Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so. If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it’s technically legal, carry on, you’re sorely mistaken. — “bko”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511
So some hedge funds are going bankrupt because the “masses” – literally bartenders and baristas are using their phone apps to bet on the stock markets – are squeezing their shorts.
So, when a “free market” causes the rich and powerful to lose money, what happens? The regulators change the rules.
What happened in 2008? New York finance went bankrupt. If anyone actually believed in “free markets” then what would have happened is what the CEO of BB&T explained. His bank was not loaded up with “toxic assets.” If there were no bailouts, then his bank could have stepped in and bought Citigroup for pennies on the dollar.
Wall Street would have closed down and Charlotte, North Carolina would have become the headquarters of American finance.
But as the Wall Street Journal explained way back in 2008, the New York banks were headed by people whose charitable giving went to “Jewish non-profits” while Charlotte, North Carolina bankers tended to give to “Republican and conservative causes.” (i.e., Ken Lewis is a “gentile.”)
So what happened? The New York banks got bailed out, the North Carolina banks did not.
Was there anything “Free Market” about any of this? Of course not.
Capitalism does not work. It is a pie-in-the-sky utopian vision that has never worked. There isn’t a single example of “capitalism” in the entire history of mankind that has ever worked. Socialism has a far better track record.
So, no one actually believe in a “Free Market.” The purpose of “Free Market” rhetoric is to convince the working class to work harder to produce more for New York capitalists.
Who are the worst people to engage in this? “Reagan” conservatives like RamZPaul.
RamZPaul is outraged that Biden’s administration has proposed a $15 an hour minimum wage (they actually have not, but when do facts matter to right-wing conservatives?)
RamZPaul is outraged because he thinks that raising the minimum wage will cause inflation. But at the exact same time, RamZPaul praises Donald Trump for keeping the stock market high. How did they do that? By printing massive amounts of money and putting it in the stock market.
The stock market is high because that is the inflation from money printing.
But that doesn’t outrage conservative right-wingers. No – what outrages conservative right-wingers is the idea of some waitress getting paid $15 an hour and getting health insurance, because that is “socialism.”
RamZPaul will probably not make any videos complaining about the new regulations being passed to prevent Redditors from squeezing hedge funds naked shorts. RamZPaul has never complained about naked shorting, which is just outright fraud – quasi-legal fraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Why? Because RamZPaul is a conservative, thus he worships rich people and hates poor people. RamZPaul himself isn’t rich, according to him he owns some rental properties in Bumfuck, Oklahoma – according to the new Trump Conservative Supreme Court, Oklahoma is Native land anyway, so RamZPaul is literally squatting on stolen land according to his own conservative judges.
But no matter. RamZPaul, as a conservative, exists to suck up to the rich and hate on the poor.
The only difference between RamZPaul and most conservatives is RamZPaul likes to impotently whine about Jewish double standards. Which is good.
How successful is RamZPaul as a landlord?
Well – unlike yours truly – he wants you to send him money to tell you why raising the minimum wage is bad and causes inflation, but Wall Street bailouts are still “free market capitalism.”
Right-wingers are a joke, but then again, water is wet, so there it is.
Heads I win tails you lose or it’s foul play.
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@guest
Ronald Reagan told me that Queens were living it up on welfare and food stamps. Meanwhile oppressed Wall Street hedge funds were groaning under the weight of Big Government regulations.
So they “unlocked the value of poorly performing companies” and leveraged differential labor rates and lower regulatory burdens in China and Vietnam, allowing us to maximize value to the consumer.
See, offshoring jobs to Communist China is just Free Market Capitalism.
Sarcasm aside, there are actual more-or-less “free market solutions” to many of these problems, but right-wing conservatives not only won’t propose them, they will scream at anyone who does.
As they say, when the tide goes out everyone finds out who is skinny dipping. Similarly, if there really was some market discipline, a lot of the loudest proponents of “free markets” would fine themelves exposed as a completely obsolete class of rentiers.
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I heartily endorse Hunter Wallace of OccidentalDissent.com pushing the Huey Long thing.
Right-wing conservatives are cowardly suck-ups. All you have to do is pressure them – threaten their business – and they will yield.
I absolutely and unironically support punitive, confiscatory taxes on the rich, up to 100% of all assets over a certain amount. Right now, let’s say cap wealth at one billion dollars. Any assets over that should be seized by the IRS.
If the billionaires leave the country, good – don’t let them back in.
This is a real war. This is not a Sunday School lesson about “fairness” nor is anyone interested in any Ayn Rand crap.
I also unironically support the arrest and indictment of the CEO’s of ABC, NYT, CNN, etc., and then show trials.
CIA officer Michael Scheuer always said that it is pointless to try to make war less brutal. If you are in a war, you use maximum force to win as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you don’t bother.
This is a war, a full spectrum fifth-generation war, and these “elites” are the enemy.
Fence-sitters like RamZPaul *will* come around – or they won’t, in which case don’t support them and punch back when they cuck to the enemy, like conservative right-wingers always do.
See?
