After Hours

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Occupy Wall St.

0 helpful
162 replies

by av .

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

This is page 2 of the discussion. Read the opening post

162 replies

by av .

Reminds me of the antiwar sit-ins from the 60's.

I'm not surprised that everyone has a different story. We all lost a lot in the financial meltdown and now we know that the banks gambled our collective future away with a nod and a wink from our government officials.

I think OWS is like the Tea Party because they are protesting, but they have different motivations. OWS really doesn't have a clear message yet. Looking at some of the protests in NY, it looks like a prolonged Woodstock kind of event.

It'll be interesting to see what they do when it gets cold out.

AV

by charliespencer

I haven't lost a penny yet.

No, I'm not getting as much interest on my savings deposits, but that's not losing money. That's just not making as much as before.

My 401K is down, but that money isn't 'lost' until I begin to draw it, and that won't be for another decade, at least. With the company's 25% match, I'm still ahead even after the market drops.

The value of my home is off a couple of percent, but I had the good economic sense to not let someone talk me into a house I couldn't afford, and I owe about 80% of what it's worth. I'm not even out that couple of percent until I sell, but since I never planned on turning it over as an profit-generating venture, I can easily afford to wait until it recovers.

Indeed, since I refinanced two years ago, I have MORE money available each month. Does that put me in the 1%? No, but not everyone in the remaining 99% has suffered.

by av .

In the 2008 meltdown, they did it with CD swaps.

No one should ever forget what the banks allowed to happen in the past. There were a couple of smackdowns for illegal activities, but no mass perp walk for the financial crimes that sank our economy. There should have been.

Personally, I don't feel that any of us have justice for what happened to our economy. Our lives.

AV

by jp85257

This just shows how Government intervention into business hurts all of us. I wonder how bad the entire situation would have been if banks weren't forced to give loans they knew wouldn't be paid back because the Government decided that it was a "right" for everyone to own a home.

by delbertpgh

Conservatives are blowing a lot of smoke around about how government caused the banking crisis by making banks underwrite poor people's mortgages. Bill Clinton's administration did encourage banks to lend to poorer people, on the grounds that (1) the poor would be more likely to work hard and behave better if they had their own homes, and weren't just paying rent; and (2) banks had been systematically avoiding borrowers in disadvantaged black neighborhoods for decades. (There was conservative think-tank support for this plan, by the way.) The loans were guaranteed by Fannie Mae and other semi-governmental agencies. That much of the story is true. However, there just weren't enough poor people who couldn't afford their loans to cause a problem the size of the crisis we experienced. Think about it for a second. It doesn't add up.

What was the real cause was a ten year boom in real estate prices, followed by ten more years where prices boomed even more wildly. It wasn't poor people who made ordinary houses in Las Vegas worth $400,000, that now sell for $90,000; it wasn't poor people responsible for a third of American homeowners' mortgages now being underwater. Prices boomed because banks shovelled money into the market, encouraging people to buy and flip homes to drive up the prices, or to make cash-out refinances. Banks were making loans to anyone who could sign a piece of paper, and millions of unqualified borrowers joined even more millions of steady payers who simply borrowed over their heads. Banks were loaning at up to 40 times their capital. The government had given up on trying to keep banks from going into risky businesses, on the assumption that bankers were too wise to act dumb. Hah.

Here's an article, refuting the blame-Fannie-Mae thesis.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jul/13/why-fannie-and-freddie-are-not-blame-crisis/

Here's a picture show, from 2008, showing how the house of cards was built and collapsed.
http://www.slideshare.net/kjain.nitin/sub-prime-primer-1468663

Conservative thinkers, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and Washington politicians spent the last 20 years in a kum-by-yah circle, holding hands and singing about the greatness of capitalism and the infallible wisdom of the great mother market, which would make sure everything was priced correctly and made bubbles impossible, and otherwise behaving like a bunch of silly economic amateurs. And all the time, the fees kept rolling in. They had such a good time singing and taking money from people that they are still trying to keep it going, making up stories about how some socialist somewhere could be blamed for trillions of dollars of disaster. Don't believe them.

by jp85257

Conservative thinkers like Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Gregory Meeks, Lacy Clay, Arthur Davis, and a host of other Democrats who blocked any attempts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from 2001 through 2005 even though they knew there were huge problems with both of them that were only going to get worse?

by delbertpgh

You are correct that Democratic politicians entrusted with oversight of Fannie did fail to keep it out of bad investments. Fannie and Freddie did stay clear of the worst stuff, unlike institutions like Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia... firms that were all privately owned and managed, all well respected and immensely rich, and have all disappeared from the business landscape due to reckless behavior. Their failure had nothing to do with government encouragement to loan to poor people.

