ultraswank

Or the big boogy man from the crisis, credit default swaps. They're complex financial basically insurance that you can take out on any asset, even one you don't own. Many institutions saw the chance of these securitized mortgage assets failing as so remote that they'd sell credit default swaps for fractions of a penny on the dollar on their coverage. They were cheaper and more predictable then shorts and when the crisis hit if you held them you made a killing. Of course a lot of that killing came on the back of the U.S. taxpayer. The number of credit default swaps that they sold were what almost killed AIG, so the government stepped up and covered almost $14 billion of their losses.

There were people who were posting their stuff on the internet. http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/ was a great resource before the crisis documenting how far off the rails the mortgage business had gone. I wouldn't say it went viral, but it did garner a lot of attention for a finance blog. Paul Krugman even mentioned it on his blog. Of course almost everyone I talked to about it back in 2007 treated me like I just said Stanley Kubrick filmed the moon landing. Back then it was pretty hard to say "Alan Greenspan is wrong and the guy on this blog is right" and have anyone take you seriously.

Although one big problem with COBRA is that if you go work for a start up and it fails you're ineligible, there's no one left for you to buy insurance from. That happened to me a few years ago and if the timing had been slightly different it would have left us uninsured during the birth of my son. Another point is that the difference between your employer "subsidising" your health coverage and you paying for it yourself is that under the current system you get a tax break for your employer paying for your insurance that you don't get if you pay it yourself. So not only do companies pay less in general for insurance, the tax benefits represent a huge jump in out of pocket expenses for people looking to leave their employer and strike it out on their own.

I've been hearing a lot of anecdotal evidence lately that the costs of private health insurance are stopping people, especially those with kids, from making the leap into their own start ups. Is anyone else getting that same impression? In my own experience on the topic I've become increasingly frustrated with the U.S. system of employer provided health care. Either give us a public option with universal coverage, or a true private system with the benefits of market efficiencies and a standard tax policy. This muddled middle ground seems to give us the worst of both, and the only people who benefit are large employers who have one more thing to prevent employees from jumping ship.

I moved to The Mission in 1996 So I'm likely included in the internet crowd that ruined the city. I loved living there, but I when I visit now its not the lack of artists that I notice, its the (relative) lack of crack addicts. Lets not let the glasses get too rose colored. It might be more difficult for people just starting out or on limited income to make it there, but if they do there is a base line improvement to their quality of life that comes with living in a safer and cleaner environment. I took my son to play at the newly renovated park at Valencia and 19th the other month and I couldn't believe that there was an outdoor water park in SF, much less The Mission, that I felt OK with him playing in. The locals looked pretty excited about it too.

Besides the young and hip are doing what they always do, find new areas to make hip. I've been living in the East Bay for a decade now and I can't believe that Oakland is the new hip spot in the Bay Area. Hope it does something for my property values.