Comments by "JP 72" (@739jep) on "The Plain Bagel" channel.

  1. He has interviewed many experts in various fields related to cryptocurrencies and has looked at what academic research there is on the topic. Did he say something factually incorrect that you can verify? He said Bitcoin has its roots in libertarianism, anti regulation and anti government - while that isn’t synonymous with the Austrian school of economics it’s pretty darn close. So it can’t be this point you think he was wrong on. He certainly didn’t suggest it was a Keynesian idea. Regardless theres little concrete evidence what ideology the creator of Bitcoin subscribed to, be it Austrians economics or otherwise. This was discussed recently on his podcast by a technological historian. The Austrian school of economics is like any economic school of thought, it has good ideas and bad ideas and the usefulness of these ideas changes as economies change. The Austrian school itself is, for the most part, narrative and makes it’s arguments a priori - whereas Ben being a researcher cares what the empirical results tell us and that is what he came to talk about today.
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  2.  @OK-Computer  he’s literally said that the markets arnt perfectly efficient. Market efficiency isn’t a true or false situation , it matters to what degree markets are efficient. He says markets are efficient enough , often enough , that investors should invest AS IF they were perfectly efficient. This is supported by mountains of evidence, which he discusses in his videos. That’s starkly different to how you represented his position.
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  3. And what’s the problem with having a trade deficit?
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  4. Or USA could simply honour their agreements and not betray their allies 🤷‍♂️ just a thought.
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  5. The country that is failing to honour their end of a free trade agreement is the one more open to trade? Good one 😂
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  6. False equivalency. Trumps plan is legitimately moronic.
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  7.  @ED_Valentin  trumps press secretary literally called them that. The White House seems to think they’re a tax cut to Americans and that foreign exporters pay the tariffs. USA elected a clown.
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  8. How so?
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  9. Trade balance is not necessary at all. In fact there are no perfect trade balances anywhere unless you’re talking about countries that just don’t trade at all with each other. They’re always offset somewhere else in the economy. You can be prosperous and grow all while running continuous trade deficits. You can also fail and slip into recession while running trade surpluses.
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  10. You don’t seem to have any knowledge of what’s actually happening ? Do you form all your opinions based on memes from maga twitter ?
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  11. That’s not what they’re doing - they’re charging extra tariffs across the board. The protections other countries had in place were agreed upon already , and the UsA had their own protectionist policies in place along side them. What they’re doing now is breaking their agreement and increasing tariffs substantially. It’s not even close to the same thing.
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  12. @ am I detecting a hint of the famous American exceptionalism? of course Canada benefits from the US , but the US benefits from Canada as well. That’s the whole point of partnerships. As for benefiting from military spending , sure , but you don’t think America position in the world both politically and economically has also benefited from their military spending? It’s not completely altruistic, not by a long shot. And many Canadians have died being pulled into Americas many pointless wars. When has Canada actually asked America to defend it from a foreign enemy ? As for the ports , the lack of manual inspections isn’t unique to Canada at all. The same thing occurs in the states. This is 2025. We rely on intelligence, risk assessment and scanning technology. We also have this thing called statistics , it enables us to make estimates about what is happening on a population level based on sample data. The amount of illegal drugs and firearms coming into Canada far exceeds that going the other way. As for Canadas geographical location , not sure what point you’re trying to make - you can say the same thing about lots of well developed countries. Ultimately, the shared success of both the U.S. and Canada is built on mutual cooperation, not one-sided dependence. That shared success is currently being threatened by the current administration.
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  13. They weren’t correct in principle at all.
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  14. You’re either a bot or an idiot. Which one ?
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  15. Gold was used as a unit of account and it was certainty not the first item to be used in this manner. Humans didn’t discover gold and decide to use it as money. Credit came first , and in early civilisations these were just recorded as obligations people had to one another (maybe not even recorded , only remembered) . It was only later when civilisations became more complex that humans developed ‘money’ as a way to measure the value of these obligations. Being defined as money in the constitution doesn’t mean anything in this conversation. The original constitution also treated people like property.
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  16. Yes that was Canadas attitude already ? Canada was the side honouring their agreement , America is the one turning their back on their agreement and betraying their ally.
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  17. The tariffs in place are in place for a reason and are carefully reasoned and agreed upon by both parties. US has their own policies that restrict Canadian exporters or give American companies artificial advantages. The difference is Canada honoured that agreement and USA did not. There’s no equivalency here - there’s clearly a party at fault.
