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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
James E Cayne of Bear Sterns had to sell all his stock and was left with a paltry $61 Million. Poor guy - down to his last 61 mill and doesn't know what to do. That my friends is what is wrong with America - Those at the top will never suffer the fate of the unwashed masses.
Link to NY Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/business/28bear.html
"the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005."
I take issue with the use of the word "earned."
How about quit depending on the government to "take care" of you and start taking care of yourself? This dependency on the government lifestyle is going to destroy this country.
I'll tell that to the nearest welfare mother if you'll tell it to the nearest defense contractor. Deal?
Please remember that as long as you have an Xbox360, no matter how 'bad' things get, you're probably not going to rise up as one, and lop off all the heads of the aristocracy. Given that, there's little you will do at all. You see sometimes inaction is its own safety brake. Else every time a blogger called for heads on pikes, a bunch of you would actually go out and do that. I don't recommend mass genocidal anarchy though.
As somebody who was an early pioneer in derivatives the capacity of Wall street to engineer products will far outstrip the capacity of the regulators to monitor them. Throw in bonuses, mark to market and investor greed we will continue to get problems as we are currently witnessing.
The only way to manage this beast is to insulate the "real economy" from the financial casino. Limit the the bonuses that can be paid by entities that use the government guarantee to attract funds, fence of certain activities in distinct subsidiaries and have stronger rules for the use of some of these new fangled instruments by banks and corporations and limit the amount of credit that can be extended by banks against these new types of instruments- banks are already limited in the amount of they can lend to a single borrower.
The net effect is that if a player in the financial casino gets into trouble the costs will be borne by the other players. Paradoxically we get a safer system by not regulating these instruments- once the participants realize that the government will not bail them out they will be more disciplined
Conservative and liberal economists are still arguing over what caused it and whether Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal fixed the mess or prolonged the pain
Given their track record over the last few decades and in the run-up to the Great Depression itself, I think it is safe to discount the self-serving opinions of conservative economists. The New Deal helped fix the mess, conservatives caused it.
This was posted on my blog
Monday, February 25, 2008
It is apt
All We Have Left Is Scenery
Yesterday, I cross country skied out my road through maples and pines then farther. The northern sun was muted gold against a translucent blue sky and I saw no one. In over an hour only three cars along the distant roads and not one human-being. All I meet were deer and turkeys and a hound, as I skied through miles of forests, orchards, and farmer’s fields, following snowmobile tracks leading from one natural gas well to the next, each barren, alone and silent, only one small sign.. Well A, Well B, Well C. The snow glittered...sparkled in the light...my backdrop, the frozen Torch lake and then miles of lake Michigan beyond. This journey cost me nothing but a lack of economic opportunity.
I worry for those in cities with their opportunity now going-gone or dwindling. Those who will soon have no jobs, or those who have been forced into three jobs to provide the income which use to come from one... Those who have been so easily fragmented by Carl Rove and his sort. Those who have no beauty and only Oprah to compensate them.
The Republicans, the Bushes of our nation have made Americans so afraid, and the Skinner box of their lives is making them crazy. It is much as Herman Goring said (to paraphrase) at Nuremberg before he committed suicide. “It is easy to get a nation to go to war, just tell the people they are under attack”.
I think of the wealthy enclaves, like the ruined Aspen, with its mountains still intact, but with most of its beautiful people gone, replaced by an immense airport and lines and lines of jets. And of places like the Yellowstone Club in Montana with its private golf course, its private ski lifts, and its private acres, its well trained guards, and hidden cameras. Bill Gates has a house there, he and others like him, and they will not even let the average citizen enter to drive about their miles of roads...roads carved out of national forest... The people’s forest, old logging roads, which now are private.
I wonder what happened to America over the last forty years. I cannot find the date when it became so bad that the elites felt so entitled that after fleecing the nation blind they also felt the need to steal the scenery. We have returned or are returning to the Gilded Age, and this is not good, not good at all. When Rockefeller was worth a billion and a daily wage was but a dollar. The people hated Rockefeller then, will we soon begin to hate the same men of today? It is possible but today we have Television.
Buck up, America, Buck up and take your country back, take it back from those who try to divide you and fragment you with abortion, and gays, and guns and terror. Buck up, don’t fall for it, or they may get their wish. And then you will be like those I saw sitting about Old Faithful last summer, waiting in a parking lot to see a spectacle that was no spectacle at all. A sickly geyser suffering for Viagra, when just miles away exists the Yellowstone club, with its land much more rugged and beautiful....land that you will never know of. Land that once belonged to you!!
Posted by Deeply Imbedded
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
