Markets Insurance Quotes

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Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.
Paul Farmer
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
This is the opposite of the free market.
Bill Maher
The market was particularly strong in Chicago, which had more than a thousand known brothels.
Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
Nature doesn’t have puts on one side and calls on the other side of the same things, nor does it waste energy betting against the same life it works to cultivate. Nature doesn’t insure high risk gambles by trying to be both the casino and the player. Instead, nature insures capital and profits through a variety of complimentary approaches. At Mayflower-Plymouth we aim to emulate nature in this way with how we approach investing and asset management.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: We're not going to have a supreme court that will overturn Roe versus Wade. There will be no more Antonio Scalias and Samuel Aleatos added to this court. We're not going to repeal health reform. Nobody is going to kill medicare and make old people in this generation or any other generation fight it out on the open market to try to get health insurance. We are not going to do that. We are not going to give a 20% tax cut to millionaires and billionaires and expect programs like food stamps and kid's insurance to cover the cost of that tax cut. We'll not make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control under the insurance plan that you're on. We are not going to redefine rape. We are not going to amend the United States constitution to stop gay people from getting married. We are not going to double Guantanamo. We are not eliminating the Department of Energy or the Department of Education or Housing at the federal level. We are not going to spend $2 trillion on the military that the military does not want. We are not scaling back on student loans because the country's new plan is that you should borrow money from your parents. We are not vetoing the Dream Act. We are not self-deporting. We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt. We are not starting a trade war with China on Inauguration Day in January. We are not going to have, as a president, a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared, gay kid, to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help and there was no apology, not ever. We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton. We are not bringing Dick Cheney back. We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with architects of the Iraq War. We are not going to do it. We had the chance to do that if we wanted to do that, as a country. and we said no, last night, loudly.
Rachel Maddow
Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lost the courts and wait for a White House scandal. And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists these days goes like this: The Republican Party has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same approach. ...Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It's what keeps us locked in "either/or" thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace "socialized medicine". It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of politics.
Barack Obama (The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream)
Michael Parenti has observed: The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere – including the people of North America – the blessings of an untrammeled ‘free market’ corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many.16
William Blum (America's Deadliest Export: Democracy The Truth about US Foreign Policy and Everything Else)
By investing in anonymous cryptocurrencies, you are buying 'insurance' against a recession, as the value of the cryptocurrency could increase significantly if the economy falters and the black market grows.
Will Martin (Black Market Cryptocurrencies: The Rise of Bitcoin Alternatives That Offer True Anonymity)
Historically one of the main defects of constitutional government has been the failure to insure the fair value of political liberty. The necessary corrective steps have not been taken, indeed, they never seem to have been seriously entertained. Disparities in the distribution of property and wealth that far exceed what is compatible with political equality have generally been tolerated by the legal system. Public resources have not been devoted to maintaining the institutions required for the fair value of political liberty. Essentially the fault lies in the fact that the democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry; it does not even in theory have the desirable properties that price theory ascribes to truly competitive markets. Moreover, the effects of injustices in the political system are much more grave and long lasting than market imperfections. Political power rapidly accumulates and becomes unequal; and making use of the coercive apparatus of the state and its law, those who gain the advantage can often assure themselves of a favored position. Thus inequities in the economic and social system may soon undermine whatever political equality might have existed under fortunate historical conditions. Universal suffrage is an insufficient counterpoise; for when parties and elections are financed not by public funds but by private contributions, the political forum is so constrained by the wishes of the dominant interests that the basic measures needed to establish just constitutional rule are seldom properly presented. These questions, however, belong to political sociology. 116 I mention them here as a way of emphasizing that our discussion is part of the theory of justice and must not be mistaken for a theory of the political system. We are in the way of describing an ideal arrangement, comparison with which defines a standard for judging actual institutions, and indicates what must be maintained to justify departures from it.
John Rawls (A Theory of Justice)
Try the following experiment. Go to the airport and ask travelers en route to some remote destination how much they would pay for an insurance policy paying, say, a million tugrits (the currency of Mongolia) if they died during the trip (for any reason).Then ask another collection of travelers how much they would pay for insurance that pays the same in the event of death from a terrorist act (and only a terrorist act). Guess which one would command a higher price? Odds are that people would rather pay for the second policy (although the former includes death from terrorism). The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky figured this out several decades ago.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1))
The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.
John Kenneth Galbraith (The Great Crash 1929)
indeed, when the Titanic went down in 1912, the most valuable and highly insured merchandise in its hold was forty crates of feathers, second only to diamonds in the commodities market.
Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century)
Then again, by the nineteenth century, owners could purchase life insurance on their slaves (from some of the most reputable insurance companies in the country) and be paid three-quarters of their market value upon their death. These insurance companies, including modern household names New York Life, Aetna, and U.S. Life, were just some of the many northern corporations whose fortunes were bound up with slavery.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
One powerful feature of a market economy is that it directs resources to their most productive use. Why doesn’t Brad Pitt sell automobile insurance? Because it would be an enormous waste of his unique talents.
Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science)
In the 1960's, some old-timers on Wall Street-the men who remembered the trauma of the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression-gave me a warning: "When we fade from this business, something will be lost. That is the memory of 1929." Because of that personal recollection, they said, they acted with more caution, than they otherwise might. Collectively, their generation provided an in-built brake on the wildest form of speculation, an insurance policy against financial excess and consequent catastrophe. Their memories provided a practical form of long-term dependence in the financial markets. Is it any wonder that in 1987 when most of those men were gone and their wisdom forgotten, the market encountered its first crash in nearly sixty years? Or that, two decades later, we would see the biggest bull market, and the worst bear market, in generations? Yet standard financial theory holds that, in modeling markets, all that matters is today's news and the expectations of tomorrow's news.
Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products designed to be obsolescent almost immediately- and I would argue that a great deal of what we're doing should just stop. Interestingly, people of all sorts are beginning to reconnect to skills and sensibilities that were bulldozed in the frenzy of 'development' that remade our world during the past two generations. Those orchards and fields that once covered the peninsula, the East Bay, and Silicon Valley are haunting us now, as we seek to relocalize our food sources and our economy more generally. People are relearning how to reuse things, how to fix broken items, and even how to make new things from the scraps of industrial waste. The world shaped by capitalist modernization is not good for human life and is certainly rough on the health of the planet. The hollowing out of communities whose lives were once anchored in the old Produce Market area or who shared life along the vibrant Fillmore blues corridor is precisely what people are trying to overcome.
Rebecca Solnit (Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas)
Pain relief is a billiondollar market, and drug companies have no incentive to fund trials that would reduce patients’ dependence on their products, he points out. And neither have medical insurers, because if medical costs come down, so do their profits. The trouble with hypnosis and other psychological therapies, he says, is that “there’s no intervening industry that has the interest in pushing it.
Jo Marchant (Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body)
Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
After all, it wasn’t science that had transformed the world, but the marriage of technology and capitalism. The ignorant might blame science for the ills and evils of the modern era, but that was a case of mistaken identity—no research scientist had ever polluted a water table with a PCB, or performed a third-trimester abortion, or denied someone insurance based on a genetic screening, or turned the Internet into a covert way of peering into private lives. Real scientists were invisible outside their own circle of peers. Even Nobel Prize recipients barely registered on the public consciousness, as Brohier well knew. A Heisman Trophy or an Oscar counted for far more—there was no market for Heroes of Science trading cards. Status was still measured in arcane units: bylines, citations, appointments, grants.
Arthur C. Clarke (The Trigger)
Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
After the first lot of policyholders universally claimed to have lost their cattle, they decided that in order to claim that an animal had died, the owner would need to show the ear of the dead cow. The result was a robust market in cows’ ears: Any cow that died, insured or not, would have its ear cut off and the ear would then be sold to those who had insured a cow. That way they could claim the insurance and keep their cow. In
Abhijit V. Banerjee (Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & the Ways to End it)
I mean to tell you, the Law's notion of justice is more cold-blooded than any outlaw I ever knew. And I mean 'outlaw,' not criminal. 'Criminal' doesn't distinguish between guys like men and the guys who own the banks and insurance companies and stock markets, who own the factories and coal mines and oil fields, who own the goddamn Law. I once said to John that being an outlaw was about the only way left for a man to hold on to his self-respect, and he said Ain't that the sad truth. The girls laughed along with us because they knew it wasn't a joke.... John got the publicity because he loved it ... he carried on like the whole thing was an adventure movie and he was Douglas Fairbanks. He wanted to to be a 'star.' That's how he was. Not me. I never even liked having my picture taken. All I ever wanted was to show the bastards who own the law that it didn't mean they owned me.
James Carlos Blake (Handsome Harry)
Prospecting & Marketing Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I were conducting a multiday seminar for her clients — corporate executives and general agents from life insurance companies — about new methods of recruiting agents. Even though the attendees had paid a very high per-person fee to be there, most had traveled great distances, and the subject was of critical importance to them, we both noticed that on breaks, what most of them were talking about was where
Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.)
We don’t worry about who manages the bank or what they do with our money. Even if we hear on the news that our bank has started to lend large sums of money to piano-playing cats, which we think is a bad idea, we would not feel the need to show up at the bank the next morning to ask for all of our money back. If you had lent your money to an individual and they in turn lent your money to piano-playing cats, you would demand your money back immediately. But because you deposit your money into a bank account insured by the federal government, you feel no need to keep a watchful eye on what your bank does with the money. Insurance removes the incentive for customers to police a bank. It can also remove the incentive for banks to police themselves because they do not bear the full or even the most serious consequences of their actions. Removing the natural tendencies of the market to notice and punish bad choices creates a moral hazard that may result in well-funded cats and other undetected market risks.
Mehrsa Baradaran (How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy)
Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt. Donating money to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, cults, et cetera, to help ensure a spot for one’s soul in the express elevator to that penthouse in the sky known as the afterlife was marketing genius! Had Sleepy paid his spiritual insurance? If so, had it done him any good? According to Shorty, whose memory had been beaten into the consistency of oatmeal by a length of pipe, or so said Bon, a quartet of Arab youth had set on them.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Committed (The Sympathizer #2))
The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-book Collection: A Brief History of Humankind and A Brief History of Tomorrow)
A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.
Sam Harris (Lying)
Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173
Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
If we sold insurance or financial products: * Most families need insurance. * Most insurance is too expensive. * Most people don’t have extra money to invest. * Most people want their money to work hard for them. * Most people hate risky investments. * Most people would love to have their savings pay for their insurance. * Most families don’t have time to become investment experts. * Most company retirement plans aren’t enough. * Most people want a financial counselor to help them with their finances. * Most people need insurance, but can’t afford it. * Most people want to protect themselves from emergencies.
Tom Schreiter (How To Get Instant Trust, Belief, Influence and Rapport! 13 Ways To Create Open Minds By Talking To The Subconscious Mind (Four Core Skills Series for Network Marketing Book 1))
No, you don’t know.” I press my hands against his chest and push him away. He doesn’t budge, which makes me explosively mad. “You don’t know what it feels like to have a chronic condition and no health insurance! To have to be perfect, to have to be on all the time because everyone around you expects you to be! And it’s pretty fucking hard to be perfect when you’re working fifteen-hour days for no money at a job you hate! You’re not experiencing any of that, so you don’t fucking know how I—” “You’re terrified. You’re overwhelmed. The job market is at its worst, and you don’t know if there’ll be openings next year. Believe me, I can relate—
Ali Hazelwood (Love, Theoretically)
I don't know the odds of an earthquake, but I can imagine how San Francisco might be affected by one. This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much of my life is based on it. You can build an overall theory of decision making on this idea. All you have to do is mitigate the consequences. As I said, if my portfolio is exposed to a market crash, the odds of which I can't compute, all I have to do is buy insurance, or get out and invest the amounts I am not willing to ever lose in less risky securities.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
While I was researching this book, an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.
