Forum Post: Defund Wall Street by providing an alternative
Posted 11 years ago on May 15, 2012, 10:21 p.m. EST by richardkentgates
(3269)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
A lot of small biz is having a hard time locking in financing to grow their business or hire (supposedly connected to hiring). At the same time, Wall Street has been raking it in and the lion share of investment capital in our country is being handled by a handful of companies.
To fix this, we should find a solution that helps small biz get access to financing just as easily as multinational corporations find it. Secondly, to do away with the small portion of absurdly wealthy people manipulating price inflation, we need to defund wall street by providing other places for common persons to invest rather than handing their investment cash over the the same few people. Lastly the solution needs to help spread the risk so that the entire economy doesn't teeter on the tiny focal point we are currently dependent on for financial and investment services.
Micro Markets
All of the things mentioned could be accomplished by introducing micro trading markets based by region. Whether that is done by geography, population, or even industry (probably not effective to focus on industry), it would allow for more people to profit from investment, support local companies, and balance the financial power throughout the entire country. This would help to stabilize the economy. An added bonus, you would immediately notice the relationship between the health of individual Micro Markets and wages. Regions with higher wages would naturally do better because people in those areas would have more money to invest and to spend. Regulation enforcement could also be made easier by bringing each state into the fold of regulating the Micro Markets under their jurisdiction.
Whether or not you agree/disagree right away, take some time to think before cornering yourself into defending a knee-jerk reply. The idea of capitalism requires a healthy circulation of capital or it stalls. The other side of the coin, socialism is about the common wealth, and this would make wealth a lot more common (pun kinda intended :)
Another aspect to this idea - really the more important, I think - is that banks wield the magic of creating money from nothing by lending more assets than they physically hold. If micro-markets of the type suggested here were permitted, that power would pass into the hands of the general public. I suspect, therefore, that we will find some legal restriction which, as if accidentally, prohibits this - even so, the research and ensuing discussion would be enlightening.
Giving small businesses and startups better access to promotion via media in both price and visibility would help.
I have seen many local small businesses fail while young because they cannot compete with the media bombardment that comes from larger chain businesses and cannot bid well against them for air time or visibility on paper.
This is even if their prices are better than that larger mega-corporate chain.
The ability to use money that one gained from their American Dream to ensure that someone else's American Dream never sees the light of day is but one facet to major corruption.
One aspect of micro markets would be to help provide funding to such startups. I agree with your assessment of corporate bullying.
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I like the idea generally. I hate it how people with cash have to hand it over to some big bank / financial advisor to manage it. I've started with peer-to-peer lending markets (prosper and lendingclub) and they've performed well, and I'm sure there are many more ways to take banks out of the equation. For example, there should be a simple way to put your money into a world-index fund ... you tie your fate to the whole world.
I just launched a website called http://the99percentvotes.com for people to submit, discuss, and vote on public policy ideas. If you have a public policy angle on this issue, I encourage you to post on the site.
I checked it out, pretty nice. I left a suggestion in the Dev section about navigation. I'll probably post on regular topics soon, though I'm currently working on an energy project and an HTML5 Content Management System.
Yeah, I saw. If you have any more specific suggestions about navigation, I'm all ears. Thanks.
You have a dependency of support linked to prioritizing a topic. If you click the priority level without supporting, nothing happens. It should at the least, provide a notice that you must support before voting on priority. To save space, I would just provide a notice when the user clicks to vote priority but has not yet clicked to support. The rest is aesthetics and mentioned in the post. All in all it's good work.
Thanks. I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The support button is simply to support the person indicated. You vote on the ideas by mousing over the voting labels by the graph and clicking. The "popular" tab on ideas is based purely on voting results. The "popular" tab on people is most affected by the support function, but also bakes in other feedback the people have received (e.g., votes on their submitted ideas).
I don't have directions on the site to clarify these things ... I'm relying on people figuring it out at this point.
For example, I wanted to vote a post by jart to "important" or something like that, I don't remember the exact wording. Nothing happened. I then clicked to support Jart (next to the name) then clicked to prioritize again and at that point it took. I guess it may have been because of a server delay but I assume it was structural because I waited about 15 second. Navigation is key to a websites success, I'd really like to see your site competing with facebook in all honesty. We need to compete with complacency and I think you have a winning idea to do that.
Thanks man. I definitely want this to be a social network for politics that is not sketchy about privacy et al like facebook.
Yeah, the voting function is on the right with the graph. You click on the voting labels (e.g., This Will Save Us, Got My Vote, etc.). The Support button registers support for the person (e.g., the idea submitter). I know that this is confusing and many people assume that Support supports the idea. I don't have instructions about this on the site, and it's a problem that about half the people have the wrong instinct on this. It's a pretty big redesign though to change it, so I won't be able to do this immediately.
Ah, I see, this is Richard. You're on the site, but not using it yet. Put an idea or two...
will do.
I have a practical idea that probably will work and it does not need many people or a lot of money to start it:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/natural-money-bomb-the-way-to-finish-off-the-usury/
But if it is a success then it can be big.
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