iforgetti

It wouldn’t be Polish if it wasn’t pessimistic ;)

Sounds amazing! What’s the name of the series if we wanted to find it on YouTube?

Idk why this is getting down voted, the article identifies them as geoglyphs in the second paragraph.

Cape Verde would have qualified under the 32 team cup as well.

Agreed with both you and parent on the commercial, I mean hydration, breaks. What a disaster.

Glen Okun of NYU business school has written about BNPL loan portfolio weakness.

The AI marketing is just an attempt to reframe the value narrative of the company before IPO. They would rather be seen as an AI company than an unsecured lender of last resort.

The narrative on Klarna’s core business is not good in any case, either an extractive lender benefiting from people buying what they may not afford and charging exorbitant interest or a lender of last resort who has not properly underwritten the risk in their portfolio. Neither is preferential to them compared to a value narrative framing them as an AI company. Likely the market is too skeptical in this environment to take the bait however.

The author (who grew up in Poland while it was a puppet state of the USSR) offers examples literally in the same paragraph that you quoted. The full paragraph is:

Russia’s expansionist policy, on the other hand, continues to cast a long shadow across Europe. The country has a long history of conquest, but for centuries, its vast dominion resembled a loose federation of fiefdoms, not a single state; it wasn’t until the emergence of the USSR that a cohesive national identity — along with a renewed focus on global expansion — started to take hold. Through various machinations, the USSR soon ended up annexing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and seizing military and political control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and other neighboring states. For decades, the residents of these lands suffered repression and economic hardships — and were barred from leaving the Soviet-controlled world.

They may be collateralized by bonds worth even less than that.

If the bonds were worth 80 cents on the dollar than they just traded 80 cents on the dollar for 99.9 cents on the dollar. A good deal if your balance sheet is in such poor shape.

But if they are using bonds which the fed has valued at face value rather than market value as collateral then this is still effectively free money.

They are only losing .1% of bond value instead of the difference between face and market value.

A bond bought by a bank in the past at a lower interest rate than those offered today is worth less than those offered today.

If the fed values those bonds at face value (rather than what the market would pay today) and allows the bank to borrow money using those as collateral, then a bank could simply borrow from the fed using the older less valuable bonds as collateral and then buy new more valuable bonds.

The bank could then default on the loan and forfeit the original less valuable bond.

This would effectively be the fed giving free money to the bank.

There is a book about this called “The Millionaire Next Door” that may be of interest to people looking to build wealth this way.

Yep that guy, except I suggest reading his actual work instead of basing your thinking on what someone else thought he thought.

I recommend reading some of the original economic theory that undermines the “Chicago School” free market thinking of Milton Friedman and others who it seems you are so fed up with.

One good place to start might be the work of Friedrich Hayek.

If you are like me, you might start to have a more nuanced view than “It’s not true!!”.

Hayek for example despite being in many ways the father of this work was very explicit about the role of government and the many areas he considered government intervention essential.

What you wrote is true about the performance of the underlying businesses but not necessarily true about an investment.

Stock performance (and any investment) is driven by both cost of purchase and underlying performance. Cost is driven by human psychology as much or more than business fundamentals.

As a result, poor stock performance is in some way an indicator of future improved investment performance because it corresponds with lower purchase price but as you note, deterioration of economic performance is absolutely not an indicator of improved future economic performance.

What others wrote was pretty much my reasoning but a bit further, over the very long run (30+ years) markets will revert to mean performance. If you have strong gains in the first half of your career then when you are in your peak earning years, investments will be more expensive at time of purchase. As a result when you are investing the most, returns on that principle will be lower.

For those of us still in the first half of our working careers, this would be a welcome development.