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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: John Vosilla who wrote (143182)8/26/2018 1:11:27 PM
From: Pogeu Mahone  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 219689
 
Will bitcoin exist in 5 years? 10% chance IMHO.
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Banking Expert’s Big Bitcoin Warning: How I Lost It AllBy: Rex MooreBack in 2013, Matt Koppenheffer bought some Bitcoin when it was trading at just $768. And he never sold.

Today, with Bitcoin trading at about $16,250(???)… Mr. Koppenheffer should be sitting on a 2,016% gain.

Instead, he has zeroand some big recommendations for those wanting to profit off the Bitcoin frenzy.

Matt Koppenheffer warns

What happened to Kopp’s coin?

Even though he never sold a single bit of his Bitcoin, the exchange he used, VirWoX, began charging account inactivity fees — in Bitcoin — that munched away at his balance until he had nothing left.

So much for long-term investing in Bitcoin, right?

Matt is a colleague of mine who was the banking and financial services bureau chief for the Motley Fool, and host of "Where the Money Is," one of the top-rated business podcasts on iTunes.

He recently showed me his account statements. It was amazing to see his balance head downward even as Bitcoin soared upward!

He’s a committed long-term investor who prefers not to check his accounts. And he simply overlooked the VirWoX fee.

Matt's big lesson, and a better way for buy and hold investors

As Matt told me, “Don’t make the same mistake as I did. It’s still the Wild West when it comes to Bitcoin wallets and trading, so don’t make any assumptions. Be careful!”

Look, Matt had it easy compared to others. Newsweek recently updated the story of an English man who accidentally threw away a hard drive that contained 7,500 Bitcoin — now worth over $100 million! (He’s still seeking permission to dig through 4 years of waste at his local landfill.)

All this — the fees, the weird ways of buying and storing cryptocurrency — points to Bitcoin’s big flaws. It’s just hard to buy and manage.

Newsweek says around 2.78 million bitcoins have been lost, in one way or another, since the cryptocurrency was created in 2009. That’s $30 billion… lost forever!

Not to mention the fact it’s extremely risky… just look at the massive sell-offs of 38%, 40%, and 29% in the past six months alone!

But thankfully, risk-averse investors need not shy away from Bitcoin’s big profit potential.

That's because The Motley Fool’s newest game plan is a savvy backdoor way to position your portfolio to capture the upside of the Bitcoin boom...

This new game plan -- just announced -- is creating a way to bring Bitcoin into the mainstream financial world.

So even if Bitcoin soars another 1,000%... drops 50%... or sits flat for the next year, this game plan could position you to profit so long as people are trading the digital currency.

This is an amazing opportunity! Just the other day, $9 billion worth of Bitcoin exchanged hands... That's twice as much trading as happened in the world's largest stock -- Apple!

But here’s why we’re so excited… as more and more Bitcoin exchanges open, we believe the volume of Bitcoin trading could soar even higher.

That’s why we at The Motley Fool decided to create a guide to help investors position themselves to potentially profit from this boom!

But please note: with the prices of Bitcoin changing at such a rapid pace and huge buy and sell cycles, you could already be missing out.

So don’t delay any further – click below to find out how to get your copy of our exclusive game plan.

It’s very telling that we couldn’t wait any longer to release these recommendations with potential upsides this MASSIVE.

Don’t miss out. We don’t want any investors to kick themselves for not being in-the-know.



To: John Vosilla who wrote (143182)8/26/2018 3:17:40 PM
From: Elroy Jetson  Respond to of 219689
 
Amazon.com has improved my life immeasurably. My God, Amazon is a dream come true. It's like having information online rather than having to travel to various college libraries.

Do you still miss having a bed pan under your bed before those evil flush toilets mostly put them out of business? The idea of time travel is fun in concept, but no shampoo and no flush toilets? No thank you!

Surely Amazon pays their warehouse workers relatively low wages, but better than Sears, JC Penny's, Macys and Walmart pay their workers.

Amazon has given me lower prices, almost infinite variety and things that come to me the very same day if I need it - and customer service that only a tiny minority of physical stores ever provided. Jeff Bezos has made a lot of money and is spending it all on space exploration. What's that to me or you?