David Epstein (Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
For financial services: * Well, you know how it is almost impossible to save money now with the cost of living so high? Well, I show people how to use tax advantages to fund all their savings. * Well, you know how insurance is so expensive, but we need it? Well, I show families how to get inexpensive insurance so that they still have money to enjoy life. * Well, you know how hard it is to get out of debt? Well, I show people how to pay off their debts quickly so that they have more money to enjoy life. * Well, you know how we are all going to die? Well, I show people how to manage their money so that they can party and have a great time before they die. (Okay, am I going too far yet?)
Tom Schreiter (Ice Breakers! How To Get Any Prospect To Beg You For A Presentation (Four Core Skills Series for Network Marketing Book 2))
The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee’s appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business. Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices—as, most famously, at Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd’s insurance market.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
I suggest a Money Market account with no penalties and full check-writing privileges for your emergency fund. We have a large emergency fund for our household in a mutual-fund company Money Market account. Wherever you get your mutual funds, look at the website to find Money Market accounts that pay interest equal to one-year CDs. I haven’t found bank Money Market accounts to be competitive. The FDIC does not insure the mutual-fund Money Market accounts, but I keep mine there anyway because I’ve never known one to fail. Keep in mind that the interest earned is not the main thing. The main thing is that the money is available to cover emergencies. Your wealth building is not going to happen in this account; that will come later, in other places. This account is more like insurance against rainy days than it is investing.
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
If companies want to benefit from the advantages of social norms, they need to do a better job of cultivating those norms. Medical benefits, and in particular comprehensive medical coverage, are among the best ways a company can express its side of the social exchange. But what are many companies doing? They are demanding high deductibles in their insurance plans, and at the same time are reducing the scope of benefits. Simply put, they are undermining the social contract between the company and the employees and replacing it with market norms. As companies tilt the board, and employees slide from social norms to the realm of market norms, can we blame them for jumping ship when a better offer appears? It's really no surprise that "corporate loyalty," in terms of the loyalty of employees to their companies, has become an oxymoron.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about it.
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
The Blood player could acquire a Rose item, but only by handing over an atrocity, thus leaving himself with less ammunition and the Rose player with more. If he was a skilful player he could attack the Rose side by means of the atrocities in his possession, loot the human achievement, and transfer it to his side of the board. The player who managed to retain the most human achievements by Time’s Up was the winner. With points off, naturally, for achievements destroyed through his own error and folly and cretinous play. The exchange rates – one Mona Lisa equalled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equalled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids – were suggested, but there was room for haggling. To do this you needed to know the numbers – the total number of corpses for the atrocities, the latest open-market price for the artworks; or, if the artworks had been stolen, the amount paid out by the insurance policy. It was a wicked game.
Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1))
In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
At the same time, surveillance will change the very nature of insurance. Insurance is an industry, traditionally, that draws on the majority of the community to respond to the needs of an unfortunate minority. In the villages we lived in centuries ago, families, religious groups, and neighbors helped look after each other when fire, accident, or illness struck. In the market economy, we outsource this care to insurance companies, which keep a portion of the money for themselves and call it profit. As insurance companies learn more about us, they’ll be able to pinpoint those who appear to be the riskiest customers and then either drive their rates to the stratosphere or, where legal, deny them coverage. This is a far cry from insurance’s original purpose, which is to help society balance its risk. In a targeted world, we no longer pay the average. Instead, we’re saddled with anticipated costs. Instead of smoothing out life’s bumps, insurance companies will demand payment for those bumps in advance. This undermines the point of insurance, and the hits will fall especially hard on those who can least afford them.
Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy)
The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.
Brian Carruthers (Building an Empire:The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Network Marketing Business)
Declan Lynch was a liar. He'd been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He's an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He's in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can't Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who'd stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, 'cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great. At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, Secrets. He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers. Well. More often he simply didn't tell his brothers the truth.
Maggie Stiefvater (Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy, #1))
If there are costs to becoming legal, there are also bound to be costs to remaining outside the law. We found that operating outside the world of legal work and business was surprisingly expensive. In Peru, for example, the cost of operating a business extralegally includes paying 10 to 15 per cent of its annual income in bribes and commissions to authorities. Add to such payoffs the costs of avoiding penalties, making transfers outside legal channels and operating from dispersed locations and without credit, and the life of the extralegal entrepreneur turns out to be far more costly and full of daily hassles than that of the legal businessman. Perhaps the most significant cost was caused by the absence of institutions that create incentives for people to seize economic and social opportunities to specialize within the market place. We found that people who could not operate within the law also could not hold property efficiently or enforce contracts through the courts; nor could they reduce uncertainty through limited liability systems and insurance policies, or create stock companies to attract additional capital and share risk. Being unable to raise money for investment, they could not achieve economies of scale or protect their innovations through royalties and patents.
Hernando de Soto (The Mystery Of Capital)
Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, national social services steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-book Collection: A Brief History of Humankind and A Brief History of Tomorrow)
This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen. This speculative market is intended to operate like the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services). Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her. There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information. To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event- or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day— doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents— it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of “independents” and “moderates” may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.
William E. Connolly (The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism)
It was a gorgeous evening, with a breeze shimmering through the trees, people strolling hand in hand through the quaint streets and the plaza. The shops, bistros and restaurants were abuzz with patrons. She showed him where the farmer's market took place every Saturday, and pointed out her favorite spots- the town library, a tasting room co-op run by the area vintners, the Brew Ha-Ha and the Rose, a vintage community theater. On a night like this, she took a special pride in Archangel, with its cheerful spirit and colorful sights. She refused to let the Calvin sighting drag her down. He had ruined many things for her, but he was not going to ruin the way she felt about her hometown. After some deliberation, she chose Andaluz, her favorite spot for Spanish-style wines and tapas. The bar spilled out onto the sidewalk, brightened by twinkling lights strung under the big canvas umbrellas. The tables were small, encouraging quiet intimacy and insuring that their knees would bump as they scooted their chairs close. She ordered a carafe of local Mataro, a deep, strong red from some of the oldest vines in the county, and a plancha of tapas- deviled dates, warm, marinated olives, a spicy seared tuna with smoked paprika. Across the way in the plaza garden, the musician strummed a few chords on his guitar. The food was delicious, the wine even better, as elemental and earthy as the wild hills where the grapes grew. They finished with sips of chocolate-infused port and cinnamon churros. The guitar player was singing "The Keeper," his gentle voice seeming to float with the breeze.