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  18. There’s nothing really to address , because a trade deficit isn’t an economic loss like the president seems to think it is. It reflects respective economic size , consumer demand and respective goods and services each country needs and so forth. You can run a trade deficit and still grow. Tarrifs on the other hand cause economic loss.
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  19. That’s not true at all. You don’t ‘dump’ (like you have in the past) because of the well planned and agreed upon tarrifs that are applied at a certain quota in order to prevent dumping.
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  20. Watch him calmly and rationally communicate the truth more like 😂
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  21. Even if one day chatgpt became advanced enough to do this , it wouldn’t be a secret and everyone would rush to use it and compete away any opportunity for alpha anyways.
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  22.  @raylopez99  haha yeh I’ve always enjoyed that one. Too bad these days it’s not two finance professors finding the $20 dollar bill though it’s very sophisticated trading algorithms run on very large computers owned by very powerful investment banks. 🤷‍♂️
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  23. It is true that the same can be done for credit cards , gold etc but I think that was the point. The same problems that exist for those forms of money exist for bitcoin, just in some other form. Bitcoin was proposed by some to be the solution to this problem in these countries that have unstable governments , but in reality it’s still possible for these authorities to control your use of btc and other crypto currencies , because they can control ports of entry and exit to the btc/crypto market. They can control whether vendors can accept it as payment , they can control the exchange of btc for the national currency that is required to pay taxes , you even need an isp to have access to the market so they have some influence there as well. Until there is a technological development to fix these problems I don’t think btc will be of much use to these kinds of nations in the long run.
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  24. And how did Trumps ass taste ?
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  25. Market efficient is a model used to explain reality and using modern asset pricing models it actually explains reality quite well. It’s not perfectly efficient of course but nobody is saying that it is . Market efficiency isn’t an on/off switch , it’s a scale. To say that it’s inefficient is as uninformative as saying that it is efficient. It’s not like there 0 information present in prices is there? - what matters is how efficient is it and what it means for investors. Broadly speaking we consistently find in the data that investing ‘as if’ the market is efficient consistently outperforms investing strategies that attempt to systematically exploit inefficiencies. This is a pretty strong indicator that markets have a significant degree of efficiency.
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  26.  @gabrielleblanc353  you’re discussing something that has been proposed by a few financial economists. Prices are set by trading not by assets under mgmt - most of the daily trading volume is still made up by active investors , as the trading done with index funds is mostly within the fund and the net redemptions or purchases are the only thing that hits the active market. It also depends on what kind of information is leaving the active space. If more uninformed investors are leaving active share and becoming passive they’re even a chance markets become more efficient (at least in terms of how accurately shares are priced to intrinsic value) You’ll always run into the grossman stiglitz paradox when talking about this concept (another collab done by these two) - that is if less price discovery starts to occur and prices become more inefficient then this should attract active investors back to the market to take advantage of the inefficiencies , making the markets more efficient yet again. There’s always going to be some level of inefficiency to entice active investors to contribute to price discovery , but can the average investor profit from this ? It doesn’t appear so.
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  27. Market beta explains far more than 5% of the price variance of stocks. It’s meant to be used when analysing differences in cross sections of stocks (although yea there are much better models now) , not individual stocks. The problem isn’t the model but how it’s being used here.
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  28. For the same reason you might have harsh punishments for terrible crimes , even if those crimes don’t occur. Not the best analogy perhaps but hear me out. The tariffs are not effective in raising tax revenue or impacting the competitiveness of American producers , but that’s fine because that’s not their intent. They’re there to stop anti competitive behaviours such as dumping - and for that they have been effective.
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  29. Well put , that’s been my experience as well. They also tend to subscribe quite passionately to the Austrian school of economics. I can’t tell which is the chicken and which is the egg though. Obviously Austrian economics is older , but it seemed to get re popularised since btc was invented.
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  30. I think the credit theory of money proposes that money itself is credit , and the units of account that we use to measure and record credit , and transport it through time are ‘currencies’. Problems may arise if you use ‘commodities’ as a unit of account for something that isn’t itself a commodity , but credit. Just my thoughts , probably a better explanation out there - it’s a tricky thing to define 🤷‍♂️
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  31. Your country is the laughing stock of the world 🤷‍♂️
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  32. Trump doesn’t even know what a tariff is. The man is a complete buffoon as are his supporters.
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  33. The fentanyl and immigration ‘issues’ are non issues. They are smokescreens, there is far more illegal activity going into Canada from the US than vice versa. The only country practicing unfair trading practices in this instance is the US. Canada was honouring their agreement , the US broke it. Canada has been used by the US for defence. Canadians have died fighting Americas wars , Canada has never called on the US to assist them. In fact in NATO America is the only nation to have invoked article 5. Canada hasn’t. Canadians don’t hate Americans , they hate the current administration. Who can blame them, he’s threatening to annex them , he doesn’t respect their sovereignty and he’s started an unjustified trade war against them. America is betraying its allies.
