Occupy Wall Street: Not on major media but worth watching!

[Dudesome]

but it does not stop there; you claim such system cannot be changed by any means, because somehow it is inherently all-too-powerful and "uncorruptable" even. why is this? because the "evil jews" have a deal with the devil?

oh my fuck.... where??? when???? wooooow.....
you got some issues man...

Jews? I love jews i have absolutely nothing against them.
Fuck, man how could you take my words that way? Evil jews? What? Pfft. get the hell out

To my thinking you are saying something like: Hey lets use the whole facism system and just change some things so we can have the jews to be our friends.

it's a metaphor... don't you get it? eh. Guess not the most successful one.


you make me a saaaad panda

 

[In~Plain~Site]

Green sector could also be ripe for a bubble

 

[Dudesome]

Green sector could also be ripe for a bubble

I agree big time

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

wait whaat As I have said the debt grew... and what I meant was that the graph that you posted was not relevent because we need to compare to today, when those numbers are much taller.
As for 20/20 hindsight. Dude. I am looking at the big picture. Obviously you love to judge by shortterm and act upon it.

On the contrary, this is a big picture demonstration. The other graph referenced historical aspects. This graph shows that by 2019, half our national debt (including all 44 presidents) is attributable to W.

Obama's spending, along with all other presidents' debt will make up the other half.

Just imagine taking over somebody's failed business where you assume all liabilities. You can't book profit until you rectify the bad debt. If all your money is going toward interest on the bad debt, your spending will naturally push the red farther out.

Then, like a big ship in a small harbor you begin the process of turning around revenues vs spending - slowly. It doesn't happen overnight because you assumed so much debt.

Now you have board members wanting to wax your ass. They know your predecessor really wrecked the boat but they think it's their chance to float in a different direction. So they make out like you're the failure. Oldest trick in the book.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

... can you show me an example of how a government is good with money?

"Good" is relative. The country that responsibly regulates finance and investment banking will be better with financing than those that don't.

you are right though. to continue kicking the inevitable can down the road we are going to need another falsely inflated bubble.

Never said anything close. Hint - stop with the "I'm glad we agree" stuff when you know we don't.

you know like in the '90s when companies with losses on the books watched stock values soar and millionaires were created on the backs of wild "tech" speculation.

giving clinton credit for the surpluses of the tech bubble only works if you believe al gore invented the internet.

Here's where you drift to oblivion. The tech bust gave W a recession but it was relatively mild compared to the HW recession and especially W's housing bust. Suggesting Clinton's surplus evaporated with the tech bust is bullshit.

remember it was a bipartisan effort that removed the walls?
it was bi partisan effort that passed nfta,cafta,gatt et al

I won't humor your haystack when you pay so little attention to detail. Nobody's making blanket arguments here - except you of course.

followed by shrubbya and unfunded wars the largest increases in spending in history and a double down on clinton era "free trade"

here we have bushIII who economically and politically has continued to carry the water for BushI and II but somehow we expect the result to be different.

and the cheerleaders wont even acknowledge the government backing sub prime based mortgage bundles for the first time in history directly followed by a huge spike in the usage of the instrument had any effect...

some folks allow ideology to overrule critical thinking.

You're so wrong in so many aspects I don't even care to rebuke.

did you know the 700BB line of credit known as t.a.r.p. is still open?

It will be as long as regulation is watered to the point it's ineffective. The same banks that were bailed out expect the same to happen again if and when they tank - again. There's nothing in place to regulate the industrialized systemic risk in investment banking and no firewall between shysters and folks playing by what few rules remain.

 

[SpasticGramps]

If you add unfunded liabilities (off the books) to "Clinton's Surplus" it was not a surplus at all. Maybe he did better than the others, but he never ran a real surplus if you follow proper accounting practice. Something that Enron and our Government has a hard time doing.

 

[dagnabit]

oh my god what??????????

language barrier i think..
he misinterpreted your gist

 

[dagnabit]

"Good" is relative. The country that responsibly regulates finance and investment banking will be better with financing than those that don't.

yeah can't point to one would have sufficed

Never said anything close. Hint - stop with the "I'm glad we agree" stuff when you know we don't.

thanks for the hint
you disagree then?

Here's where you drift to oblivion. The tech bust gave W a recession but it was relatively mild compared to the HW recession and especially W's housing bust. Suggesting Clinton's surplus evaporated with the tech bust is bullshit.

try rereading.
i never suggested such.
only the boom in the '90s was related more to developments in new tech than government practices.

I won't humor your haystack when you pay so little attention to detail. Nobody's making blanket arguments here - except you of course.

You're so wrong in so many aspects I don't even care to rebuke.

course you cant *wont*

It will be as long as regulation is watered to the point it's ineffective. The same banks that were bailed out expect the same to happen again if and when they tank - again. There's nothing in place to regulate the industrialized systemic risk in investment banking and no firewall between shysters and folks playing by what few rules remain.

i would say i agree but you somehow would find that offensive..

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

yeah can't point to one would have sufficed

The US between '32 and '99. Largely, post WWII/ pre '99 industrialized nations who maintained a 1:10 fractional reserve.