And, you say the politicians "knew there were huge problems... that were only going to get worse." I'd say instead that the politicians found it more pleasing to believe that property values would shoot up forever and that people could get rich by buying and selling their homes to each other endlessly, than to assert common sense and take measures to shut the party down. They took their cue from the banks, run by the smartest guys in the capitalist west, who held on to the same crazy belief and who were getting really, really rich from this con.

Have you perhaps not recognized yet that the problem was all due to the largest asset bubble in U.S. history, financed by debt?

by ansugisalas

Especially when they repackaged them into derivatives, the derivatives is the direct and complete source of this crisis. We also overlook the fact that the financing market has grown out of proportion, and that a select few players are thriving on the debt crises, making "funny money" out of nothing, with no risk, even though it chokes all the value-producing markets. The banks are involved, because the law says their leaders must do what is best for the shareholders, and if that means going after the funny money and screwing over the whole world... well, it's the law, you know?

by delbertpgh

Banks are where the money goes and where the money comes from. People think that the government prints the money, but for the most part, that is not true. Banks make the amount of money in circulation increase by a factor of roughly ten: they take money in as loans or deposits (deposits are actually just another form of a loan), lend it back out at higher interest, and receive the money back again when the borrower's employees and suppliers want to put their money in the bank. The speed with which the cash makes this round trip, and gets lent out again, is "the velocity of money." Banks create more money than the Federal Reserve.

There are three ways a bank makes a profit: by borrowing money at a low rate and lending it back out at a higher rate; or by charging a fee for some kind of service. The fees could be for managing a portfolio of investments, or for creating and selling a new bond built out of an assemblage of mortgages, or acting as a broker in a variety of deals. The third way is making bets on markets with its own money, such as investing in currencies as George Soros does, or day trading in stocks.

When the economy is expanding, it's easy for a bank to make money. When prices go up and interest rates stay stable, anyone can make money, but especially banks. Bankers get excited, because they make truly big personal money on some deals. They try to get more people making more loans or investing in more bank-designed vehicles, because every time the bank takes in a fee.

Since all bank lending is financed with borrowed money (hey, your savings account is just money you lend to a bank, right?) it is important that the bank not depend on cheap short term loans to underwrite its own long-term lending. If the bank borrowed from rich guy X at 2% for two years, and loaned to wise guy Y at 5% for five years, then after two years it has to refinance its own borrowing, and at four years do it again. What happens if at year four the market for two-year money is up to 7%? The bank is in a liquidity squeeze. What if wise guy Y can't pay, and the house he put up as collateral has lost half its value? The bank suddenly stops making new loans, cancels existing lines of credit to its customers, and fires employees. The velocity of money drops. Instead of the Fed's money multiplying by a factor of 10 in the economy, it's a lower multiple. Everybody suddenly experiences less cash in his pocket.

Banks can do lots of things badly, like refuse to recognize risk. When the economy is good and they are collecting fees and profiting from healthy interest differentials, anything that makes for more business seems like good business. When you're getting rich this year (and I mean filthy stinking rich, like $10 or $100 million paychecks for top deal makers) do you think about next year and how your institution will fare? Without sensible regulation, sooner or later bankers will follow the money beyond the limit.

When banks collapse, the economy collapses, because banks do not only collect and distribute money: they make it multiply, literally. When the financial system takes a major hit, as happened all around the globe in 2007-2008, the costs to society are much more severe than when any other industry gets in trouble. That's why banks are different, and can't be allowed to make money any damn way they please. We have a vital social interest in a healthy banking system that preempts banks' freedom.

"Banks" as I use the term includes every type of major financial firm, including brokerages. There used to be simple and clear lines of business that divided consumer banks, commercial banks, investment banks, brokerages, and credit companies. However, over the last 20 years they've all gotten into each others' businesses, so that the collapse of a brokerage like Lehman is similar or worse in impact than a bank like Wachovia.

by hippiekarl

1) The Tea 'Party', who point out Soros $ aiding OWS, are themselves the creation of, and beholden to, the infamous Koch Bros.
2) I humbly suggest 'Wallbangers' for OWS's colloquial moniker....

