[quote=harvey]C’mon, we need characters like phaster to keep this place interesting.
Imagine if everybody here were just posted lifestyle humblebrags. How dull would that be?
I’ll take a phaster post any day over another “I love my 4th home in Hawaii because it’s where I celebrate the holidays with my kids when they are on break from their Ivy League schools…”[/quote]
FWIW seems politicians are paralyzed like deer staring at a headlight of an on oncoming car
I say this because it does not take much more than middle school math to understand basic problems like the way public pensions are structured yet politicians do not want to acknowledge the problem exists because doing so is political suicide w/ public employee unions
thought of in another way politicians, members of public employee unions and perhaps most “investors” are mostly in, is the first of five stages of something I was introduced to way back in a high school religion class
the five stages being: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance which is the basic framework that makes up learning to live with loss
there is an economist that just won an award for describing the current problem w/ the stagnant economy, and in a paper he argues that easing monetary policy was the correct response from central banks to prevent the global economic from collapsing in 2007
that period should have been the wake up call for politicians and others in government bureaucracy to acknowledge systemic problems like public pensions, and the need to regulate financial instruments like “swaps” which are used for speculation (not just as a hedge), etc.
but politicians, others in government bureaucracy and many “investors” (not just here metaphorically speaking) don’t want to change the existing rules because they greatly benefit from the existing system, so they more or less ignore the various root causes of the problem and hope various central banks can some how jump start the various economies w/ easy money because looking at the big picture it ain’t pretty
