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Fintan
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Joined: 18 Jan 2006
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 Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2012 1:36 pm Post subject: |
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Occupy began with a campaign declaring that Wall Street is 'toxic.'
Now comes a damning resignation letter from the heart of Wall St
at Goldman Sachs - vindicating everything Occupy has said.
Rest assured that Goldman is not the only rogue firm.
GOLDMAN SACHS RESIGNATION LETTER HIGHLIGHTS:
| Quote: | Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
by Greg Smith, a now former executive director and head of the
Goldman's United States equity derivatives business in Europe,
the Middle East and Africa
TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enou...gh to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.....
I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.
But this was not always the case.
How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
What are three quick ways to become a leader?
a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit.
b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them.
c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding.
I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors.... Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm.
Article url: http://nyti.ms/wNsXnS |
Which inspired this: 
| Quote: | Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader
 TODAY is my last day at the Empire.
After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, throttling people with your mind continues to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making people dead.
The Empire is one of the galaxy's largest and most important oppressive regimes and it is too integral to galactic murder to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of Yoda College that I can no longer in good conscience point menacingly and say that I identify with what it stands for.
For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates, some of whom were my secret children, through our gruelling interview process. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in detecting strange disturbances in the Force for the 80 younglings who made the cut.
I knew it was time to leave when I realised I could no longer speak to these students inside their heads and tell them what a great place this was to work.
How did we get here? The Empire changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and killing your former mentor with a light sabre. Today, if you make enough money you will be promoted into a position of influence, even if you have a disturbing lack of faith.
What are three quick ways to become a leader?
a) Execute on the firm's 'axes', which is Empire-speak for persuading your clients to invest in 'prime-quality' residential building plots on Alderaan that don't exist and have not existed since we blew it up.
b) 'Hunt Elephants'. In English: get your clients - some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren't - to tempt their friends to Cloud City and then betray them.
c) Hand over rebel smugglers to an incredibly fat gangster.
When I was a first-year analyst I didn't know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces telepathically. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a protocol droid was and putting my helmet on properly so people could not see my badly damaged head.
My proudest moments in life - the pod race, being lured over to the Dark Side and winning a bronze medal for mind control ping-pong at the Midi-Chlorian Games - known as the Jedi Olympics - have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts.
The Empire today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about remote strangulation. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.
I hope this can be a wake-up call. Make killing people in terrifying and unstoppable ways the focal point of your business again. Without it you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much non-existent Alderaan real estate they sell. And get the culture right again, so people want to make millions of voices cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/why-i-am-leaving-the-empire%252c-by-darth-vader-201203145007/ |
_________________
Minds are like parachutes.
They only function when open. |
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IronClad
Joined: 10 Aug 2011
Posts: 435
Location: Kent
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| Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2012 7:36 pm Post subject: |
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There is something missing from this resignation. Making money via clients is what all company who have clients do. It is the only line of business and revenue.
Office talk always includes income from a clients business. Greg Smith speaks as though the client was the "mark" who was there to be swindled. He does not remark on any client being cleaned out or taken for a ride.
If clients were swindled and their life saving taken then, well that may have become to much causing anyone to resigned eventually.
But if clients had more than than they could handle and wanted their cash to work overtime for them then they would not miss it if the deal went bad or the money was spirited away. Wasn't Gaddafi reported to be one of GS investors?
So 12 years he stuck it out and some of that time was when GS went public [before then the partners stood the risk personally].
Anyway, may be the Occupy Movement has had some effect in the financial world. Some may be seeing the cards stacking up against them and have chosen to get out while the going is good.
The clients are your bread and butter and you survive in business based on the number and standing of your clients and the keeping of those clients.
Are those clients on an equal playing field or just the wealthy feeding their greed for more? Are GS the only game in town?
Watch this space. |
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Rom
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
Posts: 417
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| Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2012 4:51 am Post subject: |
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IronClad
"There is something missing from this resignation. Making money via clients is what all company who have clients do. It is the only line of business and revenue. "
You could apply for a job in FXCM, the biggest forex retail broker. One of their slogans is "Trading EURUSD is easy!" (not true, but as long as the clients believe that it means money for FXCM). One of their products is forex autotrading, where clients can chose between "profitable systems" (non is profitable).
