All about risk
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/mortality-with-meep-huge-increase
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In 2020, there were over 93K deaths due to drug overdoses — a 30% increase over 2019.
This is super-bad, and worse than what I have seen for increases in other causes of death. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this bad.
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 14 July 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack
Link: https://allisonschrager.substack.com/p/known-unknowns-1c3?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta
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So the goal of tax policy should be taking as much revenue as you can while trying to minimize distortions. Some kinds of taxes are more distortionary than others. In order of least to most harmful, it goes
1. Consumption taxes
2. Income taxes
3. Wealth taxes
Cut to our current tax debate, where these concerns get no attention. The goal seems less about minimizing distortions/maximizing revenue and more about punishment, i.e., rich people for making too much in a zero-sum world and corporations for being greedy. Now, I think our tax system should be more progressive, too. But there are good and bad ways to achieve that goal.
Author(s): Allison Schrager
Publication Date: 6 July 2021
Publication Site: Known Unknowns at substack
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/mortality-with-meep-us-life-expectancy
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The Spanish flu pandemic gives us the demonstration of what happens when there is a short-term large increase in mortality.
Using Social Security records of period life expectancy, there was a huge drop in life expectancy in 1918…. and then a huge increase in 1919. But going from 1917 to 1919 wasn’t really that big of a difference.
The period life expectancy drop was 12% for females, 13% for males in 1918.
Then there was an increase of 15% for females, 20% for males in 1919. The Spanish flu hit the U.S. hard in 1918, and let up in 1919.
If you compare 1919 against 1917, the life expectancy from birth increase was 1% for females, and 4% increase for males — male life expectancy was down in 1917 compared to 1916, probably related to World War I.
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 29 June 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/mortality-nuggets-nyt-misleads-covid
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I want you to notice something — the blue bars are the “with COVID” portion of deaths, and the chartreuse bars are the ones “without COVID”. The bars are weekly counts of deaths when they occurred. Ignore the most recent weeks because they don’t have full data reported yet.
The red pluses indicate excess mortality, defined as exceeding the 95th percentile for expected mortality for that week (so it includes seaonality). You can see the excess mortality from the 2017-2018 flu season, which was bad for a flu season.
The non-COVID mortality has been in excessive mortality range for almost all 2020 after March. But since the beginning of 2021, it has dropped off…. and COVID mortality has also dropped off.
I think we may be almost in “normal” range soon. We shall see!
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 13 June 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/national-public-pension-coalition
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NPPC, I recommend you think through what will actually inform and protect your members. The TIA folks are not distorting the message, except to the extent that state and local governments are undervaluing their pension and OPEB promises.
Complaining about TIA will not make the pensions better-funded. Complaining about TIA will not prevent the worst-funded pensions from running out of assets, which will not be supportable as pay-as-you-go, as the asset death spiral before that will show that the cash flows were unaffordable for the local tax base.
And don’t look to the federal government to save your hash. So far bailout amounts have been puny compared to the size of the promises.
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 9 June 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack
Link: https://www.netinterest.co/p/my-adventures-in-cryptoland
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Insurance is a peculiar business because customers don’t really want it, hence the adage, “insurance is sold, not bought.” As much as she’s a customer, she’s also a counterparty: what’s good for her (a claim) is not good for the company. There’s a zero-sum dynamic to the relationship, which means that the classic Amazon flywheel around customer experience and lower pricing doesn’t work.
This concept got Lemonade tied up in knots this week. In a series of tweets, the company told of how its platform is getting better at “delighting customers”. One way it does this is, “when a user files a claim, they record a video on their phone and explain what happened. Our AI carefully analyses these videos for signs of fraud. It can pick up non-verbal cues that traditional insurers can’t, since they don’t use a digital claims process.”
It seems a strange way to “delight” customers by allowing AI to auto-reject their claims based on how their face looks or their accent sounds. The company realized its (PR) error, deleted the tweets and issued a denial. But this is what happens when your customers and your shareholders start mixing in an industry that doesn’t lend itself very well to that.
Author(s): Marc Rubinstein
Publication Date: 28 May 2021
Publication Site: Net Interest at substack
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper-demographic
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The last time the Census Bureau did a population projection, the estimated population for even 2020 came in a little high. From March 2018: Demographic Turning Points for the United States: Population Projections for 2020 to 2060 — they estimated a total population of about 332.6 million, and the apportionment Census results were 331.1 million. To be sure, this is a less than 0.5% difference, so no big deal.
