BF2S Forums Double-dip recession imminent

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Diesel_dyk wrote:

IMO they're a parasite. Their services may be necessary to a certain extent, but they are taking too much out of the economy.
Anyway, there is something seriously wrong with that industry, any other service would suffer in an ailing economy. If the economy is bad, then people cut back, and people in the service industry get hurt, but by all indication these guys are rebounding like a rubber super ball. its ridiculous.

The problem is that these guys are talked about as if they were "the economy" and policy is being set as if that were true. IMO if the economy does not recover (and its not going to for another 4 years) and the gravy train of tax money going to these guys dries up, or the fed rate is forced up, then we will see this financial bubble pop and then they can all join us in the real world.

long story short, the talk of double dip is all spin about them. The rest of us are still in the decline.

Too much out of the economy? They make too much money? Who the fuck are you to decide something as arbitrary as that? What would you like the jobs to be replaced by? Factory union jobs? Jesus Fucking Christ, stop watching MSNBC, it's turned you into a moron.

Nope...  he's spot on, actually.  Most of what Wall Street does is manipulate money in arbitrary ways.  It's only perceived as a service because of how convoluted and manipulative banking can be.  Ever since the advent of fiat money, the financial sector has mostly been a very complicated game of smoke and mirrors.

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

They are exactly like any other middleman providing a service. I don't care if it's a wholesaler, Walmart, the local grocery store or whatever else. All these people are doing is providing a service, taking a cut, and moving the product on to the end user or another middleman. The middleman is a service provider whose sole function is to be a buffer between the source and the end user. Any one of us can go on e-trade and buy stocks or bonds directly. There's no reason to go through Wall Street but people do because of the perceived value of the service. You really can't be this brainwashed...

It's not the middleman aspect I'm referring to.  Things like fractional reserve banking literally create money out of nothing.

Diesel_dyk wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Diesel_dyk wrote:

IMO they're a parasite. Their services may be necessary to a certain extent, but they are taking too much out of the economy.
Anyway, there is something seriously wrong with that industry, any other service would suffer in an ailing economy. If the economy is bad, then people cut back, and people in the service industry get hurt, but by all indication these guys are rebounding like a rubber super ball. its ridiculous.

The problem is that these guys are talked about as if they were "the economy" and policy is being set as if that were true. IMO if the economy does not recover (and its not going to for another 4 years) and the gravy train of tax money going to these guys dries up, or the fed rate is forced up, then we will see this financial bubble pop and then they can all join us in the real world.

long story short, the talk of double dip is all spin about them. The rest of us are still in the decline.

Too much out of the economy? They make too much money? Who the fuck are you to decide something as arbitrary as that? What would you like the jobs to be replaced by? Factory union jobs? Jesus Fucking Christ, stop watching MSNBC, it's turned you into a moron.

Who am I? Who... Am I? Who Am... I?
Why I'm the scab picker of course

Sounds like someone wants on to the parsite gravy train bad.

first of all you should know that some jobs just shouldn't exist in the first place, like telemarketers or doctors working as health insurance claims adjusters, and for sure some 20 something pukes shouldn't be able to step into a middle man position pushing paper for a million dollars plus a year. Something is seriously wrong when a useless twat takes that much money out of the economy doing nothing. They aren't creative artists anymore than an annoying mosquitoe. The growth in that industry takes money from some where else in the economy, shuffles it around and calls it a profit. And a sure sign of that zero sum game is that with the economy failing, they are still able to pull money out of the economy to maintain their profits. That means that they have become divorced from the real economy.

I'm sure that you know that the organism in nature that flourishes at the expense of the host is a parasite and if you're a cog in a parasite then that makes you a parasite too. If the financial industry were a operating as a necessary organ of the economy, then when the body is sick, they would be suffering too. Yes, IMO they are taking too much out of the economy.



BTW I don't watch MSNBC, I look at reality and make my own conclusions. I'm sure if I worked down on wall street or lived within stones throw of there that I would have a completely different world view because I am more of merc than an idealist. I can spin both ways and I recognize spin when I see it and right now I see the double dip talk as pro financial industry spin.

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

It's not the middleman aspect I'm referring to.  Things like fractional reserve banking literally create money out of nothing.

So a big government guy like yourself is now crying about central banking? Central banking is how you fund your socialist utopia.

We don't have a public central bank.  We have the Federal Reserve -- a consortium of banking executives that are essentially granted governmental powers.

