What is the purpose of acquiring wealth perpetually until death? The implication by the author is that non-essential purchases are a complete waste of money.
Going out for a nice meal with friends is an experience. Experiences are valuable. Saving a giant pile of money for your 70s and beyond accomplishes very little.
Sure, we don't want to ever run out of money. But we also don't want to avoid experiences in our lives to build up a pile of money in old age.
Enjoying experiences while you are young and healthy is important for a fulfilling life. You're going to have more fun with $100 at 25 years old than $100 at 65 years old, inflation adjusted.
Enjoy your youth and find a balance between spending and saving. Lifestyle creep absolutely can be a problem, but so can living so frugally that you avoid valuable and unique experiences.
You're guilty until proven innocent on nearly every regulated financial service platform. Prepare to explain with evidence how you got the money, why it's being sent, and who it's being sent to, at a moment's notice. Otherwise expect to be separated from your balance on said platform indefinitely.
You can try to write all the laws you want, eventually it boils down to manually reviewing a ton of transactions and everyone loses. The bank needs to pay for growing compliance departments, customers are scrutinized on a growing number of transactions.
Small businesses who are in higher risk industries, however that is chosen to be defined, become inundated with KYC tasks. Every transaction needs an accompanying stack of documents showing the entire trail.
Finance is becoming a bureaucratic hellhole which disproportionately affects lower income people and small businesses. If you don't have a hired compliance agent you will spend your time as a business owner complying to endless demands for onboarding/KYC/transaction reporting.
What you don't see in this article is that HSBC has tons of false positives and the scrutinization of transactions slows everyone down. The more strict they need to be with money flow, the more regular people suffer from crippling KYC and financial reporting.
Do we want every transaction we send out to require an accompanying invoice and paper trail? Payment reviews, account freezing, in-depth explanations for every transaction?
Moving money has become tedious and a bureaucratic nightmare. I doubt HSBC is doing this on purpose, they just have so many obligations already from their transaction volume that it's nearly impossible to comply with regulations.
The Federal Reserve seems primarily focused on keeping asset prices high. Their policies seem to react directly to downward pressure in the equity markets.
When you consider that the appreciation of these markets only serves to widen the wealth gap, it becomes clear that the Fed's mandate is to preserve the wealth of the rich. They're pursuing "trickle down" economics at full speed, despite the overwhelming evidence that "trickle down" is a myth.
The US population is too busy arguing over race issues and partisan politics to realize the financial system is stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
It's crazy to me that if I want to buy Ray Ban sunglasses off Amazon, I am routed by default to random third party sellers. I have purchased these once before and I'm almost positive that I received a fake product.
How can I know for sure though? How does Amazon know for sure? Since that experience I have looked at Amazon in a different light, and I've realized how difficult it is to source name brand products with confidence.
This is as good a time for blockchain as any. Register genuine products on a blockchain and have them scanned once they hit the Amazon warehouse to ensure they are authentic.
They'll need to survive for 10 years losing billions annually if that is their goal. And it will take them years to scale up automated rides/food delivery even after it becomes available.
Bitcoin has really settled down in terms of price swings over the last year. It did have a major covid crash, but aside from that it's been very stable for the past year.
Keep in mind that the price moves also attract attention, and act as a sort of advertisement of its existence. It wouldn't get any mainstream coverage without the price moves.
The market seems to be pricing in the best case scenario here. They're saying that almost everything is back to normal by Q3.
This would be 4 really bad months (March-June) total. The reality is that the future is very uncertain at this point. The market drastically underestimated the virus in early February, and it appears the same phenomenon is happening now.
The stimulus packages seem more focused on ensuring that asset prices remain inflated. The idea that the average person will see any major impact from the S&P500 dropping to 2000 points is laughable.
How many people do you know that truly had their lives ruined by the 2008 crash? Allowing the markets to find a bottom and recover creates opportunities for social mobility.
The people who don't want asset prices to drop are rich people. They are the ones who own the assets.
I mean, if there is proper 2 factor authentication set up, it would be much more difficult for this scam to work. Most banks in Asia issue you a physical security token, which if you lost you'd need to get it replaced in person.
Well the solution is to have some sort of emergency fund which activates in black swan events to rebalance the portfolio. It's just something to factor in. Adds some costs to operations but only fractions of a percent.
Going out for a nice meal with friends is an experience. Experiences are valuable. Saving a giant pile of money for your 70s and beyond accomplishes very little.
Sure, we don't want to ever run out of money. But we also don't want to avoid experiences in our lives to build up a pile of money in old age.
Enjoying experiences while you are young and healthy is important for a fulfilling life. You're going to have more fun with $100 at 25 years old than $100 at 65 years old, inflation adjusted.
Enjoy your youth and find a balance between spending and saving. Lifestyle creep absolutely can be a problem, but so can living so frugally that you avoid valuable and unique experiences.