The trouble being who determines what our collective best interests are and how they are best served? If you think the government is best at that then consider the various political antics we’ve seen lately wrt the debt ceiling…or those that happened during the initial crisis in 2008 and continue to this day. I trust politicians to do what’s best for their re-election chances, or even what they think their voters want, but I don’t think that either they or the voters always want what is actually the best thing for everyone.
What an interesting philosophical question! What is, in fact, in our collective best interests? Gosh, a bit overwhelming. Can we start with a simpler proposition, that the recent debacle was most assuredly not in our best interests?
Well, see, that’s a key difference between our view point. I’m unhappy with how private industry behaved and how little foresight they showed, and I’m unhappy with people for much the same reason, but I put the majority of the blame on our government and elected officials for creating the environment that made it possible…for our own collective good of course. Both Dems and Pubs shared in the fuck-up-ery, IMHO, though for different reasons based on what they thought they would get out of the situation, politically, and who they were trying to please. But bottom line, for me, is they were collectively to blame. Which means we were to blame, since they were just trying to do stuff we thought was ‘in our best interests’. Chicken in every pot, house for everyone who wanted one, and the veneer of a vibrant economy, with plenty of construction jobs and building jobs for everyone. YMMV, but that’s how I saw/see what happened and how we got were we are today.
I was with you until this part. Phil Gramm spearheaded the repeal of Glass-Steagall in the best interests of the banks, at the expense of everyone else. There is just no other way to spin it. There just are some members of Congress who are firmly in the pocket of industry, and “our best interests” simply don’t enter into it.
I think the idea that your local banks and credit unions are not every bit as much “the financial sector” as any other financial institution is a naive and stupid thought.
For mortgages, with very rare exceptions your local institutions will immediately sell your mortgage to a third party and it will get securitized.
Your credit union outsources its treasury management to a wirehouse who aggregrates the transactions on their behalf (I do this on behalf of credit unions currently.)
The likely reason that your 401k suck is actually shit is because it’s local. Your local bank or credit union can’t afford a CFP or CRPC on staff, and likely doesn’t have a retirement planning specialist or division to help your firm navigate that pretty tricky field. So, what you probably have is some plan from an insurance agent who carries a series 6 license to sell annuities instead of a 7, and therefore you have this annuity based contract that costs 2% more per year to your employees than it should, and is administered by somebody incapable of providing the ERISA required enrollment and continuing ed, competantly, and therefore your firm is ultimately legally responsible for the poor performance. So, by insisting on being local, you are screwing your own firm legally, your employees, and even your executive suite that probably can’t contribute what they would like because they are paying penalties and failing the discrimination testing.
Does that ring a bell?
Because, you could use Vanguard, or Fidelity, if you have strong in house benefits consulting, or you could use a Merrill or a Smith Barney or another wirehouse, that could give you a top notch provider at a sub 1% cost while handling all the enrollment, continuing ed, safe harbor bullshit, and all the rest.
But hey, you’re using a local credit union and we all know that locals would never screw you, right?
Considering as I was going off memory from some continuing Ed that i took ten years ago, I am pretty impressed with myself that my summary is as faithful to the current academic thinking as it is.
Unless I misinterpret, the take away is that people are more mobil than I was crediting.
As was pointed out in an earlier post, the part where i say the affluent moving to poor is a mistake on my part. What I should have said was dropping out of the affluent level, not necessarily to the poverty level.
Finally, you brought up Sweden? really?
Do you really want to compare the mobility of all socialist countries, or do you thing that mentioning Sweden is somehow a valid sample of 1 that legitimately contradicts the incredibly piss poor record of social mobility under socialist ideologies?
Why don’t you mention Russia or China?
There socialism has really helped social mobility, yes?
The bottom line is that the Swedes are special. Thank God they have socialism holding them back, otherwise those blonde aryan bastards would be ruling the world.