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Aside from selective default, it’s hard to imagine what policy options will be available to authorities when newly-printed money doesn’t automatically flow to financial assets but rather to commodities, as last happened in the ’70s. Maybe that’s the real Great Reset.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30
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@bob saffron
Which, ironically, is deflationary for commodity prices. Because the vast majority of liquidity is in those financial instruments. So, if they go belly up, the money supply constricts – by a LOT.
What is going to happen to commodities when the money supply is constricting?
We are in the middle of a massive, historical deflationary collapse. Unlike after 1929, the Fed is not causing this – the Fed can’t throw money out of helicopters fast enough to stave off the deflation.
You know what would work? UBI. Put more M1 into circulation – debt free.
Idiots like RamZPaul and Z-Man who think that is inflationary for consumer prices don’t have a fucking clue what is going on.
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the boomers will revolt against UBI because it will actually shake up the landscape. it would be great if they could do UBI in some untraceable non digital format that makes it not connectable in any form to a social credit system.
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Well, so far, every hiccup in the financial assets has seen the Fed go into massive money-printing mode, and I imagine they’ll just continue with this m.o.. Prices of financial assets could just flat-line (outrageously priced, as per your example with Tesla) while commodities boom. The ’70s without flares, afros or paisley shirts.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2
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Capitalism is when bartenders and baristas follow their passion:
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Working hard to make capitalists rich.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
If you don’t like it, make your own economy.
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socialism is not a solution to capitalism because they are both fundamentally the same thing which is unequal distribution of property and means of production. capitalism is just a temporary phase and socialism is just the vehicle in which the elites transition from “capitalism/prolitarianism” to full on slave society. as long as issuance of money is in fiat, as long as property/ infastructure is held by the elites through coporations and through “public works” (i.e. their government puppet show) nothing will fundamentally change.
only by breaking up monopolies and fostering a creative middle class/yeomanry of small owners are you ever going to get that jeffersonian ideal, or that greek polis. socialism is just the middle wits will to power hidden in the idea of “helping the poor”. why people in the 21st century still promote socialism when one merely has to jet over to wikipedia and view the 200 million dead left in the wake of communism to see how “empowered” humanity was by the forces of socialism.
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@Steiner
“view the 200 million dead left in the wake of communism”
When right-wingers complain about socialism, it is not the body count they complain about. It is the restrictions on the freedom of the rich – and it is the midwit capitalists, the “small business owners” – that believe their freedom of action is tied to the freedom of billionaires and centralizers.
It is not that the small businessmen are wrong about freedom and liberty – they are totally correct. People spend most of their life engaging in the economy, anything that restricts people economically tends toward slavery. Can’t quit your job? You are a slave. The reverse side of that is not being able to fire someone.
“middle class/yeomanry of small owners”
Indeed – human scale high tech pastoralism is my ideal too, with the urban areas full of hip coffeeshops and pretty but quirky white gals in problem glasses. Hey man, that’s my racist hipster utopia!
But nuclear power plants are not run by “small business.” Patriot missiles are not built by “small business.” Not even electric cars are built by “small business.” A network of decentralized community credit unions can easily be raided by concentrated foreign capital – and with hard money, or even gold, it is even easier.
The US is an Empire. At the level of Empire, abstractions like “capitalism” and “socialism” are more or less meaningless. In Bernie Sanders’ worst Commie fever dreams, all he is really endorsing is a European welfare state – the European welfare states are dynamic high tech capitalist economies.
Not even Bernie Sanders wants the state to run the shoe factories.
So when conservatives complain about “socialism” their key issue is that it subsidizes the undeserving poor – the underserving rich is a harder problem to solve, so just punt on that.
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@Hipster
Fiscal conservatism looks very different in different countries. In France, the most ardent libertarians are in favor of UBI
Jean-Marc Daniel the director and founder of the most prestigious business school, ESCP Paris, speaking on the local equivalent of Bloomberg TV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Daniel
Alain Madelin the former Minister of Finance, creator and manager of the 30 billion private equity firm Latour Capital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Madelin
Gaspard Koening, an ideologue who writes in the mainstream right-wing newspapers
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspard_Koenig
All these libertarians are in favor of universal income. Maybe it’s because unemployment is very high in France, the state already gives 700 dollars to unemployed people
How do you explain the American specificity of fiscal conservatism ? Thank you
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@Terre Blanche
In America this has virtually nothing to do with economics in substance, it is a religious war. Reaganism is a religion for American Baby-Boomers, and any welfare state programs strip away the pretense that these Reaganite baby boomers are not just proles like everyone else.
It is psychologically devastating to them, as much as telling White Liberals that they are actually not “anti-racist heroes” for marching with BLM.
Serious people, like you say, see UBI as a basic necessity without which Capitalism cannot function.
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@Hipster
Thanks for your reply, this kind of polarization is devastating
The funny thing is that America had the highest tax rates in the Western world until Reagan (top income tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%). Before John Kennedy it was 90% LMAO
Davos Billionaire on 70% tax: “Name a country where that’s worked – ever.” Co-panelist and MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson: “The United States!”
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@ Terre Blanche:
Corporate taxes have never been over about 50% and this, plus the creative use of trusts and charities has allowed the super-rich to maintain and indeed consolidate their power and wealth.
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