Comments on: Warning: Anger at Financiers Rising

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:42:00 +0000

Hitler turned the German economy round in two years. His policy was that not one Reichsmark be produced without the equivalent in goods or labour being attached to it. The result was a depressed economy moving into a state of underemployment within 24 months. Hitler and the German people paid the price but as much as the history books sweep this under the carpet Hitler’s Germany showed that there is an alternative. The bankers and industrialists showed their response to the alternative. They will do whatever is needed to keep their pathetic parasitic shenanigans going and this sort of idiocy will persist until it destroys us all.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 08:53:00 +0000

We have a society that rewards financial engineers but then fails to reward accountants and auditors. We have a society that fosters financial crimes, and then lives in denial when we have no enforcement of weak regulations. Our country is corrupt because it is run by corrupt forces that grow more powerful through collusion, where they connect like dividing cancer cells and morph into larger and larger monsters that are beyond control!

Our education systems produce engineers that have choices, paths which diverge between making $45,000 to become a civil servant, or the higher road to wall street where in no time at all, you can hit the big time.

I often wonder what would happen, if this mindset, this mentality of greed had been a driving factor when The Grand Coulee Dam was built, or The Hoover Dam, The Golden Gate Bridge, The Empire State Building, etc....maybe more to the point, what about engineers that build bridges? What if our safety depending on some dumbass greedy punk that didnt give a crap about anyone and all he (or she) cared about was getting a bonus and that the work, the engineering the value didnt matter a bit! Where the hell is our society going if continue to let these types of people in our government and in our banks destroy our world? These financial engineers are creating chaos and then not accountable for their actions. What if public, civil engineers had that same mindset and didnt have accountability or ethics or reliability! We can not trust these people and they are financial terrorists that are backed by this corrupt government that is unaccountable and blind to truth! We need to restore confidence in America and put heads on pikes and run these punks into prison cells and shut down this wall street mafia ASAP!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:56:00 +0000

I have never understood how a profession that has not actually invented anything really new in the past hundreds of years ( the double entry book keeping is of 14th century vintage), nor produces any real goods or services in the real economy gets so much importance and can get away with high crimes.
Mistakes done on such a mass scale and with so much capacity to derail so many institutions, should not go unpunished. Can you imagine a doctor going scot free after entire wards of patients die due to his ineptness or an engineer being let off the hook after a couple of hundred buildings collapse because of some “wrong guessestimates”?!
Probably the whole profession of financiers and accountants can be replaced with a supercomputer that enables borrowers to borrow money from those with surplus funds to invest and the book keeping of all businesses is done automatically.
If the taxation laws are made simpler, then this should not be a pipe dream.
We can live without these expensive parasites. I think the entire Google public offer was made without any help from any of the Wall Street banks, so we seem to be moving in the right direction.

By: joelunchbucket

joelunchbucket — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:20:00 +0000

Bankers/Financiers produce nothing they just churn money. All we make in this country any more are beds and hamburgers. Bennie and the jets are just wall streets butt boys. Hang em all

By: dearieme

dearieme — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:59:00 +0000

Spike the buggers if you like, chaps, but please be un-French enough to spare their wives and children.

By: wprestong

wprestong — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:42:00 +0000

I’m a fan of Mancur Olson’s writings on special interests. The financial services industry is a huge special interest that feeds off the general interest. It has grown too big and has a free rider problem of its own. What will happen: the core people in that world will eject the other stakeholders in one way or another, and this special interest will shrink, but not go away. The equity holders will get stuck with the bill and a lot of the employees will have to go to other industries (where they can probably do some good).

We won’t get rid of this special interest totally, but it will shrink in the next few years. It has to.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:37:00 +0000

I was at the conference, which by the way, included many sessions on problems in the market, possible solutions, etc. Unlike the slant given in the NYT article which focussed mostly on bankers/financiers, the participants included investors, banks, rating agencies, legal and accounting professions among others. The ASF organization has done a great job at working with all industry participants, regulators, etc to promote potential solutions to the current crisis. It is also doing a great job for the industry by facilitating networking for those of us which are now unemployed due to the credit crisis.
For 6500 attendees, it makes complete sense to throw a dinner party, including entertainment especially given the las vegas venue. By the way, the dinner was aweful…. not “surf and turf”. Rather it was beef stew and some sort of fish which wasn’t edible. Typical news media hype, which only helps in pushing the public reaction in the direction of the editor’s choice. Don’t believe everything you read, espec from the NYT.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:26:00 +0000

I’m a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, starting a software company. I’ve been in the business 22 years. The USA had a world class, world leading software industry. Now enrollment is down 70% & the future is overseas. Why? Because financiers with their bogus ‘innovation’ (that’s a word they should leave to us, they don’t deserve to use it) control the investment decisions of this country: they’ve destroyed manufacturing and much of domestic high tech. And that is in addition to the blood bath in real estate. In my opinion this crew should be taken up in a plane and tossed into the ocean. National security? How come the well being of the industries and citizens of the country doesn’t count for national security???

By: Francois

Francois — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:36:00 +0000

"Wolf discussion of the economic profits (50%) vs. economic value adds (18%) is telling of a divide that is only set to accelerate."

Why should this be inevitable? After all, financial industry exist only because laws are set in a certain way. Laws that would cap fees, mandate Truth in Billing, separate investment from banking operations, give real rights to shareholders, and allow people to save for retirement outside of 401(k)s would change the whole game for the financial industry.

Of course, all the above mentioned is dependent on political will, the oxymoron "par excellence".

By: s

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:59:00 +0000

One of those comments is mine. Ironically, I have spent the past ten years on Wall Street at the premiere banks and the quality and character of discourse has gone down exponentially by the year - the race to the bottom.

I firmly believe we are heading for conflict (4th-5th gen warfare, reference John Robb) as the BWII system unwinds and the franchised disenfranchised gap widens. Using Barnett's "Gap" thesis is a good way to think about the United States. Wolf discussion of the economic profits (50%) vs. economic value adds (18%) is telling of a divide that is only set to accelerate. The previous comment about the mediocrity that now stands watch over the system is emblematic of an empire in decline. The United States will ultimately face one of two paths: accept that it is becoming a relic (or as Mitt said yesterday "a modern day France, still a great nation, but not the world's leader"; or pursue a path of conflict, internally or externally). The sad reality is that the United States lone remaining advantage seems to be its military strength. Seems everyone missed the China consortium that is set to build jumbo jets. That is afterall out last bastion of industrial production.

The election of Obama will accelerate the internal divide which gives a certain irony to the "uniter" theme. More and more people are beginning to realize that corporate America has no vested interest in them and the government likewise represents things so far divergent from their interests. You here it everywhere.

Clearly there will be no revolution at least one hopes; it will be an iterative process and ongoing. Reference Ralph Peters map of the Middle East as a pictorial starting point for imaging what the fractioning of the United States could look like. The ideas that have glued this polyglot together are frayed - recall the commercial of the native american crying - and the economic backstop that has assuaged always present simmering political/cultural/geographic tensions is withering.

By the way, who bought that MBA stock? Worth considering?