Forum Post: DOW, S&P and Now NASDAQ Closing in on Records
Posted 9 years ago on March 2, 2015, 8:46 p.m. EST by turbocharger
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Thanks Barrack!!
Boy, what a difference a decade or two makes. Remember how everyone loved Bill because he shipped all the jobs out and Wall St was booming?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/03/02/stocks-monday/24253319/
The stock markets are so high because the corporations are actually the biggest purchasers of stock. By buying back their own stock, they support or raise the share price, enabling executives and boards to sell their shares or cash in their options at the most profitable prices and maximize their bonuses.
The cash-injection all the Quantitative Easing - has given to the US mega-banks leaves lots of room for speculating in stocks and therefore pushing up the price despite the absence of any fundamentals that would actually really support a genuinely rising stock market.
The myriad sharp practices in which US banks engage today are hugely risky so why gamble with their own money if they can gamble with depositors’ money? The mega-banks led by Citigroup, lobbied hard to overturn the provisions in Glass Steagall and Dodd-Frank that had put depositors’ money out of their reach as any backup for many types of troubled financial instruments but now that's no longer the case.
Apparently only Senator Elizabeth Warren and a few others are opposing all this. However, Senator Warren is outgunned as Citigroup controls the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve as 40 years of Neoliberal Fantasy Financialization has sold America and Americans and so many others besides, down the 'Private Profit paid for by Public Debt' river. It's just mind bendingly clear and simple fraud.
QE1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k
QE2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGIvw7T0GPI
gambling the depositors money is an easy way to tell them they have less
But ''gambling the depositors money'' should be illegal - as indeed it was under Glass Steagall!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/19/wall-street-deregulation-clinton-advisers-obama
money does not seem accountable to me
That is because most 'money'... is made up and created in the first instance as a debt via an interest bearing loan contract, which is itself then traded at discount one day and premium the next by banks, whose 'interests' are the primary concern in this scenario. Ever wandered why banks have the biggest buildings in town? Or how they got to be so powerful? It's hard to believe that it wasn't always like this.
Later when their Ponzi house of cards explodes, we bail them out and then go on to suffer austerity and privatisation of The Commons. What suddenly happened to Greece (where the people rose up) has been slowly happening in America for 40 years. OWS tried waking people up and did do for a year or two, but people dozed off again. The next Presidential election will not mean the end of struggle, but a new start.
Open Source, Peer-to-Peer digital money is the future https://bitcoin.org/en/ and you need to research and read up the 'Block-Chain' / open-ledger technology to see why - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin but with a little luck this will be part of breaking the bankers' monopoly and their huge power over us all.
do you know about the stamp script experiment in austria? i can't find the article where i read about it but this should suffice - from what i read irving fisher found out about it and told fdr who had the idea banned! also the austrian government came down hard on worgl and ended the practice - what a surprise -
In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, the small town of Wörgl in Austria successfully experimented with its own local currency (in the form of a stamp scrip). Based on the thinking of Silvio Gesell, an early 20th-century economist, and designed to stimulate the local economy, the new currency helped put the population back to work, and inspired many other communities to want to follow its example, until the experiment was abruptly terminated by Austria’s Central Bank in 1933. The following is the story of the “miracle of Wörgl” as told in The Future of Money (pp. 153-155).
——————————————————————————————————————- One of the best-known applications of the stamp scrip idea was applied in the small town of Wörgl in Austria in 1932 and 1933. When Michael Unterguggenberger (1884-1936) was elected mayor of Wörgl, the city had 500 jobless people and another 1,000 in the immediate vicinity. Furthermore, 200 families were absolutely penniless. The mayor-with-the-long-name (as Professor Irving Fisher from Yale would call him) was familiar with Silvio Gesell‘s work and decided to put it to the test.He had a long list of projects he wanted to accomplish (re-paving the streets, making the water distribution system available for the entire town, planting trees along the streets and other needed repairs.) Many people were willing and able to do all of those things, but he had only 40,000 Austrian schillings in the bank, a pittance compared to what needed to be done.
Instead of spending the 40,000 schillings on starting the first of his long list of projects, he decided to put the money on deposit with a local savings bank as a guarantee for issuing Wörgl’s own 40,000 schilling’s worth of stamp scrip. He then used the stamp scrip to pay for his first project. Because a stamp needed to be applied each month (at 1% of face value), everybody who was paid with the stamp scrip made sure he or she was spending it quickly, automatically providing work for others. When peoople had run out of ideas of what to spend their stamp scrip on, they even decided to pay their taxes, early.
Wörgl was the first town in Austria which effectively managed to redress the extreme levels of unemployment. They not only re-paved the streets and rebuilt the water system and all of the other projects on Mayor Unterguggenberger’s long list, they even built new houses, a ski jump and a bridge with a plaque proudly reminding us that ‘This bridge was built with our own Free Money’ (see photographs
A fantastic history lesson! Thanks. It's a shame they didn't learn or remember such lessons, as Austria is about to go through a banking crisis soon as they have over extended themselves on the same short-term, greed animus as Wall Street, by lending to Eastern European home buyers etc. I wonder what the late great Abba Lerner would have made of all this Neoliberal Friedmanite B-S? Monetarism with no idea about how money is created or by who, is like trying to learn Math without knowing basic numbers, imo.
BUY the fucking all time high,BITCHEZ!