vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"&gt;If mounting debt is such an issue, why do all the markets act as though the US is perfectly solvent? They don't. China, Russia and most emerging markets are selling U.S. treasuries faster and faster. They have started doing so a couple years ago and are doing so at a higher pace now. They sold record numbers of U.S. treasuries in June. Many countries are forging trade partnerships with each other to get away from U.S. debt and even the U.N. and IMF are calling for an end to the dollar as the global reserve currency because it no longer deserves that status, largely due to increasing debt. By the way, the Fed is owning a larger and larger portion of U.S. debt these days. &gt;Why is our interest rate so low, and why do investors around the world continue buying Treasury bonds? The federal reserve keeps rates low. Investors speculate about the future of the market all the time, but they are starting to dump them now http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-15/u-s-investment-outflow-reaches-record-as-china-sells-treasuries.html http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/15/usa-economy-capital-idUSL2N0QL0T520140815 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/eaccbe18-aea6-11e3-aaa6-00144feab7de.html &gt;The total net outflow of long-term U.S. securities and short-term funds such as bank transfers was $153.5 billion, after an inflow of $33.1 billion the previous month, the Treasury Department said in a report today. The June figure, and $40.8 billion in net selling of Treasury bonds and notes by private investors in June, **were the largest on record, the Treasury said.** &gt;""This is a disappointment and is a negative for the dollar.
"&gt;Wait until you read about someone mentioning one of the main reasons main street took those losses was because of the municipalities, state, and federal pensions invested into those CDSs.   Credit Default Swaps were the ""insurance"" scams, that's different.  Municipalities purchased CDOs and not CDS'es.  Someone correct me if I am wrong.  The CDS's were also a problem, but of a different sort.  CDS allowed people to take out insurance on a competing product.  Imagine me taking out a fire insurance on your house.  Things like that.  CDO = Collaterized Debt Obligation (this is the paper which represents hundreds of mortgage slices mixed and matched by some bullshit software algorithm that promised to predict risk accurately)  CDS = Credit Default Swap (this is an ""insurance"" paper which is not regulated like all the other normal and legitimate insurance, that insures the CDO garbage above... so if your, or even your competitor's CDO goes into the shitter, you can collect on your CDS bullshit; so the CDS was supposed to be a hedge against the CDO failure)"
What happens when people move away or lose interest? If it's not profitable you'll be depending on people to continue to make payments for upkeep etc. It's not outside the realm of possibility that you could start a swimming club that could sustain itself with membership dues, but most amenities used by clubs near where I am were built and are owned by the municipalities, and the clubs come and go like the seasons.
Have an upvote. I don't really understand the issue of money competition. There really isn't anything stopping me from putting my wealth in any other currency, or any other store of value for that matter (gold, stocks, bonds, lollipops, prison cigarettes). The value of a domestic currency is affected by the relative value of these others.
While the tone of the article isn't the best or the most informative the general premise of bid-rigging and collusion is still a problem and wait till all the swaps/derivatives come to light that were sold to european municipalities also uncompetively and collusively (if the europeans have balls to press charges).  A lot of the products were offered with clauses that disallowed the muni's to check the market prices and some had even collusion (I will dig up the link when I find it).
I understand why the villagers would use the apple notes, but your story doesn't really explain why the villagers would use the new notes.  In other words, why do the villagers think the new notes have any value at all?  Once the story covers that issue, I think it will be reasonably complete.  ^[edit: ^small ^typo]
You will also have situations where some mom-and-pop takes John-LLC bonds as payment for dinner, and when they try to give John-LLC bonds to their suppliers, their suppliers say 'no thanks, we only deal in IBM bonds."" Mom-and-pop will find themselves stuck with paper that nobody wants to accept. And mom-and-pop will quickly find themselves in a cash flow crisis, as they have tons of paper, but none of their suppliers will accept that paper. The only way to get out of this situation would be to convince IBM or GE to give Mom-and-pop some GE bonds in exchange for the John-LLC they have that nobody will accept. Of course, GE and IBM being in the enviable position as some of the few trusted money printers can refuse to accept John-LLC bonds except at a severe discount. ""We know John gave you John-LLC bonds to pay for his dinner worth $100, but, we'll only give you $40 worth of GE bonds for it."" Mom-and-pop will quickly be fucked and go out of business due to having no ""hard currency"" (aka trusted currency) that they can use to purchase their raw materials. Demand for GE bonds will skyrocket as everyone seeks a safe-haven (a trusted currency almost everyone will accept), adn GE will find the entire market begging them to print bonds even at no interest just so that the money supply can increase to hold the full amount of trade occurring in the territory. This is then no different from the Fed during the recession a few years ago (and up until now) where they sell tons of bonds at rock-bottom interest rates simly because all the world is looking for a safe place to put their cash. The difference, of course, is that GE / IBM can take all this money and issue themselves HUGE bonuses, either on the cash directly or on the profit they've amassed by being the only trusted money issuer, whereas government officials can not."
