This aparrent email from some anonymous, angry Wall Street guy has been making the rounds. It’s popular, I assume, because it’s full of vitriol. It’s also full of half-baked ideas about economics.
We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
The market didn’t just happen to roar, as the author insinuates, like a lucky streak in Vegas, and it didn’t just happen to “crap out” either. The roar was made possible by artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. I.e. flooding the economy with easy money which did NOT reflect actual savings. This caused mal-investment and made the bust inevitable (see Business Cycle Theory).
I’m slightly sympathetic to the author in that the government is more to blame for providing the booze, than Wall Street is for getting drunk, but there’s plenty of blame to go around.
When the crash happened, the most irresponsible drunks should have gone bankrupt, and their assets should have passed into the hands of more responsible people. Instead, through very convoluted processes that almost made it seem like something other than stealing, money was transferred from the public to the irresponsible (but politically connected) institutions. Hence, they are worthy of our scorn.
The apparent email continues:
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?
Contrary to the author’s understanding, economics is not a zero sum game. There is no fixed number of jobs in any economy. Wealth comes from the production and exchange of goods and services that people want. The more people are engaged in the production of goods and services, the more EVERYBODY benefits. Sure, they will create competition, but the public will be better served, and out-competed enterprises will be forced to give up their resources for more efficient or more desired endeavors. Contrary to this author’s attitude, this will make us richer, not poorer.
The notion of failing and re-aligning also speaks to the necessity of letting crashes happen, as opposed to bailing out any politically connected business that falters. Bailouts keep resources locked up in enterprises the public doesn’t really want, and only postpones the inevitable.
A NATO summit in Estonia has culminated with the much-hyped “road map,” an exit strategy for the alliance from Afghanistan after nearly a decade of war. It will detail the alliance’s new strategy for the conflict and, as is so often the case, lower the bar for what constitutes ’success’ in the nation.
(Read more from news.antiwar.com)