The whole party blew up after we gifted financial markets less regulation (and substantially less enforcement of remaining regulations.) Not to mention the fed chief's major brain fart when he didn't apply the brakes while watching the private loans bus head for the cliff.

try rereading.
i never suggested such.
only the boom in the '90s was related more to developments in new tech than government practices.

Fair enough on the misunderstanding. So you're saying the revenue structure had nothing to do with sustained revenues, it was the tech boom that was largely responsible.

Sorry, the tech boom happened late in the Clinton years and sustained surpluses were already happening from substantial military cuts and welfare reform. Nobody's saying the tech boom didn't help the economy or the surplus. But the tech bust showed us that venture capital isn't always the golden goose it's marketers suggest.

i would say i agree but you somehow would find that offensive..

Yeah, the way you shred even primary concepts is pretty annoying.

 

[dagnabit]

Yeah, the way you shred even primary concepts is pretty annoying.

not my fault your "primary concepts" are so easily shredable...

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Far and away you shred the understanding necessary for rebuke.

 

[THE PABLOS]

....a good scrap underway....or are you really scrapping?

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Yeah, I recon we are. I'm all for differing opinions. But painting with a broadest of (strange) brushes, only to nitpick minutia to infinity is pretty aggravating.

 

[dagnabit]

no..
no scrap just bluff and bluster.

you remember the guy in high school who talked a good game in class then said "your not even worth rebuke" when it was time to put your game to the test?

yeah that..


back on topic:

About a year ago, The Wall Street Journal ran an article describing the plight of Americans struggling to rebuild after bankruptcy. The article highlighted Linda Frakes, who filed for bankruptcy after accumulating more than $300,000 in credit card debt.

"Ms. Frakes is now unemployed, living on $330 a week of unemployment benefits and odd jobs," the Journal wrote. Frakes "struggled to rent a home and buy a car after bankruptcy. A used-car dealer ultimately gave her financing on a Jaguar."

No one's hardship should be belittled. Becoming unemployed or losing a home aren't just financial problems. They're social and emotional problems that strike at people's sense of being.

But things always need to be kept in perspective. Only in America, I thought to myself after reading the article, can someone be driving a Jaguar and portrayed as living in an impoverished underclass. Context is crucial with these issues.

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have aimed their message at the income disparity between the 1% richest Americans and the rest of the country. But what happens when you expand that and look at the 1% richest of the entire world? Some really interesting numbers emerge. If there were a global Occupy Wall Street protest, people as well off as Linda Frakes might actually be the target.

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

That was the finding World Bank economist Branko Milanovic presented in his 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. Going down the distribution ladder may be just as surprising. To be in the top half of the globe, you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it's $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000.

Of course, goods and services cost different amounts in different countries. These numbers only apply to those living in the U.S. To adjust for purchasing power parity, those living in Western Europe should discount their dollar-denominated incomes by 10%-20%, Milanovic says. Those in China and Africa should increase their incomes by 2.5-fold. India, by threefold.

The global distribution figures may seem incomprehensibly low, but consider a couple of statistics you're likely familiar with: According to the U.N., "Nearly half the world's population, 2.8 billion people, earn less than $2 a day." According to the World Bank, 95% of those living in the developing world earn less than $10 a day.

Those numbers are so shocking that you might only think about them in the abstract. But when you consider them in the context of the entire globe, including yourself, the skewing effects they have on the distribution of income is simply massive. It means that Americans we consider poor are among some of the world's most well-off. As Milanovic notes, "the poorest [5%] of Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population." Furthermore, "only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile."

In short, most of those protesting in the Occupy Wall Street movement would be considered wealthy -- perhaps extraordinarily wealthy -- by much of the world. Many of those protesting the 1% are, ironically, the 1%.

This isn't to disparage the occupiers' message. Protestors are, I think, upset because so many of America's top 1% are perceived to have earned their income unjustifiably -- think bankers and bailouts. Most are not against inequality of wealth; they're against inequality of opportunity. As they should be.

But take a step back and put things in perspective. As Milanovic notes, "One's income ... crucially depends on citizenship, which in turn ... means place of birth. All people born in rich countries thus receive a location premium ... all those born in poor countries get a location penalty. It is easy to see that in such a world, most of one's lifetime income will be determined at birth." He continues, "it turns out that place of birth explains more than 60 percent of variability in global incomes." And there are few better places to be born than America -- even if you end up poor by American standards. If there is inequality in opportunity, those born in America are the ones with the unfair advantage.

As author Matt Ridley put it, "Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor,' 99 percent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television, 88 percent a telephone, 71 percent a car and 70 percent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these." Nor does much of the world.

Food for thought.

we are the 1%?

 

[dagnabit]

LMMFAO!!!!

we cant even agree on if it's a scrap or not...

i really do love you DB!!!
we may not ever agree on a single thing(except for MJ) but i think in person we would somehow get along.
there are some EPIC in person debates of this nature involving copious amounts of L with my oldest IRL friend.
we only came to blows once and he tried to kill me with a set of triple beams.

 

[dagnabit]

"only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile."

for some reason(my own ignorance?)this one surprised me..
i think of india as emerging and the plight of the poor lessening there. maybe just general media garbage..

