#trust benefits

[willsandtrusts]

Are you contemplating ways to manage your assets, ensure they're preserved for the future, and provide financial security to your loved ones? If so, setting up a trust could be the ideal solution. A trust is a legal arrangement that allows you to transfer assets to a designated person, a trustee, who will manage those assets for the benefit of another person or a group of people, known as beneficiaries. This article will guide you through the process of setting up a trust in the UK.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The musical episode.

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[sealaficionada]

Look at this nascent researcher! They look so earnest!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.

This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.

When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/

Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.

The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.

Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.

This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:

https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/

On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens

Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @pixelpusher220@dmv.community says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:

https://mamot.fr/@pixelpusher220@dmv.community/112457199729198644

The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble

That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.

Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/

Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.

For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3

Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:

https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.

This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.

Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":

https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf

The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.

In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.

But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud

In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.

The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks

Also in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

As does public housing:

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias

There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Abso-fucking-lutely vibing with World's Finest: Teen Titans' addition of Karen as one of the founding members.

Because good fucking god, before this the team was two demigods, two billionaire teens and a Normal Kid™ in neon yellow BUT NOW?! Now it's two demigods, two billionaire teens and TWO Normal Kids™ in neon yellow!

No but seriously though Wally is the only one who has to like... mow the lawn and watch his neighbor's cat when they go away for the long weekend. He's the only one who knows how to mail a letter at the post office and how much pencils cost at a book fair. He's got superpowers and terrible parents and yet somehow he is the MOST NORMAL ONE THERE.

Which speaks volumes about the rest of them tbh.

But now!!! Karen and Wally get to be nerds ✨together✨ and they get free tickets to watch the trainwrecks that the other Teen Titans call life

Seriously though I think these two are aggressively trying to be friends with each other while also roleplaying their 'cool guy' hero personas, which is extremely funny to me. These two are absolute nerds with no friends in school and they are DESPERATE for a friend and they've just met but they've both decided "Yeah that one. That one is friend shaped"

Wally: you move too slow

Karen: learn how to fly dumbass

Anyway I love them

[dlartistanon]

SAMUEL HAS ME IN A VICE GRIP

[nico-moist-moses]

Please don't take mental health advice from the emotionally constipated man, Dipper

[miabucky]

just read an interview from the director about how we’re apparently supposed to LIKE john walker. THAT was them writing him as likeable. maybe it’s just wyatt’s acting or something but i have never been so put off by a character in my entire life. the villainy just radiates off him. unsettling costume self-righteous attitude violent outbursts literally written like every fascist extremist ever. and they want me to pity him ?? to find him likeable or fucking redeemable?? FFFFHDJNE like i have absolutely no history with that character i have no reason to dislike him other than the fact that he is so deeply unlikable. i know “likeable” is a personal opinion but mostly im concerned for the people that like him. i genuinely cannot comprehend what people saw in him in that show to make them like him. as a person, not as a character. he’s a really cool villain and everything i’m just confused that people are treating him like a victim or a straw man. he used lethal force on civilians. he wanted to use sam and bucky to legitimize his claim to the throne. he sees that shield as a symbol of patriotism to a broken nation, a military, not to people. he feeds into every negative stereotype about captain america that steve refused to bow to. he is the american imperialist that the military wants, that steve would never be because his heart is too full of altruism to have any room for ego. the foundation of captain america is the idea of being a good man. without that, captain america is just another tool for the military industrial complex.

[vvvincentzzz]

How come the most breathtaking beautiful pretty heavenly ethereal wonderful smart intelligent popular nice sweet caring girl ever told Teru they're engaged and he just :> while the ugliest mustiest loser freak insulted him and he looked like he has never been more in love I am sick of them

[nnayomaise]

i think the thing that really gets me about all the "we've got to kill this guy kabru" meme redraws with mithrun is that in the very first conversation mithrun has with laios, he trusts him with, essentially the fate of the world and his life long revenge quest against the demon

[rosekasa]

something that absolutely changed the way i approach goals was realising that it's never the thing that you want, but rather the feelings that you believe it will give you. without striving for those feelings, the thing is not going to make you happy.

