2016 Economic Crisis Thread - Duck and Cover?

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Will the global economy implode in 2016?
	We're hosed - I have stocked up on canned goods
	My private security guards will shoot the paupers
	We'll be good or at least coast along
	I have no earthly clue

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Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

namaste faggots posted:

Roughly monday afternoon I guess.

oh how quaint

Their third largest bank is struggling to raise 5bn euros? jfc

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 11:33

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 02:41

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

shrike82 posted:

Trump saved 1000 Carrier jobs and created 50000 new ones through a deal with Sprint. What has Obama done?

Yes, sprint increasing its workforce by 270% is definitely realistic. In what world do you live in that you would not only believe such a thing but parrot it back as if it were a fact?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 11:25

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

Xae posted:

That is a non-sequitur if I ever saw one. Automation and Labor savings has gently caress all to do with the current clusterfuck.

And here is the backstory:
Healthcare wasn't always unaffordable. It became unaffordable due to medical inflation. It has been sitting there growing at 7-10% a year for decades. The inflation has to be stopped because 7-10% growth is just not sustainable under any payer system.

It isn't just "administrative overhead". Look up OECD figures for things like MRI per capita or procedures per capita. Right now the USA performs almost twice as many MRIs per person as the UK (55/107). The US performs dramatically more procedures per person than places like the UK. Simply changing the payer system does nothing to address that.

See these are good ideas because they address the core problem: The cost of providing care. Paying for care is ultimately secondary if it is affordable in the first place. Cracking down on the tech arms race is a huge one too. Hospitals are getting into dick measuring contests over technology and patients are demanding the latest and greatest things, particularly in imaging, even if they don't need it. You don't need a state of the art MRI scan for a routine broken bone, but you'll probably get one in the USA.

Just nationalizing the payers is literally the dumbest thing you can do. It is the one thing worse than doing nothing. Because the only thing that happens is shifting a cost that is growing uncontrollably onto the public books. With no cost control and at the current growth rates Medical Care will be 30% of the US economy in 10 years. It is projected to start to drop in ~15 years due to "natural demographic changes". It will be something like 40-45% of the US economy at its height.

Single Payer is a lovely hill to die on in the United States. CO, a blue state, put single payer on the ballot in 2016. It lost by 80 points. There are plenty of countries that have non-single payer systems that work well. Implementing a system that mimics one of those is a winnable fight that can improve people's lives.

And as a side note, Medicare isn't the panacea everyone who doesn't have it thinks it is. Its claims get denied much more than private insurers do. It is just that when they get denied the provider fixes the problem and resubmits to medicare instead of trying to bill the patient. I spent my last couple of years in the industry dealing with the Re-submission poo poo. If I hammered home one thing it was that providers are loving poo poo at paperwork. We had a project that was billed as this miraculous RULES ENGINE (tm) that could determine if a providers claim would get rejected. It was just a bunch of stupid poo poo "Hey, if you diagnose a broken left arm make sure the treatment is coded for treating a broken left arm. Not a broken right arm or a broken left leg. ". One of the smarter things Obamacare did was mandate the ICD10 changeover, which hopefully kills off all these lovely homegrown coding systems hospitals used then tried to transcribe to ICD9.

Seems most nations with a single payer system solve this by only paying for necessary things and then not allowing providers to bill patients directly for anything not covered. Seems like that would drastically curtail such practices if doctors/hospitals know they won't get paid for it or even be able to declare it as a loss unless they wish to justify the gouging. It seems this would work across the board too. We could also force the bundled payments you were talking about. The practice of having different doctors visit a patient and bill them individually for it, sometimes with that doctor being out of network is shameful gouging and needs to stop. And they could stop if there was only a single payer and they decided to say "cut the bullshit and charge this fairly" while also making it so the hospitals can't bill patients and try to make them responsible for it.

Not only that but with a single payer reform we can go and start mandating cost cuts and such from the providers, and again with only a single payer they'll have to toe the line. It seems by doing that we could cut out a lot of the waste and graft.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 03:45

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

Higsian posted:

You do start off very poor though with massive debt and mediocre income. Which is pretty bad because it's a big part of why doctors are able to justify their massive salaries later. Or the massive later salaries are justification for the otherwise crippling debt. Either way it's a messed up way to have the profession work.

