> The historical profits reported for some buildings were listed as much as 30% higher than the profits previously reported for the same buildings and same years when the property was part of an earlier CMBS. As a rough analogy, imagine a homeowner having stated in a mortgage application that his 2017 income was $100,000 only to claim during a later refinancing that his 2017 income was $130,000 — without acknowledging or explaining the change.
Combine this with the fact that many business no longer exist and the new normal of the restaurant industry, I would expect to see the commercial market crash pretty hard.
> Flynn has amassed “materials identifying about $150 billion in inflated CMBS issued between 2013 and today,” according to the complaint.
[...]
> The SEC has the power to fine companies and their executives if fraud is established. If the SEC recovers more than $1 million based on Flynn’s claim, he could be entitled to a portion of it.
It’s sort of amazing how easy and widely accepted it is to submit, under oath, completely different corporate financial attestations depending on whether you are dealing with the IRS, the SEC, or FINRA.
I can imagine 50 years ago, when they all got the ability to check electronically, and knew that everybody was cheating, but they couldn’t do anything because it would it would crash the economy, and also these computers were taking their jobs, so the agencies decided to be willfully ignorant and inefficient and setting rules according to whatever people were doing already. So now it’s like, “OMG we never saw this coming!”
50 years ago banking was a very personal business. A business would work locally with their own bank. The bank knew the owners and since they banked with them knew their cash flows. Now banks are national conglomerates. There is a lot of cost in banking and many of the large banks have moved to automated systems to reduce overhead and labor. This doesn't excuse the bank but they are permitting credit for all sorts of things they probably don't want on their books. It's a bit of a mess right now in the banking industry. You may ask are they knowingly allowing these loose standards? Perhaps, but I'm willing to bet it's more in the line of ignorance is bliss.
How about greed? How many decades of repeated patterns of cooking figures, "losing" paperwork, and outright fraud does it take to see that a sizeable percentage of people running the largest financial companies just want to rake in whatever they can. Since so many products are so arcane and/or never disclosed in detail, there's ample opportunity to mess with and profit from just about anything that isn't prima facie simple.
I don't know how to rein in the seemingly endless stream of schemers... and the thought that "everybody does it" (think LIBOR), and that shining the proverbial sunlight into the back rooms will cripple what financial system we have just makes me want to burn it all down anyway.
And then look at all the voters’ stances when they find out their 401k don’t look so great, or when their governments have to raise taxes to pay for pensions since the pension fund isn’t worth much.
It’s hard to make a cash bailout that isn’t based on income/wealth due to the optics. By inflating asset values, it isn’t as discriminating against those on the upper end of the income/wealth scale, who also probably have major business interests in propping up asset values.
Voter here. It's not just that I'm willing to subsist on dog kibble in 35 years to see most of Wall Street go to jail. It's that I'm willing to make that trade this year. If you founded a political party whose platform was "fuck Wall Street in every way possible, and damn the consequences", I think most of my generation would vote for that.
It would be nice if people who thought that came out and voted (skewing towards younger population). Obviously, a larger portion of the older population who do have their wealth tied up are not going to be a fan, and they tend to be the ones with the funds and votes to dictate political discourse.
I think we made a huge mistake going from pension to 401k for retirement. Pensions have a strong incentive to maintain solvency and so will be risk-averse, while with a 401k you are expected to be sophisticated enough to know how risk-averse you are given your retirement time horizon. A lot of people are not sophisticated at all with investing. So the upshot of that is that the 401k becomes a lever to encourage people to get angry when the stock market doesn't do so well. And then you have this artificial propping up of something that's supposed to be an equity market for sophisticated investors. It's great if you're a financial services company because you can hold peoples' retirements hostage with your stupid decisions.
> Pensions have a strong incentive to maintain solvency and so will be risk-averse,
If this was true, then pretty much every government in the US (and around the world) wouldn’t be saddled with enormous debt for labor performed in previous decades.
