That's like saying that investing in the S&P 500 is nonsense, because if it were so easy then everybody would be doing that, and nobody would buy bonds.
The thing is, that there is a risk/reward relationship for everything in investing. And according to this article, the return you are getting on a 3x leveraged ETF are about 20% annually (2x normal stock returns) while the risk/volatility is about 3x. So, there is no free lunch. You are only getting higher rewards for taking on much higher volatility.
It's kinda hard to create a world-class transactions system when the philosophy is that the bottleneck should be a below-average computer and internet connection.
There isn't much support there. Telsa's bubble is over. It's extraordinarily unlikely it'll be worth more than $900 / share 10 or 20 years from now.
The treasury party that has begun is starting to rob the mania of its precious fuel and it doesn't take much to break a mania. The Fed is going to have to do a lot more if they want to stave off plunging asset prices, as rising mortgage rates will tank housing activity as well.
My question was purely hypothetical, in the case Bitcoin ever becomes a more attractive store-of-value or reserve asset than gold (maybe because its easier to transfer, store and verify ownership than gold) which I admit is a very big if.
> Bitcoin ever becomes a more attractive store-of-value or reserve asset than gold
Bitcoin valuation can't increase infinitely. At some point, people want to sell them more than there is demand and the price either stabilizes or collapses.
Personally, I'm not invested in Bitcoin or any other altcoin so please don't assume I'm biased, but theoretically Bitcoin could increase in value indefinitely.
There will always be people that lose their private keys and the population of earth/universe will (probably) also increase over time.
Therefore, even when all the hype dies down, it is still designed to get scarcer and scarcer over time, regardless of the demand.
I am not sure if this is completely true. Bitcoin core can change via Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process. If 95% of miners vote for a specific BIP it gets into core. Now I am not sure what happens if 95% of miners are in China.
Yes, I assume that the core rules will not be changed, which requires an element of trust, making it more similar to FIAT currency than gold in that regard.
The argument for gold is that it isn't 100% a speculative investment.
According to Wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold) 50% of gold's use case is in making jewelry and 10% is used for industry.
On the other hand, Bitcoin isn't used for anything, except as for a speculative investment, not even as a currency or as a "decentralized PayPal".
> The argument for gold is that it isn't 100% a speculative investment. According to Wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold) 50% of gold's use case is in making jewelry and 10% is used for industry. On the other hand, Bitcoin isn't used for anything, except as for a speculative investment, not even as a currency or as a "decentralized PayPal".
Also, Gold has literally thousands of years of cultural precedent as being a "valuable thing." Bitcoin, not so much.
For the vast majority of people Bitcoin in its current form provides a worse user experience than PayPal, VISA, etc.. because the fees are a lot higher and the transaction times are longer.
If you want to buy $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin the $5-$50 transaction fee doesn't matter. For the majority of people it matters though.
The observation from comparing different countries after the fact seems to be that the economy suffers from the epidemic itself (voluntary change of habits plus hospitalizations) as much it does from lockdowns, so the argument is that if you avoided lockdowns then you got both the increased deaths from covid and also the deaths because people lost jobs and are depressed.
The economic issues and the associated death increase was avoided only in countries which successfully managed to limit the spread of disease, which generally involved aggressive early lockdowns.
My question would then be, what is the natural life expectancy of a suicide or opiate overdose victim, versus that of a person that would have survived COVID only with medical intervention.
We should be looking at deferral of death, not just death count. Death is certain to everyone and I am reluctant to value everyone’s remaining life expectancy equally, at least as far as the healthcare system is concerned.
In the U.K. there’s no evidence of any change in suicide rates in 2020 (it’s normally about 6,000 a year). Registration delays means that we don’t know the numbers for 2020, but early indications are not much change (suicide has been increasing though and is at a record high)
A much bigger issue is the lost of QALYs from lockdown but not from deaths, including the socio-economic impacts.
ONS have a more through report than a Sunday morning post from a phone.
The people who mainly benefitted from lockdown measures are the over 60s
The people who mainly lost out were the under 35s
The recovery plan needs to address this - including fixing the massive wealth disparity. A generation of property owning shareholders who have retired have seen their wealth and income balloon over the last year (and decade). But it won’t, millennials will be screwed.
