U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says he doesn't "understand why" unpaid federal workers need money

Yes, kind of. They are losing some types of their insurance if they can’t find the premiums (dental and vision), but they will keep their primary health insurance, if they were already enrolled. They can also no longer change their insurance for life events, like death, marriage, or childbirth. So if you have a new kid or spouse they aren’t covered, but the worker themself probably is. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-workers-affected-by-partial-shutdown-to-be-billed-for-dental-vision-coverage/2019/01/23/f42cd5f6-1f58-11e9-8b59-0a28f2191131_story.html?noredirect=on

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Trump proves the emolumuments clause apparently covers nothing.

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Wasserman Schultz is no friend to anyone who wants a fair democracy.

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So, just like voting “Democrat” then…

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I think the idea is to make steel workers a more significant number.

You’re welcome…

#NeoliberalismKills

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Always found the definitions of those quadrants rather dodgy.

Political alignment becomes very fluid at the extreme ends and libertarian has some very unusual iterations.

If that was their intention, they failed miserably - employment in the US steel industry has actually gone down since Trump’s been in office. But that really wasn’t the intention - it was to make US steel more profitable, which they’ve succeeded in doing.

#OligarchsDontGiveaShitAbouttheHumanCostofNeoliberalism

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The problems are several-fold.
1.) Short term low interest loans of the the low dollar value that we’re talking about are not going to be big money makers. (unless the borrower defaults and owes interest and penalties) When you consider the cost of originating it, they are probably not going to be money makers for the bank.
2.) This isn’t the 1960s, you will never talk to anybody with the authority to make any decisions at your local branch. The person you talk to is almost certainly just there to help you fill out the paperwork. If you meet the requirements, you get a loan and if you don’t, you can’t have one. The decision of what types of loans to issue and their qualification requirements are done at the corporate level, and not really the sort of thing that is easily done on the fly.
3.) Related to this, the banks don’t really lend that much of their own assets these days. Most debt is bundled up, sold to Wall Street banks, to be pooled and tranched and resold as bonds. Which makes it even more difficult to issue non-standard loans on the fly.

All of this means that the availability of loans for furloughed workers is pretty much limited to the kinds of loans that they could get before: High interest Payday lenders, and credit cards, or, if they have excellent credit, a moderate interest signature loan.

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You know, I often ask myself, “Did Marie Antoinette see it coming?”

Usually around Davos time.

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Any political compass that puts Hillary Clinton to the right of Donald Trump is a broken one.

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Not to mention that the original meaning was for anarchists who opposed the state and the capitalist system, not those who opposed the state as a means of reigning in the capitalist system. We can thank Ayn Rand for that shift in meaning…

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Admittedly, if you used a “candle plot” Trump would have a large uncertainty range. He is stupid and random which makes any rating of him along traditional policy axes less useful for predicting future decisions.

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Not quite related to the subject, but I have a question as I found out that there are 2 kinds of personal bankruptcies in the USA. Would the majority of these home owners declare bankruptcy to basically force the bank to renegotiate the house price? Because if you have a home loan for, say, 200000$ and you can get the same house down the street for 100000$, it makes sense to default.

It is a real question. I am not trying to minimize the hardship of these people, but to get a feel about the state of the US economy.

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Good explanation on why this types of loan could not be arranged quickly. Thanks.

Hypothetically, yes. However, during the 2008 financial crisis, banks didn’t really try to work with mortgage debtors. It’s well documented. Foreclosures were on a hair trigger. People who never missed a payment were foreclosed-upon. Because of the way debt was structured into securities, and how well Wall Street paid for bundled mortgage debt, it made more sense for banks to foreclose and immediately turn that house into another mortgage than to even get full payment of the first mortgage.

So the debt-restructuring type of bankruptcy did not much come into play.

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Welcome, Marxist!

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You know, in my first post, I wrote:

I meant it.

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged . One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Rogers

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