Of course FXCM has to get a "modest" fee for all this (bad-)info and (bad -)services. Whatever happens for the retail traders FXCM will make money. That is their business idea, if the client win a trade FXCM will make money, and if the client lose a trade FXCM will make money. It is a 100% win-win for FXCM, no risk at all. |
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leon
Joined: 22 Aug 2008
Posts: 1046
Location: 3d-rate nation
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| Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2012 6:05 am Post subject: |
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Definition of sucker from http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/sucker:
sucker
noun
• imbecile.
Can you dig it, sucka?
• a person that got screwed.
You sucker
• a person who is gullible, easily tricked
Ha ha! So long, sucker! (or Go long sucka!)
No te mueras un idiota - Don't die an idiot |
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Rom
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
Posts: 417
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| Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2012 9:59 am Post subject: |
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| Yes, the clients are "toast". If they believe the "info" 75% of their trading capital will end up in FXCM's pockets in 3 months (as far as I remember). That is the price for being stupid. |
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Fintan
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Joined: 18 Jan 2006
Posts: 6100
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| Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:30 am Post subject: |
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Bill Moyers talks with the NY Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson
about how money and political clout enable industries to escape
regulation and enrich executives at the top.
She says the 2008 collapse WILL happen again.
_________________
Minds are like parachutes.
They only function when open.
Last edited by Fintan on Fri Mar 16, 2012 2:09 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Rom
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IronClad
Joined: 10 Aug 2011
Posts: 435
Location: Kent
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| Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 9:15 am Post subject: |
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Rom, trading forex is easy. It's making money that isn't. Can you legislate to prevent a fool and his money soon parting?
The Occupy Movement should look into what started all this off. The selling of mortgages without due diligence. Because if there was something in law to have made this illegal then they all should go down.
And if the administration had not bailed out the company who employed the fraudsters we would not be in this mess we are in now.
It has all been downhill ever since. And it is getting awfully complicated.
Fascism, communism, globalization, monopoly capitalism, New World Order - all in together resulting in a global disorder. No one enemy. Fighting on all fronts.
Back to the drawing board. The selling of subprime mortgages. According to whistleblower[s] they were told to sell mortgages to anybody who could be enticed into buying them.
Was it fraud? Was it a criminal offence? This sort of question I can handle but not "fighting" on several fronts. Who is the enemy? Is it really the one per cent? A great divide has opened up between the rich and the rest of us and it has all come about from one event. An act that may have been a criminal offence. Let's keep it simple. If the administration bailed out criminals instead of charging them with that offence then that ain't so simple. |
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Rom
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
Posts: 417
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| Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 10:18 am Post subject: |
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(naive) IronCLad
"Rom, trading forex is easy. It's making money that isn't. Can you legislate to prevent a fool and his money soon parting?"
When I used FXCM there were "autosync" commision like "$700" when I made a profit. Why? After a complain they called it "an error". Then they offered me generously ("after a manual review") free trading capital of something like "$2000" (roughtly equal the loss in 3 months) to continue to trade with them. It is all scam business.
Another trick they have programmed: When I opened a trade I sometimes got lotsize wrong, like 1 instead of 0.1 (leverage being 10 times too large). On a demo account you can probably close everything without problem, but on a live account it is not like that. It was impossible to close a position immediately. How long will the FXCM algoritm delay I cannot say, 1 minute maybe? So when you make a profit in 30 second you will consequently not be able to take profit - there will be an error message. However I learned that it was no problem opening a new contract any time, and in this way I could neutralize a contract on FXCM by opening a position in opposite direction (by only paying commision twice)
There are maybe a couple of honest forex brokers, like MBTrading. |
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Fintan
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| Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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Audio from the recent grassroots alternative economic MMT Summit in Rimini.
| Quote: | Prof. Bill Black (who suppports OWS) writes:
"We were astounded by the number of people attending the Summit –
over 2100 by a hard count of entrants. Many of them drove for hours to
attend and all of them paid to attend so that they could fund our travel
costs. This huge number attended despite a major Italian media blackout
on the event. The attendees were regular Italians from every walk of life,
not elite policy wonks."
