and eating diets which do not provide them with sufficient amounts of it (the carnivore diets of Inuits and similar groups being a good contrast).
Vitamin D supplementation in the UK - now there is a fascinating topic.
With the industrial revolution there was a problem of kids in cities getting rickets. This was due to a lack of vitamin C and that was due to a lack of daylight due to the smog.
The solution was to take the kids out of the city so they could spend time in the countryside.
However, along with the industrial revolution came steam trains, and, with steam trains, it became a lot easier to get fresh food from the farm to the city table.
Milk became an early commodity for this railway trade, in the days before refrigeration. Bottling had to be invented too, along with pasteurisation to get the modern milk product. They fortified it with vitamin D and, in time, made it mandatory in schools for kids to have dinky bottles of milk for their morning break. All kids hated the stuff but it was 'good for them' and good for keeping farmers gainfully employed.
Then the clean air acts came along, with the first street to ban fires in fireplaces being opposite the smoke free coal factory, the factory being anything but smoke free. Deindustrialisation happened too, so there were no cities with smokestack industries at their heart.
With clean air there was no longer any need to fortify the milk with vitamin D, so that stopped. From now on, kids would get their vitamin D doing things such as playing in the school playground.
But then we became seriously car dependent and the age of the free-range child was over. With 'stranger danger' and screens (initially just TV) taking over, we entered a new era of people not getting enough daylight again.
Along the way vitamin D has been downgraded, much like Pluto, from being a 'vitamin' to being a hormone. A lot of people want to point this out and explain the science to you. From hearing how some talk about vitamin D, it sounds like the recommended supplements are all over the place.
Clearly there are millions, if not billions that seem to be living just fine with not much sunlight in their lives and on no vitamin D supplements. Where's the rickets? Good question, but then, in Antarctica, where there are months of darkness to endure, they are on something like 20,000 units a day, and they probably know what they are doing.
Maybe following their example for this winter could be my next 'nutrition experiment'. Sometimes, when there is so much conflicting information, it is best to do an n=1 experiment with one's own body.
> Maybe following their example for this winter could be my next 'nutrition experiment'
Anecdotal and a sample size of 1, but I tried supplementing Vitamin D last year in the winter months. I live in the PNW, which between October and March, the sun is too low to trigger vitamin D synthesis in the skin to see if it had any effect on my energy levels and mood, I suffer from seasonal affective disorder pretty severely.
Taking 5,000 IU daily had no noticeable effect for me. A slight increase in energy levels but not significant enough that I'd be confident in attributing it to supplementation. I was hesitant to supplement more without medical advice and a blood test.
That's not to say Vitamin D isn't important (it is), and the scientists in Antartica definitely know what they're doing, but it's more to say YMMV.
For me, just making an effort to do more physical activity outdoors during the dark months had more of an impact
~5000 IU daily between February and May was barely enough to raise 25(OH) D level in my blood from 9 to 30 ng/ml.
Depending on who you ask, 30 is either the bound between "deficient" and "insufficient", or between "insufficient" and "sufficient". Regardless of who you ask, there's plenty of headroom until "excess".
Yes, it's possible but relatively hard to overdose on vitamin D, and due to a cock-up in some calculations in a study, until recently the recommended supplement amounts were about an order of magnitude too low: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5541280/
The NHS does recommend that everyone in the UK 'consider' vitamin D supplementation during the autumn and winter: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vitamins-and-minerals/vitamin-... , because the amount of sunlight available in those months is not enough to maintain a healthy level.
It’s criminal that the US sent Somalian refuges to live in Minnesota. Those are some seriously brown people in the land of no vitamin D. Pretty big population in Seattle as well, which is worse due to cloud cover.
Not just cloud cover. Most areas in the PNW, the sun is so low in the sky between October and March that you can't synthesize vitamin D through the skin at all during those months, even on a bright sunny day.
Even during the summer up here, you really only get a window of roughly 10am to 3pm where enough UV-B rays can penetrate the atmosphere, in July. It's estimated that >80% of the PNW population are deficient (compared with 40% nationwide in the US).
That same podcast I mentioned pointed out that if a white person nude sunbathed in the winter in full sun, you’d get 2nd degree burns long before you made enough vitamin d.
The body stores it though. So how much of a deficit you’re running for how long matters.
It's only criminal if they aren't provided with the education/information they need to live healthy lives (which is possible with the right diet/supplements).
Dark skinned people do not produce enough vitamin D in northern latitudes because of melanin. If you’re black and in Minnesota you probably need supplementation.
Minnesota? Minnesota isn't particularly dark. Minneapolis is apparently on the same latitude as Venice, Italy, and I don't think of Venice as particularly dark or gloomy (to be fair, they probably have better weather).