Government defined benefit pension plans assume 7%+ return on investment, that doesn’t scream risk averse. Nor does the fact that pensions regularly place their bets with VC funds, PE firms, REITs, and other risky investments.
The only thing defined benefit pensions do is give control of a huge pot of money to a small group of people with no transparency, inevitably resulting in corruption. With taxpayer funded pensions, you get the added bonus of today’s voters and workers and politicians pushing all the costs onto future generations of taxpayers.
Well, one thing we could do to rein in the seemingly endless stream of schemers is let them face the consequences of their actions. Stop bailing out Wall St and the Square Mile, and let them go bankrupt.
The pain would be considerable. But we're used to that now, and it's like ripping a band-aid off: it hurts a lot more for a lot shorter time.
My understanding is that after 9/11, a lot of federal law enforcement resources got retasked away from white collar crime and just never went back. And I think it's part of a general decline in interest in holding people with money to account; in the 1970s, the IRS used to audit 2.5% of returns. Now that's down to 0.45% and falling. This makes a fair bit of sense when you look at who has influence with legislators and elected politicians: the donors.
But what I think a lot of this misses is that the more a financial system is prone to cash extraction, the less good it becomes at value generation. As an example, we can look in software at the era of Microsoft's dominance. Microsoft was a great cash generator, but its dominance (and misuse of its market power) discouraged a lot of startups). Then antitrust enforcement and the rise of the browser unleashed a whole wave of innovation.
"But what I think a lot of this misses is that the more a financial system is prone to cash extraction, the less good it becomes at value generation. As an example, we can look in software at the era of Microsoft's dominance. Microsoft was a great cash generator, but its dominance (and misuse of its market power) discouraged a lot of startups). Then antitrust enforcement and the rise of the browser unleashed a whole wave of innovation.
"
Pretty much all big companies are good at making cash while killing innovation. Compared to their size the innovation output of the big tech companies is pretty low.
Since 2008 it has become clear that the financial sector is viewed as an industry that needs to be protected no matter what the cost so you should expect them to keep doing crooked stuff while making boatloads of money. This comes at the expense of other sectors in the economy.
I agree totally, but want to draw one distinction. I think big companies are fine in big, competitive markets. They're generally terrible at innovation, of course (although not always; 3M is a counterexample, as is Apple). But as long as there is room for upstarts to make a good living, that doesn't worry me.
I still would argue that compare to its size Apple’s innovation is lacking. They did a lot between 2000 and maybe 2010 but now they are just iterating on the same things with only a few innovative things sprinkled in. Like all big companies their main strength is efficient execution and optimization of systems.
Yeah, they're definitely lacking in innovative products lately. But they're still spending a fair bit on incremental innovation. The iPhone is still the phone to beat in terms of camera quality, and they're making other improvements like whatever their face-radar thing is. This means that the other phone players have to keep innovating too, and can't just settle down and hoover up cash, so I'm ok with it.
I think you're right that it's about financialization. As an economy gets more focused on "moving money" as value creating versus creating as value creating then anything that adds costs (delay, taxes, risks) to that movement should be reduced and eliminated.
In the meantime, even now the primary target of those audits are the upper middle class. People who have enough that it's worth taking but not enough to defend themselves effective.. via legitimate or illegitimate means.
As a direct response, this is not strictly true. The SEC and IRS require financials prepared under different accounting standards, due to a different focus of each group (SEC - focused on overall profitability and activities of the Company; IRS - focused on cash flow and triggers of taxable events) I'm not familiar with the FINRA standards, but companies maintain their books and files to translate between SEC numbers ('book basis') and IRS basis ('tax basis')
Instead we just assume this is happening and extend 0% credit to all the investment banks so that they don't blow up on their fraudulent bets and shady accounting
Since we'll never prove anybody had the necessary knowledge of breaking the law and ignorance is an excuse when you write the law specifically that way
This makes complete sense and there’s no question commercial restate is turning into a bit of a house of cards.
