NY Times regularly publishes very critical opinion pieces on Wall St behavior.
Here's a particularly good one from last year, "When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers", Part 1 of a 5 part teardown on how PE firms have wormed their way into critical services in search of profits: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/dealbook/when-yo...
After every election there are always the same winners: Wall St is one of the biggest ones.
IIRC that was pretty much Bain's MO.
Reasonable people have put the cost of the financial crisis at 6-30 trillion, or more (6 being the lower bound of the Fed's very own estimate). The higher figure is $93,000/per citizen, and it very will could be more than that.(1)
That is only the start of the story. Ever wonder why your money devalues every day? That value is not magically disappearing due to some mystical force called inflation: someone is capturing that value.
Thanks to High Priest of the Harvard-Wall Street Order, Gregory Mankiw, the Fed even has an influential academic paper that craftily provides a logical dogma to minimize theft through seignorage, and how muxh the public really is being taken for.
There are good reasons people from Aaron Swarz to Milton Friedman really, really wanted to get rid of the Fed.
If they were truly bad, I'd hear about it from respectable liberal and conservative speakers.
Maybe that is not the best criteria, but anyways a lot of respectable figures have spoken out against the Fed, from Nobel Prize winner Friedman, to Aaron Swarz, to Sanders, JFK, Ron Paul, Grieder, etc.
Let me ask you something. So we know the financial crisis cost between 6-30 trillion, or more, so up to $100,00+ per every citizen in the US. The Fed's balance sheet ballooned to over 4 trillion.
So when the Fed turns on its printing press and buys assets, where do you think that Store of Value they are exchanging comes from? Do you think Bernenke and Yellen have pixie dust that magically assembles into productive goods or services? No, the value comes from hard working Americans who actually create value. If no one produced anything of value and exchanged dollars for it, the currency would no longer fulfil the technical requirement that money be, in part, a Store of Value.
So since we dont believe Fed Chairman have magical powers, this value the Fed is capturing must come from somewhere. And it comes from devaluing our currency. They're very simply dilluting (stealing) value from everyone who has dollars.
It is very literally the greatest heist in the history of the world, and it is right there, out in the open. Just like tragedies in history were tolerated by people of their time to the bemusement of us today, so have we tolerated this for some unholy reason.
source?
There are pdfs available online
This paper is just epic bullshit that defends the Fed's existence.
Well. The New York Times is generally for more financial regulation. If you're calling for a FINRA, SEC, CFPB, House Financial Services Committee, Senate Banking Committee and state-by-state financial services regulatory equivalents for tech, then you'll probably find yourself in agreement with (a) the New York Times, (b) most of the media and (c) a growing fraction of legislators and the American electorate. Partly because of what happened. Largely because of the flippant response the offending companies, and our Silicon Valley culture as a whole, has had to the complaints.
Zuckerberg for example claims that he has some goal of changing the world for the better.
Note, I think this is all a little silly when it clearly comes down to rich individuals that define most of the giving. Gates couldn’t have done so much without microsoft.
Wall Street does not claim to improve the world!?!?!?
At a very fundamental level, the whole premise of capital investment is such that it spurs economic growth and stability and thereby establishes a more accessible marketplace in order for consumers to achieve an increased "marginal utility of happiness".
Wall street flies the flag of investment banking and are by virtue implicit actors in "improving the world" through capital investment. I-banking firms are responsible for increasing gains for stakeholders, maintaining competitive pricing for consumers and optimizing performance of output and product. Therefore, the sentiment in question (although not explicitly phrased as "improving the world") does manifest itself in various ways through the marketing messages delivered by WS, and the promise has been fulfilled, more or less.
The end result of an improved world as such is evidenced by you typing on a computer designed in Cupertino, materials thereof industrially sourced from Africa, manufactured in China and delivered to you via Amazon, all of which required the assistance of Wall Street capital...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2009/11/world_not_laugh...
The thing is, the technology industry, and the finance industry do useful, good work. The trouble really comes from an overreach of corporate power. poor regulation and lousy, antisocial corporate governance are not the problems of their industries, they are the problem of our government.
With wall street, we knew that we were dealing with people of low character because they were open about it. “greed is good” was the motto
With silicon valley, the tech companies portrayed themselves as do-gooder “don’t be evil” types on a mission of contribution and some of us were naive enough to believe it. Big difference.
I think we tend to hate those who betray our trust us more strongly than those who are honest about their intentions.
The comparison here isn't very apt because wallstreeters don't really pitch themselves as visionary innovators out to "save the world" and "do no evil." I mean sure the PR departments of all the bulge brackets will spin their typical corporate BS, but generally speaking, Wall Street is pretty self-aware.
In comparison, tying your mission to some humanistic cause is basically a pre-requisite for a tech company/startup. Case in point from yesterday's WSJ coverage of Outcome [1]:
Outcome has said its mission is to “activate the best health outcome possible for every person in the world” and provide "actionable health intelligence at the moment of care."
In practice, it puts flat screens and tablets in doctors’ offices and gets paid by pharmaceutical companies to run ads on them.
Talking to friends in NYC, they say that the "Silicon Valley is evil" trope plays well there because New York is heavily finance-based, and finance has been slammed while tech has ascended.
Also note that Amazon is included in "Silicon Valley", even though they have never been headquartered in CA.
It's actually a trope for SV companies. It was lampooned in season 1 episode 1 of the show Silicon Valley:
> And yes, we're disrupting digital media, but most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility.
Well, unless 'you' are one of the very few (statistically speaking) benefiting.
It's neither impossible nor unreasonable to constrain organizational behavior to incorporate collective goals.
It's just politically toxic in an America where self interest has been cultivated to be the ultimate moral litmus test.
That economic theories predicated on the aggregated consequence of self interest providing for collective benefit have been utterly disproven has not affected the received ideology.
Who would want to question the belief that acting in their own benefit is not morally unimpeachable?
QED the lionized cowboy culture at Über, to name an egregious example among a bottomless pool of them.
That would be providing a product that people are freely willing to pay for.
Although it is fiction, it is an entertaining read of the attitude you describe during the dot.com boom.
I remember reading it a chapter at a time, as it was released, I think weekly, on yil.com.
That's exactly what I had in mind when I was reading the article! Businesses are in existence to make money, it's up to us (which includes govt. regulations) to reign them in when necessary. This shouldn't be a surprise that businesses are exploiting the masses.
In Bay Area with your freshly mint MBA, over the weekend you could put together power-point presentation, pitch it on Monday as a "big shot with incredible idea and amazing connections" and get funded by Friday.
Meanwhile to be selling the same BS on the stock market you actually had to had a stock, who got on the NYSE/NASDAQ board first, and that means there has been actually a physical company with employees and everything in place.
During the dot.com boom it was pretty clear that there were people here in the Bay Area whose only goal was to sell some investors on an idea, pump it up, take it public on a story, pocket some big profits and then blow town. My friends and I called it the "Invasion of the MBAs" but it really was the invasion of people who want to make easy money and they don't care who they hurt doing it. After things blew up and the only people getting investment were people trying to actually build products it calmed way down. This 'type' of person seems to seek out other avenues when there is real work to be done.