My Day With FINRA And Recommendations (Wonkish, Long)
thecallus:
A look inside the financial self-regulatory system.
I’m a registered representative. I just had my first bout of “continuing education”, which is intended to keep me updated on the latest regulatory developments in the financial industry. You probably have some idea of what this is like if you’ve ever attended mandatory corporate training of any stripe. Which is to say: it hysterically and profoundly misunderstands the problem and goes about solving it in the must proclamatory and ineffective manner possible.
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The only reason you hear crickets in response to a question is that on the Internet nobody can talk back. Until you hit “post.”
None of those things are recommendations. Is this explanation too dated?.
I don’t think the trial attorneys are going to get far on things like alphabetization unless they can show a deliberate effort on the part of the person providing the service to bias people toward them.
zombiecuddle:
squashed:
I’m moving—which means I’m doing a bit more buying and selling than usual. Some of this involves selling large objects on craigslist. Like most craigslist transactions, it’s pretty straightforward. Something is listed at a price. Maybe some negotiation occurs. Sale commences or doesn’t. Everybody…
I generally agree with your post and fully agree with your sentiment, but just to provide some pushback that isn’t based along “well if you don’t have both a high level of education and hours of time to spend researching every transaction you deserve to be crushed by your betters” lines, here’s a little devil’s advocacy:
Comcast is providing you with a service. This includes provisions in case things go wrong. It also includes detailed descriptions of what they will and will not provide for you. There are intricacies to this, and they have to be laid out in advance so that you can know what to expect. When I buy a set of headphones, I get a box with a set of headphones … and a pamphlet containing a couple of thousand words explaining to me how to get service and replacements if my set is defective, and also the circumstances in which the producer will not help me (for example, if I wear them in the shower).
Boilerplate isn’t a great way to do it. And confusing pricing structures are probably a different animal entirely meant to prey upon vulnerable consumers. But I think some significant portion of the complexity of most market transactions is unavoidable if we are to live in an interconnected society, where I have the ability to sue the people that make my headphones if they shock me (but not if I run the headphones over in my car first) and in which I can reasonably expect some kind of warranty, service, or responsiveness for most of the items I buy.
I’ve moved some items on eBay recently, which is a similar market to Craig’sList, and the vast majority of these transactions (especially on Craig’sList) contain “no returns” or “no service” declarations. You can have a simple negotiate-give me cash-here’s your item exchange with a buyer over Craig’sList because that’s all you’re doing. Your buyer doesn’t need to know how to set up an account on your website to manage his subscription plan or how to reach you if something doesn’t work or what your privacy protections for his credit card information are or or or.
Of course, I’m being a bit cheeky here, because I think most of these safeguards/promises made to consumers in boilerplate are fairly standard, and it wouldn’t be unimaginable for a public agency (the CFPB, for example) to standardize them, thus making such boilerplate unnecessary and taking away a not-infrequently-used opportunity for sellers to hide nasty surprises from unsuspecting consumers.
Boilerplate is something I have feelings about—though I’m disinclined to commit them all to writing because it’s the sort of thing I’d rather write in a more professional capacity. The short version is that yes, you’re right, market realities are complex. The long version is that considering they used to involve a lot more ships and perilous communications and things, they’re not all that complex. We have a good set of default options. However, technological change has made a different set necessary. Things like the GNU Public License take a step in that direction. Most boilerplate is unnecessary and the rest really should be eliminated so that people can have a set of readily understood options.
meowsense:
Fixed. (Unfortch you can’t reblog photo posts and replace the photo.)
And here I was going around all those years thinking feminism meant something different.
(Source: meow-sense, via zombiecuddle)
thecallus:
squashed:
No.
No matter how many times conservatives repeat this, it’s simply not true. The social security trust fund has about $2.6 trillion in assets. Those assets are comprised of long term, interest-bearing U.S. bonds.
Without some changes, the social security trust fund will eventually run out…
Only right-wing idiots mis-speak and state that Social Security is bankrupt. Squashed is correct - it isn’t. The typical charge from more learned observers is that Social Security is insolvent, which is true. It would only be bankrupt if it could not pay its benefits, which will never be true as long as the United States has access to credit markets. Similarly, Lehman Brothers would have stayed open had other banks simply continued lending to it.
