>I wonder how "Wall Street is not your friend" would play in the NY Times.
NY Times regularly publishes very critical opinion pieces on Wall St behavior.
Here's a particularly good one from last year, "When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers", Part 1 of a 5 part teardown on how PE firms have wormed their way into critical services in search of profits: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/dealbook/when-yo...
Ok not bad, but it isn't really fair. The real villains are not PE firms (people who play with their own money and don't care who they hurt trying to make more), but the commercial-investment banking empires (people who play with other people's money, get the world's cheapest, most unlimited insurance--err no: bail out policy, from a private bank that somehow swindled the American people into controlling its printing press (the Fed), gets direct financing from the Fed, are filled with collusion and corruption with government, and have the ability to destroy the entire economy).
After every election there are always the same winners: Wall St is one of the biggest ones.
PE firms do pretty villainous things. "Oh, burdened by unfunded pension obligations? Those are pretty much unranked next to debt, so sell off all the good assets to a carbon copy firm, default on everything, and pass the pensioners onto the government."
They do. They're just not on the robber barron level of the commercial banks, which steal truly unholy amounts of money from American citizens.
Reasonable people have put the cost of the financial crisis at 6-30 trillion, or more (6 being the lower bound of the Fed's very own estimate). The higher figure is $93,000/per citizen, and it very will could be more than that.(1)
That is only the start of the story. Ever wonder why your money devalues every day? That value is not magically disappearing due to some mystical force called inflation: someone is capturing that value.
Thanks to High Priest of the Harvard-Wall Street Order, Gregory Mankiw, the Fed even has an influential academic paper that craftily provides a logical dogma to minimize theft through seignorage, and how muxh the public really is being taken for.
There are good reasons people from Aaron Swarz to Milton Friedman really, really wanted to get rid of the Fed.
There are tons of nutballs who are convinced the fed is behind every bad thing. Where's the evidence that they are bad? I believe they are like wall street, insulated from normal life via controlling the money supply, and their goals might not help most people, just 'keep the economy going and growing' helps wallstreet more than main street.
If they were truly bad, I'd hear about it from respectable liberal and conservative speakers.
Remember when Obama was one of the few "respectable" reps to vote against the Iraq War?
Maybe that is not the best criteria, but anyways a lot of respectable figures have spoken out against the Fed, from Nobel Prize winner Friedman, to Aaron Swarz, to Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Grieder, etc.
Let me ask you something. So we know the financial crisis cost between 6-30 trillion, or more, so up to $100,00+ per every citizen in the US. The Fed's balance sheet ballooned to over 4 trillion.
So when the Fed turns on its printing press and buys assets, where do you think that Store of Value they are exchanging comes from? Do you think Bernenke and Yellen have pixie dust that magically assembles into productive goods or services? No, the value comes from hard working Americans who actually create value. If no one produced anything of value and exchanged dollars for it, the currency would no longer fulfil the technical requirement that money be, in part, a Store of Value.
So since we dont believe Fed Chairman have magical powers, this value the Fed is capturing must come from somewhere. And it comes from devaluing our currency. They're very simply dilluting (stealing) value from everyone who has dollars.
It is very literally the greatest heist in the history of the world, and it is right there, out in the open. Just like tragedies in history were tolerated by people of their time to the bemusement of us today, so have we tolerated this for some unholy reason.
> Thanks to High Priest of the Harvard-Wall Street Order, Gregory Mankiw, the Fed even has an influential academic paper that craftily provides a logical dogma to minimize theft through seignorage, and how muxh the public really is being taken for.
"PE firms do pretty villainous things" -- in whose name? Investors in many PE funds are often .... you guessed it: pension plans chasing returns for their retirees.
And pension plans can't be evil? All it takes is the guy running it to be immoral, and they have an incentive to be as it increases the numbers they are rated by
That is an excellent example, thank you for the link. In a related action I think switching my NYT subscription to Blendle does limit the amount of 'browsing' I do. Something I'll have to fix.
NY Times regularly publishes very critical opinion pieces on Wall St behavior.
Here's a particularly good one from last year, "When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers", Part 1 of a 5 part teardown on how PE firms have wormed their way into critical services in search of profits: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/dealbook/when-yo...