ZachPruckowski

5 ms·

1.
by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
Looking at your thought experiment, the difference is whether that customer gets $500K (all of the bank's assets are sold to make him whole[1]) or $1M - all the banks assets are sold, and also he gets another $500K from the FDIC. [1] -
2.
by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
> "Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law." Very curious to see who ends up paying this special assessment. Are we all goi
3.
by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
> I hope the FDIC is able to get a substantial dividend quickly so that they can keep operating and that everyone works to keep disruption low The FDIC has publicly said there will be an advance dividend and I don't see why it would
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by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
I mean, yeah, that's ultimately a potential problem for the federal budget. But that's not what tripped up SVB - long-term Treasury prices declined because higher interest rates made short-term Treasuries more attractive than long
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by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
Interest rates are where they were in the mid/late 90s ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS ). The idea that these interest rates are unsustainable/dangerous is just silly. If anything, the 2009-2016 a
6.
by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
I mean, completely reducing this risk to 0 is probably expensive and annoying, yes. But you could halve the risk by splitting your money into just two bank accounts, and reduce it further by keeping medium/long-term savings in short-du
7.
by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
> "This isn't some sort of complex bid call option strategy" Exactly. And "don't put all your eggs in one uninsured basket" is the exact sort of 101-level business advice I'd expect the experienced hand
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by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
They actually had like $12B split across 5 or 6 banks. But yeah, they definitely could've split it better. "No more than $1B per bank" seems like an easy rule, and even maxing at $500M could be doable.
9.
by ZachPruckowski 4y ago
Well and it's not just that they had money over the insured amount in a bank. It's that they had ALL of their money in ONE bank. If they had $500K in three different banks instead of $1.5M in one bank, there would still be a risk,
10.
by ZachPruckowski 6y ago
Not just any initial capital, clean US dollars in a brokerage account under somebody's real name. You can't use BTC or rubles or drug money or whatever.
11.
by ZachPruckowski 6y ago
>When Musk posted a tweet 'joking' about taking Tesla private, which was utterly trivial to investigate, the SEC only managed to deliver a slap on the wrist. Because prosecuting Elon Musk requires going up against top tier defe
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by ZachPruckowski 6y ago
>Of course, insider trading among well connected hedge fund managers and our unaccountable financial elite is indeed pervasive and goes by without being prosecuted all the time And a lot of those non-prosecutions involve either (a) civil
13.
by ZachPruckowski 6y ago
I'm not sure this works. A lot of the folks who're short on Tesla are big names with trading records who've been short on Tesla for a while. If you roll up and your first stock trade is to buy some short term put options righ
14.
by ZachPruckowski 6y ago
In the aggregate sense, it eventually netted out. But a lot of people who sold when it looked like prices were collapsing sure got a pretty decent chunk of their bank accounts "erased".
15.
by ZachPruckowski 11y ago
I know, right? I work with a lot of politicians and they run the gamut from "tech savvy 30-year-old" to "grandpa who still uses AOL". Any product which wants to appeal to the entire population needs to be able to explain
16.
by ZachPruckowski 11y ago
You're not supposed to round 0.08, you're supposed to divide 0.08/8.24. The 8.24 is the percentage point return for the pension fund and the 0.08 is the percentage point cost for the fees
17.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
A serious security push might raise computing costs to the point where some low-margin computing activities become unprofitable or folks like Amazon push less into expansion/R&D to keep budgets balanced, but I think it's likel
18.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>"make a single-service product, get millions of investment dollars, sell it to Facebook or Google for billions at 1000x revenue premium while still not profitable and cash out" And if you're not playing this game, realize
19.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>Breaking a bad law can be virtuous, but I suspect in this case it's neutral at best. It's not "breaking a bad law" that can be virtuous, it's the case. Sit-ins are/were virtuous because the cause (civil rig
20.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>Why do regulations have to be in line with market economics in the first place? Yeah, I think this is something a lot of folks overlook - regulations exist because society has decided its interests are better served by making folks play
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by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
Don't forget to factor in the costs of running, cooling, and maintaining that much hardware (also bandwidth costs). I'm not saying it's $2k/month, I'm just saying don't compare the physical box and AWS without
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by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
No, the article suggests that teachers can't raise scores in heavily impoverished unstable areas fast enough to meet demands. That's a much narrower thing than "schools are useless"
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by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
Yeah but what fraction of home users are going to consider that prompt as opposed to just clicking on the OK button? I've noticed a lot of software will include that in its install steps.
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by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
The sort of bot he's describing would be designed to mask large purchases and prevent them from sucking all liquidity out of the market temporarily or spiking prices. Let's say I want to buy 500 BTC at $1000 (to make the math easy
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by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
Fairly hard actually - you've got to stakeout the house without being detected and tail the guy when he leaves. Plus you may not know how many folks were in the house in the first place (and thus how many are still there when the main
26.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>it's quite possible that it's just a sampling of bad hackers - he mentions that he has gathered many examples of bots and shells and such, so you can imagine that he's looking at a sampling of 1. hackers whose bots store
27.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>they haven't even peeped one single word about making the customers of theirs that use Netflix pay more money to Verizon. Not directly, but if the ISPs charge Netflix a fee that forces Netflix to raise prices for its customers to r
28.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>I looked at 40,000 samples of hackers’ passwords and found that nearly 2,000 were unique and 1,255 of those were in plain text. Another 346 passwords were easily cracked from MD5 hashes, because they were shorter than 9 characters. That
29.
by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
I think part of it is that there's no real venue for customers to express their satisfaction to other prospective customers. If I find a store relatively well-laid-out, convenient, and friendly, I don't have a lot of opportunitie
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by ZachPruckowski 12y ago
>But my question/argument is, would that be a rational decision? Does that matter? We[1] live in a capitalist democracy. One of the tenets of capitalism is that consumers should be well-informed and "vote with their dollars&#

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