I hope for you US guys this also doesn't turn into a political party on steroids. I always thought 2 extra political parties would be good for the US, but I'd rather not have them at the fringes if I were an American.
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I hope for you US guys this also doesn't turn into a political party on steroids. I always thought 2 extra political parties would be good for the US, but I'd rather not have them at the fringes if I were an American.
Spoiler:
When "Wall Street" and big banks hand 10,000 low-level workers their pink slips, maybe they'll join the protests, too. :p
Nice poster though.
http://www.adbusters.org/files/image...all-street.jpg
That is a good looking poster.
50 of the "best" signs from occupy wall street.
Those are great, OG. :D
Between the little boy with the sign America For Sale, and the one about 'bring back Arrested Development'....there's the 84 yr old woman who's Mad As Hell.
(But the veteran made it clear how bad things have gotten.) :(
You know it's bad when Libertarians start marching
Excellent graphic. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Ziggy Stardust
Reminds me of some quote about the Grace of an Adult instead of the Brawn of a Bully. Something like that.
Will be interesting to see how this movement reacts when cold weather comes. Probably not too much of a hardship in NYC unless they get another weird winter with a foot of snow, unless the 99% includes the snow plow operators. Might see more of the "Occupy" in warmer climates after November.
Google earth showed over 1,400 US cities participating in the "Occupy" movement. And even Iranian "officials" apparently called out the "Occupy" movement as part of recent assassination attempts as distractions and propaganda. Heady stuff, if ya think about it. Continents away....
NO! When you noticed it is not when it started. The "Tea Party" started out, WELL BEFORE the 2008 election cycle, as a protest against perceived out of control spending in Washington by both parties. It had nothing to do with the health care reform legislation. That was something that came years later, AFTER the GOP had been co-opting and organizing it for their own use.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Citation? You might be right it started earlier than when it became "noticed". Can you connect that to when it became co-opted with millions of dollars from Dick Armey and Koch Brothers? Also, if they were angry about spending by both parties, how did they get drawn into the GOP?Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Wait what?Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Also J8888888888888888888888S
Because only the Koch Brothers listened?Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Potpourri for $1,000 Alex?Quote:
Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy
Merkel Says U.S. Reluctance on Financial Transaction Tax ‘Not Acceptable’
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...ction-tax.html
Pay for profits? That's unreasonable! And if you have enough profit you can sell it to the americans as unamerican. You guys crack my nuts. :haha:
Seems to me it's not about paying for being profitable, but paying for destructive and often predatory profits. The kind that almost took down the whole global financial system. Has any central banker, national secretary of treasury, comptroller of currency, SEC official, administration economist, congressman, bank or hedge fund CEO been prosecuted and sent to jail? Nope. Hell, we can't even manage to send Angelo Mozilo to jail. Plenty of prison room for those carrying an ounce or two of marijuana, though. Gottsta have our priorities and all that, see. :rolleyes:
Yeah, such a tax sort of takes the fun out of trades on superthin margins. The kind of trading that doesn't do very much more than make traders rich from the money of investors in good times and from the money of tax-payers in not-so-good times.
It wouldn't suprise me if such a tax would also reduce the need for oversight, which very obviously was not a strong talent in the parts of government charged with oversight.
Taxing something to get rid of it is bad policy. Right now the estimates from such a transaction tax are ludicrous. What's rich is the idea that such a tax will actually raise that much money and not drive trading away.
Quote:
A European Commission proposal for a financial transactions tax, set to take effect in 2014 and raise about 57 billion euros ($79.1 billion) a year, would set minimum tax rates for financial transactions throughout the 27-nation the European Union, the commission said on Sept. 28. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet has said a levy on financial transactions should be global.
I don't understand why the government can't create a bank tax that's calculated on two components: the size of the bank's holdings and the riskiness of those holdings. The larger the bank and the riskier its holdings, the higher tax. Make the tax just high enough to pay for a future bailout. Not only will this prevent the need to bail banks out at the taxpayer's expense, but it will reduce the incentive for large banks to take unreasonably high risks.