"At breaks, one could see members of the audience engaged in
substantive policy discussions and debates with each other. I had
somewhat similar experiences in Ireland and Iceland talking to general
audiences about the causes of their crises, but the numbers were far
smaller. In each country one reaction has been common – they are
delighted to hear scholars who do not believe the failed dogmas that
caused the crises, who have real alternatives that offer hope, and who are
not looking to make a buck off their misfortunes.
There IS An Alternative To European Austerity: Modern Money Theory
| on Guns and Butter KPFA 94.1 FM www.kpfa.org
with Stephanie Kelton and Michael Hudson in Rimini, Italy.
Difference between sovereign and non-sovereign money;
what is money; fiat money; gold standard;
fixed exchange rates; the Euro;
difference between central banks
and more....
See Also: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/show/34
http://michael-hudson.com/2012/02/mmt-theory-as-an-ecb-alternative/ |
_________________
Minds are like parachutes.
They only function when open.
Last edited by Fintan on Fri Mar 16, 2012 10:15 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Fintan
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| Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2012 7:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Bill Black: (Re) Occupy Greece
Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and
an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-
Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement set its sights on occupying a financial center, Germany has accomplished the vastly more impressive feat of occupying an entire nation – Greece.
Germany has experience at occupying Greece having done so during World War II. The art of occupying another nation is to recruit a local puppet to do the dirty work required to repress the citizens. Germany used several puppets, most notoriously the murderous Ioannis Rallis, to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people during World War II. (After Germany’s defeat, Rallis was executed for his treason.)
This time around, Germany has been far more successful in recruiting and using a puppet to (nominally) rule Greece and terrify the Greek people before the German occupation. It was able to put its puppet, Lucas Papademos in place and have him “request” that Germany reoccupy Greece. Papademos is not elected. He is in power because his elected predecessor, George Papandreou, announced that Greece would hold a plebiscite on whether to agree to the terms of a deal on Greece’s sovereign debt that would have the effect of surrendering Greece’s remaining sovereignty and consigning the Greek people to an even deeper depression. The inevitable German reaction to the plebiscite was: Democracy in Greece – inconceivable! Germany threatened to destroy Greece’s economy if there were a plebiscite. Germany’s extortion led to the collapse of Papanderou’s elected government and Papademos’ appointment as Greece’s de facto prime minister.
Papademos is a banker and shares the theoclassical economic views that caused the global crisis and then led the ECB and many European leaders to adopt austerity strictures that have hurled the Eurozone back into recession. He has been wrong about the most important economic issues of his time. His economic dogmas, track record of failure, and disdain for democracy and the Greek people made him the perfect puppet to the Germans. For reasons that pass all understanding he is called a “technocrat. His record of economic policy failure demonstrates that “faux shaman” would be a more accurate label.
Germany and Papademos have ended Greece’s political sovereignty, but Greece gave up its economic sovereignty long ago when it adopted the euro. Two aspects of national economic sovereignty were inherently lost with nations that gave up their own currency and adopted the euro. A member nation could no longer have a monetary policy and it could no longer revalue its currency. The designers of the euro required a measure sharply curtailing the member nations’ remaining economic sovereignty. The demand that the euro nations surrender the last vestige of their economic sovereignty was deliberate. The euro’s designers viewed national economic sovereignty as the gravest threat to the euro’s success. Their great fear was that inflation could lead to a weak euro, so they adopted the “Stability and Growth” Pact to sharply limit the member states’ ability to control their fiscal policies. The Pact forbade member nations from running material budgetary deficits even during a severe recession or depression.
The European Central Bank (ECB) was created with a single mandate – preventing even benign inflation. It was directed not to try to counter even severe recessions, mass unemployment, and extreme poverty. It was not even designed to function as a lender of last resort. But the equally important aspect of the ECB was not written into its charter – but understood by everyone. The ECB would be subservient to Germany’s economic views (with an ever diminishing French fig leaf). Germany’s economic view was that hyper-inflation always lurked around the corner and the ECB must act like a eternally vigilant raptor. The nations of the periphery had no realistic hope of influencing ECB policies.
