anon_
14d ago
The canonical solution to the prisoners dilemma is tit for tat with forgiveness.
I think we’ve got the tit for tat part. I’m not sure if we’re down with forgiveness yet.
anon_
17d ago
Yes. It also means that it is impossible to run the bank system with the priorities currently decided by the regulators without giving the banks discretion on who to serve.
Those two things can be true concurrently!
anon_
17d ago
I think the heavy regulation is not working in the direction you imagine: that regulators decided (for better or worse) that the tradeoff would be that consumers are protected from deadbeats and that banks would eat those costs.
anon_
17d ago
For political requests it gets a bit thornier and requires some nuance. How do you seperate 'illegitimate' govt requests (eg Trucker protests) vs 'legitimate' govt requests (eg financial sanctions on Russia)?
Indeed. And a third category is "predictive" in the sense of Epstein give that he was apparently in government favor until a point where his line went out and then they hung him out to dry.
In some sense, this is kind of the worst of all worlds: dump a politically connected guy today and get flamed by his friends. Keep him and then the moment he's out you'll be smeared along with him. No business wants to be in flapping in the political winds like that.
anon_
18d ago
This is not true. The financial industry provides normie customers will significant protection against various kinds of frauds in a way that is incompatible with allowing credit risks to continue to bank. It is not a ledger, it is a ledger with a complicated system of dispute resolution w.r.t entries on that ledger and the implicit line of credit that covers the total potential cost of those disputes.
You could imagine an "all transactions are absolutely final no matter what" kind of a financial system, akin to a blockchain. This is broadly incompatible with current expectations regarding fraud and disputes. It's also broadly illegal (see CFPB Reg E) to offer to consumers in the US. And having reasonable experience in adjacent fields, I'm pretty sure it's not a great idea.
anon_
18d ago
This is right, but it does then raise the obvious next question of how we can actually operationalize a distinction between the two.
anon_
18d ago
I think the majority of those decisions aren’t social pressure, they are vanilla business decisions based on risk.
When does a regular credit decision become a judicial matter?
anon_
18d ago
Those are focused on the fear of specific, articulable harm.
It's not something like "this business is dodgy and we don't want to take a risk that they welch on their debts and leave us to make all their customers whole at our expense".
anon_
18d ago
But he did have a lot of control over Wexner's money and was able to spend it as if it were his own, in turn enabling him to present the façade of really, really wealthy guy
Which in turn would let him get more private finance business.
After all, when choosing finance guys, it's an important indicia of competence that the guy himself isn't broke.
Of course, this can be gamed -- lots of those guys are in deep debt to fund an appearance of wealth that they wish to parlay into business opportunity. And many are indeed a house of cards.
anon_
18d ago
There's a big difference between the ordinary JPM customer who has an account with $5,000 in it and who barely interacts with anyone at the bank, and a high net worth client who has private bankers and gets personal attention from higher ups.
Sure. My claim wasn't that he's treated like me, only that JPM was customarily in the business of private banking HNW individuals. That's one of the services that they offer in their normal and usual course of business.
JPM didn't just let Epstein open a checking account at a branch without anyone being aware of it. They extensively courted, discussed, facilitated Epstein's business at the bank.
Sure, but did they do so in a way that was different from other similar private banking clients? Did he use those services in specifically criminal ways (beyond using money from their bank to pay for criminal acts, which is not sufficient grist) such as using it to launder money or commit fraud? As far as I understand, the answer to both of those questions is no.
So "Epstein got all his money from Les Wexner" isn't really a conversation ender to me, it's the start of another more interesting mystery.
Indeed, and I think that deserves its own thread that is independent of whether we should blame the bank for not cutting him off.
anon_
18d ago
It should be know your client > report suspicious activities to the authorities > authorities ask judge for approval to debank > banks debank.
I understand you're just proposing as a thing, but there is literally no analog for a court to adjudicate this. You'd be inventing a new kind of judicial process for this.
anon_
18d ago
My understanding is that it wasn’t just rank and file, it was mid level command structure.
anon_
18d ago
So it appears that JP Morgan may have allowed Jeffrey Epstein to continue using their financial services, so of course the Times leads with the most bombastic possible version of this claim. One could imagine an alternative headline like How JPMorgan Conducted its Usual and Customary Business. Probably there are intermediate versions of this headline that are closer to neutral.
