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That's why I have approximately 0 faith in the pension plan my government(s) have in place. I'll save for my own retirement so I'm not high and dry when they mi

by mfoy_ 9y ago

That's why I have approximately 0 faith in the pension plan my government(s) have in place. I'll save for my own retirement so I'm not high and dry when they mismanage the funds or change policies or whatever.

zanny 9y ago
While it is less likely, nothing is guaranteed. You assume your investments will be around until you cash them out for retirement, and they are all dependant on something not failing: * Direct stock ownership depends on the company growing, not failing, not being bought out, etc. * Mutual funds depend on the fund manager not going under / properly managing assets. * Bonds depend on state institutions honoring them. * You can't really save for retirement in a bank because their rates of return are below inflation. You lose money in banks. * Hoarding fiat is obviously bad. * Any asset you would try to store long term is subject to market volatility at the least and potential obsolescence at the worst. You simply cannot guess what anything will be worth decades from now. The current US administration knows full well that throwing tens of millions of people off insurance will probably cost them the disenfranchised working class that elected them in the first place and lose them their majorities in congress and the presidency. I fully expect them to stab themselves in the foot with this, since a lot of monied interests benefit from the absurdly inefficient default state of healthcare where many people depend on emergency rooms for all problems, but in the same vein repealing social security would destroy their voting base unless they made it a grandfathered in shutdown where the next Democratic administration could just reinstate it and nobody on benefits would lose benefits.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  >Mutual funds depend on the fund manager not going under / properly managing assets. Err, no. This is not a risk of properly structured mutual funds. The manager does not directly hold assets - they make decisions about what to do with the assets, which the custodian executes. And the fund's management has no recourse to the assets held by the custodian. How the fund goes under is if the assets they hold go to zero value. There's still execution risk, though, which is why passive management is ideal. I'm pretty sure VTSAX can successfully hold a market-cap weighted mix of the 3600 largest US firms pretty much indefinitely. The risk is that the largest US firms stop being generally profitable, like what happened in Japan.
Romanulus 9y ago
Which is also _another_ reason UBI is a terrible idea that is bound to fail.

by mfoy_ 9y ago

zanny 9y ago

While it is less likely, nothing is guaranteed. You assume your investments will be around until you cash them out for retirement, and they are all dependant on something not failing: * Direct stock ownership depends on the company growing, not failing, not being bought out, etc. * Mutual funds depend on the fund manager not going under / properly managing assets. * Bonds depend on state institutions honoring them. * You can't really save for retirement in a bank because their rates of return are below inflation. You lose money in banks. * Hoarding fiat is obviously bad. * Any asset you would try to store long term is subject to market volatility at the least and potential obsolescence at the worst. You simply cannot guess what anything will be worth decades from now. The current US administration knows full well that throwing tens of millions of people off insurance will probably cost them the disenfranchised working class that elected them in the first place and lose them their majorities in congress and the presidency. I fully expect them to stab themselves in the foot with this, since a lot of monied interests benefit from the absurdly inefficient default state of healthcare where many people depend on emergency rooms for all problems, but in the same vein repealing social security would destroy their voting base unless they made it a grandfathered in shutdown where the next Democratic administration could just reinstate it and nobody on benefits would lose benefits.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
>Mutual funds depend on the fund manager not going under / properly managing assets. Err, no. This is not a risk of properly structured mutual funds. The manager does not directly hold assets - they make decisions about what to do with the assets, which the custodian executes. And the fund's management has no recourse to the assets held by the custodian. How the fund goes under is if the assets they hold go to zero value. There's still execution risk, though, which is why passive management is ideal. I'm pretty sure VTSAX can successfully hold a market-cap weighted mix of the 3600 largest US firms pretty much indefinitely. The risk is that the largest US firms stop being generally profitable, like what happened in Japan.

Romanulus 9y ago

Which is also _another_ reason UBI is a terrible idea that is bound to fail.