Do we really want to build our financial system around a set a government-approved risk measures? Isn't that basically what we did with the rating agencies?
Plus I would hate for investments like Goldman's stake in Facebook to be discouraged by a poorly-constructed risk/size tax.
The prospect of bailouts is a negative externality. I fail to see what's wrong with correcting for this market failure. As things stand, the riskier a bank's investments, the higher their expected income (because if things go well, they'll make more than more conservative institutions, while if things go poorly, they won't lose much more than those same conservative institutions). No law is really going to prevent financial institutions from engaging in risky practices, and we all know that large banks won't be allowed to collapse even if their risk-taking is to blame for their losses. So who should pay for these bailouts if not the institutions that are at the greatest risk of receiving them?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
I'd hate to see Goldman make money when their risks pay off and not lose money when they don't. Capitalism requires gains and losses, not just gains.
Hmm, an interesting suggestion, Loki. I think that there are better ways to address it than a tax, though, since it requires pretty complex definitions that will change with financial innovation. Why not just increase reserve ratios and stringency for larger institutions? Ignore the level of 'risk' as too tough to quantify, but just make any institution large enough to require a bailout (and thus have an implicit subsidy and a significant moral hazard problem) to insure themselves against a problem by requiring a much higher tier 1 capital ratio. There can be penalties for dropping below the ratio, which can be used to fund a 'bailout fund', similar to FDIC.
Another way to avoid the risk issue is to insist that banks spin off riskier programs (e.g. in-house trading) to smaller subsidiaries with no direct financial connection, which means their risky trading arms can go down without jeopardizing the bank itself. Something like the original provisions of Glass-Steagall.
(Separately, I think the idea of an EU financial transaction tax is a good way for other financial centers to make a lot of money, including the US and Swiss, to the detriment of the UK and a few smaller banking centers.)
I've always agreed on the issue of bailouts and moral hazard. As we can see, the financial system basically held the rest of the economy hostage and losses were socialized for a time. I remain uneasy with the bank bailouts in 2008, but also aware that we were backed into a corner. Still, I don't think some kind of "FDIC for banks" is really a solution here.
Wiggin is right that we probably don't have to invent new tools to mitigate systemic risk. I'm on the fence about Glass-Steagall, but higher reserve ratios definitely makes sense.
Er... isn't FDIC already for banks? Of course, all it does is insure deposits, not the solvency of a bank. But fundamentally it works pretty well - banks that do go under do so in a managed manner that doesn't burn anyone too badly, and it provides a financial incentive for banks to have good capital ratios.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Of course, we don't need to have that specific fund - in fact, I don't like the idea of having a permanent bailout fund. I'd prefer that banks be told that all bets are off for future interventions (even if we all know that true financial calamity will result in the Treasury stepping in again with something like TARP). But either way I think the best solution is regulation, not taxation (in this case). Fundamentally we should offset their risk subsidy by making their capital more expensive. The only alternative is to break up the big banks by force, which is probably not a good idea.
(I'm still astonished that there's so much controversy about TARP, BTW. If you strip out the auto industry mess, TARP saved our entire financial system on the cheap, and even with the auto companies, you're only talking about less than $20 billion. That's chump change for this kind of thing. The 'Occupy Wall Street' guys are complaining how there's this big bailout for Wall Street but no bailout for Main Street just don't get it. We've passed on the order of $1 trillion in stimulus that we're never getting back, the bulk of which went to Main Street - extended unemployment, tax breaks, increased spending on things like construction/jobs, etc. Compared to that, spending 2% of that amount to prevent utter calamity is a no-brainer. Now, I personally agree that the fiscal stimulus is too little and that current trends toward fiscal tightening are too early. But that's irrelevant to the basic comparison here.)
