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diary, fiction, prose poetry

@internet-sentences

cultural capitalist economic socialist

Very tired, withdrawing. I cried a bunch today about how I don’t want to think about my body, I don’t want to think about my environment, I want to think about the abstract concepts, I want to redose my stimulants and my human said this is good, I like that you’re feeling things that aren’t anger, it will pass. He did some return emotional vulnerability about how he gets anxious that I’d rather be with a taller, more Instagrammable man and I said what? no, I think you’re perfect, you’re the perfect man-shape and a legitimately good strategist and he blushed a little bit. I like my work. I have a lot of concepts to catch up on but I also seem ahead in some ways.

April 6, 2023 - Rail workers protesting the raising of the pension age occupied the French headquarters of investment company Blackrock, saying that the money for workers’ pensions could easily be found if Blackrock and other corporations were taxed properly. [video]

The little human cannonball that I live with is curling himself up into a perfect sphere like Sonic the Hedgehog and rolling alongside me while I unhappily pedal on the bike. He’s saying see, it’s not so bad. I know you hate it. It’s good for your joints.

He’s saying you need to listen to me more. You should be throwing me at your problems. I’m good at colliding into problems and smashing them. I’m really dense. Feel these muscles.

He’s saying some stuff you need to resolve with the therapist. I can’t help you with the women’s issues. I can help with the rest. Business is emotional labor and I’m in an unusually cuddly field. Literally 50% of the work I do is some form of therapy. The rest is VBA macros and making shit up.

I’m telling him look over there. There’s a blue shirt navy suit guy. You’re twinsies. Look over there. There’s five blue shirt navy suit guys walking together. Quadruplets. He’s saying don’t remind me. I’m a clone. I’m an interchangeable component part within a big machine.

I went to my friend’s first party of the season yesterday in the abandoned building on the beach or the isolated park near the river or under one of the bridges and I brought the fucking laptop. I was sitting to the side on the fucking laptop and he sat down and said that’s not a good sign.

I said yeah, I’m fucked right now, I’m rapid-cycling, I’m so manic and so sad. I've been looking at the pension funds. I'm losing my mind over the pension funds. I think it's Alan Greenspan's fault. There's so much more visible human misery now. I don't remember seeing this a year ago. Sometimes I don't know if people are dying in front of me.

My friend said yeah, it's worse. I carry Narcan everywhere now. I was on the subway and I saw a man nodded off, leaning on his walker. He had a bag of Narcan pinned to his walker, the same brand I carry. I thought well, at least he's being a responsible addict. I poked him a little bit and he responded and I thought ok, he isn't dying, he's safe.

He said you’re sad because you’re on the fucking laptop at a party thinking about sad shit and you hardly leave your house. Ted Cruz is proposing a law to guarantee the legality of cryptocurrency, isn’t that great? I can’t believe I’m praising Ted Cruz. The US dollar is going to collapse soon, it’s not sustainable. Capitalism can’t keep cannibalizing itself to stay alive forever.

I said I’m sad because I don’t know what to do with my life other than work. My friend said yeah, I went through a phase where I felt like a total loser. I was so depressed that I actually got a job, I thought it would make me feel fulfilled. It was bullshit. Fuck jobs. This is what I want to do with my life, bring people together, help form connections.

He said I heard you guys are dating now. He’s cool, you met him here, stuff like that is why you should leave the house. Do you actually like him? and I said I think so. I closed the laptop and turned on the lightsaber and some people wandered over to look at it and my friend said the glow always draws them, like fireflies, and I said I think I love him.

my habits and the ways I exist are putting me in actual medical danger now and I’m not doing a very good job of fixing it. my heart rate is fucking fast all the time. I’m rarely sleeping or eating. when I stand up my vision goes out and I need to sit down about a third of the time. I have numbness and tingling in my hands and arms, which could be nothing. I have never exercised a day in my life and the Equinox guy said wow I’ve never seen one that low when they put me in the pseudoscience machine to measure my muscle percentage. pretty much everyone is in agreement that I need to quit or at least taper the stimulants and they’re objectively correct but also lol, lmao, I can’t fall behind at work and I like the stimulants. I’d rather take the Holter monitor and that’s really stupid and makes me feel sad and angry but it’s true. I think this is what addiction feels like.

I legit think the emotionally monogamous coworker partnership is the optimal relationship structure for women who date men and have jobs they enjoy. Some women aren't work-motivated and that's cool. It's a different and valid approach to life. Some women are naturally romance-focused. That's cool. It just usually doesn't lead to good teamwork-based partner selection.