If we had never gotten rid of the Second Bank of the U.S., things would've turned out much better in the long run.  Instead, we eventually went through an ineffectual series of commodity based currencies, the Bretton-Woods System, and now, we have a modern fiat currency that is very vulnerable to reckless behavior on the part of the financial sector as a whole.

Ideally, we would disband the Fed Reserve, create a Third National Bank, and then tie our currency to a commodity, but the hard parts are deciding what commodity to choose and how to get our major trading partners to build up their own reserves of this commodity so that they could be a part of our system.

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

We don't have a public central bank.  We have the Federal Reserve -- a consortium of banking executives that are essentially granted governmental powers.

If we had never gotten rid of the Second Bank of the U.S., things would've turned out much better in the long run.  Instead, we eventually went through an ineffectual series of commodity based currencies, the Bretton-Woods System, and now, we have a modern fiat currency that is very vulnerable to reckless behavior on the part of the financial sector as a whole.

Ideally, we would disband the Fed Reserve, create a Third National Bank, and then tie our currency to a commodity, but the hard parts are deciding what commodity to choose and how to get our major trading partners to build up their own reserves of this commodity so that they could be a part of our system.

Well shit, how do you plan on 'stimulating' your way out of recessions if you can't just create money out of thin air?

Well, for starters, you let the big companies fail.  Bailouts should be out of the question.

Secondly, anti-trust laws should be revised to close all of the various loopholes involved in local markets.  If anti-trust regulations actually were enforced as they are supposed to, there would be no monopolies or oligopolies.  Competition would be much more prevalent throughout the economy.

For the few situations where a monopoly or oligopoly is inevitable, heavy regulation would keep these industries accountable, but that of course requires appointing bureaucrats that aren't in bed with the industries they're supposed to regulate.

JohnG@lt wrote:

You're just confused. You had me nodding along to the beginning of your post and then you go off on a tangent about regulations when its those very same regulations which create the oligopolies and monopolies in the first place. They make the cost of doing business so high that they drive out all the smaller businesses in a given market.

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

You're just confused. You had me nodding along to the beginning of your post and then you go off on a tangent about regulations when its those very same regulations which create the oligopolies and monopolies in the first place. They make the cost of doing business so high that they drive out all the smaller businesses in a given market.

Plenty of barriers to entry are purely market driven.  There's a reason why privatized healthcare results in a lot of mid-size cities having only a handful of hospitals owned by one or two companies -- because they're expensive to run regardless of regulation.

The same is true of nation building companies like Halliburton.  They don't have much competition in that field, because few companies have the resources needed for that work.

So no, it's not regulation that creates all monopolies or oligopolies.  Plenty of it is organic.  Now, I would agree with you that the telecommunications industry is very oligopolistic because of deals the government made with the major players of the industry.  That much we agree on, and about the only thing that could actually change that is antitrust law.

So, like it or not, antitrust regulations are necessary for opening up competition.

JohnG@lt wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

I find it humorous that people whine and cry and bitch and moan about regulated industries (and the financial services industry is the most heavily regulated industry in America) and thinking that even more regulation will work when everything else has failed.

Quantity of regulation isn't the issue -- quality of regulation is.  Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were trusted with the oversight of banking and such, and they fucked it up.

And therein lies the problem with every single one of your solutions. You're asking corrupt as fuck politicians to make other people 'play nice'. lol, just lol.

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

Quantity of regulation isn't the issue -- quality of regulation is.  Chris Dodd and Barney Frank were trusted with the oversight of banking and such, and they fucked it up.

And therein lies the problem with every single one of your solutions. You're asking corrupt as fuck politicians to make other people 'play nice'. lol, just lol.

The private sector is equally corrupt.  Therein lies the biggest problem.

One could argue that America's level of corruption (especially in California) is a cultural problem.  Plenty of other wealthy countries have corruption issues, but it seems like we're exceptionally corrupt in certain respects.

By comparison, Canada seems a lot less corrupt.

Turquoise wrote:

JohnG@lt wrote:

Turquoise wrote:

The private sector is equally corrupt.  Therein lies the biggest problem.

One could argue that America's level of corruption (especially in California) is a cultural problem.  Plenty of other wealthy countries have corruption issues, but it seems like we're exceptionally corrupt in certain respects.

By comparison, Canada seems a lot less corrupt.

Involving the government in the economy is the cause of the corruption. If a senator can't help or hurt a company based on the bribes, oops, sorry, I mean campaign contributions, that he receives then there is no issue. Keep the laws simple. Punish corruption, theft and fraud severely (no more white collared prisons) and the rest works itself out.

In theory, I agree.  In practice, not so much...