In some big cities you have many large buildings where their primary tenant was WeWork, which appears to be imploding, and now adding onto that the whole covid WFM shift where companies are starting to cancel and downsize future leases. When you start to dig into the revenue streams behind these buildings and the owners ability to pay the mortgage back it starts to look really shady in some cases.
Most buildings need a fairly high percentage of the floors to be leased out for the building rent to cover the mortgage and moving forward it seems a lot of buildings will struggle to hit that number. It’s going to be an interesting time for commercial office real estate.
On the plus side if you’re looking for office space there are going to be some amazing deals!
Commercial real estate is going to be really interesting to watch. For a lot of mid-size companies, the building lease is 15% of your total operating expenses.
Especially in CA, where it's propped up by umm prop 13!
Every default should trigger a re-assessment when the property changes hands. CA recently put into place a rule (law?) where a change of control of the ownership entity also triggers re-assessment, thereby ending the long running scheme of selling the LLC owner rather than the property itself.
If enough of these bad (metric-wise) loans default, there could be a very far reaching negative valuation impact, ie well beyond just the defaulted properties. I expect rents will go up, even as property values go down.
What would be interesting is if those holding commercial property in high rent cities start converting commercial properties to residential. It may not be easy or cheap, but I reckon it's mostly rezoning and just putting up walls and adding plumbing.
If this happens, I wonder what happens to cities afterwards where the ratio between residential to commercial in a city shifts permanently. I reckon we could end up with more WFH or flexible work arrangements because commercial real estate becomes scarcer and more expensive.
> Investors don’t comb through financial statements, added Riordan, who used to manage the CMBS portfolio for retirement fund giant TIAA-CREF. Instead, he said, they rely on summaries from investment banks and the credit ratings agencies that analyze the securities. To make wise decisions, investors’ information “out of the gate has to be pretty close to being right,” he said. “Otherwise you’re dealing with garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.”
Is there a way to add incentives so investors don’t analyze information from summaries?
Make fund managers partially liable financially for failure to do due diligence on the assets they’re investing in, versus relying on abridged information and credit rating agencies.
Came here to post this quote. I don't understand how you would base your decisions on ratings agencies after what happened in 2008 and the fact that the incentives are still totally misaligned.
The person quoted seems to indicate "investors" in this case means institutional funds as well, which is just frightening. Hope they can do their job otherwise this will go from big loss-causing mistake to contagion.
If the summaries were false or misleading, the bank may be liable for any loss occurred , as for the bankers this may be characterised as securities fraud. So the incentives are for the summaries to be accurate.
Yeah, no disagreement that putbacks occurred, but those perpetrating the fraud aren't being held personally responsible. It's a slap on the wrist for the bank, cost of doing business. Call me when they're doing perp walks and handing out Maddof length sentences. Those are incentives to not violate securities law.
I find that a bit surprising. I used to structure CMBS transactions before the financial crisis and even then all income from properties would be ticked back against the leases and the dataset verified by an independent auditor.
In fact the CMBS market blew massive holes in banks balance sheets in 2008 but not because of fraud, but because the commercial property market tanked so much (and will likely not do much better after covid).
So it is always possible that underwriting standards drifted downward, and there are perhaps different standards in the US than Europe. But I find this story surprising and unlikely and would like to see more before forming an opinion.
Wait until Propublica learns that lenders are underwriting based on pro-forma forward Adjusted EBITDA net leverage, not past EBITDA leverage.
The whole idea of Adjusted EBITDA is insane to me. We add back "one-time," expenses and other items, but the underlying business ends up seeing similar "one-time," costs every year.
The result is that companies often borrow at a leverage ratio that looks 30% smaller than it actually is. This year we are doing "COVID-19," addbacks. What the fuck? You lost money because of COVID, so add it back to EBITDA so that you are still meeting your loan covenants? Lenders are in on it too, because they don't want to see their clients default and deal with bankruptcy or taking control of the assets.