You can't date a literal coworker, obviously, that introduces more risk than it's worth. Even dating within the same field seems risky depending on context. A good balance seems to be a cousin-field of the same industry, where you can consistently teach each other things, with someone whose skillset is naturally different so that you can effectively specialize labor.

Poly is suboptimal because very few people can manage multiple partners in such a way that maximizes benefit vs. time spent for everyone. You end up dividing your attention and it makes everything function a little bit worse. You want the heavy partner investment, the K-selection.

Free love as a concept is just generally a terrible deal for women. It's a psyop invented by men to scam women into increased accessibility. Some girls like it, that's valid, they probably aren't optimizing. Sexual nonmonogamy is fine, in moderation and practiced sanely. It helps keep things in perspective. People tend to function better when they aren't too invested in sex.

When people think “private equity” they probably think leveraged buyouts, buying and selling companies, right? Like how when they think “hedge fund” they probably think about the stonks meme. That’s a small piece of private equity. It’s really everything.

Data centers. Insurance. Loans. Pipelines, power plants, utilities. Hospitals. Schools. Bridges and airports. Houses and offices. Very reductively, hedge funds handle the liquid assets. They can enter or exit a position within a minute, a day. Private equity handles the illiquid.

You don’t know what it’s worth until you sell. It might take a year or longer to do the trade. You have to do some footwork to find a buyer. It comes down to connections. You know this guy Greg at another firm. You offload your asset onto Greg.

It’s less data-driven. It’s not very mathy. That’s because every deal is so different. Deals are a fundamentally social mechanism. It’s hard to standardize them and if you try the information you get is so granular, it doesn’t tell you much. You have to go off instinct.

People love to complain about all this. They have some good points. What’s the point of it? Why does it exist? Retirement. Pension funds, a massive pool of money. Pension funds don’t care about maximizing their money, it’s liability driven investing. They want returns that will safely cover their future outflows.

So what’s the problem with that? They’re underfunded. They need massive, safe, returns. No one else can provide it. Hedge funds might get higher returns but they’re riskier. I’d argue that private equity in its current form exists just to cover this shortfall.

Let’s go back to the ironies of it all. The schoolteacher’s pension is paid for by her losing her home to feed a fund. Her retirement comes from the bankruptcy of the local hospital. It’s all the government’s fault. They created the mess and created an industry to fix it and take the blame. Conclusion: it’s always the government’s fault.

In finance, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is a model used to determine a theoretically appropriate required rate of return of an asset, to make decisions about adding assets to a well-diversified portfolio.

The model takes into account the asset's sensitivity to non-diversifiable risk (also known as systematic risk or market risk), often represented by the quantity beta (β) in the financial industry, as well as the expected return of the market and the expected return of a theoretical risk-free asset. CAPM shows that the cost of equity capital is determined only by beta.[1][2] 

Despite its failing numerous empirical tests,[3] and the existence of more modern approaches to asset pricing and portfolio selection (such as arbitrage pricing theory and Merton's portfolio problem), the CAPM still remains popular due to its simplicity and utility in a variety of situations.

Assumptions:

All investors:[7]

  1. Aim to maximize economic utilities (Asset quantities are given and fixed).
  2. Are rational and risk-averse.
  3. Are broadly diversified across a range of investments.
  4. Are price takers, i.e., they cannot influence prices.
  5. Can lend and borrow unlimited amounts under the risk free rate of interest.
  6. Trade without transaction or taxation costs.
  7. Deal with securities that are all highly divisible into small parcels (All assets are perfectly divisible and liquid).
  8. Have homogeneous expectations.
  9. Assume all information is available at the same time to all investors.

Problems

In their 2004 review, economists Eugene Fama and Kenneth French argue that "the failure of the CAPM in empirical tests implies that most applications of the model are invalid".[3]