It's hard to trust a reporter who exaggerates such basic facts.  Assuming it's correct to use the $800 billion figure, why not just use that instead of bloating the number up to $3.7 trillion?  Like you said, if the bigger picture issue here is not $800 billion vs. 3.7 trillion, why lie about it?  The end result is that while something corrupt did happen with the banks involvement in the bond market, the public isn't getting truthful information about it either way.  Taibbi is doing a disservice to the public by lying, because of the huge amount of disinformation, and insincerity coming from all sides of the issue, the public has no one to trust to give them credible information, and so the issue gets ignored.
I know that assets like bonds have prices that have an inverse relationship with interest rates, but what other assets do as well? I'm a bit new to finance and all that so I'm trying to learn. Would real estate prices be high as well? If so, why?
"I don't mean to be flippant, but why not try ""titster"" or similar and see if the first three characters are the issue. If it's accepted, than you should ask the bank why they are discriminating against your religious beliefs. If it's rejected, then you know they are going overboard on avoiding certain words."
If you are talking about a corporate entity, weighted average tenor refers to the average maturity of the company's bond portfolio (or all debt) from the issue date. For example, a company issues 2 bonds in 2017, one for $100 with a maturity of 2019 and one for $50 with a maturity of 2020. The weighted average tenor would be 2.33 years. These numbers are not exact, just trying to give you an illustrative example.
I get the feeling you attribute anything on Reddit you don't like to those idiots.  You know how you read further up the comments about how bad it is that everything has become a partisan issue? People like this are why.
We can go back and forth all day if this should be illegal, should there be qualifications, standards etc. The bigger issue at hand really is what qualifies as being able to live a basic standard of living in regards to income. Can we even define this? This is the core of the issue at hand. Does someone who was making 40k a year deserve it more or less than someone who was making 1mil a year? I don't know. I do know this, if i can make 100k a year and still live a great life with the ability to save enough to have enough stashed away for 6-8 mos of unemployment, why can't people making 1 million+? It should be rather apparent why people making 40k a year can't  do that as easy.
littleadv's answer gives a concise summary of the system as it stands now, but much more changed than just the portion of the mandatory contribution that was diverted to the private plan. In broad terms, the balances of your accounts and your future benefit won't change. It's only the source of these benefits that's changing. The Bloomberg article describes the changes this way: The state will take over the amount of bonds that pension funds held as of end of Sept. 3 and turn them into pension liabilities in the state-run social security system... The state will assume control of 51.5 percent of pension-fund assets, including bonds guaranteed by the government and “other non-stock assets” After the change, Polish workers that held bonds in the private portion of their retirement portfolios will instead have more payments from the state-run pension system. The balances of your retirement portfolio and your future benefits shouldn't change, but the reality may depend on how the state pension system is managed and any future changes the government implements. The effect this change will have on future benefits isn't clear, because the change may simply delay the problem of high levels of outstanding sovereign debt, not solve it. The government stated that because increasing numbers of workers invested their money in private pension funds, less money went into the government's fund, which forced them to issue sovereign debt in order to cover the shortfall in their current pension liabilities.  The government's recent cancellation of government bonds in the hands of private pensions will decrease their overall outstanding debt, but in exchange, the government is increasing its future pension liabilities. Years down the road, the government may find that they need to issue more sovereign debt to cover the increased pension liabilities they're taking on today. In other words, they may find themselves back in the same situation years down the road, and it's difficult to predict what changes they might make at that time.
The debt is absolutely real. China loans money to US via buying the US treasury bonds. The bond is essentially a promise to pay back the money with interest, just like a loan. As you point out, the US can print money. If this were to happen, then the USD that the owner of a treasury bond receives when the bond matures are worth less that than the USD used to purchase the bonds. There are lots of reasons why the US doesn't want to print lots of money, so the purchaser of the bond is probably confident it won't happen. If for some reason they think it is possible, then they will want to cover that risk by only purchasing bonds that have a higher interest rate. The higher interest offsets the risk of the USD being worth less. Of course, there are lots more details, e.g., the bonds themselves are bought and sold before maturity, but this is the basic idea.
Why would you consider Amazon to have an anti-trust issue? Think about monopolies of the past - you didn't go to them because you wanted to, you went to them because you had no other choice....  With Amazon, you can you Google's cloud services or Walmart's ecommerce site, but you don't... Why not? Because Amazon does it the best. You, the consumer, still have a choice.
