Yeah, what’s interesting is not just the mixed response he has received, but that there doesnt appear to be any sort of ideological line you can draw on what distinguishes the positive responses from negative. Most of what I’ve seen of the criticism is simply that he just isnt good at what he does and has been wrong about all the major issue in his professional lifetime. There has been nothing about him being an ideological crank as we now expect of important Trump appointments
I found this a pretty useful summary of the response as someone who knows nothing about the guy
Crypto, or more specifically Bitcoin behaves a bit like an asset. I think it’s had the same sell off as gold and silver. It also hit a bit a barrier with the $100k and $110k prices and kind of tracked sideways for a while.
I should also say to that Bitcoin has traditionally followed the 4 year debt cycle the US has, until now that is. It’s gone sideways the last 12 months when all the signals say it should still be going up. Trump’s policies seem to be upsetting that trend.
The added risk there is that he has found his way to career redemption by appearing to be willing to do what Trump wants. The uncertainty is fundamentally around how real that is versus the views he was expressing over a decade ago.
In the process of buying a house and have been thrown into the wacky world of offset loans. Took me ages to understand how they work, and still don’t fully get how they benefit all parties. The advantages for the lender are clear, but what do the banks get out of it? Apparently higher interest rates, but if they are charged on a smaller sum, I still don’t get the benefit for the lender.
The bank thinks it will benefit because they expect people to not pay the money back as quickly as they would on a repayment mortgage. Instead the borrower may keep dipping into that money to fund other purchases. For the borrower, it is the flexibility of being able to draw that money back down to fund refurbishments or holidays etc that may otherwise require holding back on other spending to save up the cash or paying out on higher rate loans
What is it? Something that allows you to keep your original mortgage (presumably on better terms) and only newly finance the additional money needed to buy the new house?
Offset mortgages lend you a fixed amount to buy your property and will treat any savings you have/ build up over the term of the mortgage as paying it down (you don’t get the interest from those savings though). However, you can spend that money so the mortgage effectively becomes a line of credit I think.
As I understand it; say you want to borrow 1 million. You can offset that by 500,000. That means you have an offset account to the sum of 500,000. You then only pay interest on the remaining 500,000 (the principal).
The offset account doesn’t have to contain 500,000 though. It only needs to have enough to cover the loan repayments, month by month.
When I had one, it was called a “current account mortgage” and the best way to think of it is a current account but with a huge overdraft that is secured against your house.
I liked it, it meant not having to worry about going overdrawn (because you were anyway at a mortgage rate of interest) and if you were making a big purchase like a car, you were effectively a cash buyer and didn’t have to worry about finance.
Also, as you effectively don’t have any savings, there’s no tax on interest to pay.
Interesting thread about new data on the effect of an established minimum wage for gig work delivery drivers in Seattle. The conclusion seems entirely predictable to me so Im surprised the authors consider this to be surprising or against conventional wisdom