Which begs the question, out of all the different qualities that you could attribute the Swede’s success, why do you choose socialism?
If correlation implies causation that you could just as equally argue that the reason they are successful is that because they are almost all blonde and white, or that they are all Christian, or that they make the best porn, or any other bullshit obviously false explanation.
So why do you attribute their relative success to socialism?
Naw, we’re big service with the 401k, not local. We’re just down significantly below any market index you care to name on every recommended series of fund packages at any risk level.
Regarding credit unions? Ultimately, I know enough of a percentage of the shareholders so that when it’s in our best interests as customers to stop using any given wire service or whatever, we can. And it’s happened. And so the fees stay nonexistent, the mortgages stay with a regional credit-union-specific aggregator that’s not (so far as I know) securitizing them, life is good.
It’s a small as hell credit union, and the shareholders are typically pretty informed about big-bank idiocy, so we vote it down as necessary.
Yeah, you were pretty clear that you were making a guesstimation. I just figured, since we’re at the Straight Dope and all, that I might throw out some of the actual numbers produced by the research. We’re still supposed to be fighting ignorance around here, aren’t we? Or did someone change the mission statement in my absence?
My “take away” is that people in the middle income brackets – especially in the second and third quintiles – are more mobile than you suggested (or I suspected), but that people who are rich – the upper 20%, and especially the upper 5% – are less mobile than you suggested. YMMV. Of course, it’s important to note that the study quoted above spans 10 years, and that these trends would probably be even larger over the course of 20, or 30 years.
The line about Sweden was really a throw away. Just to start with, Sweden is not by any reasonable definition a socialist country. I was just kidding about that. Neither is France, Germany, Denmark, or Canada, to name a few others, all of which have higher levels of income mobility than the US. While none of these countries are socialist, they all have generous social programs, progressive taxation, and fairly strict financial regulations by US standards.
I personally think these policies contribute to social mobility, yeah. There is no real poverty in Sweden of the kind one sees in the States, for example. I don’t think there are any privately run universities here, and all education is free .. well, free for the students, I mean. State run. I think that’s one very important element, access to affordable education. Strong labor unions force employers to provide decent wages and working conditions. That’s another. Progressive taxation plows wealth from the upper levels back into a strong and vibrant middle class. That’s a third point. There are broader social trends too – the last few generations of Swedes have been “class travelers” in particular, for some reason.
Then there are the cultural differences. The Protestant Work Ethic lies heavy on the heart of the Swede. Having a job is an essentially part of what it means to be a person here; it’s in the water. There’s something very shameful about not being employed, and good work is understood as being necessary to fulfillment as a human being. This goes a long way to eliminate the “free rider” problem, although there are always a few free riders anyway, of course.
In America we search long and hard for free riders. If we don’t find them we lie. Then claim they are deadbeats who are taking advantage of our generosity. All programs that help the poor must be eliminated because there are so many cheats living like Warren Buffet off of them.
Over half the people on assistance are children. They are of course members of the future cheaters of America and should have to wear signs saying so. Perhaps facial tattoos.
What do Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Robert Wolf have in common?
If you said that they were heads of some of the big name Wall Street firms, you’d be correct.
If you said they were Democrats, you’d be correct.
If you said that they or their companies were some of the largest contributors to the Obama campaign, you’d be correct.
What about Larry Summers? He favored passing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act as Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He championed the very derivatives that many now feel helped precipitate the financial meltdown. He then served on Obama’s National Economic Council until he was found taking kickbacks from the firms he was overseeing.
So there is a virtual who’s who of the players responsible for the economic meltdown with one thing in common- involvement with the current administration.
I don’t mean this as a endorsement of any Republican positions, or as an inference that a Republican administration wouldn’t have been right there in the same boat, just that there seems to be some disconnect that people are having between the Obama administration and Wall Street.
I admit having a little chuckle when it was reported that OWS was going to protest at the home of Jamie Dimon. If they only knew.