That’s the beauty of working in finance, it’s all subjective. A janitor can’t fudge a dirty bathroom, a mechanic can’t fudge a broken car, a plumber can’t fudge cold water into hot water. But in finance, you can make whatever results you want come true for a long time. And if you have the government’s back who can print funds, that long time could be until the country blows up.
>And if you have the government’s back who can print funds, that long time could be until the country blows up.
I wonder about this. I suspect that if the fed keeps buying junk corporate bonds to prop up share prices, there's got to be a reckoning somewhere. For one, it incentivizes stupid & risky behavior among corporations. I wonder if even the fed can absorb the scope of real contractions in GDP with tricks like this. Color me extremely skeptical. Seems like something will have to give.
Disagree - every job has bad work that doesn't appear so until later.
The mechanic who just uses a cheap fix to get you out of there, the plumber whose work results in a frozen pipe that leaks behind a wall, etc.
Finance is no different. The only issue is that in a capitalist society, bankers hold a lot of political/economic influence, and this results in bad incentives for the rest of us.
You are correct. But the intention of my comment is that those failures are evident quickly and more easily, and don’t have as much of a shield from plausible deniability.
Yes, the other day I found out my mechanic did terrible job fixing my car and in fact they damaged it. I came back to the garage and rewarded them with obscene bonus money. I also reassured them that I will be coming back for more business in the future.
The bogus Adjusted EBITDA metrics popular with financially unhealthy startups and others really does need to stop.
In most cases these metrics may as well just say “Hey, if for a moment you ignore all the things about our business model that make it unsustainable our finances look quite good! Ain’t that cool.”
Of course the creative accounting that goes into these things tries to say they’re just “one time” expenses and other factors that justify ignoring these costs but of course most companies that play these games seem to have tons of “one time expenses” every quarter so...
There is nothing wrong with that if the banks are allowed to fail when the loans don’t pan out. Underwriting is supposed to be about managing risk, not completely avoiding it. The problem isn’t the analysis, rather it is not letting banks absorb the consequences of being wrong.
> The whole idea of Adjusted EBITDA is insane to me.
The straitjacket bank regulators have placed around the ability of banks to go outside of the government defined process of evaluating credit-worthiness doesn’t help. The rules (mainly FDIC insurance requirements) make it near impossible for many companies to get loans. This problem incentivizes companies to play games to get around the crazy restrictions.
This is also why there is an emerging trend of non-traditional lenders (e.g. some VCs and PE firms). I’m sure the government will find a way to regulate them eventually.
> This year we are doing "COVID-19" addbacks.
What’s wrong with that? Ability to repay is based on expected future cash flows. If COVID losses are believed to be non-recurring (a big if), then that makes sense.
> There is nothing wrong with that if the banks are allowed to fail when the loans don’t pan out. Underwriting is supposed to be about managing risk, not completely avoiding it. The problem isn’t the analysis, rather it is not letting banks absorb the consequences of being wrong.
I agree with you, with the caveat that many of these receivables are taken off balance sheet through a securitization process, and the resulting structure is almost unable to technically default as long as the AAA tranche interest is paid. Responsibility for originating good loans, meaning they are creditworthy in a downturn, goes down if you can securitize them into a credit enhanced structure or sell them to another investor.
> Generally, I agree. The straitjacket then bank regulators have placed around the ability of banks to go outside of the government defined process of evaluating credit-worthiness doesn’t help. The rules make it near impossible for many companies to get loans. This problem incentivizes companies to play games to get around the crazy restrictions.
In my opinion (not worth much) the industry is simultaneously under and over regulated. Enough bad actors that reducing the regulation is a bad idea, but the existing regulation makes lending more challenging and constrains growth on most businesses, who are operated in good faith.
If the bank wants to exclude an exceptional item, it can always waive the breach of a covenant for a few reporting periods. I am perplex as of why the covenant would allow the borrower to make any adjustment.