There were three key implications for nations that adopted the euro and surrendered economic sovereignty by giving up their sovereign currency. First, the member nations gave up their only reliable means of recovering from a serious recession or depression. Second, the member nations rendered themselves defenseless to devastating attacks by the bond markets if they fell into economic crisis. Third, the nations of the periphery placed their political sovereignty at grave peril should they fall into economic crisis.
The proven tool kit for recovering from a serious recession includes three policies. The policies are not mutually exclusive. They are typically used in conjunction. A nation that retains its economic sovereignty can speed its recovery from a severe recession by adopting a stimulative fiscal policy, a stimulative monetary policy, and by devaluing its currency. A nation that adopts the euro cannot use any of these methods. The Stability and Growth Pact allows nations to run only a tiny budgetary deficit that is grossly inadequate to replace the lost private sector demand.
A nation that has a sovereign currency whose value floats and whose debts are denominated in its own currency makes an exceptionally poor target for currency attacks. It always has the capacity to repay debts denominated in its own currency, so it makes an even worse target for attacks by the credit markets. A nation that uses the euro is not an issuer of a sovereign currency. It uses another entity’s currency. Its sovereign debts, therefore, are inherently denominated in another currency – typically the euro. When a nation falls into recession or a debt crisis the debt markets produce a vicious cycle. As the sovereign debt increases the rating agencies cut the ratings, which raises the interest rate on the sovereign debt, which increases the debt costs, which leads to further rating downgrades. Note that when the credit rating agencies downgraded the United States the credit markets proceeded to loan vast sums to the U.S. at even lower interest rates. The credit markets rightly view the U.S., in no small part because it has a sovereign currency, as a “safe haven.”
The dynamics of sovereign currencies drive the deficit hawks to distraction. They eagerly await the day, and invent fictional debt ratio “tipping points”, when the credit markets will adopt their Austrian economic views and refuse to lend to the United States. Even Japan’s financial leaders, still able to borrow vast amounts at virtually zero interest rates despite long having one of the highest debt ratios in the world, are so Austrian in their economics that they are unable to understand their monetary system. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) scholars have repeatedly demonstrated analytical and predictive success in explaining the inexplicable (from the dominant theoclassical economics perspective).
The result of the destruction of economic sovereignty is that a nation that adopts the euro and sinks into a severe recession can be forced into an unrecoverable spin. The euro system had no means to deal with such a death spiral that would lead to default and forced withdrawal from the euro. The default of one member nation on its euro debt would cause the debt costs of other euro members trapped in recessions to spike and could lead to a series of defaults and withdrawals from the euro.
The only established institution to assist way out lay outside the euro system, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF provides loans to nations and demands austerity, privatization, and deregulation in return. Austerity makes recessions worse and deregulation is one of the causes of financial crises, so IMF loans often prove destructive to the recipient nations. The IMF was unwilling to take on the loss exposure of becoming a dominant lender to the periphery. This forced the European Union (EU) and ECB to create a fund that worked in conjunction with the IMF to lend to euro members that went into crisis. The EU lent to periphery nations under austerity, privatization, and deregulatory terms that were even more destructive than those imposed by the IMF. Theoclassical economic dogma has forced the Eurozone back into recession and much of the periphery into depression. This is one of the most destructive and spectacular “own goals” in history.
The ECB’s theoclassical dogma leaves only one means of escaping a severe recession or depression – ending the European safety net and slashing working class wages such that every member state in economic difficulty becomes a major net exporter of goods and services. This is why we call the dogma the “New Mercantilism.” Adam Smith, of course, was motivated to write largely by his desire to expose the folly of mercantilism. Economics is the only “science” I am aware of that has deteriorated dramatically in its predictive ability over the course of 150 years. The ECB’s dogma is premised on a fallacy of basic logic (and is economically illiterate and vicious). One nation’s export is another nation’s import so we cannot all be net exporters. The success of one nation (Germany) in becoming a net exporter in part through substantial reductions in working class wages does not prove that the periphery can emulate its “success” by slashing working class wages. Indeed, the more Germany becomes a net exporter the harder it is for the periphery nations to become net exporters.