Now on the other side do lock-downs cause less use of healthcare? And will it result in health-debt? If there is less preventive maintenance done on population will that results increased deaths in future? Thinking of elective surgeries and so on...
taking the anarchist's approach: if people are happier owning tusks and using the stock market as a casino than seeing elephants and having stable finances, let em do it.
It's a pretty varied group defined around a negative. That's like asking whether atheists believe a specific positive statement about the world. That said, to try to answer your question, my guess is left anarchists would say "absolutely not, capitalism is full of unjust hierarchy and the profit motive is bad news altogether", and right anarchists would say, "there's no such thing as the collective interest, but nobody gets to violate the individual rights of anyone else for whatever motive".
they do, because they believe they themselves are going to be at the top. If you showed them where in society they will end up (i.e., at the bottom), they will change their tune.
I don't want to strawman anyone. Are there really Anachrocapitalists who believe that the market should decide whether or not we have mass extinctions, or is this post mostly satirical?
There are so many problems with this idea, not the least being that markets aren't designed to eliminate niche ideas, they're designed to support them -- and because wild populations of elephants are a shared common resource, even a small number of people who are happier owning tusks means that their preferences suddenly outweigh the vast majority that want them to stop killing elephants.
Markets aren't designed to stop people from irreparably damaging commons and messing up the world for everyone. That doesn't mean markets are bad, it just means... that's not what they were ever designed to do. You're using them to try and fix a problem that they're not optimized to fix.
This is very much a, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" proposal. We don't need to solve literally every single problem with Capitalism. We especially shouldn't look at every single problem and say, "Capitalism doesn't solve that, so it's not a real problem."
Does it not seem plausible to you that perhaps one factor in the reduction of poaching was local people realizing there was more money to be made from tourists drawn to see elephants, rather than from poaching them? Government action helped too, no doubt.
I expect that the major positive impact of tourism was providing motivation for local governments and local citizens to crack down on poaching. I am skeptical that you can convince every single poacher to stop poaching and become tour guides. I am also skeptical that the person paying money for ground elephant tusk elixirs is going to view a vacation as a suitable substitute.
Reducing demand certainly helps, but tourism and poaching are not exclusive markets, you can have tourism and poaching happening at the same time -- and demand for one isn't necessarily going to reduce demand for the other. If 100 people are giving tours, and 20 people are deciding that they'd still rather just shoot elephants because they don't like dealing with tourists, then you still end up with zero elephants. Reducing demand is only going to be one part of the puzzle, a slight reduction isn't enough on its own to solve the problem.
And regardless, looking at market demand as a part of the solution is still kind of missing the point. Sure, we might be able to leverage some market forces to help with the overall problem, but it's still a problem regardless of what the market says about it. The market in this case is at best a tool, it doesn't define what the right outcome should be.
It doesn't matter if the vast minority of people rich enough to spend money on this prefer elephant tusks or tours. It should not be their choice to make. We don't want the market to decide whether or not we have mass extinctions. If we end up with zero elephants, saying, "well, the market just didn't create enticing tours, so we'll never have elephants again" is not a valid response.
What percentage of the population is rich enough to go on wildlife tours to another country? They don't have the right to choose for everyone else whether or not elephants go extinct.
Interesting read about feedback loops and self-fulfilling prophecies.
However, the author made it sound as if "momentum" is the only thing that drives human behavior. While it's certainly a part, I wouldn't say it's the only force driving human decisions.
I don't think the author was claiming it's the only force. But I do agree this was interesting but felt like something was missing. If feedback loops are so powerful, why are most things actually fairly stable? How and when and why does something get sucked into a positive feedback loop? I'd be curious to read more thoughts about that.
To link it to the world of investing, other key factors that drive returns/risk of assets are value, size, quality, yield and volatility, besides momentum. It's a multi-variate equation.
The thing is, that there is a risk/reward relationship for everything in investing. And according to this article, the return you are getting on a 3x leveraged ETF are about 20% annually (2x normal stock returns) while the risk/volatility is about 3x. So, there is no free lunch. You are only getting higher rewards for taking on much higher volatility.