Wall Street is livid because WF is their competitor. WF is mostly an investment bank - they make the majority of their money from equities, bonds, currency trading, corporate services, etc. Small time auto loans aren't a huge portion of what they do. Why would something that's 1% of their business cause a 15% drop?
"20-year Treasury Bonds are not equivalent to cash, not even close.  Even though the bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government, they are long-term debt and therefore their principal value will fluctuate considerably as market interest rates change. When interest rates rise, the market value of 20-year bonds will drop, and drop more than shorter-term bonds would.  Your principal is not protected in the short term.  Principal is only guaranteed returned at the 20-year maturity of those bonds.  But, oops, there is no maturity on the 20-year bond ETFs because every year the ETF rolls the 19-year positions into new 20-year positions! ;-) For an ""equivalent to cash"" piece of a portfolio, I'd want my principal to be intact over the short term, and continually reinvested at the higher short-term rates as rates are rising.  Reinvesting at short-term rates can be an inflation-hedge.  But, money locked in for 20-years is a sitting duck for inflation. Still, inflation aside, why do we want our ""equivalent to cash"" position to be relatively liquid and principal-protected? When it comes time to rebalance your portfolio after disastrous equity and/or bond returns, you've got in your cash component some excess weighting since it was unaffected by the disastrous performance. That excess cash is ready to be deployed to purchase equities and/or bonds at the lower current prices.  Rebalancing from cash can add a bonus to your returns and smooth volatility.  If you have no cash component and only equities and bonds, you have no money to deploy when both equities and bonds are depressed.  You didn't keep any powder dry.  And, BTW, I would personally keep a bit more than 3% of my powder dry. Consider a short-term cash deposit or good money-market fund for your ""equivalent to cash"" position."
Rebalancing your portfolio doesn't have to include selling.  You could simply adjust your buying to keep your portfolio in balance.  If you portfolio has shifted from 50% stocks and 50% bonds to 75% stocks and 25% bonds, you can just only use new savings to buy bonds, until you are back at 50-50. Remember to take into account taxes if you are thinking of selling to rebalance in taxable accounts. The goal of rebalancing is to keep your exposures the way that you want them.  Assuming that you had a good reason to have a portfolio of 50% stocks and 50% bonds, you probably want to keep your portfolio similar in the future.  If you end up with a portfolio of 75% stocks and 25% bonds due to stock market fluctuations, the exposure and the risk / return profile of your portfolio will have changed, and it's probably not something that you want. You don't want to rebalance just for the sake of rebalancing either.  There can be costs to rebalancing (taxes, transaction fees, etc...) and these aren't always worth the effort.  That's why you don't need to rebalance every month or if your portfolio has shifted from 50/50 to 51/49. I take a look at my portfolio once a year, and adjust my automated investments so that by the end of the next year I'm back to the ratio I want.
If you have complicated taxes (own a business, many houses, you are self employed, you are a contractor, etc etc) a person can make the most of your situation. If you are a w-2 single job, maybe with a family, the programs are going to be so close to spot on that the extra fees aren't worth it. I would never bother using HR Block or Liberty or those tax places that pop up.  Use the software, or in my state sometimes municipalities put on tax help days at the library to assist in filling out the forms. If you have tough taxes, get a dedicated professional based on at least a few recommendations.
How?  Your latest claim is that caring for the poor is everyone's responsibility as much as they can.  Are you saying that you can't pay a penny more in taxes to help resolve this issue?  If that is what you're saying, why do you believe that?
"Yes, but it depends on WHICH other currencies the country's money is depreciating against, and to what extent.  This is why China ""pegging"" the renminbi/yuan to the dollar is an issue, it means Chinese goods do NOT become more expensive in the US."
------------------------------------------- Update 2 * I think you keep changing them, because for some reason you just won't admit you have no understanding of modern/classical banking. Once again: &gt;In order to induce subscription to the loan, the subscribers were to be incorporated by the name of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. The bank was given exclusive possession of the government's balances, and was the only limited-liability corporation allowed to issue bank-notes.[12] The lenders would give the government cash (bullion) and also issue notes against the government bonds, which can be lent again. The £1.2m was raised in 12 days; half of this was used to rebuild the Navy. This statement still DOES NOT show that the government here simultaniously purchased its own bonds it issued. It issued debt, yes, no one is debating this. The bank, for all purposes, acted as the Treasury for England. But honestly, you are a fucking piece of work. I have watched you lie, change your answers, and pretty much do every childish thing in the book to try to win an arguement on Reddit. You are a little person, honestly. I know not of what world you live in, but it isn't this one. Seriously, get better, the world is alot more fun when you don't suck so bad at it."
The debt is a problem but IF (and the key word is if) other nations are lending to us at rates we dictate, then that is not a problem.  But if our own banks, Central Bank, and the like are buying it then the problem is being kept on our shores.  The issue is with fractional reserve lending, one will always have this issue but if other nations give us items/services for paper/pixels we send them why not continue.
