I hate this divide and conqure method of politics. Pit the people against each other, asking them to take sides that don’t even exist. Listen, people, capitalism can work. It HAS worked. It got us here. Yes, there are issues. But it’s not corporate greed or government regulations (sorry, both sides are wrong here). The problem is something that neither side will talk about – they are both scared to. The problem is the stock market.
Yes – the stock market. You know, they place you send your money hoping to hit the jackpot on some undervalued ticker item that doubles it’s price and your 401k balloons up to grant you retirement bliss. It’s vegas, but for real players. It’s our own fault…we pay these wall street elite, well, because we don’t know what we are doing. We tell them “Make me money!” and that is what they try to do. We tell them “Do whatever is needed, go ahead and pay yourself a little each time you make a transation”. And that is what they do. Many, many times. Individual stocks wasn’t quite cutting it (just too cimplicated!) so now we let them do everything behind closed doors on mutual funds. Oh, we love mutal funds. “You guys go crazy, just tell me how much money I’ve made”. Oh yes, we’ve created a monster. A monster no one is willing to face. Kind of like the fed, only more dangerous.
You see, the elite hold all the cards. They make all the rules. They are the ones that control “big business”, not the businessmen. Your almighty CEO 1% has only one job: make wall street happy. Make his stock value go up. That really *is* his job. Not profits, or keeping employees happy, or philanthropy. These things might contribute to making wal street happy, so willwill adress them – but they are not really his main concern. He is hired to raise the stock price. Up, up, up. It has to go higher – ALWAYS. A CEO is not allowed to tread water….make a decent profit with a stead revenue and keep his employees happy. Nope. Wall Street dictates that companies have to GROW. Bigger bigger bigger. More profit, more market share, anything to make stock price to go up. Why? Because we ask them to. “Please, wall street, make us money!”. Gone are widows and orphans. Gone is the concept of investing in a company you like and letting them pay you back some dividends in repayment of letting them borrow some money from you. Instead, we give wall stret all the cards. They decide which companies are “worth more” or “losing value”. They are the ones telling a stangnant CEO “let go of 10% or your workforce to save cost. Then we will raise your value! Then you can keep your job!”.
I am, of course, having a little fun with this, but it’s pretty close to the truth. I’m sorry, but I have a real problem with corporations making decisions to appease “investors” (like an individual investor really cares), instead of making decisions, well, just because it’s a good decisions. I have some revalating news… sometimes it’s not always a good idea to downsize. But what does a broker know about this? He’s not a businessman. He tracks charts and numbers and makes educated guesses based on what he thinks other brokers will do.
You wonder why we have these huge oligopy corporations? Giant conglomerates gobbling up everything they can afford? Because increased market share gaurantees better stock price! They would get bigger if they didn’t have that pesky monopoly law in their way. I wonder how many of these “99%” people have all their retirement hopes riding on the stock market. I bet it’s quite a few. “Down with big business! But.. don’t hurt my 401k, please”.
You might say “why are you attacking wall street? I thought you said you like capitalism?”, which is a fair question. I do like capitolism. I love it. But there has to be a way for a company to raise a large amount of capital other than selling their soul to the devil. If I am a startup, and I go public to raise money to make my product global, the last thing I am worried about is firing grandma to save some costs and make JR Ewing and extra fifty cents per share when he dumps my stock.
So, people, please stop with this one percent, ninty-nine percent talk. Step back, and look WHY everything is happening. Wall Street isn’t going away. Sadly, it’s a monster no one can tackle. But is people started to see the issue, perhaps, just perhaps, a nice little backlash can happen.
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