"Thanks; I'll hang up and listen".....*click*

by av .

I don't understand what you mean when you say the money isn't lost until you begin to draw it. Your 401k lost value whether you draw from it or not.

My 401k lost almost a third of its value. Ten years worth of gains wiped out. I didn't lose the money I put in or that my employer matched, but I might as well have stuffed the money in the mattress.

I've owned my house for many years and don't live over my head, so I didn't lose there. I just won't make as much when I sell.

Unlike you, I don't have so many years to make up for the losses to my 401k and I'm pretty angry about it. I want to see the people that caused this nightmare brought to justice.

AV

by delbertpgh

I'm afraid the idiot bankers could not have made all those bad loans without a much larger bunch of eager idiots (i.e., all of us citizens) willing to sign the contracts. We borrowed the money they were lending.

I think that there was a decline in public morals over the last few decades. As a people, Americans used to live closer to their budgets, and as a country, we did more as a community. Now it seems to all boil down to how much you can get and how much you can spend. To recall the catchphrase of Gordon Gecko, greed, for lack of a better word, is bad.

by jamesrl

Even though we couldn't make those loans ourselves. Our banking regulations are pretty tight, and those kinds of mortgages are just not legal or available.

But our banks can invest in the US, and at their height of the boom, were investing heavily in US mortgage backed securities.

None of our banks went under, not even close, but some did lose a fair chunk of change, and since banks are a favorite of pension fund managers, we all lost.

by hal 9000

That many of the Sub Prime Loans where offered to people who should have qualified for more Main Stream Loans without the massive Jump in Repayments that occur in the Sub Prime Type Loans that proved their demise.

The reason that these people where sold Sub Prime Loans instead of the more conventional Housing Loans was because it allowed the lending Agency namely the Bank to make much more money than they otherwise would have on what are conventional Home Loans.

Sub Prime Home Loans where levered on the premise that Home Prices would continue to rise around 10% per annum which is part way believable in the short term over 5 years maybe but Unbelievable in the Long Term. If it was realistic any dwelling in any of the major cities in Europe would cost well in excess of a Billion $ with a average 3% increase in value from the time it was first developed till now. Over the past few years to 2007 the price increases where far in excess of that 3% Increase but it was only a matter of time till a Price Drop was encountered which had to happen because it's simply not possible to have House prices continually increasing in value.

Even in the US if House Prices where to increase by 3% per annum with a starting cost of 50 cents when the land was first developed the older cities would have house prices far in excess of a Million $ per dwelling for the average home dwellings not the mansions. The mansions on the other hand would be in excess of a Billion $ and continually rising.

Anyone with half an ounce of brains can see that this is an impossible situation which immediately ruled out the Banks Lending Managers as to them [b]"Long Term"[/b] is a 6 month period on the Trading Floor not even the average 25 Year Home Loan Life which to them was inconceivable that any loan could last that long, even though they continued to offer loans over that period of time they just believed that they would be paid off within a few years.

Of course for Housing Prices to increase at that level the CPI would have to increase accordingly and the Average Pay Packets of workers would need to also increase which they simply do not. ;)

Col

by jp85257

You gambled with the stock market for your 401k and lost POTENTIAL earnings. You admit that you haven't actually lost any money and even made money since your employer matched your donations.

Just what would you consider to be a fair punishment for those that have "wronged" you? Can I insist on the same punishments for the owners of the casinos when I gamble and lose?

by ansugisalas

then, that there is no financial crisis, now?
And that there are no victims, either?

The perpetraitors are still growing fat on this, strangling production sectors in their money-for-nothing frenzy.

by delbertpgh

Hey, JP: My cousin's 401k, as an example, was rich enough to let him plan on retiring at age 60, when his sons were entering college. Since 2007-2008 revised his savings downward, he's planning to work until 67. As you say, potential losses, so nothing really disappeared, except illusions he had about taking some years off while his body was still in good condition.

Employers match 401k contributions in lieu of contributing to a pension plan. Don't know if you're old enough to remember pensions. They worked a lot like Social Security.

