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Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 18:32:23 :
In Reply to: Re: the snow ball is larger now posted by Kaegi on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 18:03:58 :
I agree with you about the bean counters and Wall Street types. These financial geniuses all want to push numbers around and figure out ways to be bankers without banking regulations. The last thing they want to do is run a stodgy old company that actually makes something. Look what they did to General Electric and Westinghouse. The both used to be heavy industrial manufacturers and now they're mostly holding companies and financial service outfits. Enron took it to an extreme, creating an unregulated bank disguised as an electric utility. I wouldn't call the whores, though. Whoring is an ancient and honorable profession that takes real skill, dedication, hard work, and business sense. Calling the Wall Street whiz-kids "whores" is an insult to whores. What those guys really are are confidence men, flim-flam artists, shysters, swindlers, and plain old lying sons of bitches.
I read an interesting article recently that explained how country after country has seen its world influence fail after it decided to focus its economy on financial services rather than on real manufacturing or trade. I believe they looked at Italy, Spain, and England, among others. Once the rich men of those countries decided it was easier to make money financing other peoples' work rather than actually doing work, it set in motion an inevitable course of events that ended up wrecking the country's economy and kicking it out of its position as the world's economic leader. No country has ever recovered from a downfall like that, and it looks like the US is headed exactly the same way, thanks to all those MBA whiz-kids and their credit-default-swaps, collateralized-debt-obligations, and a whole zoo of futures, options, and hedging. Their whole game seemes to be to turn bad money into good money (or bad debt into good debt) by hiding it in such convoluted and incomprehensible "investment vehicles" that nobody, even their fellow MBA whiz-kids, can really figure it out. Now that all these finance companies are "too big to fail" the government will have to bail them out so as to avoid a panic collapse. In 50 years, the US may end up like England -- a pleasant enough country with little freedom or ambition, but little risk either -- a nice place place to retire to, but not a country that anybody elsewhere in the world pays any attention to.
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