I think you're losing out if you only look at one metric or the other. Yes, companies can stuff recurring charges into the one-time column in their adjusted EBITDA metric. But there are certainly cases where an adjusted EBITDA metric gives you a better long-term view of the business.
The issue is not adjusted EBITDA per se, it's that stuff gets jammed in there dishonestly.
The only true answer is that if this matters to you then you need to dig into the adjusted EBITDA and see how they are really calculating it and decide how good of a picture of the business it's painting. But there is value there.
It’s almost as if economics of ephemeral ideas is just math itself and has nothing to do with the trade of stuff
I get a laugh out of men who say other ephemeral objects can’t exist but stocks and 401ks, indeed even a specific currency or finance is anything more than emotional belief of some hierarchy
“They’re value stores!”
No it’s functional fixedness.
Decades of denialism of science by the god heads and y’all still follow them along believing they’re anything more than just copies of the pasts god headed would be authoritarians
Neuroscience is revealing much about how we transfer and carry on activity in our brains from one another. To suggest history can’t repeat itself seems to not agree with science.
The masters of commerce back in the day bought off the average person with emotionally satisfying promises and literally abusive practices of deflating the value of their efforts to maintain power
The literal expressions in the form of nation state conquest need not exist for an idea like “history repeats itself” to mean something that’s true
It’s random annotations on numbers that don’t mean anything except what we define the annotations themselves to mean.
We don’t get to have say so of course you’re confused. The narrative around economics is out of your hands.
None of these fellows seem to have understood Godel wasn’t talking about the universe. He was putting constraints on consciousness. They keep trying to find that complete recursive set of axioms for economics by ignoring it’s all just people
What if Flynn publishes a list of the companies involved and the timeframes, we construct a list of the executives, directors, and mangers involved, and blacklist them?
No business with any company that employs even one of them, ever again. Starting today.
Damn the chaos, signal that this kind of profiteering and crash-building is not tolerated.
Why do people keep expecting other people to act against their best interests? Why are buyers relying on sellers’ valuations? And given these are billion plus dollar products transacted between professionals, why does Buyer Beware apply?
This will continue as long as human beings are in the loop. If it were automated, code-reviewed and made secure we might have a system that could follow the rules.
This is in part due to a search for yield (same as we saw with the housing crisis). There is such a glut of capital that it will invest in anything - even risky CMBS - without performing adequate due diligence. If you don't invest, someone else will. Unfettered "quantitative easing" distorts the price of risk. This is the not-so-surprising consequence.
The difference with the other capitalistic system is that the guys from Deutsche Bank are going to jail when this kind of shenanigans is going on. Bankers in the west do not have skin in the game.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadTL;DR
[...]
> The SEC has the power to fine companies and their executives if fraud is established. If the SEC recovers more than $1 million based on Flynn’s claim, he could be entitled to a portion of it.
Hope he got a good lawyer!
I can imagine 50 years ago, when they all got the ability to check electronically, and knew that everybody was cheating, but they couldn’t do anything because it would it would crash the economy, and also these computers were taking their jobs, so the agencies decided to be willfully ignorant and inefficient and setting rules according to whatever people were doing already. So now it’s like, “OMG we never saw this coming!”
I don't know how to rein in the seemingly endless stream of schemers... and the thought that "everybody does it" (think LIBOR), and that shining the proverbial sunlight into the back rooms will cripple what financial system we have just makes me want to burn it all down anyway.
Lots of frustration, little action. No answers.
If this was true, then pretty much every government in the US (and around the world) wouldn’t be saddled with enormous debt for labor performed in previous decades.
Government defined benefit pension plans assume 7%+ return on investment, that doesn’t scream risk averse. Nor does the fact that pensions regularly place their bets with VC funds, PE firms, REITs, and other risky investments.
The only thing defined benefit pensions do is give control of a huge pot of money to a small group of people with no transparency, inevitably resulting in corruption. With taxpayer funded pensions, you get the added bonus of today’s voters and workers and politicians pushing all the costs onto future generations of taxpayers.