Hell no the Republicans own the damn boat. Blankfein was one of the worst ,most overpaid execs in history. what does his party affiliation have to do with what he did? And what Dems are trying to protect him.?
Summers is a horror . He was a big pusher of the destruction of Glass. He should never have been allowed near a political cabinet.
One of the worst spanned many admins, Greenspan. His Libertarian beliefs screwed up things big time.
Like Durbin said’ the banks own the place". That is why people are in the streets instead of talking to the pols. The politicians will do nothing until they are aware their political futures are at risk. Perhaps you should be occupying too.
Fuck, Gramm was McClain’s economic adviser. How fucked up was that?
I’m not denying it is fucked up, but when you say Obama should go after some bankers, what bankers do you mean? The bankers who helped put him in office? The bankers who are his economic advisors? The bankers in his administration?
I believe a lot of people think Wall Street = Greedy Republicans. Reality is, Wall Street is populated by a good many from both sides. If it was fucked up that Gramm was McCain’s economic advisor, remember that McCain wasn’t elected President. What’s really fucked up is that Summers was an Obama advisor after Obama was elected. How fucked up was that?
I think that’s one thing the OWS protesters have right, both parties are FUBAR’d.
I still bet that if you interviewed the protesters in the park and asked them,
"The financial crisis was precipitated by
a) Greedy Republican bankers or
b) Contributors, confidants, and advisors to the Obama administration"
It is worldwide. It transcends political parties. you are being defensive about the poor misunderstood Repubs, who have been greasing the skids to this mess for generations. Thre is no way to defend the totally bought off Repubs. mentioning the much less , but still bought off Dems, will not do the job.
Duke, are you operating on the assumption that the OWS is a Democratic Party function? You don’t think we’ve ever heard of Blue Dog Democrats? “Business friendly” Clintonistas, born again centrists, Republican Lite?
Besides which, isn’t that what hedge fund guys do? Hedge their bets? These men have a deep and abiding commitment to economic equality and the well-being of their fellow Americans? Wonderful news. But its news, isn’t it?
It is hard to argue against oil price shock as the precipitator.
As far as why the economies of very few countries were resilient enough to withstand the shock (and probably none before the depression is over), this will be argued by economists, and economic historians, for decades if not centuries. Right now, it looks to me like too much real estate debt held by banks that didn’t properly access the risks has a lot to do with it. You could call this greedy bankers. A lot of that real estate debt was American, but, well, a lot wasn’t. Ireland is small, but comes to mind as having the problem in a more extreme form than the US.
I’d be shocked if greedy bankers have a predictable political affiliation, so it isn’t greedy Republican bankers. A lot of the bankers are not US citizens, and thus couldn’t be Republicans. As for the Obama administration, obviously they inherited the ongoing train wreck, from which there is no magic way out.
Answer: The charge is rubbish from a left wing web site that was never taken up by mainstream media, much less the courts. If you read that last link carefully, you’ll see that this has to do with Summers having had been, previous to government service, on the board of directors of a would-be PayPal competitor whose investors included big banks. The supposed payoff thus was a pay before, and was not to Summers, but to a company he was a director of. With this kind of standard for payoff, every government official who ever was on a board of directors would be in prison for received pay-before payoffs.
Presumably Summers should have proven himself to be independent of the banks by bringing them into bankruptcy with failing stress test grades :rolleyes:
The problem is bankers will not break up the institutions that have made them extremely wealthy. When you are looking for insiders to fix it the banking system, you will be disappointed. There were plenty of economists who saw the banking problems coming and suggested fixes as the mess was occurring. One of them should have been put in charge. Instead we have a government full of Goldman execs, who are supposed to do the right thing. It is not working. It will not work.
But bankers own the place . They will not permit real changes.
Instead of going to jail, they are sentenced to 4 years of working for the administration. That costs them a few zillion dollars.
