Some breakthrough work on the impact hedge funds have had on the real economy was posted this evening on DailyKos by vets74: 1,000 Companies Attacked -> 1,200,000 Jobs Destroyed.
These attacks combine corrupt MSM lie campaigns with market dumps of "naked shorts" and counterfeit "phantom stock."
. . . . Statistical sampling and employment data for the largest 1,000 attacked companies show they suffered 1,200,000 extra/excess layoffs.
Throw on a macroeconomic multiplier effect... this gets past 3,000,000 jobs dropped overall.
All the technical details of the data sorts and data bases used are in the article. Brilliant stuff!
What is missing is "countervailing power"
John K. Galbraith developed this idea in his book "American Capitalism". I totally forgot about it but it is absolutely applicable today.
But what makes the imbalance of power worse is that we have a financial oligarchy running wild and a corporate oligarchy dead set on maximizing profits regardless of implications for society as a whole while owning a huge share of the government and corporate media.
I am not a history buff and I don't have much context for when Galbraith wrote "American Capitalism". My sense is that the imbalance of power is far worse now than at the time of his writing the book.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Fantastic blog for a Scarey Hallowe'en
'According to finance historian Niall Ferguson, "there were just 610 hedge and equity funds with $39 billion in assets in 1990. By the end of 2006, there were 9,462 of such funds with $1.5 trillion in assets under management."' [From Nomi Prins' It Takes a Pillage]
Interesting to note that the chairman of the American Enterprise Institute is also the owner of the one of the largest hedge funds on the planet (was rated the largest for two years running) and individuals from that outfit are forever out pandering for the banksters!
Now that $1.5 trillion is leveraged to how many trillions? Nobody actually knows. The hedge funds and the private equity buyout funds are all about quick turnarounds and quick and dirty bucks -- raping and pillaging companies and employees and the real creators of progress and wealth and social stability!
The government and its fiduciary regulation must be the countervailing power to Wall Street, and at the time of which Prof. Galbraith was writing, the ones on the opposite end were JP Morgan, Warburg, Harriman, and a host of others, with those well-described (by Louis Brandeis in his Other People's Money) interlocking directorates, only more so today.
And today, the economic indicators of concentrated wealth are far worse than at the outset of the Last Great Depression, which can only bode ill for the rest of us.
Strongly recommend Nomi Prins' book, BTW (It Takes a Pillage --- having read pretty much all the books published to date on the economic meltdown (far too many of which were subsidized by Wall Street to proclaim that no one was responsible, and all this stuff "just happened") it is the absolute best!
Halloween
maybe you would like to put together for Oct. 31st, a "top 10 horror stories from the economic world". Make a nice theme post.