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Originally Posted by Ozy_Flame
That's fantastic Cow. Now can you convince the growing number of people who are participating in these protests and the dearth of people supporting them across the United States and into Canada? I'm not sure how it's hurting the message. Seems like people who have been affected by bad governance and for-profit banks that didn't stop these people when they were bombarded with "it's not bad for you!" advertising for subprime mortgages are the ones losing their jobs and livelihoods.
You can frame the picture the way you want, and say no crimes were committed - but somebody clearly won at the expense of others - and it's affecting people's lives. And that's more than enough to send the common man to the streets to protest, even if educated types who know more about the situation see a bigger picture.
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Its not a crime to win. Nor should it ever be.
Its not a crime to see a hole in a regulatory umbrella and exploit it, in spite of moral ambiguity . . . . something Obama himself said earlier today.
Its not actually a crime to have a short term profit point of view while lacking vision of the long-term consequences . . . . and shareholders can throw out Boards if they disagree and can organize the votes.
Its not a crime, necessarily, to be a flat out idiot either.
Certain types of "crimes" were actually committed in 2008 in terms of "failure to disclose" and weighty fines were imposed on financial firms and duly paid. And again, those types of fines/penalties, the structure of it all, are effectively created by politicians.
Obama said today that the future might be that you make those "crimes," for which the penalties are only fines right now, into "crimes" in which people pay with time in jail . . . . . . . . but right now they are not. Hence no one in jail and probably not going to happen either.
As I said, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.
In 1987, I think Prudential had to come up with about $1.2 billion in a class action plus regulatory penalties for failing to disclose certain oil/gas trusts were depreciating assets - the oil would eventually be pumped out of the ground and the well would go dry - and income streams would end.
I kind of laugh a bit at the "corporate greed" thing since the Dow returned about 1.9% per annum for the 2000's. Not a lot of people got rich on the stock market. Right now, today, the S & P 500 is sitting in the same place it was in 1998. Zero growth. Stock options can also be a noose around your neck in that kind of situation.
They got rich in unregulated and unsupervised environments, in some cases markets easily manipulated, like derivatives and real estate where the greed of the common man came into play as well. You didn't have to own two or three houses and you didn't have to buy a $1 million house with zero down.
It started to look a little like the Tulip Mania.
We saw this in Canada in the 90's I think when insurance companies were in danger of being pulled down by massive losses in subsidiary trust companies. Smaller scale then but kind of similar to today where investment banking arms were taking down generally successful banks.
And it will happen again, in spite of protests and tighter regulations. Someone always has a bright idea and everyone piles in, usually with leverage and usually in an environment lacking oversight or regulation. The lions being let out of the cage. Then it explodes.
A few thousand protesters in a USA/Canada population of 360 million or so isn't exactly an epidemic yet.
We'll see where it goes.
People are frustrated though but generally I get the sense that frustration is over politicians failing to govern.
If dumping private banking losses on the public balance sheet isn't a crime, then I don't know what is.
Government, duly elected by taxpayers, decided to take that upon itself.
You have lots of opposing points of view among the duly elected that government shouldn't have done that. And history in the 1920's and 30's where that actually happened.
If I'm not mistaken, about 3,000 banks/financial institutions have gone belly up in the USA since about 1980. Its not like there isn't precedent.
Pure financial firms, by the way, have largely paid back the money forwarded to them by taxpayers, generally to the profit of taxpayers actually. I think it was in the 1990's that taxpayers also profited in a similar, but smaller and more contained situation.
It would be more fair to say economic damage coming from a loss of global confidence, created by a financial system being completely paralyzed and bringing the global economy to a grinding halt, led to a very large dollar amount of lost tax revenues and excessive expenditures.
That's the bill government is dealing with.
Cowperson