Susan Wiggs (The Beekeeper's Ball (Bella Vista Chronicles, #2))
This is why, from this point on, no debt will be paid off. It can at best be bought back at a knock-down price and put back on to a debt market — the public sector borrowing requirement, the national debt, th e world deb t — having once again become an exchange value. It is unlikely the debt will ever be called in, and this is what gives it its incalculable value. For, suspended as it is in this way, it is our only insurance against time. Unlike the countdown, whic h signifies th e exhaustion of time, the indefinitely deferred debt is our guarantee that time itself is inexhaustible. Now, we very much need assuring about time in this way at the very poin t whe n the future itself is tendin g to be wholly consume d in real time . Clearing the debt, balancing up the books, writing off Third World debt — these are things not even to be contemplated. It is only the disequilibrium of the debt, its proliferation, its promise of infinity, which keeps us going. The global, planetary debt clearly has no meaning in traditional terms of obligation and credit. On the other hand, it is our true collective claim on each other — a symbolic claim, by whic h persons, companies and nations find themselves bound to one another through lack. Each is bound to the other (even the banks) by their virtual bankruptcy , as accomplices are bound by their crime. All assured of existing for each other in the shade of a debt which cannot be settled or written off, since the repayment of the accumulated world debt would take far more than the funds available. The only sense of it, then, is to bind all civilized human beings into the same destiny as creditors. Just as nuclear weapons, stockpiled across the world to a point of considerable planetary overkill, have no other meaning than to bind all human beings into a single destiny of threat and deterrence.
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
If Jim was back at the imaginary dinner party, trying to explain what he did for a living, he'd have tried to keep it simple: clearing involved everything that took place between the moment someone started at trade — buying or selling a stock, for instance — and the moment that trade was settled — meaning the stock had officially and legally changed hands. Most people who used online brokerages thought of that transaction as happening instantly; you wanted 10 shares of GME, you hit a button and bought 10 shares of GME, and suddenly 10 shares of GME were in your account. But that's not actually what happened. You hit the Buy button, and Robinhood might find you your shares immediately and put them into your account; but the actual trade took two days to complete, known, for that reason, in financial parlance as 'T+2 clearing.' By this point in the dinner conversation, Jim would have fully expected the other diners' eyes to glaze over; but he would only be just beginning. Once the trade was initiated — once you hit that Buy button on your phone — it was Jim's job to handle everything that happened in that in-between world. First, he had to facilitate finding the opposite partner for the trade — which was where payment for order flow came in, as Robinhood bundled its trades and 'sold' them to a market maker like Citadel. And next, it was the clearing brokerage's job to make sure that transaction was safe and secure. In practice, the way this worked was by 10:00 a.m. each market day, Robinhood had to insure its trade, by making a cash deposit to a federally regulated clearinghouse — something called the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC. That deposit was based on the volume, type, risk profile, and value of the equities being traded. The riskier the equities — the more likely something might go wrong between the buy and the sell — the higher that deposit might be. Of course, most all of this took place via computers — in 2021, and especially at a place like Robinhood, it was an almost entirely automated system; when customers bought and sold stocks, Jim's computers gave him a recommendation of the sort of deposits he could expect to need to make based on the requirements set down by the SEC and the banking regulators — all simple and tidy, and at the push of a button.
Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
[A] central theme is why social, political, and economic institutions tend to coevolve in a manner that reinforces rather than undermines one another. The welfare state is not 'politics against markets,' as commonly assumed, but politics with markets. Although it is popular to think that markets, especially global ones, interfere with the welfare state, and vice versa, this notion is simply inconsistent with the postwar record of actual welfare state development. The United States, which has a comparatively small welfare state and flexible labor markets, has performed well in terms of jobs and growth during the past two decades; however, before then the countries with the largest welfare states and the most heavily regulated labor markets exceeded those in the United States on almost any gauge of economic competitiveness and performance. Despite the change in economic fortunes, the relationship between social protection and product market strategies continues to hold. Northern Europe and Japan still dominate high-quality markets for machine tools and consumer durables, whereas the United States dominates software, biotech, and other high-tech industries. There is every reason that firms and governments will try to preserve the institutions that give rise to these comparative advantages, and here the social protection system (broadly construed to include job security and protection through the industrial relations system) plays a key role. The reason is that social insurance shapes the incentives workers and firms have for investing in particular types of skills, and skills are critical for competitive advantage in human-capital-intensive economies. Firms do not develop competitive advantages in spite of systems of social protection, but because of it. Continuing this line of argument, the changing economic fortunes of different welfare production regimes probably has very little to do with growing competitive pressure from the international economy. To the contrary, it will be argued in Chapter 6 that the main problem for Europe is the growing reliance on services that have traditionally been closed to trade. In particular, labor-intensive, low-productivity jobs do not thrive in the context of high social protection and intensive labor-market regulation, and without international trade, countries cannot specialize in high value-added services. Lack of international trade and competition, therefore, not the growth of these, is the cause of current employment problems in high-protection countries.
Torben Iversen (Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics))
To understand what that means in commonsense terms, consider a person who plans to live off the income from $1 million invested in T-bills. Suppose he retires in a given year and converts his investments into an inflation-protected annuity with a return of 4% to 5%. He will receive an annual income of $40,000 to $50,000. But now suppose he retires a few years later, when the return on the annuity has dropped to 0.5%. His annual income will now be only $5,000. Yes, the $1 million principal amount was fully insured and protected, but you can see that he cannot possibly live on the amount he will now receive. T-bills preserve principal at all times, but the income received on them can vary enormously as return on the annuity goes up or down. Had the retiree bought instead a long-maturity U.S. Treasury bond with his $1 million, his spendable income would be secure for the life of the bond, even though the price of that bond would fluctuate substantially from day to day. The same holds true for annuities: Although their market value varies from day to day, the income from an annuity is secure throughout the retiree’s life.
