Interesting. So a bailout is when the rules are changed so that some people get to keep money that they otherwise would have lost (or would not have gotten). I'm onboard with that.
But then the PPP and pandemic payments were bailouts, too - a bailout isn't necessarily a "bad" thing, right?
Like, we judge the bailout by who benefits, right?
We should just bail out families, small businesses with payroll needs, etc., and VC firms should take a haircut? Or rich people shouldn't be bailed out - cap FDIC guaranteed deposits at 1m?
Or should Signature have gotten the full deposit bailout (not tained with VC funny-money), while SVB should not?
Serious question: what is the rule / policy / threshold that solves the problem better than "everyone affected by the problem gets the same full deposit insurance"? It's a decision full of tradeoffs, being made in a limited time and information situation. I don't think the Fed+FDIC+Yellen are making calls based on trying to "save" nor "punish" certain groups - they can't possibly have the time or resources to figure out an optimal solution.
<< So a bailout is when the rules are changed so that some people get to keep money that they otherwise would have lost (or would not have gotten). I'm onboard with that.
I would say that bailout is a bailout is a bailout. No need for conditionals here. Most people instinctively know the bank would not survive without government intervention.
<< But then the PPP and pandemic payments were bailouts, too - a bailout isn't necessarily a "bad" thing, right?
You may be assuming something about me that I did not say. I am not sure what PPPs were exactly, but at its core, they were bailouts too ( or at least that was their intended purpose ).
<< what is the rule / policy / threshold that solves the problem better than "everyone affected by the problem gets the same full deposit insurance"?
The rule is really simple: follow the policy you claim to follow. Otherwise some may think you are lying all the time.
> But then the PPP and pandemic payments were bailouts, too
Yes, PPP loans were 100% bailouts. I do think, however, that there’s a significant difference, which is that we didn’t have widely available insurance for pandemics. Even if businesses wanted to protect themselves against the risk of pandemic, they probably could not have done so before COVID.
Businesses that fail to hedge risks when the option is readily available to them should fail.
A bailout is a bailout is a bailout. I am not sure why people get so offended by this. Here it is a bailout with extra steps to allow for claims that it is not a bailout. I have no real horse here. My market exposure is maybe 10k usd now.
The point made is rather simple: whatever the rules are, enforce them. Otherwise they are not rules and no one will take you seriously.
I mean, they spent the weekend trying to find a private buyer and clearly nobody wanted it. Doesn't seem to be a reach to conclude it might not actually be a great deal for the new owners (the US government)...
I don't think you have a realistic understanding of "taxpayer money".
You know the budget hasn't been balanced in years, right?
Let's guesstimate that over the last 20 years, for each dollar taxed, the government has been spending 5 more.
Those 5 dollars came from private investors and commercial banks. They gave USD money to Treasury, and received an IOU note from the Treasury. So:
1) The money is national debt, not taxpayer dollars.
2) The QE and other "unusual" things done by the Fed in the last decade means many of the Treasury notes are now held directly by the Federal Reserve. Treasury can and will magically convert the notes to USD currency over time, which the Fed disposes of by sending USD back to ... the Treasury.
3) The debt and Fed actions don't necessarily cause inflation. Also, inflation is a form of a "sales tax", which isn't what people consider "taxpayer money" (in the US, there is no general sales tax, only federal income tax)
I understanding this perfectly well. Every bailout was monetized in this way. Nobody paid a special assessment on the tax form called "bailout". Doesn't change the fact that they will be paying and this is happening again. All you are saying is that it is not only literally taxpayers who pay but also everyone who holds US dollars.
So - veteran data wrangler here. I skimmed some of Humana's files. There's lots of repetition that can easily be removed when converting from a raw input to an analytical dataset - basically the huge blocks of text in "BILL_TYPE_CODE: 130,139,..." in the ADDITIONAL_INFO field can be normalized away by building a quasi-Huffman-encoded lookup table.
Noteworthy(?): there seems to be a limit of ~100~ 140 sets of prices, as seen in the filenames:
~Did I miss something? ... or is this some kind of technical limitation for Humana?~ Edit: I missed the alphabetical ordering. Still, only about 140 price sets.
Also, each plan member's JSON file has a small chunk of useful information, then a useless list of all 15k gz parts of a relevant NN_in-network-rates file (you only need the first filename to figure out which NN to reference).
I would also be interested in helping throw such an analytical dataset into BigQuery. It'll be great for sharing an open dataset. No doubt this will still be a gigantic headache, but it is tractable.
The source [Google post](https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/...) says “ men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women” so your 50/50 split of n is the most aggressive way to interpret that information.
More likely, we should interpret that to mean that men were found to be more likely to be underpaid (n_men > N_men), and that the appropriate comparison of variance (finding outliers) among men versus women was performed.
> your 50/50 split of n is the most aggressive way to interpret that information.
I'm satisfied with that choice.
Given that Google are here quoting this stat in the press (with the 50/50 implication) to defend themselves against an inequality suit, without actually giving us the figures, I assume that this is the best spin that Google can put on it.
Look - the next 10 years is all about card-circulators. It's actually a combination of two things: Cards, which present business metadata such as contact info and personalized notes, and a circulator, which efficiently organizes and presents the best contact for any particular job. We're branding it Rolodex, but really, there is a whole industry ready to break the mold of traditional B2B.
the users will need to adjust to new ways of organizing and sorting, but some power users already have proven the new model.
But then the PPP and pandemic payments were bailouts, too - a bailout isn't necessarily a "bad" thing, right?
Like, we judge the bailout by who benefits, right?
We should just bail out families, small businesses with payroll needs, etc., and VC firms should take a haircut? Or rich people shouldn't be bailed out - cap FDIC guaranteed deposits at 1m?
Or should Signature have gotten the full deposit bailout (not tained with VC funny-money), while SVB should not?
Serious question: what is the rule / policy / threshold that solves the problem better than "everyone affected by the problem gets the same full deposit insurance"? It's a decision full of tradeoffs, being made in a limited time and information situation. I don't think the Fed+FDIC+Yellen are making calls based on trying to "save" nor "punish" certain groups - they can't possibly have the time or resources to figure out an optimal solution.