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Banned
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Originally Posted by loquitur
Host, you object to pension funds being protected by the government? That's who the biggest shareholders are, and that's who is getting bailed out. Pipsqueaks like me are barely a hair on the pimple on the ass of the market. Even rich people don't account for that much. It's mainly institutions, the biggest of which are the pension funds.
Roachboy, the "tendency to naturalize social inequities" that you see me doing is simply a recognition that different people are good at different things and have different priorities. One of my friends is extremely good at making money, seeing opporutnities, and he's very good at it. He's a wealthy man. I'm not nearly as focussed on money - I need to be creative - so I'm in a line of work where yes, I make a decent living, but I'll never be rich. Other people may value leisure time, or have lower risk tolerance, or avoid stress, or seek fulfillment in other ways.
There are tradeoffs everywhere, and I have enough respect for people as individuals to recognize that they are allowed to make their own choices and choose their own muse. They take the risks they find congenial, they follow the paths they find useful, and they are entitled to those. This is part of the reason why I asked in that other thread why it is that people find economic inequality so bothersome. There are plenty of inequalities between people - in terms of talent, intellect, physical abilities, attractiveness, musical talent, etc etc etc. We don't object to those. I would argue, in fact, that economic inequality is just one more kind of human diversity.
Again: I have enough respect for each individual's own sovereignty to recognize that each person is more than just the size of his/her wallet. It's not a question of someone with means being more deserving or more moral, because they're not, they're simply better at certain kinds of activities - but I think the flipside is that they are not more immoral either. And their activities do tend to benefit a lot of other people as well.
As for fascism, I find it curious that my view on economics is called right-wing, and according to the OP, tending to fascist, when my basic credo is that people should be free to follow their own paths and make their own lives as they choose -- but you and host seem to feel that my liberty and my very brain have to be put at the service and direction of others who supposedly know better than I how I should be spending my time and my money, and that the force of government should be behind that compulsion -- and that, supposedly, is enlightened and liberal.
I just don't get it. I'm a classical liberal. I don't feel a need to force other people to do things my way. But I don't want them telling me to do things their way, either.
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loquitur, your take on the Fed's actions since last september somehow having populist overtones is entirely opposite the information I'm sharing with you below.
I think Roosevelt described what it actually is, as reported by Time in May, 1938.
I think the vast majority of Americans would be much better off with a Fed practicing a fiscal policy that actually promoted a strong dollar, as they and Paulson claim, but that they don't fucking do....
I think the rapid short term interest rate cutting in 2001 was the single biggest catalyst for the housing valuation bubble, and now they've cut rates even faster than 2001 to 2003. I think the two espisodes of drastic rate cuts
are the biggest factor in the 68 percent decline in the dollar vs. the euro, since 2002.
I think Fed policy is intended to do what is in the best interests of the wealthiest, and what is has done to the purchasing power of the dollars is devastating economically to at least half the country's households.
I think that leaving the interest rate where it was last september, at 5.5 percent, and not allowing the four largest banks to lend up to thirty percent of their assets, (instead of the former ten percent limit) to their brokerage subsidiaries, and not nationalizing Bear Stearns last weekend, and not destroying Fannie and Freddie by forcing them to buy up hundreds of billions of dollars of MBS, would serve most of the country better than what the Fed is doing.
It should not be government policy to make it easier now to borrow. No one should take a mortgage loan until the average selling price of the average home is at a level where the average income earner can qualify for a mortgage loan by putting 20 percent "seasoned funds"....funds documented to be in an account in the applicants name for at least six months before approval of mortgage loan application, and where MTI monthly payments do not exceed 36 percent of the borrower's monthly income.
Until that is the state of things, all purchasers of homes, going forward, will likely experience home valuation depreciation. There was no sharing of profits during the price bubble phase of the 2001 to 2006, why should the losses in the collapse phase of the bubble, be put on all of us?
Why should the Fed keep weakening the dollar to perform a "prop job" for the wealthiest? Could it be that the status quo is as Roosevelt described?:
Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...8FD85F4C8385F9
The Text of President Roosevelt's Message to Congress on Monopoly; Cites Estate Tax Returns Good Citizens as a Problem Suggests Individual Penalty Asks More Control of Banks
April 30, 1938, Saturday
Page 2, 4850 words
The text of President Roosevelt's monopoly message to Congress today was as follows: Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
.....Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.....
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<h3>loquitur, the only thing that has changed in the last 70 years is that no US president is independent enough from the wealth and power of the wealthiest to say what Roosevelt said publicly on April 30, 1938. By that measure, we are today even closer to the fascism in the US that Roosevelt described and warned the public about.....</h3>
Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...759590,00.html
Anti-Monopoly
Monday, May. 09, 1938
Last year Harold L. Ickes and Robert Houghwout Jackson handed U. S. Business the Administration's Christmas greetings in the form of a pair of diatribes about "economic oligarchy" and "the 60 families." Implication was that they would be followed by a similarly vehement message from the President to Congress, suggesting revision of U. S. anti-trust laws. Anxiously awaited by Business ever since, the business monopoly message from the nation's greatest governmental monopolist finally appeared last week. A detailed request for Congressional investigation of the whole subject of monopoly as a preliminary to future legislation to curtail it, it was chiefly noteworthy for a tone as mild as Messrs. Ickes & Jackson had been bitter.