Once a doctor reaches residency they're already going to be making a decent amount (50kish) and loans can be potentially deferred or put in forbearance while in residency. Doing such can be expensive, it does allow one to manage the debt they have to pay down while they finish up their residency and become a big boy doctor. And many states do have loan forgiveness programs if you work in an underserved community. The debt burden is a lot but I am not sure it is fair to characterize it as mediocre income.

I am all for making college free for everyone who is able to show they are successful in their studies, and that would include for med school. I'm not sure med school would be the first place to start with it since if you are accepted you are basically guaranteed to graduate and if you graduate you're guaranteed a pretty decent career.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 05:06

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

Ramrod Hotshot posted:

Why would a recession in the US happen soon, other than it's 'bout that time? And if it did, wouldn't it be rather shallow? It's not like there's a housing bubble now. I don't know if there's a bubble to burst at all right now. Growth has been pretty anemic.

The housing bubble is still there as well as other consumer debt bubbles. The fundamental problem tho is we kicked the 08 crisis down the road and never fixed any of the core problems. OTC derivatives are still completely unregulated and are still a huge ticking time bomb.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2017 07:58

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

uncop posted:

Steve Keen has pretty wonderful youtube lectures on The Great Recession and financial crises in general. Basically it's not so much that people taking less credit caused the crisis, instead that itself *is* the crisis. Housing bubble bursts => people start taking less credit, banks stop giving easy credit => aggregate demand falls. They don't even have to start saving paying their debts down, just taking less credit yearly in a high private debt to GDP environment is enough.

If you follow the data, we are actually in for a series of these serious crashes rather than the mild recessions of old, because the current widespread economic policy to beat recessions is to get corporations and people to take on more debt. Credit-fueled demand is the only type of demand that has historically had large enough fluctuations to cause this level of crisis, and we are still at 150%+ private debt to GDP ratio and it's not going down.

The lack of credit was as you said the crisis. However the cause of the lack of credit was the banks having to realize losses on their balance sheets because of how deep they were into mortgage backed securities while assuming that credit default swaps would save them for any of the MBS tranches that went tits up. But since this was all based on the idea that housing prices nationally could never go down it was doomed to fail. Once they did go down and the banks realized those massive losses they tightened up credit because they had no idea how badly they extended or any other bank for that matter. They even stopped doing interbank lending because of it.

The organizations that were losing access to credit were ones that used commercial paper. Corporations like GE ould have potentially had cash flow problems that could easily lead to massive layoffs or bankruptcy.

So yes the lack of credit flowing was the actual crisis but the cause of it was pure and simple the banks loading up on poo poo investments.

Raldikuk fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Feb 14, 2017

# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 08:53

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

Grouchio posted:

So you're implying that recessions can be predicted to an extent if you're smart enough?

To an extent they can be but the markets can remain irrational longer than one can often remain solvent so it can be quite risky even if you notice all the right boxes being ticked.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2017 08:06

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 02:41

Raldikuk: Apr 7, 2006; I'm bad with money and I want that meatball!

rkajdi posted:

Where is that? I thought we had higher registration fees, and that's only $165 every other year. And the state right next to me (WV) is full of people bitching that their registration went up from $21 to $51 a year.

High sales tax is the dumbest thing ever though. It's basically a handbrake on consumption, which is one of the major drivers of any economy. Income tax can collect the same amount of money without hurting your consumption nearly as much.

In MN the registration cost is based on the base value of the car and then each year after the car has been made it gets knocked down a bit. (Here is a link to the rate schedule). The minimum fee is $35 if your car is '07 and older and the max is $1,259 for a brand new car with a base value of 99,800-99,999.99 (not sure what they do for base value above? probably extrapolate?) and that is per year. It seems like a fair way to do it imo.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2017 21:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 2016 Economic Crisis Thread - Duck and Cover?