Social Security’s cashflow is negative and its liabilities exceed assets. Its funding sources have been drying up for years and years. It also has problems keeping current assets - for example, right now we’re a scant few million from hitting the debt ceiling again. One of the things that happens when we get close to the debt ceiling is Treasury issues a bunch of IOU’s to the Social Security custody accounts and raids them to pay government workers; fine when you can safely assume that the debt limit will be raised.
If the debt ceiling hadn’t been raised earlier this year? Social Security recipients would already have seen life without regular checks. It’s a Ponzi scheme; ask Paul Krugman.
Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).
Were Social Security a bank, it would be out of business. It will go out of business by the time we receive our promised and paid-for benefits if payroll taxes are not increased and / or benefits are not reduced. And that’s the problem that has many folks in the younger generation complaining that their current payments are going toward current recipients. It’s hard to have faith in an institution with such tenuous finances, and it’s hard to be so dependent on future earnings when it’s costing us all money now.
I don’t think we actually disagree on much here. Social Security will need some changes in the next few years. It will be a lot easier to make those changes now. Short of criminal level misgovernance, we’re not looking at an immediate crisis. The antics we’ve seen lately are pretty close to criminal level misgovernance. The changes needed to make the program viable longterm are significant—but don’t require any kind of radical re-imagination.
newsweek:
Zooey Deschanel does good things with her money (according to financial docs recently filed by her lawyer and promptly obtained by Internet).
Wow. That’s like an entire 1.5%.
I guess that’s better than nothing, though.
zigziggityzoo:
squashed:
zigziggityzoo:
It’s not exactly that he wants them to be cut - it’s that he believes that it’s the states’ responsibility to be doing many of the things the Federal government is doing.
And it’s not that I don’t want to take out the trash, it’s just that I believe it’s the dog’s job to do…
But don’t you think there are some things that the Federal government is doing that the states could do, or have done better?
Like Massachussetts and their healthcare program. States that do something better than the fed still have to pay the Federal taxes to pay for the respective Federal program, even if they’re doing something that supersedes it.
Of course there are (some) things that states do or could do better. And in those cases, I have no problems with giving a block grant back to the state to do the good thing it’s doing. But it seems disingenuous to cut the federal program before a credible state alternative is in place. Setting these things up is monstrously difficult.
I think, for example, that some sort of single-payer system would be the simplest and most efficient way to handle health care. However, that’s awfully rough to construct. It was a heck of a lot easier to patch together what we have. And the transition is going to be less messy.
If we were to cut, say, the EPA, the state environmental protection agencies would step up their act. But the transition would be a nightmare, enforcement would be haphazard, and we’d get a lot of messiness when two states couldn’t agree on what to do.
(Source: muppetpants)
muppetpants:
squashed:
[snippy-poos]
But if you go around talking about cutting the things that Ron Paul wants to cut, it’s going to be hard to lift your support above about 10%.
There are a lot of people who try to make Ron Paul (the man) look a lot more fringe than he is: when matched up against…
We’re not going to agree on the merits of Obama as president—so I’ll set that one aside for now. But let’s talk about the 42% of Paul’s voters. It seems to match the 42% who “strongly disapprove” of Obama’s job performance. A baked potato could get that 42% of the vote.
Yes, Paul has a lot of real support. But he’s way behind “generic Republican.” And as his name recognition has grown, his popularity hasn’t really taken off.
People similarly vote for idealism. But … they also have to like the ideals. Paul’s going to have trouble there.
squashed:
… I think The Callus is right—at least to the extent that the Libertarians’ race issues go beyond some awful things that Ron Paul may or may not have allowed to be said in his name. I would lay it out a bit differently, though.
- Any real-world political ideology should grapple…
Jeff, despite our (persisting) disagreement, I’m always thankful for your thoughts on an issue. I’m also a bit time limited—so I’ll offer the quick response.
First, I don’t know that a comparison of pedigrees is helpful. One problem is that we can pick out some horrible folks (or statements) on both sides of the divide. Granted, my side of the divide is a bit bigger. But it wouldn’t be to hard for either of us to dredge up a paleo-libertarian or two. The bigger problem, however, is that I’m not a very good Democrat. (I don’t think I’m even registered as a Democrat—and if the Republicans can ever get together something that I’d consider a credible approach to poverty, I wouldn’t be adverse to voting for them.)