Anonymous
present, there exists no overarching regulatory framework governing OTC derivatives markets in any major jurisdiction. Provided that certain qualifications are met, 29 OTC derivatives transactions generally reside outside the scope of securities, insurance and other regulatory regimes in the jurisdictions in which they notionally take place.Accordingly, while certain market participants (most notably banks and publicly traded firms) may be subject to, for example, prudential banking requirements30 . and mark-to-market accounting rules31 . which tangentially impact upon their ability to utilise these instruments, OTC derivatives themselves have historically
Anonymous
would the Volcker amendment, had it been law in 2007, have prevented the 2008 financial crisis? The financial crisis was caused by the overleveraging of real estate-related securities in Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which were investment banks and would not have fallen under the purview of the Volcker amendment. Nor would it have applied to the insurance giant AIG, which the Fed chose to save after seeing the turmoil unleashed by the Lehman bankruptcy. Furthermore, banks that obtained loans from the Fed, specifically Citibank and Bank of America, ran into trouble because of bad real estate loans, not proprietary trading. Given this history, it is dubious that the Volcker amendment, had it been in effect in 2007, would have changed the course of the financial crisis.
Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
bank gives some poor schmuck a mortgage at 100% the value of his property. No deposit. The bank sells the debt off to a larger bank in return for instant cash. The larger bank bundles up a hundred crappy mortgages like this and sells insurance policies for ten cents on the dollar – because their analysts tell them it’s a sure thing. They do this with thousands of loans. The mortgage securities market grows. Nothing can go wrong, right?” “Until the homeowner can’t make his repayments.
Nick Stephenson (Paydown (Leopold Blake Thriller #0.5))
give you an example. A bank gives some poor schmuck a mortgage at 100% the value of his property. No deposit. The bank sells the debt off to a larger bank in return for instant cash. The larger bank bundles up a hundred crappy mortgages like this and sells insurance policies for ten cents on the dollar – because their analysts tell them it’s a sure thing. They do this with thousands of loans. The mortgage securities market grows. Nothing can go wrong, right?
Nick Stephenson (Eight The Hard Way)
Seminars allow you to deliver your stadium pitch to multiple people at one time. The purpose is to create more buyers, but the deciding factor as to if your seminar will swim or tank is your title and pitch. Seminars are over 500% more successful when you use market data over product data. Market data is factual information that can be found by anyone doing research. Product data is information developed by your company or yourself to sell your product.                  Prospects are only interested in product data when they are looking to purchase your type of product at that moment. Everyone is interested in market data if you could show them how they can benefit from the information.
Rashaun Page (STOP BUYING LIFE INSURANCE LEADS.CREATE THEM.)
Central banks across the globe have been hesitant to recognize bitcoin as a form of money, and Tuesday’s vanishing act isn’t helping. Mt. Gox “reminds us of the downside of decentralized, unregulated currencies,” said Campbell Harvey, a professor at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business who specializes in financial markets and global risk management. “There is no Federal Reserve or IMF to come to the rescue. There is no deposit insurance.” However, Campbell said, Mt. Gox’s disappearance “doesn’t mean the end of the road” for bit-coin and other virtual currencies.
Anonymous
privatising the weaker ones, this space could become even more interesting. The government’s intention to continue with economic reforms is clear from the fact that it brought two ordinances, to clear bills relating to insurance and coal, after the legislative process was stymied by the opposition. Without going ahead with auctioning of coal blocks, India’s power sector would have been badly hit in 2015, and hence it was necessary to bring in an ordinance. What’s in store for 2015? The US will raise interest rates, which will lead to some outflow from emerging markets. But after that foreign money will return, provided that the government continues with its economic reforms. The Make in India campaign would bring back jobs with Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking all his ministries to make it easier to do business in India. A dip either caused by foreign institutional investment outflow or due to a harsher than expected budget or to a political crisis, should be an opportunity to enter the markets.  (J Mulraj is a stock market commentator and India head for Euromoney Conferences;views are personal) Now,
Anonymous
For financial services: * Would it be okay if your bills got paid off faster? * Would it be okay if your payments were less? * Would it be okay if your insurance was affordable? * Would it be okay if you could save for the future with one little change? * Would it be okay if you paid less in taxes?
Tom Schreiter (Ice Breakers! How To Get Any Prospect To Beg You For A Presentation (Four Core Skills Series for Network Marketing Book 2))
Switzerland, and the Netherlands, any resident can choose any insurance plan on the market—and change to a new plan on short notice. That’s a wider choice of health insurance than any American has.
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
When Boston imported its first streetlights in 1774, Paul Revere was asked to serve on the committee that made the arrangement. When the Boston market required regulation, Paul Revere was appointed its clerk. After the Revolution, in a time of epidemics, he was chosen health officer of Boston, and coroner of Suffolk County. When a major fire ravaged the old wooden town, he helped to found the Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance Company, and his name was first to appear on its charter of incorporation. As poverty became a growing problem in the new republic, he called the meeting that organized the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, and was elected its first president. When the community of Boston was shattered by the most sensational murder trial of his generation, Paul Revere was chosen foreman of the jury.
Anonymous
If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.
Zvi Bodie
There is always home, sweet home. As an insurance policy or a pension plan, however, this strategy has one very obvious flaw. It represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on one market: the property market. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter, a bet on bricks and mortar is very far from being as safe as houses.
Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)
She was determined to guard against moral hazard and protect the FDIC insurance fund. She saw this as a teachable moment, a chance to show the world that the irresponsibility of WaMu and its bondholders would be punished. She made the same argument the Germans and other moral hazard critics had made against IMF assistance during the emerging-market crises: It will only encourage bad behavior in the future.
Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
The market crash seemed to focus their minds. Before Monday, the public reaction to TARP had been all anti-bailout anger, but now politicians started hearing from constituents whose life savings were disappearing. Senate leaders added some sweeteners to the bill, including extensions of dozens of tax breaks for businesses. The bill also temporarily raised the FDIC’s deposit insurance limit from $100,000 to $250,000, to help protect the kind of account holders burned by IndyMac’s haircuts, and to help prevent runs on traditional banks. On Wednesday, October 1, the tweaked version of TARP passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support, 74–25. On Friday, it passed the House as well, as 57 representatives flipped from no to yes. The abrupt reversal evoked the Winston Churchill line about Americans always doing the right thing after trying everything else, but there was also something inspiring about it.
Timothy F. Geithner (Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises)
If those with pre-existing conditions can be covered separately and removed from the broader insurance market, it would make it easier to create a functioning free market for everybody else.
Philip Klein (Overcoming Obamacare: Three Approaches to Reversing the Government Takeover of Health Care)
For most people, “buy term insurance and invest the difference” ends up being “buy term and spend the difference.”   “Most people’s egos prefer THEIR facts to THE facts.” —Dan Kennedy, marketing guru and author
Pamela Yellen (The Bank On Yourself Revolution: Fire Your Banker, Bypass Wall Street, and Take Control of Your Own Financial Future)
Social money and payments: iZettle, Payatrader, mPowa, SumUp, payleven, Inuit GoPayment, Square •   Social lending and saving: Zopa, RateSetter, smava, Prosper, Lending Club, Cashare •   Social insurance: Friendsurance •   Social investing and trading: StockTwits, eToro, Myfxbook, Fxstat, MetaTrader Trade Signals, Collective2, Tradeo, ZuluTrade, Nutmeg •   Social trade financing: MarketInvoice, Platform Black, the Receivables Exchange, Urica •   Payday Lending: Wonga, Cash America, Advance America •   Goal setting and gamification: SmartyPig, Moven, Simple •   Crowdfunding: Funding Circle, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, crowdrise, Razoo
Chris Skinner (Digital Bank: Strategies to launch or become a digital bank)
John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” has maligned into “What can my country do for me?” While I can’t comment on the societal deterioration outside of the United States, within the last 20 years Sidewalking has become a way of life in America. Americans once loyally proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Now we just say, “Give me.” As I write, the economy is in a tailspin. The housing market crashed, lending dried up, and millions have lost their savings. How did we get here? It isn’t complicated: We relied on “others” to make financial decisions for us. We ignored the fine print. We didn’t read the contract. We didn’t read the legislation. We made government an insurance policy. As a society, history is doomed to repeat if we continue to repeat the same behavior.
Anonymous
Since 2000, no important technology innovation in the United States has been scaled up to create millions of manufacturing, marketing, and engineering jobs here, as personal computers and related industries did. While selling online and social networking are clearly transformational movements that have created entrepreneurial opportunities, fewer than fifty thousand traditional jobs—those with full-time hours, benefits, and health insurance—have been created.
Doug Menuez (Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000)
Given the inefficiency of the Indian bureaucracy to effectively implement national objectives, a possible approach (as suggested by Prof. Kelkar once), to salvage the existing PSEs (including all its stakeholders) and to protect the State’s investment in them, would be to transfer all Government’s share in all PSEs to a holding company set up under the Disinvestment Act, at once. 8.4.4 Government should disinvest majority of its share (55 %) in the holding company to Indian mutual funds, and insurance companies through the book-building route, twenty per cent of its share to small investors through IPO (Initial Public Offer), five percent of its share to foreign institutional investors, ten per cent of its share through ADR/GDR in the foreign capital market (this would lead to improved corporate governance as listing in foreign markets, particularly NYSE has stringent requirements), and retain just ten per cent of share in the holding company. 8.4.5 The holding company should be managed by a reputed professional board (initially appointed by the Government through wide consultations and subsequently confirmed by the shareholders of the holding company). The Board would be responsible to its shareholders. The Board of the individual PSEs (which would no longer be a PSE as they would become subsidiaries of the holding private company) would be appointed by the holding company and be responsible to the Board of the holding company.
SANJEEV MISHRA (INDIA'S DISINVESTMENT STORY: Relaunch with Lessons Learnt?)
One reason why many types of technical analysis don’t work too well is because such methods are often applied indiscriminately. For example, if you see a head-and-shoulders pattern form in what is the market equivalent of a twenty-year-old, the odds are that the market is not likely to die so quickly. However, if you see the same chart formation in the market equivalent of an eighty-year-old, there’s a much better chance of that pattern being an accurate indicator of a price top. Trading the market without knowing what stage it is in is like selling life insurance to twenty-year-olds and eighty-year-olds at the same premium.” — Victor Sperandeo
Ashu Dutt (15 Easy Steps to Mastering Technical Charts)
During this first term [as Burlington mayor in 1981] I discovered that the city was wasting substantial sums of money on its insurance policies. Companies, year after year, were getting the city’s business at substantially higher than market rates. I instituted a radical socialist concept, 'competitive' bidding, which saved the city tens of thousands of dollars.
Bernie Sanders (Outsider in the White House)
trying to convince the largest insurer of art in the country to give them some of its “totaled” art. When a valuable painting is damaged in transit or a fire or flood, vandalized, etc., and an appraiser agrees with the owner of a work that the work cannot be satisfactorily restored, or that the cost of restoration would exceed the value of the claim, then the insurance company pays out the total value of the damaged work, which is then legally declared to have “zero value.” When Alena asked me what I thought happened to the totaled art, I told her I assumed that the damaged work was destroyed, but, as it turned out, the insurer had a giant warehouse on Long Island full of these indeterminate objects: works by artists, many of them famous, that, after suffering one kind of damage or another, were formally demoted from art to mere objecthood and banned from circulation, removed from the market, relegated to this strange limbo.
Anonymous
Politics, like insurance, security, pharmaceutical and religious institutions all work the same. They sell the idea of a threat along with the antidote. Marketing 101.
Tarryn Tomlinson
The market/non-market boundary does not define the edge of the economy: unpaid work in preparing a meal for someone is as much an economic act as preparing pizzas for sale – or selling computers or insurance.