In practice, the ECB strategy means that the Irish are trying to substantially reduce working class wages so that they can out export the Portuguese. The Portuguese are trying to cut their working class wages so they can out export the Greeks. The Greeks are slashing working class wages to try to out export the Turks. We call this the “Road to Bangladesh” strategy. Recessions mean that demand is severely inadequate. Cutting working class wages and public sector demand through austerity – simultaneously – during a Great Recession (a depression in the periphery) must reduce demand further and increase unemployment. Indeed, the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, conceded this in his extraordinary interview in the Wall Street Journal.
Draghi went on to promise that at some unknown point what Paul Krugman aptly derides as “the confidence fairy” would appear and private sector demand would spontaneously surge and drive a robust recovery in the periphery. The defining characteristic of dogma is that because it is not rooted in fact or logic it cannot be refuted by facts or logic. We are left to debate how many confidence fairies can dance on the head of an ECB pinhead.
This was the context that led thousands of regular Italians to invite, and pay the travel costs, to bring a leading MMT scholar, Stephanie Kelton, to Italy and expose the ECB’s most destructive myth – TINA (“there is no alternative”). Stephanie Kelton is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, the home of other leading MMT scholars. Randall “Randy” Wray, along with Australia’s Bill Mitchell, are the most prominent academics specializing in the development of MMT. (James Galbraith is a prominent MMT scholar, but MMT is not his specialty.) Professor Mathew Forstater runs the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (CFEPS) at UMKC. CFEPS was created and maintained for years with funding from Warren Mosler, a hedge fund owner who is a leading intellectual contributor to the creation and development of MMT.
The Italians also invited Marshall Auerback, an investment analyst who works closely with MMT’s developers, particularly Warren Mosler and UMKC scholars, in the development of MMT. Auerback writes frequently in top financial blogs, including the UMKC economics blog “New Economic Perspectives” (created and led by Kelton).
The organizer of the Italian “MMT Summit” was Paolo Barnard, a journalist who became convinced that MMT was correct and offered an alternative that Italy needed to embrace. He invited three other speakers, whose specialty is not MMT, to add their views at the Summit in Rimini, Italy. The three speakers were the French economist Alain Parguez (Professor Parguez is best known for the development of the Theory of the Monetary Circuit), the American economist Michael Hudson (an expert on finance), and an American criminologist, lawyer, and former senior financial regulator teaching courses in economics and law at UMKC (me).
We presented and fielded questions from the audience over the course of three days (Friday, was only a 90 minute salute to the attendees, but Saturday ran from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., and Sunday was a full day). I cannot summarize such extensive presentations, from differing conceptual and disciplinary perspectives, in a brief article. I will note only five aspects of Kelton’s presentation. First, she explained the points I have made above about how entering the euro removed the member nation’s economic sovereignty and left them vulnerable to the bond market death spiral.
Second, she showed how the euro designers and the ECB sought to create a condition in which there is no alternative (TINA) because they systematically sought to eliminate the superior alternatives for recovering from a severe recession or depression.
The EU claims to have created a self-fulfilling prophecy of TINA. Kelton showed graphically how the ECB, the bond markets, and the Stability and Growth Pact cumulatively, and increasingly narrowed the policy space within which euro member nations could operate. Third, she showed that there were alternatives, far superior alternatives, for nations with sovereign currencies even in severe economic distress. By explaining the alternative she gave the Italians hope. They have suffered a deluge of national media that buys into TINA hook line and sinker and blames Italians for the crisis. Fourth, she explained why a sovereign currency allowed a nation new policy options, including job guarantee programs that would pay the unemployed to take productive jobs. (The “guarantee” is that one will be offered a job. An employee who fails to perform or engages in misconduct on the job can be fired and refused work.)
Fifth, she explained that the EU’s twin theoclassical dogmas, budget austerity and becoming net exporters through severe cuts in working class wages, are not in fact “alternatives” to recession but means of deepening recessions. Kelton explained that EU nations could not simply “decide” to run a budget surplus or become net exporters. There are two major impediments. “Deciding” to run a budget surplus during a severe recession or depression means some combination of raising taxes (Draghi calls that bad austerity if it involves taxing corporations) and cutting social expenditures. Both actions reduce demand, already inadequate in a recession, and normally act to contract the economy and expand unemployment and poverty, which reduces tax receipts and increases budgetary expenditures. The result is that austerity can increase budgetary deficits rather than cause them to shrink. Under austerity and the euro a member nation has the illusion of control of its budget deficit.