This is the growth rate they projected, even in 2018:
2020-2030: 7%
2030-2040: 5%
2040-2050: 4%
2050-2060: 4%Those are full-decade growth rates. That’s before the pandemic has shaved our numbers down a little.
Would you like to know the growth rates from prior decades?
2010-2020: 7%
2000-2010: 10%
1990-2000: 13%
1980-1990: 10%
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 28 May 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack
Link: https://allisonschrager.substack.com/p/known-unknowns-905
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Is it just me or are people obsessed with tax compliance lately? I suppose it is part of this fantasy that high earners and corporations have enough money to pay for all our new spending – we just have to force them to pay up.
You know what might be simpler than jacking up taxes and doubling the size of a government agency? A broader base and simplified tax system that doesn’t leave so much room for getting out of paying taxes. Take the idea of a global minimum corporate tax. Sounds sensible enough; after all, you can’t increase the corporate tax rate too much because it is so easy to send profits overseas where taxes are lower.
But anyone who studied public finance can tell you there’s the tax rate and there’s the tax base. Generally, it is better to have a broader base and a lower rate. You get more revenue that way, and it causes fewer distortions and enhances transparency. Maybe we can convince OECD countries to set a higher corporate rate, but that creates a new race to the bottom to degrade the base. Countries will compete to offer more loopholes and deductions. And that seems worse to me.
Author(s): Allison Schrager
Publication Date: 24 May 2021
Publication Site: Known Unknowns at substack
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/mortality-with-meep-on-excess-non
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All of the excess mortality for age 85+ can be explained by COVID, essentially
Very little of the excess mortality for those age 15-24 can be explained by COVID
There is a lot of excess mortality for those age 25-44 not explained by COVID
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 22 May 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack
Link: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/con-of-the-week-greensill-capital
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In finance there regularly appears a character who stands on a soapbox and claims to have re-discovered the natural laws of the universe. Go ahead, jump: with 10 shares of Invest-O, you won’t come down! Alan Greenspan’s declaration in the middle of the first tech bubble that we might be in the middle of a “once-or twice-in-a-century phenomenon that will carry productivity trends to a new higher track” helped birth the “new paradigm” theory, which denounced caution before investing in companies without revenues or plans as anachronistic timidity.
Greensill prophesied a revolution in his erstwhile dull trade. He hammered the theme that “AI” and “Big Data” were bringing about a “tectonic shift,” described by one writer as “the biggest revolution in history.”
Author(s): Matt Taibbi
Publication Date: 19 May 2021
Publication Site: TK News
Link: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tk-newsletter-introducing-racket
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In 2007, before the crash, Goldman, Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein even inadvertently paid tribute to one of the most ancient scams — the pig in the poke — when he ordered subordinates to start selling off the mortgage-backed “cats and dogs” on his company’s books. This detail, which came out in a Senate investigation of Goldman’s “Big Short,” let the “cat out of the bag” about the real value of mortgage-backed securities.
In 2021, we’re seeing a surge in con-like corruption cases once again, many involving old-school ripoffs. An economy puffed up by the steroid enhancement of Fed support has led to a great flowering of such creative grifts. Some are not terribly accessible to non-financial audiences at first glance, so to make it a bit easier to keep track of new cases coming in, I’m creating a new feature, “Racket of the Week.”
We had a cartoonist draw up icons for a key system, which will help explain how and if the story covered contains elements of common street rackets.
Author(s): Matt Taibbi
Publication Date: 7 May 2021
Publication Site: TK News
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/mortality-nuggets-global-excess-deaths
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In particular, it is pretty clear to me that specifically in the U.S., the non-COVID excess mortality has been very high. I do not think that’s under-counted COVID deaths. I think it’s due to other causes. We’ve already seen that car accident deaths were up, even though total miles driven was down by a lot.
So yay for their statistics in grabbing the excess deaths, but boo for assuming all those excess deaths were COVID.
Now, results of COVID and COVID policies, sure, I’d go with that. But do you want to start digging into the stats of suicides, drug overdoses, “accidental” deaths, and more? How about deaths of neglect? I bet that is involved in a bunch of non-COVID elderly deaths.
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 18 May 2021
Publication Site: STUMP at substack