Posts tagged wall street
5:47 pm - Thu, Oct 6, 2011
35 notes
American government is often a kind of elective dictatorship, where politicians and bureaucrats feel that once they cast their ballots, the people should sit down and shut up and let those elected run everything and make all the decisions (even if those decisions clearly run counter to what the electorate was signalling it wanted). Thus, who could have imagined that by fall of 2011 there still had been no significant reform of Wall Street so as to forestall effectively a repeat of the 2008 crash? Surely such reforms were part of the change people voted for in 2008? But ‘legislative capture,’ the process in American politics whereby the industries and corporations regulated by Congress tend to ‘capture’ the legislators through campaign contributions, and then write the legislation themselves that regulates their industry, ensures that very little change can be enacted by Congress. Since elected government is in the back pocket of the top 1%, and since the top 1% is using derivatives and sharp practices to speculate with the public’s money and is throwing people thereby out of their jobs and their homes, it is only strange that more people weren’t on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday.
Juan Cole (via azspot)

(via azspot)

10:30 am - Wed, Jul 20, 2011

How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule

Despite the financial crash of 2008, the financial assets of America’s billionaires and the idle cash of the most profitable corporations are now at historic highs. Their biggest challenge is figuring out where to park all their cash.

Unfortunately, most of those who hold the cash and the corporations they control have lost interest in long-term investments that build and expand strong enterprises. The substantial majority of trades in financial markets are made by high-speed computers in securities held for fractions of a second. Business pundits still refer to this trading as investment. It bears no resemblance, however, to the investment required to put people to work rebuilding a strong America.

Corporations are using their stores of cash primarily to buy back their own stock, acquire control of other companies, invest in off-shoring yet more American jobs, and pay generous dividends to shareholders and outsized bonuses to management.

It was not always so. In response to the Great Depression, our country enacted financial reforms that put in place a system of money, banking, and investment based on community banks, mutual savings and loans, and credit unions. These institutions provided financial services to local Main Street economies that employed Americans to produce and trade real goods and services in response to community needs and opportunities.

This system, which Wall Street interests dismiss as quaint and antiquated, financed the U.S. victory in World War II, the creation of a strong American middle class, an unprecedented period of economic stability and prosperity, and the investments that made America the world’s undisputed industrial and technological leader.

In the 1970’s Wall Street interests began pushing a deregulation agenda that led to a transfer of financial power from Main Street to Wall Street. Wall Street’s mega-banks lost interest in real investment and developed a new business model. They now specialize in charging excessive fees and usurious interest rates, providing leverage to speculators, speculating for their own accounts, luring the unwary into mortgages they cannot afford, bundling junk mortgages to sell them as triple-A securities, betting against the clients to whom they sell the overrated securities, extracting subsidies and bailouts from government, laundering money from drug and arms traders, and offshoring their profits to avoid taxes.

The consequences include the erosion of the middle class, an extreme concentration of wealth and power, a costly financial collapse, persistent high unemployment, housing foreclosures, collapsing environmental systems, the hollowing out of U.S. industrial, technological, and research capacity, huge public and international trade deficits, and the corruption of our political institutions.

Wall Street profited at every step and declared its experiment with deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy a great success. It now argues for extending the same measures even further.

(Source: azspot)

10:32 am - Thu, Jun 2, 2011
44 notes
The twenty-first-century zomb­ies no long­er em­er­ge from the grave; they now in­habit the rich en­virons of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gil­ded monu­ments of greed such as Goldman Sachs. As an editori­al in The New York Times points out, the new zomb­ies of free-market fund­amen­tal­ism tur­ned “the fin­an­ci­al sys­tem into a casino. Like gambl­ing, the trans­ac­tions most­ly just shif­ted paper money around the globe. Un­like gambl­ing, they pac­ked an en­orm­ous capac­ity for col­lec­tive and economic de­struc­tion—hobbl­ing banks that made bad bets, freez­ing credit and economic ac­tiv­ity. Society—­not the ban­kers—bore the cost.” In this way, the zom­bie— the im­mor­al, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven “other” who is “hyper-dead” but still alive as an avatar of death and cruel­ty—provides an apt metap­hor for a new kind of aut­horitarian­ism that has a grip on con­tem­pora­ry politics in the Uni­ted States. This is an aut­horitarian­ism in which mindless self-gratification be­comes the sanctioned norm and pub­lic is­sues col­lap­se into the realm of privatized anger and rage. The rule of the mar­ket of­f­ers the hyper-dead an op­por­tun­ity to ex­erc­ise un­preceden­ted power in American society, re­construct­ing civic and polit­ical cul­ture al­most en­tire­ly in the ser­vice of a politics that fuels the friend/enemy di­vide, even as de­moc­ra­cy be­comes the scand­al of casino capitalism—its ul­timate humilia­tion.
Henry A. Giroux (via azspot)

(via azspot)

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