Maybe a consumption tax with broad exemptions for necessary goods like food, clothing, shelter, etc would be a nice way of dealing with the issues people seem to have with others having wealth.
Billionaire heirs use the inheritance to buy a yacht, big tax bill, mostly use the inheritance to continue funding things that are generally good for society, smaller tax bill.
I don't care if a rich person buys a yacht or not, it's their money and after they've paid the tax they can do whatever they want. The wealthier you are you should pay more tax regardless of how you use the money. Consumption taxes just make it harder for regular people to afford things they want; the wealthy won't care that a luxury bag with 1000% profit margin has an extra 10% tax on top.
There's already exemptions for both income and estate tax for donations to charities or governments to benefit society. It's possible to set up a private foundation, with some additional guardrails to prevent abuse, if you want to give the money directly to people that need it.
Just a friendly reminder that this figure is only true if you attribute the emissions from those companies customers back to those companies. It doesn’t make sense to me that my emissions should be attributed to Shell or Exxon, but to each their own.
But then, doesn't that mean everyone with coverage pays for it?Insurance pays for it, and everyone with coverage pays for these high costs through high premiums -- public healthcare in Canada doesn't pay for drugs, and even without insurance the cost of those drugs tends to be substantially cheaper, at least in the few scenarios I've been exposed to.
I mean 225,000 Americans are on it, and multiply that by 1400 x 12, and you're already way past Truvada's global annual revenue. The numbers don't work out.
Americans do subsidize European and African prices though, there's no doubt about that.
More likely it means you pay (or more appropriately, your insurance company pays) the negotiated rate, which is often far, far less than the published retail cost of a medication.
Those big monthly $$s get investors excited tho.
This is to say nothing of the public / private debate.
Actually, I believe his point is that the probability distribution is from the Cauchy Distribution, where the mean, the variance, and the kurtosis are all undefined. In fact, you're providing an example of exactly what he writes about in believing that the tools being taught in "freshman econometrics" apply to the sort of randomness you encounter in the real world. Certainly Mandelbrot has had some things to say about this topic as well.
When basic financial tools and theories are based on assumptions that are Just Plain Wrong, it makes you question the gigantic stack that has been built on top of them.
It's easy enough to dismiss this stuff as worrying about edge cases, but these edge cases occur more often than the theory dictates, and unfortunately, people underestimate their impact.
You're right about him preferring a Cauchy distribution vs. a leptokurtotic distribution, I was mistaken.
Taleb argues that these tools aren't being used in the real world, but all the evidence in places like the options market seems to indicate otherwise: options get way more expensive (from a lognormal perspective) the deeper in/out of the money they are, primarily because there are fat tails already being modeled into the price. And given that options market data, it's tough to see how going long on Black Swans will fetch a good Sharpe ratio--which wouldn't be the case if it were true that everyone were slaves to normal distributions.
Yeah what you described is called the volatility smile.
I would say going long on Black Swans is more of an insurance policy unless you are a VC. As the Taleb advised Universa Investments L.P. sells itself as "an investment management firm that specializes in hedging tail risks for its clients. Universa has a focused investment approach employing positively-skewed payoffs, empirical and fundamental-based option valuation, and order flow trading."