Simple Truths. Read to Congress the day after Governor La Follette's launching of a new party in Madison, Wis. (see p. 12), the President's message opened with some strikingly similar themes:
"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the <h3>liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power</h3> to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. <h2>That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.</h2>
"The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. <h3>Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."</h3>
Statistics. To prove his point that current concentration of economic power is unexampled, the President quoted familiar statistics from reports to the Bureau of Internal Revenue: 1) .1% of U. S. corporations own 52% of all corporate assets, get 50% of all corporate income, less than 5% of U. S. corporations own 87% of the assets and less than 4% of manufacturing corporations get 84% of their net profits; 2) even in 1929 .3% of the population got 78% of the dividends and 3) in 1936, 33% of all inheritances went to 4% of all heirs. Taking this as premise No. 1, the President proposed as premise No. 2 that the concentration was due to monopolistic trends in U. S. business. His conclusion was that "a thorough study of the concentration of economic power in American industry and the effect of that concentration upon the decline of competition" should be undertaken by the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Securities & Exchange Commission, for whom he recommended appropriating $500,000. In addition, the President requested $200,000 more to enable the Department of Justice—whose Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold (The Folklore of Capitalism) was last week telling a New York audience about his plan to publicize antimonopoly prosecutions—to enforce existing anti-trust laws.....
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Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...764913,00.html
Thirteen Families
Monday, Oct. 28, 1940
....He wrote an erudite bombshell of questionable accuracy titled America's 60 Families, watched his subjects squirm while Secretary Ickes and then Assistant Attorney General Jackson quoted it with gusto. Within less than a year the families were sprawled under more powerful microscopes as the Temporary National Economic Committee made a study of corporate practices and controls.
Last week the Securities and Exchange Commission published its report to null a 121-page study of "The Distribution of Ownership in the 200 Largest Non-Financial* Corporations." Based on 1937 figures, it whittled the Lundberg roster to 13 families, was considerably less personal than his census of Du Pont bathrooms, considerably more dogged in tracking down actual shareholdings (Lundberg had estimated fortunes by 1924 tax returns). <h3>It found:
» Of an estimated 8,500,000 U. S. stockholders, less than 75,000 (.06% of the population) own fully one-half of all corporate stock held by individuals. The majority of the voting power in the average large corporation is in the hands of not much over 1% of the shareholders.</h3> But some of the biggest and best-known corporations are exceptions (i.e., widely held, without visible centralized control): A. T. & T., Anaconda, Bethlehem Steel, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Goodyear, R. C. A., U. S. Steel, Pennsylvania Railroad, etc.....
....» The 13 most potent family groups' holdings were worth $2,700,000,000, comprised over 8% of the stock of the 200 corporations: Fords, $624,975,000; Du Fonts, $573,690,000; Rockefellers, $396,583,000; Mellons, $390,943,000; McCormicks (International Harvester), $111,102,000; Hartfords (A. & P.), $105,702,000; Harknesses (Standard Oil), $104,891,000; Dukes (tobacco, power), $89,459,000; Pews (Sun Oil), $75,628,000; Pitcairns (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), $65,576,000; Clarks (Singer), $57,215,000; Reynolds (tobacco), $54,766,000; Kresses (S. H. Kress), $50,044,000.
» Three groups—Du Fonts, Mellons, Rockefellers—have shareholdings valued at nearly $1,400,000,000, control, directly or indirectly, 15 of the 200 corporations....
*Excluded: banks, trust companies, insurance companies, investment houses.
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The Fed has assigned "NORC" to produce the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, (It probably won't release any data on wealth distribution BEFORE the November election....):
http://www.norc.org/projects/Survey+...r+Finances.htm
Quote:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/o...f2007home.html
2007 Survey of Consumer Finances
Information for Respondents
The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is conducted every three years by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the federal agency that is the headquarters of the nation's central bank. The main purpose of the survey is to help the government and, ultimately, the public at large understand the financial condition of families in the United States and to study the effects of changes in the economy. The data collected in the survey also support a wide variety of research on topics including saving, investment, debt payments, pension coverage, business ownership, use of financial institutions, credit discrimination, and financial markets.
The 2007 survey is expected to be conducted from May through December 2007. The interviewing will be done for the Board of Governors by NORC, a national organization for social science and survey research at the University of Chicago. The NORC website for the SCF provides answers to questions that you, as a potential respondent, may have about the study.
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Quote:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...34/ai_56973864
The survey of consumer finances
Business Economics, Oct, 1999 by Robert P. Parker, C. Brian Grove
....4. Ownership of many types of wealth is very concentrated, e.g., <h3>estimates from the 1995 SCF indicate that the wealthiest 1 percent of all households in the U.S. own 55 percent of directly held publicly traded stock.</h3> A standard random sample of the population will not give adequate insight into holdings of such concentrated assets......
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Quote:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/Pubs/F.../200613pap.pdf
Family Finances: Evidence from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances
Page 28:
Ownership shares. For some assets, the distributions of the amounts held are far moredisproportionate than the differences in ownership rates. Most striking is the 62.3 percent shareof business assets owned by the wealthiest 1 percent of the wealth distribution in 2004(table 11a); the next-wealthiest 4 percent owned another 22.4 percent of the total. Other key items subject to capital gains also show strong disproportions: <h3>the wealthiest 5 percent of families owned 61.9 percent of residential real estate other than principal residences, 71.7percent of nonresidential real estate, and 65.9 percent of directly and indirectly held stocks. For bonds, 93.7 percent of the total was held by this group.....</h3>
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Last edited by host; 03-19-2008 at 11:54 PM..
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