Headlines aside, right wing media is picking it up because all the Epstein stuff draws lots of clicks but I'm wondering (and hopefully I'm not alone) whether this is fundamentally about getting upset when banks don't drop unpopular clients even when their relationship has nothing to do with the clients' bad behavior.
That is to say, contra the Times, JPMorgan didn't enable Epstein's crimes in anything but the most useless sense of the world. Sure, he used money from the banks to pay people -- but I'm sure lots of criminals withdraw money from a Chase ATM in the commission of a crime, which hasn't (till recently) been laid on the bank.
The other claim is that his friends in the bank intervened when some transactions were flagged (for what, no one really explains) but this only deepens the original question: even if he was guilty of sex crimes, that doesn't imply that his financial dealings weren't in order. It's not money laundering or fraud to pay for underage hookers -- it's child prostitution which is illegal in its own right.
Ultimately where this seems to end is back to a place where banks rightly fear that they are gonna be next on the Times' hitlist because they didn't drop a client fast enough.
anon_
18d ago
Right, so this boils down too: I should be mad that we didn’t pull the trigger first.
Implicit in being mad that we didn’t pull the trigger first is the judgment that the action was good in itself.
anon_
19d ago
You can blow up Osama Bin Laden and there's basically no effect. Al Qaeda trundles on, they're still doing their thing.
This seems factually untrue. Over the GWOT the US dismantled Al Qaeda and related groups to the extent that they seemed unable to mount meaningful strikes against the US afterwards.
anon_
19d ago
What this does say is, Qatar has joined the ranks of countries that have no true sovereignty, and can be bombed at will by capable powers.
They already were. Maybe before now they could put on airs and pretend it wasn't so.
Under what circumstances would you feel that a foreign drone strike targeting a terrorist living or operating in the United States was justified and acceptable?
In what sense would I be mad that a foreign terrorist that was operating on our soil is disintegrated? That we didn't get the pull the trigger first? What national interest of mine does that foreigner serve?
In an even larger sense, terrorists from country A operating against country B while hiding out in country C are putting the citizens of C in danger to further their own ends in the A/B conflict. Unless C has a specific interest in that conflict, they only lose by their presence.
[ Of course, if the target(s) were factually innocent of terrorism or were too unimportant to be really culpable, that would be a different matter. But that obviously doesn't apply to this situation in which we all know with certainty that Hamas are culpable here. ]
anon_
21d ago
No, it relies on the fact that American talent is very well tapped. Once that marginal talent is mostly taken, there is more elsewhere that's willing to come because we pay workers far far more. Far more than even "worker friendly" socialist places.
Or at least it used to be that every high school counselor in the US was an effective magnet for figuring out which hick-born genius should go to MIT or CalTech and build rockets or computers.
anon_
21d ago
That sounds great -- but it's not an argument for throwing all the H1Bs out. Make it $250K and it returns to being a truly high-skilled program.
All in all it's a M&B -- the motte is "the H1B salary floor is too low and it's not skilled enough", the bailey is "immigration bad".
anon_
21d ago
The other part is that the firm has the option to open a subsidiary office somewhere else and hire locally there. This is a substitute for trying to recruit those folks to physical move stateside.
That has lots of drawbacks: there will be additional overhead for travel, management, legal, compliance and whatnot. The remote office will be less productive (all told) and probably at a weird time zone.
Still, people forget that even in the world of tariffs, there's literally zero legal penalty for a US company to just open an office abroad and hire people.
anon_
21d ago
Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?
Americans are so wildly successful that their time is worth far more than the entire $20 just to clean a room. This is not a sign of failure, it's quite the opposite.
This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.
This just means the data science guys messed up and over-specified the flight. The airline likely lost money on it, it's not sustainable to run an airplane at less than 70-80% utilization (paging /u/madmonzer to fact check me).
[ As an aside, there might be different accounting when the airline has to run a money-losing connection in order to capture the profitable long-haul international seats. Still, better to run it on a smaller plane rather than leaving an empty. ]
anon_
21d ago
he cartels already have extant and significant distribution networks that new operations have to create from scratch.
At the same time, the cartels' distribution networks are ... not super cost efficient. I expect they are paying (either directly, through inefficiency or through outright theft) at least 20-100x what WalMart is paying :-)
The point isn't about the best strategy knowing your opponent's strategy. If you knew your opponents strategy then just copying their move is the best.
The usual metric for rating success is one that works against the success-weighted average set of other strategies.
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