The conditions under which money (excuse me, market value) was lost were not over heated stock markets. There was an over heated real estate market, residential and commercial, which was all financed with borrowed money, which was all converted to bonds. It was a situation in which, over a period of a few months, banks realized that many of those bonds would be more valuable in the bathroom than in their vaults, and that several trillion dollars might need to be marked off the books. Banks stopped lending, even to each other. Some of the most durable financial firms in the world failed, or sold themselves to competitors, or borrowed unprecedented enormous sums from the U.S. Treasury. The auction rate securities market, which thrived for 20 years, went from $200 billion to zero in three weeks in February 2008, and has not come back. The problem was global, and the world was looking at a hole the likes of which hadn't been seen since 1930. The stock market, like everything else, crashed. It took a third of my retirement savings, too, incidentally.

It's good that you bring up the example of casinos, and compare them to banks, and ask if you can blame the owners for losing when you gamble. The world financial system can be turned into a casino, but that's a bad deal for everyone. Bankers have a fiduciary responsibility to behave in the public interest, because they live off everybody else's money, and can destroy the prosperity of a generation in a fit of greed. Bankers should be able to sit on that pile of money and get rich, just so-so rich; not three houses/three ex-wives/two mistresses/five cars/yacht/plane/ski chalet-rich.

by av .

I have a conservative 401k and it still lost 1/3 of its value in the downturn. It isn't gambling. I'm not a day trader or playing slot machines in a casino. It is pretty much the gold standard 401k balanced portfolio that most people have. The reason you invest in a 401k through your employer is to make money on the investment.

The people that swindled everyone should go to jail. Just like Bernie Madoff. Instead, they're still out there doing what they do best, swindling other people out of their hard earned money.

How can you defend people like Bernie Madoff?

AV

by michael jay

is that the current value is down, but as the market recovers, and hopefully it will that money will be recovered.

If you pull it out now you will be losing money, till then it is a paper loss, not a real loss of money.

It will only be a real loss if the market does not recover.

by av .

You're starting with a 401k that has the same amount it did in the year 2000. You would have made more money if you kept your savings in a basic savings account.

True, if you pull the money out now, you will never be able to recover those losses. Still, if you can't trust a 401k anymore because of swindlers in our banking system, how is it really a worthwhile investment anymore? How can you trust that it won't happen again?

AV

by hal 9000

He believes that Greed is Bad so he can not be a True Free Enterprise Follower.

You should be able to do as you like without any Restriction so you can make a profit.

It's simply outrageous that he believes in the idea that allowing a 747 Pilot to fly drunk is unacceptable. If anyone wants to make money they should be able to do as they please when they please without any interference from Government. ;)

There is no justification for Government to Restrict Anything ever under any circumstances. True Free Enterprise allows Companies to do as they please when they please and they just have to have Government Contracts at their Unsupervised pricing. How dare any Government expect to get a Fair Deal from Private Enterprise and pay a reasonable profit when Private Enterprise should get at least a 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% Profit on all Government Contracts.

Of course the same Private Enterprise Entities would feel justifiably aggrieved when their Home Country is invaded as the Government failed to protect them from their countries enemies and there is no excuse that the Government in question simply lacked the necessary funds to buy their products.

True [b]"Free Enterprise"[/b] allows companies to do as they please when they please without restriction but with the full protection of the Government even if in the process the Government goes broke.

What would happen next someone will say that Companies have a Responsibility to the Countries that the work from? :^0 :D :^0 :D :^0 :D

Col [/sarcasm]

by hal 9000

Sony seems to have security in place well enough so you can not download the movie. :D

Col

by jp85257

But anyone with any sense at all would understand that the 401k's are going to fluctuate. I can guarantee that no one was complaining when their 401k's were artificially inflated. They only complain when they lost the supposed gains.

They are also the type that bought houses they couldn't afford at prices much higher than the house was worth because they thought they could flip it in a few months and make tons of money.

They gambled with the stock market and the housing market and lost. I can't think of a single reported instance where someone proved that they were forced to invest in a 401k or buy an overpriced home.

You never hear the people with 401k's mention that they've actually profited because their employers matched funds. You also never hear about the the tax savings that the 401k created for all of those years that donation were made.