  • The traditional CAPM uses historical data as the inputs to solve for a future return of asset i. However, the history may not be sufficient to use for predicting the future and modern CAPM approaches have used betas that rely on future risk estimates.[8]
  • Most practitioners and academics agree that risk is of a varying nature (non-constant). A critique of the traditional CAPM is that the risk measure used remains constant (non-varying beta). Recent research has empirically tested time-varying betas to improve the forecast accuracy of the CAPM.[9]
  • The model assumes that the variance of returns is an adequate measurement of risk. This would be implied by the assumption that returns are normally distributed, or indeed are distributed in any two-parameter way, but for general return distributions other risk measures (like coherent risk measures) will reflect the active and potential shareholders' preferences more adequately. Indeed, risk in financial investments is not variance in itself, rather it is the probability of losing: it is asymmetric in nature as in the alternative safety-first asset pricing model.[10][11] 
  • Some investors prefer positive skewness, all things equal, which means that these investors accept lower returns when returns are positively skewed. For example, Casino gamblers pay to take on more risk.
  • The model assumes that all active and potential shareholders have access to the same information and agree about the risk and expected return of all assets.
  • The model assumes that the probability beliefs of active and potential shareholders match the true distribution of returns. A different possibility is that active and potential shareholders' expectations are biased, causing market prices to be informationally inefficient.
  • The model does not appear to adequately explain the variation in stock returns. Empirical studies show that low beta stocks offer higher returns than the model would predict.[16] Either that fact is itself rational (which saves the efficient-market hypothesis but makes CAPM wrong), or it is irrational (which saves CAPM, but makes the EMH wrong – indeed, this possibility makes volatility arbitrage a strategy for reliably beating the market).[17][18][19] 
  • The model assumes that there are no taxes or transaction costs, although this assumption may be relaxed with more complicated versions of the model.[20]
  • The market portfolio consists of all assets in all markets, where each asset is weighted by its market capitalization. This assumes no preference between markets and assets for individual active and potential shareholders, and that active and potential shareholders choose assets solely as a function of their risk-return profile.
  • The market portfolio should in theory include all types of assets that are held by anyone as an investment (including works of art, real estate, human capital...) In practice, such a market portfolio is unobservable and people usually substitute a stock index as a proxy for the true market portfolio. Unfortunately, it has been shown that this substitution is not innocuous and can lead to false inferences as to the validity of the CAPM, and it has been said that due to the inobservability of the true market portfolio, the CAPM might not be empirically testable. This was presented in greater depth in a paper by Richard Roll in 1977, and is generally referred to as Roll's critique.[21]  Other authors have attempted to document what the world wealth or world market portfolio consists of and what its returns have been.[23][24][25]
  • The model assumes economic agents optimize over a short-term horizon, and in fact investors with longer-term outlooks would optimally choose long-term inflation-linked bonds instead of short-term rates as this would be more risk-free asset to such an agent.[26][27]
  • The model assumes just two dates, so that there is no opportunity to consume and rebalance portfolios repeatedly over time.
  • CAPM assumes that all active and potential shareholders will consider all of their assets and optimize one portfolio. This is in sharp contradiction with portfolios that are held by individual shareholders: humans tend to have fragmented portfolios or, rather, multiple portfolios: for each goal one portfolio.
  • Empirical tests show market anomalies like the size and value effect that cannot be explained by the CAPM.[32] For details see the Fama–French three-factor model.[33]

Roger Dayala[34] goes a step further and claims the CAPM is fundamentally flawed even within its own narrow assumption set, illustrating the CAPM is either circular or irrational. The circularity refers to the price of total risk being a function of the price of covariance risk only (and vice versa). The irrationality refers to the CAPM proclaimed ‘revision of prices’ resulting in identical discount rates for the (lower) amount of covariance risk only as for the (higher) amount of Total risk (i.e. identical discount rates for different amounts of risk. Roger’s findings have later been supported by Lai & Stohs.[35]

Anonymous asked:

i lost your blog for a bit, so glad to have found you again. ive missed hearing about your dog-boyfriends. peace and love from below the tower, from the man raising and lowering the bridge across the moat as requested.

🖤🖤🖤

I wear my branded clothing like armor, covered in the logos of organizations and companies like a racecar. Communities, schools, graduate schools, and firms, so many firms. I wear my vest like a security blanket.

I spend time in Manhattan’s citadels of steel and stone, lavish with high ceilings like temples. Citadel: a fortress in or near a city, intended to keep the inhabitants in subjection, or, in case of a siege, to form a final refuge and point of defense. I bow my head before the only God I can see.

I grab the arm of my dog-boyfriend who I love because he does whatever I want and projects a sense of strength and stability like stone and I try to pull it out of the socket, dragging his chest and shoulders down to crush me. He grunts in pain and says I love you.

He says try not to stress over work, try to have fun. People are nice to women now and we’ll support you, I’ll support you. Try to stop resisting. We’re here to nurture you. Everything’s easier once you stop resisting.

I tangle my limbs around his and we wrap our invisible leashes around each other. I tell him I love you, puppy, I love you, and he blushes. He does the thing that radiates warmth and safety that’s manipulative because it’s intentional and helps keep me around.

I ask can we talk about the commercial mortgage backed securities, the interest rate caps, and the banks? and he says of course, always. I’m not an expert but I listen to people, always, and I remember things. Everyone’s retreating to safety, you know this. It may get bad, you know this. We’ll be fine. We’ll always be fine. I love you.