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  34. And you’re going to look dumb doing so becuase Americas justifications for this nonsense are also dumb
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  35.  @drpapi444  I’ll tell you why , just need to know which of the justifications you’ve fallen for , and I’ll address those specifically - your president seems to change what they are every couple hours.
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  36.  @drpapi444  do you usually evaluate trade policies based on what you pay for gas?
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  37.  @uiliumpowell4684 Canada is fighting back. That’s what you have to do with bullies. If America wakes up and stops being stupid Canada will go back to being the good neighbor they’ve always been and supporting the US whenever they need it.
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  38. Do you believe every tweet you see ?
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  39. Everyone loses a trade war. Canada will lose. But so will the US.
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  40. Well yeh, basically. The two policies are not equivalent in the slightest.
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  41. @ because they are tariffs , just different rates, with different conditions and different products they’re being applied to. Different countries and states have different income tax polices too - they’re still income taxes. 🤷‍♂️
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  42. So you think trump should scrap his tariff plan then ?
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  43. Reasonable restrictions (when well thought out and agreed upon) make sense in order to prevent dumping or to level the playing field when foreign exporters have access heavy govt subsidies or practice unethical trading practices.
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  44. Maybe it’s cause they’re not a nation of idiotic assholes so not that worried about being attacked? Only time they’ve needed their military was to help others - and in recent years that’s been mostly the USA - so who needs who?
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  45.  @venusrise  it’s not a pointless fact , but being used for a really long time doesn’t mean it has a place in a modern economy. If anything is short sighted it’s that. Things change. Economies are vastly different to even 100 years ago let alone 6000. There’s many good reasons we went off the gold standard. Slavery was also crucial to economies for thousands of years , but nobody is seriously arguing for slavery to be a viable means of supplying labour today. If how long something has been around matters then credit has been around far longer than gold and continues to this very day. Saying money is credit makes perfect sense using that reasoning. ‘Gold is money.’ Only if we arbitrarily choose it to be used as money, there’s no outright physical or economic law that makes gold money. Money could be anything. The true value is in the goods and services that are exchanged.
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  46.  @venusrise  gold can be debased and has been as well - it’s not different to fiat currency in that sense. It has held its value in the long term , but in the short term it’s been volatile and not a great inflation hedge for individual savers and investors (citing ‘the golden dilemma’ by erb and Harvey) . What do you mean by working? While I concede there are advantages to gold over other forms of money , there are plenty of disadvantages. In what sense did gold work better than fiat currency? Every developed economy in the world didn’t leave the gold standard for no reason. Sure one ounce of gold may have held its value in relation to one dollar note , but it’s not like people are less wealthy now than they were during the gold standard. Incomes and wealth can and have risen faster than prices. Could we return to a gold standard now that the world economy is so financialised , exchange rates are floated and would individuals be willing to suffer periods of high unemployment for the sake of a stable monetary supply. A stable money supply doesn’t guarantee no inflation by the way , purchasing power can still be eroded.
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  47.  @venusrise  I agree that too much debt is a potential problem , especially fiscal debt. I’m not sure it can be claimed people are less wealthy , you said yourself that asset prices have increased. People are certainly way better off these days compared to even just 100 years ago. We could probably agree however that wealth distribution has become less equal however. As you pointed out , assets such as homes have priced a lot of people out of the market , and raising asset prices only increase wealth for those who hold assets. I’m not saying we should print money endlessly , there should be constraints - and there is.
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  48.  @jasonmaguire7552  my comments were regarding slavery’s role in earlier economies. It wasn’t a comment on the morality of slavery or colonisation , just acknowledging that it happened and likely played a large role in economic growth. Economic growth isn’t the most important objective humans should be pursuing.
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  49. Tariffs are by definition about trade. A republican starts the dumbest trade war in history by implementing the dumbest trade policies and you want to shift blame to communists ? The blame lies with the current administration.
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  50. @ whatever protectionist policies Canada has (I’m sure you think they’re worse than they actually are but anyways), it was agreed upon in the trade agreement that trump himself signed. America also has protectionist policies that were agreed to and you don’t hear Canada whining about it. USAs newest measures however are a direct violation of the agreement, and go beyond normal protectionist policies - they are predatory. Did you forget the threats to annex Canada and the lack of respect shown to Canadas sovereignty? Again … More open to trade? Good one 😂
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