This gives me hope, Karma is a B!tch

[GoPats]

GCD is absolutely right. Guys like the ones in the article were not the source of the problem. Believe me, the majority of those people are still doing just fine. It's always the lower tier who pay the price.

Forget the whole "Wall Street" background of this story. Similar tales are being told everyday from people in different industries who have to tell their kids some very bad news.

 

[Little_Bill]

Don't be hatin'

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Don't+Hate+The+Playa/Playette+Hate+The+Game

 

[kf4amu]

At least he gets a break to call his daughters. Many times pilots don't get a break to call anybody. And the Republic, Colgan, Mesa F/O's make less than him to boot.

 

[livin'thesim]

Want to know the real problem?

The problem was an over-reliance on the financial sector to provide work for the American public. The financial sector is a wonderful way of allocating capital, but it is important to understand that the financial sector does not PRODUCE any actual output.

Despite the high earnings and dividends for shareholders that makes it seem as though high finance creates wealth, it really collects commission (interest and/or fees) for moving money around.

Consider trading - it is a zero-sum game. At the end of the day, if you made 10% trading, collectively others lost the same amount. There is nothing inherently wrong with trading, but the fact is that it does not produce wealth. This differs heavily from direct investment in a factory, farm, medical company or any other PRODUCER. The over-exuberance for finance went hand in hand with the tech bubble and the housing bubble. When too many people think that a certain type of business will generate excessive profit, they flood into it.

Federal Reserve policy over the last few decades unfortunately helped exacerbate the over-emphasis on the financial sector. Politicians from both parties are very guilty of ignorance on this point.

What is happening now is the blow-off of excessive financial-sector activity. Many people, like the guy in the article will never be able to return to the financial sphere, or at least not anywhere near their previous compensation level.

People waiting for the end of the credit crunch for things to return to the way they were over the last couple decades will be disappointed.


The average American household's balance sheet is in terrible shape, even compared to the late 1970s. Consumers are encumbered with higher debt loads than are sustainable long-term. Since the debt load is unsustainable, it is logical then that it will not be sustained.

Mortgages and credit card debt are being defaulted on at record rates, and commercial real estate is now on track to follow. As a nation, we have passed the point of maximum credit, and now deleveraging must occur.

Recently, the total consumer revolving debt decreased for the first time ever. Households are no longer collectively indifferent to high debt. Personal savings rates are likely to increase substantially over the next several years as households find the joys of having a large savings account outweighs the joys of granite countertops and leased BMWs.

For a long time, the US has taken heat for its excessive (in some peoples' opinions) consumption.

Regardless of which side of that opinion a person is on, I think it is very clear that we have passed the point of peak consumption as well.

Households are rediscovering thrift and economy, and even if it costs us a bad recession to get there, in the end it may be worth it.

 

[Rez O. Lewshun]

Our Economy Is Going to Keep Tanking Until We Stop Shoveling Billions to Rich People

By Pam Martens, CounterPunch
Posted on June 2, 2009, Printed on June 3, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140394/


For the past eight months, we have been a nation focused on bailouts and bankruptcies. For the past ten years, we have been a nation ignoring massive wealth transfer and wealth concentration through a rigged Wall Street.

As simple and clear as this picture is, some of the brightest minds in this country are unwilling to connect the cause and effect of wealth in too few hands to bankruptcies and a tanking economy.

Wealth-deprived consumers can't buy the goods and services being produced. This leads to repetitive cycles of layoffs and growing unemployment which leads to more wealth-deprived consumers leading to more overcapacity in production plants, more layoffs, more shrinking purchasing power.

The accompanying, and equally dangerous, problem is that concentrated wealth stifles the very innovation that is necessary to create new industries, new jobs and lead us out of the downward economic spiral.

Let's think about the individuals who tapped into Wall Street's rigged wealth transfer system and what they have done with their ill-gotten loot: typically, they own three or more homes, fancy cars, multiple country club memberships, airplanes, yachts, and numbered offshore bank accounts. The problem is, they just can't buy enough to compensate for the purchases they have deprived hundreds of thousands of other consumers from being able to make.

Goods sit on shelves, new orders get cancelled, leading to production cuts, layoffs, plant closings and bankruptcies.

In a nutshell, it's the $1 Billion that Sandy Weill extracted from Citigroup as its former CEO and Chairman that's the problem; it's the $42 million condo he bought that's depriving 140 other people from having $300,000 to buy a home ready to go into foreclosure for want of a buyer. It's the hundreds of millions Weill is throwing around to plaster his name and his wife's name on buildings that could be in the hands of 10,000 consumers going out to buy Chrysler and GM cars now gathering dust on the lots of dealers about to go bust.

It's also that Sandy Weill and his colleagues of that era on Wall Street did not do anything worthy or smart in exchange for extracting that wealth from the system. They repealed the regulations that had kept the system on a more solid footing, then looted the system and left it a basket case. We have no residual benefits of innovation to compensate for all that missing wealth.

And that is the real and overlooked attendant danger: too many billionaires sitting atop too many billions tied up in mansions and yachts means that millions of budding innovators and entrepreneurs are being deprived of adequate funds to create the breakthroughs that will lead to new industries and future job growth.

And let's not forget about the trillions of dollars of wealth that evaporated in bogus ventures that Weill and his fellow Wall Streeters brought to market on NASDAQ. Add those trillions to the bailout trillions and you're looking at a lost generation of funds for innovation.