Honestly, why not? The divide between legal enhancers and non-legal ones is increasingly arbitrary. Look at Barry Bonds. The stuff he was using wasn't originally against the rules. I guarantee you that almost all the athletes out there are doing something. Does that ruin your enjoyment of the game?
well, you know the problem lies with bonds maturing. The issue is not the function COMP but the security itself. You have to use existing total return indices that reflect a constant 10yr maturity position.      &gt;perpetually rolled the principal once the bond matured until the present?      That would mean your 10y becomes 7y, 5y, 3y, 1y, matured then you reinvest. Not the same.      Use SECF to find something like MLT1US10 Index or go to the IND page to see Merrill Lynch's bond indices. They're some of the best.
You have no idea where interest rates will go.  A year or two ago people thought 3% was absurdly low, why buy them?  And then interest rates dropped even further, so the people who bought then got more interest AND the present value went up since then.  If you'd done nothing you would have lost money.  Now, rates are REALLY absurdly low.  What do?  Well, they could drop even more!  It's possible.  We could also have 20 years of flatline - see Japan.  Sitting on your hands loses money.  What else should you do?  Put your money in risky equities?  A lot of people these days are buying dividend paying stocks now.  It's extremely foolhardy to treat stocks as fixed income because they are very far from it.  Overextending yourself and taking on too equity risk, IMO, is FAR more risky than accepting low interest rates+interest rate risk.  Finally: I don't exactly use bonds to make money, I use it as a safe haven while I wait for stocks to do something.  Stocks go up, I sell some and buy bonds.  Bonds go up I sell them and buy more stock.  It's nice to get a little interest on the side but not critical.  I could use cash (or 1month tbills) but I'm comfortable with the amount of risk-return that 5-10year bonds provide.
"who computes the S&P 500? Standard and Poor's. Why are they sharing this information and Because that's what they do. This is a financial research company. how do they recuperate the costs inherent in computing the S&P 500? By charging clients for other information. The computing of the index itself is not all that complicated, its coming up with the index that's a problem. Once they've come up with the formula, and it became widely accepted, the computation itself is not an issue. But the fact that its so popular leads to the S&P brand recognition, and people come and pay good money for their other services (ratings and financial analysis of securities). They do more work for free. For example, the ratings of various government debts are being done by S&P for free (governments don't pay for that), while private bonds are rated for a fee (corporations pay to have their bonds rated). Also, as noted by JBKing, there are probably some licensing fees for using the index name in the fund name (and other users are probably paying the licensing fee, like the news agencies and the exchanges). S&P500 is a registered trademark, and as such cannot be used without the owner's permission. Why is then ""active management"" not required for indexed funds Because no research and stock picking is required. In fact, these funds don't really require a manager, they can be managed by a simple script. and how does it lower taxes? (perhaps this could be a different   question if this has become too broad) Actively managed funds perform a lot more buy/sell operations, each leading to tax consequences to the fund (which rolls them over to the investors). Index funds only buy and sell to re-balance back to the index (or when the makeup of the index changes, usually once a year or half a year), leading to much lesser realized capital gains to the fund, thus much lesser tax consequences."
"&gt; If you have five to eight dictators fighting at once You will quickly see these 5 to 8 dictators mutually come to the conclusion that it is not in their interests to ""fight it out"", but rather, support each other and prevent new-comers. Or, you will see mergers as we saw in the accounting and banking fields. You both knock out a competitor AND increase your market share in the process. This becomes similar to a government-sanctioned monopoly, but instead of one firm, you have 6 or 8, each recognizing that they've got a great position as gatekeepers and rent-seekers. This is similar to how the healthcare and insurance companies really don't DO very much except extract money. They over-bill the hospitals, then over-bill the customers, and profit the huge margins. Or how the government used to do student loans, then instead outsourced to the big banks to do it. Then recently they determined that hte big banks were taking tens of billions of dollars in profit for ""running"" the program. That's tens of billions of dollars of wealth simply extracted from our taxes. This is why the government under Obama decided to kick out the banker middle-men and simply issue the exact same loans with the exact same rules,a ll by themselves. Why outsource to a middleman when you can run the exact same program with tons less overhead? It's also the reason single-payer healthcare is tons more efficient over the current model, and would save our country trillions over the looong term. Not to mention, the democratization of currency you envision is truly ephemeral, a mirage. The firms the government chooses as suited enough to pay taxes basically means the government still has the final decision on which ""currency"" (bonds) to accept. What if the government then decides only ONE corp is suited to do this job, or only two? Then it's functionally no different than teh current situation. Right now, the world buys USD bonds at extremely low interest rates, and this helps fund our government and keeps our nations costs very low.