Economic terms, from “absolute advantage” to “zero-sum game”, explained to you in plain English

Summing up the economic results of the year, many Russian economists say that “everything is not so bad”, referring to the usual indicators, such as GDP of the rates of unemployment, inflation or exchange of the ruble. Judging by these, “GDP has declined less than expected,” unemployment and inflation are virtually nonexistent, and the ruble has “stabilized,” but does this really mean that the country is not in economic crisis? Vladimir Milov explains why these indicators are irrelevant at a time of war, the crisis is already in full swing (even if the average citizen cannot see it yet), and the payback for Putin's military ambitions will be dire for Russians.

This as been a challenge for the crypto back market. It's easy to get dirty money into crypto, but getting a significant amount out is hard. Most governments classify crypto as a security, so crypto exchanges must follow the same KYC laws as banks.

NFTs solve this problem nicely.

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NFTs are instruments that act like securities, but are not regulated as securities.

When you think about it, OpenSea would actually be much "better" in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use. For example, to accept a bid on my NFT, I would have had to pay over $80-$150+ just in ethereum transaction fees. That puts an artificial floor on all bids, since otherwise you'd lose money by accepting a bid for less than the gas fees. Payment fees by credit card, which typically feel extortionary, look cheap compared to that. OpenSea could even publish a simple transparency log if people wanted a public record of transactions, offers, bids, etc to verify their accounting.

However, if they had built a platform to buy and sell images that wasn't nominally based on crypto, I don't think it would have taken off. Not because it isn't distributed, because as we've seen so much of what's required to make it work is already not distributed. I don't think it would have taken off because this is a gold rush. People have made money through cryptocurrency speculation, those people are interested in spending that cryptocurrency in ways that support their investment while offering additional returns, and so that defines the setting for the market of transfer of wealth.

I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft's Excel, Apple's Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.

I've also been interested in personal finance and the FIRE community for a while—not so much in the early retirement aspect but in the financial literacy it teaches its members. I have combined my passion for both into one mega-spreadsheet that I use to track my income, expenses, savings and investments in one overview. While creating this spreadsheet I got proficient in some new formulas, which I'll share here—and also write down for my own reference.

No, cryptocurrency is not a currency at all: it's an investment vehicle. A tool for making the rich richer. And that's putting it nicely; in reality it has a lot more in common with a Ponzi scheme than a genuine investment. What "value" does solving fake math problems actually provide to anyone? It's all bullshit.

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Maybe your cryptocurrency is different. But look: you're in really poor company. When you're the only honest person in the room, maybe you should be in a different room.

You can see that for holding periods of less than 9 years the stock strategy is a lot more risky than the bond. However if your holding period exceeds 9 years the stock strategy is both, less risky and yielding better returns. Also notice that in long term, the width of the yield distribution for the stock strategy is about the same as for bonds, but overall it is located above bond yield distribution.

What does it all mean for regular folks that are trying to save for the retirement? Don't worry about whether the market is trending up or down, it's in a bubble or a recession is coming. You will never be able to time the market. But putting money in stocks and not touching them (other than reinvesting dividends) for long periods of time will ensure that your hard-earned money will not be lost, also giving you a chance to earn quite a healthy return - no downside and all the upside.

Health care spending in the United States greatly exceeds that in other wealthy countries, but the U.S. does not achieve better health outcomes. Policymakers commonly attribute this spending disparity to overuse of medical services and underinvestment in social services in the U.S. However, there has been relatively little data analysis performed to confirm that assumption. Writing in JAMA, researchers led by former Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow Irene Papanicolas and mentor Ashish Jha, M.D., report findings from their study comparing the U.S. with 10 other high-income countries to better understand why health care spending in the U.S. is so much greater.

In a paper from 2012, Vanguard found that 66% of the time it is better to invest your money right away (“Lump Sum”) rather than buying in over 12 months (“DCA”). I don’t disagree with Vanguard’s results (my results were strikingly similar), but I don’t think they went deep enough in explaining why this is true.

The main reason Lump Sum outperforms DCA is because most markets generally rise over time. Because of this positive long-term trend, DCA typically buys at higher average prices than Lump Sum. Additionally, in those rare instances where DCA does outperforms Lump Sum (i.e. in falling markets), it is difficult to stick to DCA. So the times where DCA has the largest advantage are also the times where it can be the hardest for investors to stick to their plan.

In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, draws a portrait of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear: America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly different resources, expectations, and fates.

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The two sectors, notes Temin, have entirely distinct financial systems, residential situations, and educational opportunities. Quite different things happen when they get sick, or when they interact with the law. They move independently of each other. Only one path exists by which the citizens of the low-wage country can enter the affluent one, and that path is fraught with obstacles. Most have no way out.

The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.