Nations using the euro also lack the ability to ensure that they run a balance of trade surplus (much less the very large surpluses essential to Draghi’s preferred “export driven” strategy). They cannot devalue their currencies (the most effective means of producing a trade surplus) because they do not have a sovereign currency and the ECB, dominated by Germany, insists on a “strong” euro – a major impediment to an export driven strategy. I have explained that the export driven strategy rests on the logical “fallacy of composition” because we cannot all be net exporters. That fallacy is particularly strong for EU members with whom Germany is a significant trading partner. More generally, the export driven strategy ignores essential interaction effects. Other nations with sovereign currencies can devalue them and many of them follow export driven growth strategies (also subject to the fallacy of composition). Even if the EU’s periphery slash working class wages to third world standards they cannot guarantee that other nations will fail to react to the strategy by some combination of import barriers, export subsidies, devaluation, and competitive slashing of (already lower) working class wages. Note that this strategy threatens to create the “trade wars” that can also exacerbate recessions and depressions. Once more, the “only alternative” that Draghi purports to exist to drive a recovery in the periphery turns out to be illusory because a nation using the “strong” euro cannot follow policies that are certain to produce large net trade surpluses even if it reduces its workers’ wages to third world levels.
There were several extraordinary aspects about the MMT Summit from our perspective as speakers. We were astounded by the number of people attending the Summit – over 2100 by a hard count of entrants. (There are a series of YouTube videos showing the attendees.) Paulo Bernardo had to move the forum for the Summit to a basketball stadium because no conference facility was available that could seat so many people. Many of them drove for hours to attend and all of them paid to attend so that they could fund our travel costs. (We were not paid any fee or honorarium and we flew coach, but we stayed in a very nice hotel in Rimini.) This huge number attended despite a major Italian media blackout on the event. The attendees were regular Italians from every walk of life, not elite policy wonks. The people attending were beyond enthused. They sat, in not very comfortable seats, for hours to listen to economists talk economics and while we pitched the level of our presentations to be what we guessed to be appropriate for a general audience, there were plenty of graphs and some sophisticated analytics. They also had to listen to us in translation, and while the professional translators were excellent some things are inevitably lost in translation. We spent hours doing Q&A, and the members of the audience asked us overwhelmingly about economics topics, including specific implementation measures. At breaks, one could see members of the audience engaged in substantive policy discussions and debates with each other. I had somewhat similar experiences in Ireland and Iceland talking to general audiences about the causes of their crises, but the numbers were far smaller. In each country one reaction has been common – they are delighted to hear scholars who do not believe the failed dogmas that caused the crises, who have real alternatives that offer hope, and who are not looking to make a buck off their misfortunes.
I was left with a profound respect for the Italian people and renewed hope that they would say no to TINA and the self-destructive troika dogmas that have caused the Eurozone to spiral back into recession. Thousands of Italians are eager to work to recover Italy’s full economic and political sovereignty and adopt economic policies that were humane and efficient and constrained by real resources – not bad currency choices. MMT opened their eyes to a world of more desirable alternatives that would work well for Italy.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/03/bill-black-re-occupy-greece.html |
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Minds are like parachutes.
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Rom
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2012 8:32 am Post subject: |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0bu6vU32J8&feature=player_embedded
I don't know much about Paolo Barnard, but considering
"What we need now is sound economics"
ok
"they can issue as much money as they want"
What he means is maybe not sound economics, but distribution of the money created - the need for redistribution is obvious...