The physical stores that I still frequent in my community are very, very good. You and they both know why they're going to be around decades from now. But who needs something like a Radio Shack? Bloated prices on low-quality merchandise - yuck! Or for a person like myself, who's taller than most people, a store like Macy's that never ever had my size in stock. To me it's only ever been a complete waste of real estate space.

What do I rarely buy at a Home Depot or Lowes? Things like paving stones that are really cheap and heavy or too large to ship. We even buy toilets on Amazon. The Container store too seems popular, selling huge oversized and inexpensive items.

The shopping malls which remain popular in Los Angeles are mostly restaurants, businesses offering services like watch repair or haircuts, a film theater and other entertainment. The one close to us is essentially a town square and park and people even go there to have picnics.

There's also stores that have only one of everything in every size - and when you like something they deliver it to you the next day, because the one item in that size is a display item, and you want a new unused one anyway.

When I was a kid, Moms would buy appliances at Sears and your clothes at JC Penny's when you were too young to be style conscious. Today they use Amazon and life is better.

If you bought Trump on Amazon at least you could easily return him for a full refund at no cost to you.



To: John Vosilla who wrote (143182)8/27/2018 12:41:30 AM
From: elmatador  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 219689
 
US student debt balloons past $1.5tn


student loan debt has grown by $500bn since the 2010-11 academic year


Politicians and policymakers fear rising burden is a long-term drag on US economy The overall size of US student loan debt has grown by $500bn since the 2010-11 academic year

The US student loan burden has swelled past $1.5tn despite actual lending volumes falling for more than half a decade, as struggling students fall behind on their payment plans and debt relief programmes fail to offer sufficient succour.

The overall size of US student debt has grown by $500bn since the 2010-11 academic year, according to a report by S&P Global, but the credit rating agency notes that loan origination has declined every year since then.

That has been caused by payment adjustment schemes that offer some short-term relief but add to the overall long-term burden by reducing the minimum payment without lowering the interest rate, according to John Anglim of S&P.

“By reducing the payments, they allow borrowers to stay current, but the balance keeps growing. That’s what we’re seeing now,” he said. “If the government is serious and concerned about growing student debt, then we need to come up with a broader plan rather than one that just helps a select few.”

Student debt has emerged in recent years as a big concern for American households, politicians and policymakers, who fret that the rising burden is a long-term drag on the US economy by stymieing the ability of people to buy a home or start a business.

“A significant portion of the millennial generation has gone bankrupt before it could start building wealth, which is a — still-unaddressed — threat to the long-term health of the US economy,” Vincent Deluard, a strategist at INTL FCStone, said in a report.

The US student loan delinquency rate — how many loan balances are overdue by 30 days or more that were not delinquent in the previous quarter — fell to a 12-year low of 8.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2018, according to New York Federal Reserve data.

a bar chart showing US student debt pile swells past $1.5tn mark



The decline is largely thanks to the strong economy and robust jobs market. The unemployment rate for graduates with a bachelors degree or higher now stands at just 2.2 per cent in the US, compared with 5.1 per cent for those with less than a high-school degree and 4 per cent for high school graduates who spent no time in college.

The size of the pool of bonds backed by student loans has also gradually declined, from $242.6bn a decade ago to $175.6bn at the end of the second quarter, according to data from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Nonetheless, student debt remains the worst-performing area of consumer credit. Brookings, the think-tank, warned in a January report that according to the default trends of past age cohorts, as many as 40 per cent of borrowers could default on their student loans by 2023.

There are various programmes designed to offer some debt relief, such as the “Revised Pay As You Earn” scheme introduced at the end of 2015, but these are in practice not helping whittle down the overall student debt burden, S&P’s report argued.

The rating agency said the failure of these income-determined repayment plans to whittle down the overall student debt pile was because of “misplaced” incentives that will in practice simply shift the burden over to the government.

“We underestimate how much this will cost the government over the next 20 years if it just has to eventually forgive them,” Mr Anglim said.

ft.com