Source: https://www.data-z.org/pension_database/
The pain would be considerable. But we're used to that now, and it's like ripping a band-aid off: it hurts a lot more for a lot shorter time.
But what I think a lot of this misses is that the more a financial system is prone to cash extraction, the less good it becomes at value generation. As an example, we can look in software at the era of Microsoft's dominance. Microsoft was a great cash generator, but its dominance (and misuse of its market power) discouraged a lot of startups). Then antitrust enforcement and the rise of the browser unleashed a whole wave of innovation.
Pretty much all big companies are good at making cash while killing innovation. Compared to their size the innovation output of the big tech companies is pretty low.
Since 2008 it has become clear that the financial sector is viewed as an industry that needs to be protected no matter what the cost so you should expect them to keep doing crooked stuff while making boatloads of money. This comes at the expense of other sectors in the economy.
In the meantime, even now the primary target of those audits are the upper middle class. People who have enough that it's worth taking but not enough to defend themselves effective.. via legitimate or illegitimate means.
Since we'll never prove anybody had the necessary knowledge of breaking the law and ignorance is an excuse when you write the law specifically that way
In some big cities you have many large buildings where their primary tenant was WeWork, which appears to be imploding, and now adding onto that the whole covid WFM shift where companies are starting to cancel and downsize future leases. When you start to dig into the revenue streams behind these buildings and the owners ability to pay the mortgage back it starts to look really shady in some cases.
Most buildings need a fairly high percentage of the floors to be leased out for the building rent to cover the mortgage and moving forward it seems a lot of buildings will struggle to hit that number. It’s going to be an interesting time for commercial office real estate.
On the plus side if you’re looking for office space there are going to be some amazing deals!
Every default should trigger a re-assessment when the property changes hands. CA recently put into place a rule (law?) where a change of control of the ownership entity also triggers re-assessment, thereby ending the long running scheme of selling the LLC owner rather than the property itself.
If enough of these bad (metric-wise) loans default, there could be a very far reaching negative valuation impact, ie well beyond just the defaulted properties. I expect rents will go up, even as property values go down.
If this happens, I wonder what happens to cities afterwards where the ratio between residential to commercial in a city shifts permanently. I reckon we could end up with more WFH or flexible work arrangements because commercial real estate becomes scarcer and more expensive.
Is there a way to add incentives so investors don’t analyze information from summaries?
You can’t fix people, only incentives.
The person quoted seems to indicate "investors" in this case means institutional funds as well, which is just frightening. Hope they can do their job otherwise this will go from big loss-causing mistake to contagion.
In fact the CMBS market blew massive holes in banks balance sheets in 2008 but not because of fraud, but because the commercial property market tanked so much (and will likely not do much better after covid).
So it is always possible that underwriting standards drifted downward, and there are perhaps different standards in the US than Europe. But I find this story surprising and unlikely and would like to see more before forming an opinion.
The whole idea of Adjusted EBITDA is insane to me. We add back "one-time," expenses and other items, but the underlying business ends up seeing similar "one-time," costs every year.
The result is that companies often borrow at a leverage ratio that looks 30% smaller than it actually is. This year we are doing "COVID-19," addbacks. What the fuck? You lost money because of COVID, so add it back to EBITDA so that you are still meeting your loan covenants? Lenders are in on it too, because they don't want to see their clients default and deal with bankruptcy or taking control of the assets.
I wonder about this. I suspect that if the fed keeps buying junk corporate bonds to prop up share prices, there's got to be a reckoning somewhere. For one, it incentivizes stupid & risky behavior among corporations. I wonder if even the fed can absorb the scope of real contractions in GDP with tricks like this. Color me extremely skeptical. Seems like something will have to give.
The mechanic who just uses a cheap fix to get you out of there, the plumber whose work results in a frozen pipe that leaks behind a wall, etc.
Finance is no different. The only issue is that in a capitalist society, bankers hold a lot of political/economic influence, and this results in bad incentives for the rest of us.