for example, until i was eighteen i would daydream about having a Real Best Friend. like i wanted my disney channel bff you know?? and getting older felt a lot like 'okay it'll happen when i get to secondary school' 'okay it'll happen when i get to sixth form' 'okay it'll happen in fandom' and it just. never did. i kept getting sucked into friendships that made me feel shit about myself while all the people that seemed to want to be close to me would, for some reason, make me feel uncomfortable. but it was at the point where i was like, okay. what do i really want from a friend? is it the actual object of A Friend or is it what i feel like A Friend would allow me to do? so instead of looking for that Real Best Friend, i started allowing myself to feel like i deserved a Real Best Friend. i stopped deleting my messages even if i thought they were embarrassing, and i stopped worrying that people would think im annoying if i messaged them first, and i stopped being scared of being 'too much' whenever i shared my interests.

and you know what? within two months i GOT that Real Best Friend. within a few more i had Multiple of those Real Best Friends. it's been three years since that shift in my life and it's like All my friends are like my disney channel bff friends -- they genuinely care about me, they genuinely like me as a person, they invite me to their houses, they cook for me, they buy me random things when they think of me, and most of all they make me love myself more, when for my entire life the trade off for a friendship always felt like i had to hate myself a little.

idk. i just think it's worth remembering that the feeling of something is the most important thing to strive for. a thing without feeling is nothing

[randomtextxx]

dont mind [haha] me. just testing something out

silly

[lewisinho]

1+1 deal was a slap in the face, and on top of that denying him an ambassadorial role is verging on absurd…what merc was playing at i do not understand and i’m glad lewis made the decision on his own terms before he was going to be (what looks like from what toto has been saying) miserably discharged at the end of 2025

[edorazzi]

JOSIE I'M SO EXCITED FOR A MATTER OF TRUST!!!!! I'm pretty sure you're the one who led to me finding out about the PV and being curious about it and the characters, and even though I don't watch Ladybug any more, I still love the characters and the way we understood things in 2015/2016, and so to see the Mentor AU get a HUGE piece is HUGE news and make me feels HUGE happiness and respect for your skill and talent!!!!! I'm SO EXCITED TO READ IT THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

Eeeee, thank you so much!!! I'm thrilled to finally have this comic ready to go after working on it so long, and the responses just to the title/character pages have been amazing! I had no idea people would be so hyped for it! ; u ;

The majority of A Matter of Trust takes place in 1999 and adapts the PV into that time period, and I purposely capped the "modern day" at 2015 before canon got so huge and complex - it's my love letter to the early Miraculous fandom (as well as Felix's character and the difficulties of being neurodiverse) and I hope people can feel that! ❤️

[stoat-party]

Data from Vault 95 confirms that The Chair is not a magical-fix-all-your-problems machine — at the very least, it can’t cure the psychological side of chem dependency. It’s not stated in Cait’s quest because of fo4’s aversion to loose ends, but her story definitely isn’t over. (She references this if you do drugs in front of her afterwards.)

I think the next step for Cait is going to have to be expanding her circle of trust past The Player Character (All Hail). The Sole Survivor is wonderful and their relationship is lovely, but they have a lot on their plate, what with being responsible for every political and personal issue in all of Boston.

But… the team has a former addict on it! It’s Deacon! (Unless he was lying. Honestly it’s 50-50. We’ll assume for now that he wasn’t.) We also know that Hancock is really supportive about addiction! I really like the thought that he stops doing/talking about drugs around Cait (or Mama Murphy)(or the kids for that matter). Preston and Piper aren’t bad about it either. Other companions… well, we don’t see how they handle it past the intervention stage. I’m sure they try.

If I knew more about addiction, I’d write about how Cait handles it all. But I definitely do want to write more about the companions supporting each other, because the game’s limitations leave a lot of room to explore that.

[zeb-z]

“Red team was so selfish looking past the cursed team like that” listen man they were thinking about it often, and had evidence they were cursed too. They were convinced they were cursed too. Bad (with Pierre’s help I’ll be honest) singlehandedly destroyed any sort of civil relations and good faith between the two teams and this shot Blue in the foot when they tried to make the case about them being cursed last minute, about trying to rig it in the cursed teams favor.

There was never a cursed team in the first place, it was all a tactic to build paranoia and that feeling of betrayal and to get them to tear eachother a part. And it worked super well! At the end, neither would listen to the other about their evidence, not with an honest open ear, not with the willingness to think the other team could be cursed. It’s not a case of ‘Red just refused to listen because they wanted to win more than they cared’ they thought they were cursed too - if they were selfish, then so were Blue in the same way.

Every time Red had tried to talk first early on, it was met with extreme violence - and with Bad consistently proving he’ll play dirty to win, they didn’t trust Blue enough to listen to them in the later game. Maybe they should have listened then. Maybe Blue have listened earlier. The game worked as intended to set them against eachother.