But yeah. Low vitamin D levels are common even with lily white people in Northern Europe, and at least here in Norway everyone with dark skin knows that they need vitamin D supplements. Traditionally, public health recommendation (for everyone) was to take cod liver oil regularly for every month with an R in it.
I’m painfully aware of that being dark skinned myself. That doesn’t mean that Minnesota is inhospitable though (or that it would be criminal to send me there). It just means that they’d need to know that they need vitamin D supplements and perhaps regular blood screens. Idk if that happens though.
There are towns in Canada that have heated hallways that go between buildings so you can’t get completely snowed in during the winter. Maybe they should build those. Or the underground walkways they have in a couple of the cities.
I'm an Asian who was born and raised in a tropical weather region of my country. I'm now living in the PNW region of the US and it's always miserable from November-April. Vitamin D helps but it's not the same.
Seattle taught me a lot about procrastination. If you look outside and it’s sunny, and you promised yourself you’d go out today, drop whatever you’re doing and put on a jacket. Because by the time you finish it might be cloudy again. Seize the hour. There are no days to seize.
It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.
In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch and the Daily Mail General Trust.
Not sure how that translates into US media context.
The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing multiple newspapers with different editorial stances (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.
Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving.
Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.
Not sure what the verb was that is missing here, but The Guardian has offices in the US, reporters across the country, articles written solely for its US audience. If you only care about who owns it, then I guess it still counts as an overseas operation, but in most other senses, it really isn't. Also, by that metric, Fox News is an overseas entity.
> It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s
It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the original trust and transferred assets to a limited company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their properties to private equity.
They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue it's mission but the limited company can sell off the Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.
If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.
You will still have $10 mil, but at an average inflation rate of 3% that will be worth half in 24 years, and 1/4th in 28. So you will have less and less of a newspaper. And that's if none of your investments go bad. This kind of logic doesn't work for long time horizons.
Coming Soon: WaPo Marketplace. Search for a story and get 10000 results from writers in China like LIOPOSFO and XIGISNN that look almost like the genuine article!
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Zhao was convicted of crimes which were a direct result of his operating a crypto exchange, and not any other criminal activity. It may be possible to operate a legally-compliant crypto exchange, but I am not sure that any current exchange is fully compliant with US law. If we agree on these facts, and think that the 'war on drugs' is what has resulted in 'drug possession' and 'drug trafficking' convictions, then it seems reasonable to say that Zhao was convicted as the result of a 'war on crypto'.
I am actually not sure that either the 'war on drugs' or a 'war on crypto' is a bad idea, but they do seem analogous.
He made a lot of money from the other criminal activity. That's what money laundering is: just because you're not directly trafficking children, for example, doesn't mean you have clean hands when you make significant profits from the people who are.
What you're describing is (in my view) the best casus belli for both the 'war on drugs' and a 'war on crypto', but a moral case does not make a criminal case (on its own).
I don't even necessarily think a 'war on crypto' is needed. The problem is that crypto seems to function as a get out of jail free card for very straightforward financial crimes: you just do the financial crime, but apply a thin veneer of 'but with crypto' and the legal system is utterly bamboozled.
Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.
I completely agree that crypto is being used as an end-run (if you'll pardon the expression) around the existing financial oligopoly, whose regulatory burden is paid for by the monopoly rents extracted by the government-endorsed players. The problem is that criminal laws aren't being maximally applied against banks, so instances like this do give the appearance of 'unfairness'.
Except, correct me if this is wrong, but he wasn't even convicted of money laundering, let alone the underlying crimes you suggest he was launder the proceeds of. It was simply for failing to register / setup an appropriate AML system. Whether any ML occurred, by whom, and in relation to what... are outstanding questions. If he had done all that and all they got him on was a 4-month technicality, that tends to suggest he was probably innocent (or the investigation was inept).
I'm not sure you understand the point. It isn't that CZ himself was specifically putting forth the effort to launder money. It isn't that he was specifically doing things to try and make it easier. The point is that he had a legal duty to actively attempt to prevent money laundering. Binance was legally required to do this to operate in the US, and did not. The court case produced messages from the Chief Compliance Officer pointing out a myriad of ways in which they were not complying with various laws of this nature and they were ignored.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
The guy was punished with a 4-month jail sentence. It's reasonable to assume his crime was of the sort that would result in a 3-6 month sentence... generally misdemeanors.
It's certainly in a different category than speeding or jaywalking, but it's a lot closer to that than to the 150 years that Bernie Madoff got.
The CEOs of Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. have not been indicted for anything. Those exchanges have had some compliance issues but they were minor compared to Binance, FTX, BitMEX, etc.
edit: smallmancontrov below pointed out that I wrote 'purchasing puts' was long, when I meant to write 'purchasing calls'