Forum Post: TaxPayer; Please read and respond!!!!
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 8, 2011, 12:29 a.m. EST by agrajag
(12)
from Denver, CO
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
How is it that people coming together and protesting the absence of accountability on wall street becomes the characterization you just threw down on us all as your fox news sponsored rant?
If you think for a second this group efforts has anything to do with the damage that has taken place to the middle class over the last 2 decades... you are out of your mind.
I have a job, I no longer invest in wall street, I work with people who finance small businesses instead. But I'm sick of watching wall street destroy people's wealth who are not informed properly on how to weather shifts in the market by the people they pay fees to for "managing" their investments.
We can not allow deposits for you and me to end up collapsed to risk taking by the 1/2 wits that invariably stumble into positions of power in the finance industry . It is getting dangerous because along with the rocket scientists who have figured out how to make slices of pennies increase in value, and who don't give a shit about us... are working with them... and as a team they have really screwed us this time (programmatic trading now controls the market, it used to be just "all of us" and our brokers, by the way).
As long as it is "OK" for the financial industry to experiment with reality and trigger global financial collapse nothing will be safe. Without their being accountability while they manipulate the politicians we have entrusted with making sure the oversight is in place to prevent overt fraud. De-regulation has set the stage and the right's claim is that even more de-regulation is needed before anything can change?
So here is a direct question to you TaxPayer: Why would you support politicians that allow lobbying to remove the banking and trading safeguards that were in place on the market to prevent risk like what we've seen happen since they were removed?
Why would you believe news media organizations that present conservitive value points of view while the programming of the network promotes anti-social values and shock based reality programming to prevert your children?
Stop and realize its nothing but mis-information designed to devide you against your fellow american.
Please... WAKE UP... START TALKING NOT ARGUING. WORK ON FINDING COMMON GROUND FIRST.
Your family's financial security is being destroyed for you and your children and their kids future is tied up in leveraged debt to china?
What exactly has Washington being doing right for you for the last 10 years that your so ready to lead the "stop the 99%" marching band and yell all the people to go home and get jobs?
If the jobs were there, trust me, people would not be out in the streets demanding change at this scale.
And honestly, stop and realize that the goal of corporate controlled media working so hard to disparage your fellow American in your eyes.
1) shock and awe (over and over) to desensitise us to actual real issues
2) to control the structure of the news disseminated in such a way keep us in conflict with one another... conflict over things that are based on how our brains are wired (conservative vs liberal values) instead of keeping track of what is going on. In other words keep everyone arguing about nonsense while the national coffers were plundered by a war no one figured out how to fund properly for an entire decade.
3) to sell advertising while providing the latest fix for our addictions to conflict and drama that only TV can bring us (well that or a bar fight).
We want accountability and for a fair apportioning of tax burden, not handouts from the rich.
Well actually I do understand how capital markets allowed America and Europe to prosper... And I practice investment in the "most promising ventures" off market these days within small business.
I cant understand how regulation keeps getting peeled away that exposes the small investor to uncontrollable/unmanageable risk or allows a nation's security to be compromised like where we are now. This is why I left the publicly traded markets.
Its amazing that with all that "success" somehow we are ending up HERE.
Even if the big bets had paid off and we avoided the collapse... it still would have done nothing for the downward spiral the middle class have been dealing with.
I'm going to have to disagree with you sunny side endorsement for Algorithmic trading (trying to use lay terminology as who is going to follow that one from the laypeople). Its done nothing for anyone other than people lucky enough to be able to work with it to trade ongoing gains around billions of slices of pennies each day. IMHO it has the capacity to drive uncontrolled market reaction as competing theories begin to emerge and you see HOSTILE PARTIES begin to enter the market well positioned, flush with cash and ready to rip anything showing weakness down with a wall of trading that only the programmers will be able to follow.
I've watched sloppy developers take perfect working architectural patterns and drive it to the ground based on half baked theory and assumption at the behest of money people who want results NOW.... So honestly until regulation can catch up with the technology, IMHO this crap is like building a financial skynet and then building a prototype terminator factory for it before handing over autonomous control.
You fail to understand how capital markets allowed America and Europe to prosper for the last centuries. Investment is more efficiently directed to the most promising ventures.
The middle class took the well oiled financial system for granted, because they don't see it. When there is a setback, as we have been experiencing for the last few years, instead of realising how crucial wall street is to main street, they blame WS for it..
Banks were indeed bailed out with tax payer's money, but it was all payed back with significant interest. Most of the anger comes from "large" bonuses. The difference between most businesses and investment banking is that the later only requieres a few players to get the job done. They are getting paid significant sums of money since they generate very large commissions. (Investment bankers help corporations raise capital.) However, those commissions are extremely small % of the corporation's profit derived from the banker's services.
Algorithmic trading (or programmatic trading as you call it) has served everyone. It makes the spreads much tighter for any financial products. It doesn't "control" the market..
If the capital markets serve only to build and aggregate capital and not real wealth for citizens and communities, then it is serving nothing. These capital markets favor only targeted exploitation of human and natural resources for profit and very often invest little back into the communities they would have us believe they are "supporting".
If companies make more money, they get more employees, pay more people who themselves spend more. And the circle of life continues!
But if American corporations are allowed to hire employees without either paying for health care, or paying sufficient taxes on that employee to support a public health care system, then that job will most likely do little to help that employee build actual wealth and security for themselves and their family. I'm using health care as an example here, but I hope you see what I'm saying. These types of corporate based employee support systems used to be commonplace and are now disappearing from American life. It makes sense that corporations would cut these types of benefits because it affects their profitability. Here is your problem. In a deregulated US workforce, it's a humiliating race to the bottom that only looks good on a quarterly report.