What he misses completely is understanding of Silvio Berlusconi and the whole Khazarian corruption of the country. They have been governed by crooks all time, time to do something about it? But leftist will probably do nothing about it, they think the problem is "monetary theory" :( |
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atm
Joined: 16 Apr 2006
Posts: 3578
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| Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2012 9:26 am Post subject: |
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Rom
still in need of English lessons, I see. One can help, for a large fee, of course.
atm  |
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Rom
Joined: 28 Feb 2007
Posts: 417
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| Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2012 9:45 am Post subject: |
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atm, the only Englishspeaking on the net who are difficult for me to understand are .... ? Unilinguals who write dialect (they cannot even write standard English, everything is Telly for them - no wonder they thought Saddam was behind 911 :(
"In another recent Canadian study, it has been shown that monolinguals are at a disadvantage with the onset of senility compared to bilingual people.[4] Bialystok's most recent work, also shows that lifelong bilingualism can delay symptoms of dementia.[5]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingualism |
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Fintan
Site Admin
Joined: 18 Jan 2006
Posts: 6100
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| Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2012 11:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Occupy protest anniversary ends with police sweep
By SAMANTHA GROSS, Associated Press – 22 minutes ago
NEW YORK (AP) — Chanting and cheering down Wall Street on Saturday to mark six months since the birth of the Occupy movement, some protesters applauded the Goldman Sachs employee who days ago gave the firm a public drubbing, echoing the movement's indictment of a financial system demonstrators say is fueled by reckless greed.
"I kind of like to think that the Occupy movement helped him to say, 'Yeah, I really can't do this anymore,'" retired librarian Connie Bartusis said of the op-ed piece by Goldman Sachs manager Greg Smith, who claimed the company regularly foisted failing products on clients as it sought to make more money.
Carrying a sign with the words "Regulate Regulate Regulate," Bartusis said the loss of governmental checks on the financial system helped create the climate of unfettered self-interest described by Smith in his piece, although Goldman's leadership suggested he had not portrayed the bank's culture accurately.
"Greed is a very powerful force," Bartusis said. "That's what got us in trouble."
On Saturday, six months after the protesters first took over Zuccotti Park near the city's financial district, the protesters gathered there again, drawing slogans in chalk on the pavement and waving flags as they marched through lower Manhattan.
The observance ended at the park where the movement began when police declared the park closed Saturday night and swept through the excited and sometimes agitated crowd, arresting some protesters as they went. A spokesperson for Occupy Wall Street estimated dozens of protesters were arrested.
With the city's attention earlier focused on the huge St. Patrick's Day parade many blocks uptown, the Occupy rally at Zuccotti drew hundreds of people, with many gathering in the park into the evening hours.
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who had given a speech at a nearby university, also made an appearance at the park, milling around with protesters.
With the barricades that once blocked them from Wall Street now removed, the protesters streamed down the sidewalk and covered the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial. There, steps from the New York Stock Exchange and standing at the feet of a statue of George Washington, they danced and chanted, "We are unstoppable."
Police say arrests had been made, but they don't have a full count yet.
As always, the protesters focused on a variety of concerns, but for Tom Hagan, his sights were on the giants of finance.
"Wall Street did some terrible things, especially Goldman Sachs, but all of them. Everyone from the banks to the rating agencies, they all knew they were doing wrong. ... But they did it anyway. Because the money was too big," he said.
Dressed in an outfit that might have been more appropriate for the St. Patrick's Day parade, the 61-year-old salesman wore a green shamrock cap and carried a sign asking for saintly intervention: "St. Patrick: Drive the snakes out of Wall Street." He, too, praised Smith's editorial and said it came just as the Occupy movement is again gaining ground.
It was a sentiment echoed by others. Stacy Hessler held up a cardboard sign that read, "Spring is coming," a reference, she said, both to the Arab Spring and to the warm weather that is returning to New York City. She said she believes the nicer weather will bring the crowds back to Occupy protests, where numbers have dwindled in recent months since the group's encampment was ousted from Zuccotti Park by authorities in November.
But now, "more and more people are coming out," said the 39-year-old, who left her home in Florida in October to join the Manhattan protesters and stayed through much of the winter. "The next couple of months, things are going to start to grow, like the flowers."
Some have questioned whether the group can regain its momentum. This month, the finance accounting group in New York City reported that just about $119,000 remained in Occupy's bank account — the equivalent of about two weeks' worth of expenses.
But Hessler said the group has remained strong, and she pronounced herself satisfied with what the Occupy protesters have accomplished over the last half year.
"It's changed the language," she said. "It's brought out a lot of issues that people are talking about. ... And that's the start of change."
Samantha Gross can be reached at www.twitter.com/samanthagross
Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. |
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