There is a difference.
In most cases these metrics may as well just say “Hey, if for a moment you ignore all the things about our business model that make it unsustainable our finances look quite good! Ain’t that cool.”
Of course the creative accounting that goes into these things tries to say they’re just “one time” expenses and other factors that justify ignoring these costs but of course most companies that play these games seem to have tons of “one time expenses” every quarter so...
> The whole idea of Adjusted EBITDA is insane to me.
The straitjacket bank regulators have placed around the ability of banks to go outside of the government defined process of evaluating credit-worthiness doesn’t help. The rules (mainly FDIC insurance requirements) make it near impossible for many companies to get loans. This problem incentivizes companies to play games to get around the crazy restrictions.
This is also why there is an emerging trend of non-traditional lenders (e.g. some VCs and PE firms). I’m sure the government will find a way to regulate them eventually.
> This year we are doing "COVID-19" addbacks.
What’s wrong with that? Ability to repay is based on expected future cash flows. If COVID losses are believed to be non-recurring (a big if), then that makes sense.
I agree with you, with the caveat that many of these receivables are taken off balance sheet through a securitization process, and the resulting structure is almost unable to technically default as long as the AAA tranche interest is paid. Responsibility for originating good loans, meaning they are creditworthy in a downturn, goes down if you can securitize them into a credit enhanced structure or sell them to another investor.
> Generally, I agree. The straitjacket then bank regulators have placed around the ability of banks to go outside of the government defined process of evaluating credit-worthiness doesn’t help. The rules make it near impossible for many companies to get loans. This problem incentivizes companies to play games to get around the crazy restrictions.
In my opinion (not worth much) the industry is simultaneously under and over regulated. Enough bad actors that reducing the regulation is a bad idea, but the existing regulation makes lending more challenging and constrains growth on most businesses, who are operated in good faith.
And if investors (of the banks, or of the securities backed by such loans) are accurately apprised of the risk factors.
It only gives brownie points if you purchased it before the blowup!
The issue is not adjusted EBITDA per se, it's that stuff gets jammed in there dishonestly.
The only true answer is that if this matters to you then you need to dig into the adjusted EBITDA and see how they are really calculating it and decide how good of a picture of the business it's painting. But there is value there.
I get a laugh out of men who say other ephemeral objects can’t exist but stocks and 401ks, indeed even a specific currency or finance is anything more than emotional belief of some hierarchy
“They’re value stores!”
No it’s functional fixedness.
Decades of denialism of science by the god heads and y’all still follow them along believing they’re anything more than just copies of the pasts god headed would be authoritarians
Neuroscience is revealing much about how we transfer and carry on activity in our brains from one another. To suggest history can’t repeat itself seems to not agree with science.
The masters of commerce back in the day bought off the average person with emotionally satisfying promises and literally abusive practices of deflating the value of their efforts to maintain power
The literal expressions in the form of nation state conquest need not exist for an idea like “history repeats itself” to mean something that’s true
It’s random annotations on numbers that don’t mean anything except what we define the annotations themselves to mean.
We don’t get to have say so of course you’re confused. The narrative around economics is out of your hands.
None of these fellows seem to have understood Godel wasn’t talking about the universe. He was putting constraints on consciousness. They keep trying to find that complete recursive set of axioms for economics by ignoring it’s all just people
Old language acquires new annotations
The goal, whether it’s intuitive or planned, is to keep it from looking like the system itself can ever grind to a halt
They don’t care about your buy in to some language but keeping agency at scale economically active
Varoufakis was literally in the room as masters of market finance made shit up to keep markets moving
Humans do it all the time. To ever pretend some language model that “fits society” will ever stay the same is a fools errand
No business with any company that employs even one of them, ever again. Starting today.
Damn the chaos, signal that this kind of profiteering and crash-building is not tolerated.
Or make automation that abstracts on top of the automation.
Finance is just dirty.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/carl-icahn-placing-a-big-bet-ag...