Second, we agree on a lot of the civil liberties issues regarding police issues, incarceration, and so on. I’ll grant that the libertarians have a partial solution there. I’d implement it if I could.
I think we can agree that race and racism are a tough issue. I think huge gains have been made in the past fifty years—but we’ve still got major problems. We may simply disagree on whether the libertarian approach to the problem is credible or whether it would work better than the democrats approach.
With all that said, I like your phrasing here:
Libertarian ideology holds that the government (that is force) should not be used to correct every social wrong.
That’s where our central disagreement is. I don’t believe that the government has any kind of monopoly on force—particularly when we’re willing to let the government enforce property rights at the direction of private individuals. Second, I think the decision not to use government action to correct specific (or even categories) of social ills is a morally relevant decision.
(Source: thecallus)
huskerred:
This will be a reply for both Squashed and Politicalprof, who have been courteous enough to engage with me in a thread of discussion on the Enlightenment. I’d like to quickly provide what I hope can steer the discussion in the direction I originally intended, which is most certainly not…
I’m going to reply on my comments blog—because I just have a few scattered responses. I agree with most of what you wrote. That said, in bullet points:
As somebody who someday aspires to be a dead white man, I won’t criticize reading their work. I do, however, want to caution you on following them too carefully down the garden path. Locke, for example, builds his theory of property from, essentially, a state of Nature. So does Hobbes. So did everybody then. And, not surprisingly, their view of the state of nature and how society should logically be constructed from that mirrors what they set out to prove. (Be cautious about this any time anybody makes an argument from the State of Nature. It invariably is an argument based on an imagined state that’s been imagined, generally unintentionally, for the sole purpose of affirming some political structure somebody wants to base upon this. I could probably dig through my the archives to find the time somebody got so upset that I pointed this out that he blocked me.)
I ignored most of your argument on the enlightenment because I’m pretty skeptical about political theory as a discipline. Or, rather, I get concerned about how it is applied to contemporary politics. I’ll probably write a post on this before too long, but the short version is that we craft political rules that we think we should follow in order to have the best government we can. The rules help us avoid doing terrible things in a moment of passion. Unfortunately, they also stop us from doing good things when we understand society better. Balancing established political principles with the needs of people is … tricky.
I don’t think the left is particularly guilty of turning its back on science, en masse. Sure, the Huffington Post publishes some quack stuff, but we don’t see mainstream Democrats echoing that in the way that we see Republicans denying global warming. The “natural” medicine movement is a combination of rubbish (say, homeopathy) and a sense that we perhaps often overmedicate things. (I’ll drink a tea with, say, cloves in it if I have a sore throat an just want to numb it a bit with out getting into pharmaceuticals.)
The health consequences of our industrial food chain are pretty easy to document. Most of it comes in the form of diabetes. There’s some amount of rubbish in the “natural foods” movement. (Raw foods, etc.) There’s also a lot of good stuff. Pesticides, for example, really do have harmful buildups. There are also very legitimate concerns about the treatment of animals in our industrial processes. They also have a nasty habit of creating better pests. Again, I don’t think any of the flag bearers on the left are trotting out the pseudoscience on any of this.
Without going too far into it, I’m not sure how the left is attacking people’s food choices on any sort of wide scale. I understand there are some citywide bans on trans fats and proposals to put an extra tax on soft drinks. But most of the food movement has been in the form of nutrition education. Telling people the consequences of certain choices is different than taking that choice away.
littleorphanammo:
How do we know that rape is under-reported, you know, If it’s not reported. Does that mean under-reported to police, or under-reported altogether.
I’ve never understood how we can say things like 70 percent of rapes (or whatever!) are not reported…if they aren’t reported!
Somebody (say, Zombie Cuddle) could probably get this better than I could—though I think we also have a set of surveys that some of that data comes from. As mentioned, there are always questions about how good the data was and so on—though I think even a conservative estimate will conclude that date rape and child sex abuse are dramatically under reported.
(via thecallus)