People need to stop playing the victim card and accept the fact that they made bad investment choices.

by ansugisalas

So you'll not find an argument from me on that.
But there are still people who should be tried for crimes relating to the creation of this mess. The big investment houses seem to have been committing accounting fraud to boost the values of their derivatives, worsening the problem. They also seem to have advised people to buy a product they themselves were hedging against, so, giving advice they'd not follow themselves, advice they knew to be wrong.
Obama apparently hired the crooks for his administration - I guess you'll be happy to hear that ;)

by charliespencer

There is indeed a crisis. There are 'victims', although many of them are at least partially responsible for their situation. My only debate was with your assertion that we 'all' suffered.

by hippiekarl

I only recently finished WSJ's James B. Stewart's 'Den of Thieves', an account of the Boesky/Milken 'junk bond financing' leverage scams. Even with Drexel and MerrillLynch gone, the same crooks are still working the games at Goldman Sachs, First Boston, and others. To these crooks the 'value' of a company (or these days, a mortgage portfolio) is not what revenue it produces over time, but what it can be dismantled and sold off in pieces for to the next sucker down the line. I love seeing banks take each other to court every time the music stops and one of them's still holding the ol' diaper bag of artificial, uncollectable debt.

by jp85257

but dealing with the stock market IS gambling. And your portfolio is only worth what you can convert to cold hard cash at any particular time. Just because your quarterly report showed a certain number for your "earnings" doesn't mean that you will have that value when you are allowed to pull the money out without penalty (obviously).

I'm not defending people like Madoff but there's a big difference between jailing someone who swindled people and wanting to jail someone who didn't break any actual laws just because your net worth changed; at least on paper. Doing business in a way that may be detrimental to your customers is not always illegal.

by delbertpgh

The stock market and the bond markets are "gambles", in the sense that prices fluctuate. You don't put in your money with the feeling you're playing roulette, though. The worth of your investments should grow over time, as the overall American economy grows. There are laws about the way companies are run: company officers are held by federal and state laws to operate as fiduciaries for their shareholders' interests. It's possible (as with Enron, which was once the seventh largest company in the U.S. by stock market value) for crooks and sharpies to take over a company and line their own pockets, or just make foolish bets, and ruin the company and the owners (i.e., shareholders.) That's illegal. Crookedness in business will drive out honesty, and we have laws against irresponsible behavior, to save capitalism (and owners of stock) from the inescapable bad side of human nature.

Except, JP, it would seem from your defense that you would excuse banks from responsibility. Boys will be boys and capitalists will be capitalists, and working people ought to just keep their head down and work and save and invest, in the awareness that it's a complete gamble and they could lose every cent. Don't be surprised if the American people revolt against that deal, if it continues to sour on them. Here's what the last anti-Republican revolt looked like: between 1930 and 1936, in four elections, the House of Representatives went from 270 Republican members to 103, and the Senate from 56 to 25 (in an time when there were only 96 senators.)

Incidentally, I'll remind you that it's every big Republican's dream to privatize Social Security. That means turning the old age safety net into 401k plans, gambling everything on the stock market, and not counting on government. I can imagine at retirement parties, instead of a gold watch, the guy being pushed out the door gets a revolver and one bullet.

by jp85257

Delbert, you claim that's illegal? Show me a specific law that prevents businesses from making poor business decisions.

Thousands of businesses go bankrupt each year because of poor business decisions or just plain ineptness. Do you actually believe that these people are breaking the law and should be arrested?

I'm all for locking up anyone who breaks the law or swindles people, but I don't think we have enough jail cells to lock people up because they're stupid or greedy.

by av .

"The stock market and the bond markets are "gambles", in the sense that prices fluctuate. You don't put in your money with the feeling you're playing roulette, though."

I never expected to lose 1/3 of my 401k investment with less than 10 years till retirement, especially to absolute fraud.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-4546199.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody

Read this article about what happened and then tell me how you don't feel outraged at how these people played with our investments. We can't ever have this happen again and there has to be penalties even if its only public shame.

AV

by jp85257

from the link you provided:

"It would have been illegal during most of the 20th century under the gaming laws, but in 2000, Congress gave Wall Street an exemption and it has turned out to be a very bad idea."

So no laws were broken as I've mentioned before. The real culprits in this is the Government. The bankers were just playing the game with the rules they were given. So, what we need to do is remove all the members of Congress who let this happen. They're the ones ultimately responsible for you and others (including myself) losing most, if not all of our 401k earnings.

by av .

(From the 60 Minutes article) "It would have been illegal during most of the 20th century under the gaming laws, but in 2000, Congress gave Wall Street an exemption and it has turned out to be a very bad idea."