Andrew Sayer (Why We Can't Afford the Rich)
The unprecedented bull market in Treasury bonds, supported by the belief that Treasury bonds are “insurance policies” in the case of financial collapse, could end as badly as the bull market in technology stocks did at the turn of the century. When economic growth increases, Treasury bondholders will receive the double blow of rising interest rates and loss of safe-haven status. One of the prime lessons learned from long-term analysis is that no asset class can stay permanently detached from fundamentals. Stocks had their comeuppance when the technology bubble burst and the financial system crashed. It is quite likely that bondholders will suffer a similar fate as the liquidity created by the world’s central banks turns into stronger economic growth and higher inflation.
Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
Some of these tasks are interesting. Tinkering with machines is fun. Marketing decisions, especially how to manage the Web site and AdWords, are an intellectual challenge. Some are unpleasant but lead to a satisfying conclusion, like nagging customers for past-due payments. (They've always paid me, eventually.) Some are frightening, I can change an employee's life with my decisions about pay rates and whether to hire and fire. And many are just aggravating: the taxes, insurance purchases, legal issues, and some of the employee interactions. Each layer of government, each enormous and indifferent private bureaucracy, requires its own special knowledge: the right form filled out the correct way and filed at the right time. Learning how to complete on type of tax filing tells you nothing whatsoever about how to fill out the next form. One health insurer presents a quote one way, another in an entirely different way, and both require extensive study to determine the best choice. It's like stepping back to an old, old world where every tree, every rock, every stream is inhabited by its own resident spirit, and each needs to be mollified in the correct manner. Or very bad things happen. I didn't start my company to do any of this. I had no idea, when I decided that I would make furniture in exchange for money, that this was in my future. And the strange universe of administration expands as the company grows.
Paul Downs
What is my target market really buying? E.g. people don’t really buy insurance, they buy peace of mind. What’s the biggest benefit to lead with? What are the best emotionally charged words and phrases that will capture and hold the attention of this market?
Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
With the recent drop in markets and housing, many of the baby boomer men are underinsured. Who will pay the consequences? Women! Don’t take my word for it: Find a widow who is living well and a widow who isn’t. Ask them about the importance of life insurance – it will be the key difference between them.
Tom Hegna (Don't Worry, Retire Happy!: Seven Steps to Retirement Security)
Putting up to a third of your stock money in mutual funds that hold foreign stocks (including those in emerging markets) helps insure against the risk that our own backyard may not always be the best place in the world to invest.
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
Good character is the best insurance that pays good dividends than any insurance covers in the world. Preserve it!
Olawale Daniel (10 Ways to Sponsor More Downlines in Your Network Marketing Business)
As I travel around the financial services industry today, the most interesting trend I see is the one toward relationship consolidation. Now that Glass-Steagall has been repealed, and all financial services providers can provide just about all financial services, there's a tendency - particularly as people get older - to want to tie everything up... to develop a plan, which implies having a planner. A planner, not a whole bunch of 'em... You've got basically two options. One is that you can sit here and wait for a major investment firm, which handles your client's investment portfolio while you handle the insurance, to bring their developing financial and estate planning capabilities to your client's door. And to take over the whole relationship. In this case, you have chosen to be the Consolidatee. A better option is for you to be the Consolidator. That is, you go out and consolidate the clients' financial lives pursuant to a really great plan - the kind you pride yourselves on. And of course that would involve your taking over management of the investment portfolio. Let's start with the classic Ibbotson data [Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation Yearbook, Ibbotson Associates]. In the only terms that matter to the long-term investor - the real rate of return - he [the stockholder] got paid more like three times what the bondholder did. Why would an efficient market, over more than three quarters of a centry, pay the holders of one asset class anything like three times what it paid the holders of the other major asset class? Most people would say: risk. Is it really risk that's driving the premium returns, or is it volatility? It's volatility.... I invite you to look carefully at these dirty dozen disasters: the twelve bear markets of roughly 20% or more in the S&P 500 since the end of WWII. For the record, the average decline took about thirteen months from peak to trough, and carried the index down just about 30%. And since there've been twelve of these "disasters" in the roughly sixty years since war's end, we can fairly say that, on average, the stock market in this country has gone down about 30% about one year in five.... So while the market was going up nearly forty times - not counting dividends, remember - what do we feel was the major risk to the long-term investor? Panic. 'The secret to making money in stocks is not getting scared out of them' Peter Lynch.
Nick Murray (The Value Added Wholesaler in the Twenty-First Century)
What’s Your Foreign Policy? Investing in foreign stocks may not be mandatory for the intelligent investor, but it is definitely advisable. Why? Let’s try a little thought experiment. It’s the end of 1989, and you’re Japanese. Here are the facts: Over the past 10 years, your stock market has gained an annual average of 21.2%, well ahead of the 17.5% annual gains in the United States. Japanese companies are buying up everything in the United States from the Pebble Beach golf course to Rockefeller Center; meanwhile, American firms like Drexel Burnham Lambert, Financial Corp. of America, and Texaco are going bankrupt. The U.S. high-tech industry is dying. Japan’s is booming. In 1989, in the land of the rising sun, you can only conclude that investing outside of Japan is the dumbest idea since sushi vending machines. Naturally, you put all your money in Japanese stocks. The result? Over the next decade, you lose roughly two-thirds of your money. The lesson? It’s not that you should never invest in foreign markets like Japan; it’s that the Japanese should never have kept all their money at home. And neither should you. If you live in the United States, work in the United States, and get paid in U.S. dollars, you are already making a multilayered bet on the U.S. economy. To be prudent, you should put some of your investment portfolio elsewhere—simply because no one, anywhere, can ever know what the future will bring at home or abroad. Putting up to a third of your stock money in mutual funds that hold foreign stocks (including those in emerging markets) helps insure against the risk that our own backyard may not always be the best place in the world to invest.
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
Anyone under the age of 65 that has private health insurance is not the true customer in American healthcare. Large and small group employers are.
Kat Lahr (What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It (To Err Is Healthcare #1))
Nothing is possible until you believe that it is.