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Definitely brings perspective to world poverty.

However, the top ten countries with the largest income disparity are industrialized. US has the highest disparity, only behind Turkey, Mexico and Chile.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/...ty_n_865869.html#s278234&title=10_New_Zealand

 

[flubnutz]

don't leave your best friend to fight the good fight alone ...

JOIN

Riot Dog needs YOU ​

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

photoshop dog needs nothing but attention just kidding

 

[SpasticGramps]

So is OWS going to hold Senator/Governor/CEO-Goverment Sachs/CEO of now defunct Primary Dealer MF Global Corzine accountable? If that's not Fascism then I don't know WTF is.

Will Corzine be another petite-bourgeoisie patsy? To be thrown under the bus Madoff style?

Someone Is Going To Jail For This: MF Global Caught Stealing Hundreds Of Millions From Customers?

Say you are the head back office guy at MF Global, it is the close of trading on Thursday, the firm has already completely drawn down on its revolver, and all the resulting cash in addition to all the firm's cash at your disposal in affiliated bank accounts, up to and including petty cash, has been used to satisfy margin demands due to declining collateral value, yet the collateral calls just won't stop, and impatient voices on the other side of the phone line demand you transfer even more cash over immediately or else risk default proceedings commenced against you within minutes. What do you do? Do you go ahead and tell your superior that the firm is broke even though the co-opted media is trumpeting every 5 minutes that "MF Global is fine", knowing full well you will be immediately fired for being the bearer of bad news, or do you assume that courtesy of your uber-boss being the former head of the Vampire Squid, and thanks to infinite moral hazard which after Lehman made sure nobody would ever fail ever again, that there is simply no way that you will be left without some miraculous rescue, if only you can last one more day, and as a result proceed to "commingle" some client funds with the firm's cash. It turns out that at MF Global you do the latter... over and over... until you have literally stolen hundreds of millions from the firm's client accounts in hopes that the miracle rescue will come on Friday... then over the weekend... and then you realize no miracle is coming, partly because your actions have been exposed, partly because miracles only exist in fairy tales. The next thing you know, your firm is bankrupt and hundreds of clients are about to learn that all their money is gone. Poof. This is not a fictional tale. This is precisely what very likely happened at MF Global in the past 72 hours. And someone has to go to jail. That someone, if indeed this criminal act is proven to have taken place, should be none other than Jon Corzine himself.

The sad truth of just how low Wall Street has fallen comes to us courtesy of the New York Times:

Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money have gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the company’s operations as it filed for bankruptcy on Monday, according to several people briefed on the matter.

The revelation of the missing money scuttled an 11th hour deal for MF Global to sell a major part of itself to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global, the powerhouse commodities brokerage run by Jon S. Corzine, had staked its survival on completing the deal.

As for the details:

What began as nearly $1 billion missing had dropped to less than $700 million by late Monday. It is unclear where the money went, and some money is expected to trickle in over the coming days as the firm sorts through the bankruptcy process, the people said.

But regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer money to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse. If that was the case, it could violate a fundamental tenet of Wall Street regulation: Customers’ money must be kept separate from company money.

And just like in the Lehman collapse where tens if not hundreds of international prime brokerage hedge fund clients, due to no fault of their own, found themselves insolvent after their cash ended up being caught at the London Lehman office (the details of how that money was illegally transferred from London to the US is a different topic entirely) and never to be seen again except to satisfy general unsecured claims, so thousands of MF clients are about to realize that money they thought they had, even if completely unencumbered with other assets, read pure cash, read money not at risk, is now gone forever, and they will have to wait years until the bankruptcy process determines if the claim deserves priority status to the unsecured bondholders. Best case: assume a 70% haircut on the money, if it is every to be seen again at all.

So who can be sued? Who can be blamed for this malicious and purposeful criminal act? Why everyone from the back office clerk presented in the thought experiment above, all the way up to the man at the very top, Jon himself, who, like in every other act of Wall Street impropriety will plead stupidity and deny he ever knew of this crime. Unfortunately, our criminal regulators, who will be just as complicit in clearing him of all wrongdoing, will aid and abet this latest destruction of faith in US capitalism.

What happens next? Why customers at all other brokerages, all other exchanges, afraid that their money will suffer the same fate as MF, even if they transact with perfect solvent clearers and agents, will proceed to pull their money, as they know they have nobody to trust but their own prudent and forward looking actions. Which in turn will start the kind of liquidity drain that killed not only Lehman, but froze money markets, and with that brought the complete capital markets to a standstill, only to be thawed after the Fed pledged multiples of the US GDP to rescue Wall Street in October of 2008.

And that, dear reader, is called unintended consequences, and how the bankruptcy of a small exchange can avalanche into a crippling Ice Nine of what is left of capital markets all over again, courtesy of crony capitalism, rampant criminality and a regulator and enforcement body that is more fascinated with midget porn than any regulating or enforcing of the very firms it hopes to get an assistant general counsel job from in a few short years.

If this movement doesn't Occupy both corridors of the Corpratist Establishment.

Wall Street and Washington DC. Then I can't take it seriously.