Theres a bigger issue here that involves business practices and morals. The whole thing is wrong . I don't want to do business with people like that. I want to at least know who feasted on the carrion. Who is low enough to invest in whether a mortgage will fail or not.

AV

by jp85257

You're on a very slippery slope when you start talking about what is moral and what isn't. Who's set of morals should we use as the standard to decide if a particular bank was using moral business practices?

It's either legal or illegal. What they did should have still been illegal but Congress stepped in. Now, in all fairness, they probably changed the law due to banking lobbying, but the law was changed. The lobbying problem in our Government is a whole different discussion.

by delbertpgh

A lot of poor business decisions are not against any law, but do violate a fiduciary relationship. Stockholders can sue in civil court. Other bad decisions do violate actual laws, such as the fraudulent companies that the executives of Enron set up to hide their bad bets, and from which they also embezzeled funds. A lot of the laws are highly technical, tough for anybody who doesn't have a background in managerial or financial accounting to understand. Likewise, the stock regulations of the SEC, which are mainly aimed at preventing crooks from selling stock at values inflated by fraud or undisclosed information. Lots of things are regulated very closely; other things, very little.

The bank I work for is answerable to the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Controller of the Currency, and a whole bunch of other regulators that have the force of law behind them. I can happily say we did not get exposed to the kind of risk that sank Washington Mutual, Lehman, or AIG. We weren't so much highly moral as our business plan didn't put us in the way of that sort of risk.

The CBS story was about derivatives, which were extra frosting on the cake, but not the cake itself. The scandalous mess with AIG's credit default swaps was bad enough to sink the company, but not bad enough to wreck the whole economy the way it did. The swaps were bad for AIG because the bonds that the swaps insured (swaps are bond insurance, and guarantee the bond's value) were rotten, and they were rotten because all the real estate in America and Europe was overvalued, and the middle-income consumers of this country were borrowed up to the ears on everything else as well.

Making too much money available to real estate just drives up the price of existing homes, and causes new more homes to be built than the economy actually needs. That's the story of all asset bubbles, an abiding problem of capitalist economies. "Too much" and "actual need" are difficult terms to define. You have to trust to bank regulators to raise interest rates or capital ratios (the amount a bank must actually keep on hand, versus loaning out) in line with their wise judgement of what's good for the economy, and clamp down on the money supply when stuff goes wild. You have to have a Congress that doesn't put the squeeze on regulators when their favorite bankers/contributors want to get richer. And you have to have that Congress pass laws that make deals transparent and illegalize some activity. Congress has to have the guts to pass regulation all the time, because bankers keep working out new kinds of stupid deals that aren't defined in the older laws, like designer drug makers.

Capitalism is the most successful and dynamic system in the world. It won't work without government regulation, though, because every so often it will cut off its own legs and serve them to the other end for dessert.

by cheesel_z

Why protest now? And why Wall Street? They should be occupying the land around the Capitol Building, espectially around Barney 'Hot Bottom' Frank's office.

by ansugisalas

Coz the crisis is still going on?
Coz the idiocy that created the crisis is still going on, on wall street?
It is.

Legislators are just middle men. They're following orders from Wall Street.
Follow the money.

by jck

The big chiefs who got bailed out...are still giving themselves and each other (as each others' board members) huge raises.

Want to know why you're paying more for television? For your bank account? Gas at the pump?

Go read the CNN Money report about the "20 Biggest CEO pay raises" from 2010. Shocking how companies who are still "rebounding" are giving away $10Ms in options and $1M+ pay raises to their CEOs.

by av .

Everyone had no idea what would happen after the 2008 collapse. We know now that we all lost wealth, jobs, houses and everything else during the downturn. Thats why people are protesting.

Wall St. represents greedy capitalists. I think they didn't get to the Capitol building yet, but its on the itinerary.

AV

by charliespencer

"if you can't trust a 401k anymore because of swindlers in our banking system,"

You could never 'trust' a 401k in the first place.

"You would have made more money if you kept your savings in a basic savings account."

Not against inflation.

by ansugisalas

Let the brokers and the top execs receive incentives ONLY, if those incentives are tied to the direct value of their decisions, long term.
Say, sure, they get their bonuses, but they get them as bonds that can't be sold for five years, and the value is indexed to the crap they've sold others all (this) year.