Scott Grates (Insurance Agency Optimization: A Proven Step-by-Step Guide to Market Domination)
The IoT market grows rapidly and it’s acceleration will continue in all major areas like Industrial Internet of Things; Digital Enterprise; Internet of Healthcare; Internet of Energy; Internet of Education; Digitalisation of global Supply Chains. Security concerns add to the IoT complexity. Strategically, to assure the system’s reliability & data / knowledge engineering, it is important to insure data integrity, availability, traceability, and privacy. A complex problem of digital transformation globally. The Internet of Things cybersecurity, therefore, is not a matter of device self-defence. What is needed is a systemic approach. Identify underlying patterns. Secure elements of a chain: from security of a device that creates, captures your data.. to the data storage.. to the back-end storage.. Create/ join IoT ecosystems, driven by protection with external monitoring, detection and reaction systems. It is a challenge - to secure systems.
Ludmila Morozova-Buss
A major portion of the cost of defense against foreign aggression in a laissez-faire society would be borne originally by business and industry, as owners of industrial plants obviously have a much greater investment to defend than do owners of little houses in suburbia. If there were any real threat of aggression by a foreign power, businessmen would all be strongly motivated to buy insurance against that aggression, for the same reason that they buy fire insurance, even though they could save money in the short run by not doing so. An interesting result of this fact is that the cost of defense would ultimately tend to be spread among the whole population, since defense costs, along with overhead and other such costs, would have to be included in the prices paid for goods by consumers. So, the concern that “free riders” might get along without paying for their own defense by parasitically depending on the defenses paid for by their neighbors is groundless. It is based on a misconception of how the free-market system would operate.
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
Finally, as I’ve emphasized, there is the level of conscious public policy. A Soviet official issuing a planning document, or an American politician calling for job creation, might not be entirely aware of the likely effects of their action. Still, once a situation is created, even as an unintended side effect, politicians can be expected to size up the larger political implications of that situation when they make up their minds what—if anything—to do about it. Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”9 I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun. What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialized health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do.10 So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs.
David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
A major portion of the cost of defense against foreign aggression in a laissez-faire society would be borne originally by business and industry, as owners of industrial plants obviously have a much greater investment to defend than do owners of little houses in suburbia. If there were any real threat of aggression by a foreign power, businessmen would all be strongly motivated to buy insurance against that aggression, for the same reason that they buy fire insurance, even though they could save money in the short run by not doing so. An interesting result of this fact is that the cost of defense would ultimately tend to be spread among the whole population, since defense costs, along with overhead and other such costs, would have to be included in the prices paid for goods by consumers. So, the concern that “free riders” might get along without paying for their own defense by parasitically depending on the defenses paid for by their neighbors is groundless. It is based on a misconception of how the free-market system would operate. The role of business and industry as major consumers of foreign-aggression insurance would operate to unify the free area in the face of any aggression. An auto plant in Michigan, for example, might well have a vital source of raw materials in Montana, a parts plant in Ontario, a branch plant in California, warehouses in Texas, and outlets all over North America. Every one of these facilities is important to some degree to the management of that Michigan factory, so it will want to have them defended, each to the extent of its importance. Add to this the concern of the owners and managers of these facilities for their own businesses and for all the other businesses on which they, in turn, depend, and a vast, multiple network of interlocking defense systems emerges. The involvement of the insurance companies, with their diversified financial holdings and their far-flung markets would immeasurably strengthen this defensive network. Such a multiple network of interlocking defense systems is a far cry from the common but erroneous picture of small cities, businesses, and individuals, unprotected by a government, falling one by one before an advancing enemy horde.
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
Picture a small South American dictatorship, weakened by economic stresses and a popular demand for more freedom, resulting from the existence of a laissez-faire society nearby. What would the dictator of such a country do if faced by a large and powerful insurance company and its defense service (or even a coalition of such companies) demanding that he remove all taxes, trade restrictions, and other economic aggressions from, say, a mining firm protected by the insurance company? If the dictator refuses the demand, he faces an armed confrontation which will surely oust him from his comfortable position of rule. His own people are restless and ready to revolt at any excuse. Other nations have their hands full with similar problems and are not eager to invite more trouble by supporting his little dictatorship. Besides this, the insurance company, which doesn’t recognize the validity of governments, has declared that in the event of aggression against its insured it will demand reparations payments, not from the country as a whole, but from every individual directly responsible for directing and carrying out the aggression. The dictator hesitates to take such an awful chance, and he knows that his officers and soldiers will be very reluctant to carry out his order. Even worse, he can’t arouse the populace against the insurance company by urging them to defend themselves—the insurance company poses no threat to them. A dictator in such a precarious position would be strongly tempted to give in to the insurance company’s demands in order to salvage what he could (as the managers of the insurance company were sure he would before they undertook the contract with the mining firm). But even giving in will not save the dictator’s government for long As soon as the insurance company can enforce noninterference with the mining company, it has created an enclave of free territory within the dictatorship. When it becomes evident that the insurance company can make good its offer of protection from the government, numerous businesses and individuals, both those from the laissez-faire society and citizens of the dictatorship, will rush to buy similar protection (a lucrative spurt of sales foreseen by the insurance company when it took its original action). At this point, it is only a matter of time until the government crumbles from lack of money and support, and the whole country becomes a free area. In this manner, the original laissez-faire society, as soon as its insurance companies and defense agencies became strong enough, would generate new laissez-faire societies in locations all over the world. These new free areas, as free trade made them economically stronger, would give liberty a tremendously broadened base from which to operate and would help prevent the possibility that freedom could be wiped out by a successful sneak attack against the original laissez-faire society. As the world-wide, interconnected free market thus formed became stronger and the governments of the world became more tyrannical and chaotic, it would be possible for insurance companies and defense agencies to create free enclaves within more and more nations, a sales opportunity which they would be quick to take advantage of.
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
Insurance companies would sell fire insurance and would then either maintain their own facilities to put out fires or buy the services of independent fire extinguishing companies for their insureds (and anyone else who wanted to pay a fee for the services when used).
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)