Silly me! Here I thought the main reason for funneling so much money into higher education via what has become lax student loan screening was patronage. Academics and administrators have a strong tendency to vote Democratic. So a debt-fueled expansion of colleges and universities could only help Team Dem.
But in finance, bad accounting regularly drives bad outcomes and that looks to the far more immediate cause for the expansion in student loans, and the resulting escalation in higher education costs.
Another example of this type of dynamic is the global financial crisis. As we explained long-form in ECONNED, many banks adopted accounting practices that allowed them to use credit default swaps to remove CDOs from their balance sheets for accounting purposes. Traders had the entire theoretical future profits from this so-called negative basis trade booked in the current year. This resulted in Eurobanks as well as some US securities firms to (at best) be indifferent to CDO risk and
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 25April 2021
The news posted last week for the coronavirus 2019-nCoV (aka SARS-CoV-2), which produces COVID-19 disease, has been surveyed and some important articles are summarized here. The articles are more or less organized with general virus news and anecdotes first, then stories from around the US, followed by an increased number of items from other countries around the globe. Economic news related to COVID-19 is found here.
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Summary:
both new Covid cases and US deaths attributed to the virus were lower during the past week. New Covid infections during the week ending April 24th were down 16.3% from during the week ending April 17th, and down 76.7% from the early January peak. US Covid deaths were down 2.0% from the prior week, and down 79.0% from the January peak. New infections in the states that had been leading the early spring surge, including Mi
Yves here. As IM Doc indicates in passing in this post, he’s been keeping Lambert and me (and the other members of our Covid brain trust) updated on what he is seeing in the field, via the CDC’s
Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and hearing from MDs at a major teaching hospital and in his network about the Covid vaccines. Recall that IM Doc was early to warn that vaccinations would soon hit a wall after those eager to take them had gotten their shots. He saw that in his area (which has a substantial wealthy/PMC population) before the J&J “pause”.
Yves here. America’s relationship with the military is becoming more and more unhealthy. The “all volunteer” service is a cover for shifting the human cost of service mainly onto young men and women who lack better career prospects, as in members of the lower/lower middle classes who lack the family monies and connections to have more attractive options. And while that deal once might have seemed attractive between government-funded higher education, medical care, and pensions, extended tours of duty have changed this equation. And while it used to be members of the right that were subject to hard-ons for men in uniform (as opposed to a mere healthy respect for military service), Team Dem has more recently gone into swoons over current and former senior military men in the wake of RussiaRussia! Recall that Lambert and others warned of the Clinton camp’s lobbying for a change in the Constitutional order, including the incoming President having to be acceptable the Pentagon.