That would get them thinking...

by av .

I'm still not sure where this movement is going yet, but I think its about time that our government and corporations be held accountable for the state of the economy now and the financial collapse of 2008. These people are determined to bring all of the injustices to light. I think they are a group that can't be ignored.

http://occupywallst.org/

AV

by av .

If you invest in stable funds, you shouldn't lose your money. If you invest in aggressive funds, its always a possibility.

Companies offer these tax shelters and you should be able to trust that you're not going to get soaked by what they're offering if you choose stable investments.

Maybe your savings account wouldn't be enough against inflation, but at least you know your money will be there.

AV

by hal 9000

The moment that the Pollies realize that they are not in control like they believe they are the better we all are. ;)

Col

by ansugisalas

What with the temper fits, screaming and wailing, vomiting white stuff and soiling their bloomers.

Depending on their ability to recognize the degree to which they don't control things :D

by jp85257

I found this post on a blog. I couldn't agree with her more.

Life isn't fair. The concept of justice - that everyone should be treated fairly - is a worthy and worthwhile moral imperative on which our nation was founded. But
justice and economic equality are not the same. Or, as Mick Jagger said, "You can't always get what you want."

No matter how you try to "level the playing field," some people have better luck, skills, talents or connections that land them in better places. Some seem to have
all the advantages in life but squander them, others play the modest hand they're dealt and make up the difference in hard work and perseverance, and some find jobs on Wall Street and eventually buy houses in the Hamptons. Is it fair? Stupid question.

Nothing is "free." Protesting with signs that seek "free" college degrees and "free" health care make you look like idiots, because colleges and hospitals don't operate on rainbows and sunshine. There is no magic money machine to tap for your meandering educational careers and "slow paths" to adulthood, and the 53 percent of taxpaying Americans owe you neither a degree nor an annual physical.

While I'm pointing out this obvious fact, here are a few other things that are not free: overtime for police officers and municipal workers, trash hauling, repairs
to fixtures and property, condoms, Band-Aids and the food that inexplicably appears on the tables in your makeshift protest kitchens. Real people with real dollars are underwriting your civic temper tantrum.

Your word is your bond. When you demonstrate to eliminate student loan debt, you are advocating precisely the lack of integrity you decry in others. Loans are made based on solemn promises to repay them. No one forces you to borrow money; you are free to choose educational pursuits that don't require loans, or to seek technical or vocational training that allows you to support yourself and your ongoing educational goals. Also, for the record, being a college student is not a
state of victimization. It's a privilege that billions of young people around the globe would die for --- literally.

A protest is not a party. On Saturday in New York, while making a mad dash from my cab to the door of my hotel to avoid you, I saw what isn't evident in the
newsreel footage of your demonstrations: Most of you are doing this only for attention and fun. Serious people in a sober pursuit of social and political change
don't dance jigs down Sixth Avenue like attendees of a Renaissance festival. You look foolish, you smell gross, you are clearly high and you don't seem to realize
that all around you are people who deem you irrelevant.

There are reasons you haven't found jobs. The truth? Your tattooed necks, gouged ears, facial piercings and dirty dreadlocks are off-putting. Nonconformity for the sake of nonconformity isn't a virtue. Occupy reality: Only 4 percent of college graduates are out of work. If you are among that 4 percent, find a mirror and face the problem. It's not them. It's you.

By Marybeth Hicks

by charliespencer

or, alternatively, never read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

by ansugisalas

Especially in commodity economies.

The never-never-land qualities of modern money however makes "free" seem a lot less impossible, by comparison.

The creators of this financial crisis tapped into this "impossibility of the dollar", and they'll keep trying to "get it right" until someone musters the balls to kick the crap out of them.
What are they after? Free money.

by jp85257

is to buy some shares in the company and then make your feelings known during the shareholders meetings.

Companies will pay what they think they have to to get the right executives in place. Hiring anyone is a gamble. If they make good decisions and get good executives the company grows and everyone makes money. If they hire a loser, they lose money and their gamble failed. They pay what they need to to get rid of him and move on.

Companies aren't going to listen to someone gripe about executive compensation when the gripers don't have a stake in the company and IMHO, they shouldn't.

by jp85257

I just thought it was humorous that they would trash the place one day and put their money in it the next. Not much commitment to the cause.

This discussion is closed to new replies.