What all of this means is that President Obama has precious little time left to stop rewarding failure and bad behavior before his own Presidency is deemed a failure. It was difficult enough to countenance the reappearance in his administration of all those Wall Street faces who failed to rein in the Wall Street abuses or, worse, aided and abetted the actual creation of the opaque system that permitted the looting and pillaging. But this past week's news that the President might be considering a pivotal role for the Federal Reserve in the new regulatory structure planned for Wall Street crosses the line, if true, from hubris to outright contempt for the American people.

The inherent cronyism of the Federal Reserve renders it utterly useless as a watchdog. (Why is it even necessary to have to state that obvious fact when no one can shake loose from the Fed what it's done with trillions in taxpayer dollars or why it failed to police these Frankenbanks in the first place.) The same thing is true of the U.S. Treasury, which can't auction its own debt without the goodwill of its Wall Street primary dealers.

According to March 31, 2009 data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there are 8,246 FDIC insured institutions with total assets of $13.5 Trillion and domestic deposits of $7.5 Trillion. Four institutions, Bank of America Corporation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc., four institutions out of 8,246, control 35% of all the insured domestic deposits and 46% of the assets according to the March 31, 2009 figures from the FDIC.

Has the Federal Reserve taken steps to reduce this massive concentration since the financial crisis began? Quite the contrary. Bank of America was allowed to purchase the investment bank and brokerage firm Merrill Lynch as well as subprime lender Countrywide Financial; JPMorgan Chase took over the investment bank and brokerage firm Bear Stearns as well as Washington Mutual; Wells Fargo & Co. took over Wachovia.

The Federal Reserve's answer to concentrated wealth is to concentrate it further. The Federal Reserve's answer to unmanageable, dysfunctional banking institutions is to make them more unmanageable and more dysfunctional.

President Obama needs to do three things quickly to get the country back on course: he needs to separate investment banking/brokerage from commercial banks. This will restore risk taking and innovation to where it belongs, in non FDIC insured institutions. He needs to put new faces that Americans can trust in charge of real regulators with real powers. He needs to stop funneling money to zombie institutions that haven't created anything of innovative value in a decade and channel those funds into innovative research and development projects.

President Obama needs to step up to the plate and stop listening to conflicted advisors. The fate of a nation, as well as his place in history, hangs in the balance.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be reached at [email protected]
© 2009 CounterPunch All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140394/

 

[livin'thesim]

Fractional reserve lending is a big part of the problem, and one that is little understood by most.

The deregulation of the financial sector has been a major reason why so many people are poor.

From the previous post, a home could never even reach $42 million without the financial system we have in place.

The equitable distribution of wealth is another important issue, but without examining the issue of how and where money comes from, it is impossible to correct inequities in the distribution of wealth.

Most people don't know where money even comes from; open up your wallet and take out a $1 bill.

When did that dollar get called into being? Not printed, we can look at the date to find that out.

But when a dollar bill gets printed, it is often replacing an old worn-out one. how about the dollar you have? Is it a replacement, or a new dollar that never existed before?

The way in which the Treasury creates money is the reason why we have so many citizens struggling to get by.

I recommend a paper called "The Mystery of Banking", by Murray Rothbard. It is in .pdf form, and easily found with google.

 

[Max Powers]

As used as an excuse on the other thread, well "that's their job." I do not go along with the idea that "greed" got us in this mess, although it was a contributing factor and the Press is sure hesitant to blame the real causes:

• Folks buying houses they could not afford then deciding simply not to pay back the loans (although many have the ability to pay) once the investment went upside down.How is this not "greed". THen ask yourself how they got approved for those mortgages? The answer: Greedy banks/mortgage brokers gave them the loans anyway they could(lie about income etc) then sold the loans in the form of CDO or collateralized debt obligations to unsuspecting countries/investors; but not before morning star lied about the credit rating of these CDO. If that Ain't greed i don't know what is.
  
• The government failing to enforce the rules that were on the books, despite repeated warnings. The number of notices the regulators received on Madoff with no action taken is just astounding. That IS the government's job. They simply were too lazy and too incompetent to perform the task. Madoff and Standford weren't greedy either than? What is your point?

Frankly, we need ambition to get us out of this mess. We need people to produce, sell and buy with the intent of making money. A socialist government with a communist economic system will work about as well as it has in Russia. For a better reference, look at the change in the Southern Philippines since the Americans left.

By reading your last paragraph I can now see you are a Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh butt buddy. Please carry on, sorry I wasted my time on you........You can go back to fox news.

 

[Scope out RJ's]

By reading your last paragraph I can now see you are a Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh butt buddy. Please carry on, sorry I wasted my time on you........You can go back to fox news.

And you back to the fractionals forum.
But please, do stop back when you have less time! I'm sure the guys/gals at flops are waiting for you!

 

[livin'thesim]

Max powers-

It was a failure on the part of congress for years to stop the imbalances, both parties were at fault.

And I'm not sure that saying that we need to become a manufacturing powerhouse again is all that partisan of a comment. Manufacturing gives a nation's currency its value.

And some level of free markets is needed to encourage business. Should businesses operate without intent to make a profit?

 

[samballs]

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=7111098&page=1

Heres another one, deserved what he got. Screw USA, save no money, overspend, you deliver pizza