Yeah, I'm not sure if reinstating Glass-Steagall is a great idea, and it probably needs to be tweaked a bit even if it is put back. But I think that having some sort of mandated separation within a company between its riskier branches and it's boring 'plumbing' for the financial system is maybe a good idea. It doesn't need to be a completely separate firm, but perhaps have a separate division with a clearly labelled pot of money to work with that is separate from its other obligations. I'm not a financial wizard, though, so I'm not sure how this would be best implemented, or if there would be unintended ripple effects.Quote:
Wiggin is right that we probably don't have to invent new tools to mitigate systemic risk. I'm on the fence about Glass-Steagall, but higher reserve ratios definitely makes sense.
I mean an FDIC for the banks themselves and their creditors/stockholders, not the depositors. :)
A permanent bailout fund is indeed what Loki's suggestion sounds like, but I'll let him elaborate.
You are correct that anti-TARP people often forget that the US basically spent nothing/made money back to save the financial system. My beef is more ideological, that I wish bank employees (who were often heavily compensated in stock) had their company stock values wiped out. I understand why the TARP program shifted from asset purchases to stock purchases, but I think one could make the case that we were left with a semi-stabilized financial system and a good dose of moral hazard.
Where I think most people get frustrated is on the idea that they also could get back on their feet with some kind of large, government-run assistance. I don't think that's true at all, but it's what many people think when they look at the banks who have gotten bailed-out, already repaid the money and are now having occasionally good quarters. Of course, this morning's Goldman earnings loss release just now (and BofA's stock going below $6) certainly don't speak to them riding high.
Oh, I think the Occupy Wall Street protesters "get it". Being held hostage by the financial industry pretty much sums it up. Especially since our political system is linked in with money and big donors. This kind of bail-out would never have been undertaken for Education, Healthcare, or Infrastructure, which would be a better "investment" than propping up banks and investment firms.
State education systems already got a huge bailout in the stimulus bill. The problem is they continue to be a huge revenue drain, so they continue to be in crisis. So did construction workers (IE infrastructure) via the first stimulus. The auto companies also got a bailout.
Bailouts aren't really the solution here, that's the point. Which I think the protestors most definitely don't get.
But stock values of these companies have taken a nosedive, not least because their ownership share was significantly diluted by the Treasury owning a huge portion of some of these companies.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
Uhm... our federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on education, health, and infrastructure. Probably more than a trillion, but I'm too lazy to look up the exact numbers. That's far more than we've ever spent on the financial industry. (edit: and of course, as Dread says, there was lots of money for education and infrastructure in ARRA/etc. and quite a bit of money for healthcare in PPACA.)Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Dread and wiggin, I think you're both missing what the global Occupy protests are all about: anger that governments, politicians, banking financial and corporate $billions have done a crappy job at both managing "our" money and public services for The People (like better education and healthcare, roads and transportation, sound money, retirement savings, etc.)
So what you suggest is to burden all banks with the risk of merchant banks? That sounds like an even worse idea than taxing certain types of trades out of existence.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
Also, I don't really think we need to worry too much about other financial centers making profits on those trades, we (the EU tax-payers) won't be the ones bailing US and Swiss banks out when they miscalulate again.
It's a lot of backward looking anger though, and as such not really contributing a whole lot to the solution.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Not that I disagree with the sentiments though, not so long ago some bonus guzzlers in pinstrips would have been swinging from the lanterns. I still can't get over the fact that nobody is held liable for the monumentally wrong decisions that might still push the world's economy into the abyss.
Uh... what? That's not what I suggested at all. And also, I think we have different definitions of the term 'merchant bank'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazir
Total cost to the US taxpayer for bailing out Wall Street? Probably under $10 billion. Total business Europe will lose? Probably hundreds of billions a year. Just sayin'. If the UK is strong-armed into this, it's likely that a lot of their operations will move overseas.Quote:
Also, I don't really think we need to worry too much about other financial centers making profits on those trades, we (the EU tax-payers) won't be the ones bailing US and Swiss banks out when they miscalulate again.