The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.
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GMF - The Copenhagen Consensus: Reading Adam Smith in Denmark - 0 views
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Adam Smith observed in 1776 that economies work best when governments keep their clumsy thumbs off the free market's "invisible hand." Two generations later, in 1817, the British economist David Ricardo extended Smith's insights to global trade. Just as market forces lead to the right price and quantity of products domestically, Ricardo argued, free foreign trade optimizes economic outcomes internationally. Reading Adam Smith in Copenhagen -- the center of the small, open, and highly successful Danish economy -- is a kind of out-of-body experience. On the one hand, the Danes are passionate free traders. They score well in the ratings constructed by pro-market organizations. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third, just behind the United States and Switzerland. Denmark's financial markets are clean and transparent, its barriers to imports minimal, its labor markets the most flexible in Europe, its multinational corporations dynamic and largely unmolested by industrial policies, and its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent the second lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). On the other hand, Denmark spends about 50 percent of its GDP on public outlays and has the world's second-highest tax rate, after Sweden; strong trade unions; and one of the world's most equal income distributions. For the half of GDP that they pay in taxes, the Danes get not just universal health insurance but also generous child-care and family-leave arrangements, unemployment compensation that typically covers around 95 percent of lost wages, free higher education, secure pensions in old age, and the world's most creative system of worker retraining. Does Denmark have some secret formula that combines the best of Adam Smith with the best of the welfare state? Is there something culturally unique about the open-minded Danes? Can a model like the Danish one survive as a social democratic island in a turbulent sea of globali
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trade 4 target - 0 views
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Indian Stock Markets are very volatile in very nature but regardless of it everyone tried to predict the daily movements in the markets on his own. Not everyone can do this perfectly, so it requires a specialist's job to track the stock and commodities markets and thus make a conclusion about the market directions. Forecasting or predicting the markets is an art in itself. Trade4target have best tools but a man without any software's or any other modes may just predict the better way.
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Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views
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Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
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In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.
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The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.
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About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses.
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Any nation that is not “investor friendly,” that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as “a threat to U.S. national security.”
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Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.
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Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.
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In the corporate world of “free-trade,” the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.
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To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.
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There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself. Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace.
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Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.
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These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.
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Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as “a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back “with money that wasn’t there,” as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.
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The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it. In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint.
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Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them. The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.
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Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.
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But the 2008-09 “rescue operation” offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve. Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.
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If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.
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America's not so "free market" leads to capitalistocracy « The Canadian Headl... - 0 views
lecanadian.com/...rket-leads-to-capitalistocracy
America's not so "free market" leads to capitalistocracy « The Canadian Headlines Newspaper
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Politicians and talking heads, of both the mainstream liberal and conservative persuasions, commonly refer to this as "our free market system," or maybe "free enterprise." But Americans haven't had anything even remotely resembling a free market for over 150 years. (For that matter we didn't have one before, what with Enclosures, the Combination Law, mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.) Since the mid-19th century, what we've had is massive collusion between big government and big business.
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Lawrence Lessig: Systemic Denial - 0 views
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So in coming to this meeting of some of the very best in the field -- from Elizabeth Warren to George Soros -- I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points. The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about. The pivot points of our financial system -- the infrastructure that lets free markets produce real wealth -- have become profoundly corrupted. Balance sheets are "fictions," as Professor Frank Partnoy put it. Trillions of dollars in liability hide behind these fictions. And as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. That bubble burst, but we can already see the soaring profits of the same firms that sucked billions in taxpayer funds. The cycle has started again. But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors. As if regulators had just miscalculated, like a pilot who accidentally overshoots the run way, or an engineer who mis-estimates the weight of cargo on a plane. And so, because these were mere errors, people spoke as if these errors could be corrected by a bunch of good ideas. The morning was filled with good ideas. An angry earnestness was the tone of the day.
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There were exceptions. The increasingly prominent folk-hero for the middle class, Elizabeth Warren, tied the endless list of problems to the endless power of "the banking lobby." But that framing was rare. Again and again, we were led back to a frame of bad policies that smart souls could correct. At least if "the people" could be educated enough to demand that politicians do something sensible. This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets -- and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right -- believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud. Yet that ignorant anarchy was the precise rule that governed a large part of our financial system. And not by accident: An enormous amount of political influence was brought to bear on the regulators of these core institutions of a free market to get them to turn a blind eye to Wall Street's "innovations." People who should have known better yielded to this political pressure. Smart people did stupid things because "the politics" of doing right was impossible. Why? Why was their no political return from sensible policy? The answer is so obvious that one feels stupid to even remark it. Politicians are addicts. Their dependency is campaign cash. And in their obsessive search for campaign funds, they let these funders convince them that for the first time in capitalism's history, markets didn't need the basic array of trust-producing regulation. They believed this insanity because it made it easier for them -- in good faith -- to accept the money and steer financial policy over the cliff. Not a single presentation the whole morning focused this part of the problem. There wasn't even speculation about how we could build an alternative to this campaign funding system of pathological dependency, so that policy makers could afford to hear sense rather than obsessively seek campaign dollars. The assembled experts were even willing to brainstorm about how to educate ordinary Americans about the intricacies of financial regulation. But the idea of changing the pathological economy of influence that governs how Washington governs wasn't even a hint. We need to admit our (democracy's) problem. We need to get beyond this stage of denial. We need to recognize that until we release our leaders from a system that forces them to ignore good sense when there is an opportunity for large campaign cash, we won't have policy that makes sense. Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can find the fix to fund the next cycle of campaigns. Throughout the morning, expert after expert celebrated the brilliance in Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Nation's last truly great financial collapse. They yearned for a modern version of his system of regulation. But we won't get to Franklin Roosevelt's brilliance till we accept Teddy Roosevelt's insight -- that privately funded public elections tend inevitably towards this kind of corruption. And until we solve that (eminently solvable) problem, we won't make any progress in making America's finances safe again.
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Everyone recognizes that our nation is in a financial mess. Too few see that this mess is not simply the ordinary downs of a regular business cycle. The American financial system walked the American economy off a cliff. Large players took catastrophic risk. They were allowed to take this risk because of a series of fundamental regulatory mistakes; they were encouraged to take it by the implicit, sometimes explicit promise, that failure would be bailed out. The gamble was obvious and it worked. The suckers were us. They got the upside. We got the bill.
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In Past Decade, American Funds Created Most Wealth - Yahoo! News - 0 views
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Morningstar determined that Janus and Putnam were the two largest "wealth destroyers" during the decade, losing $58 billion and $46 billion, respectively. "Janus and Putnam rode the growth wave more than anyone else," Kinnel says. "They had some very aggressive funds that put up big numbers that got huge inflows." After the tech bubble burst, the funds that were most heavily invested in these types of holdings experienced huge sell-offs, which made it difficult for these funds to attract inflows through the remainder of the decade. According to Morningstar, American Funds created about $191 million in wealth for investors during the decade, followed by Vanguard and Fidelity. Since American Funds generally employs a more value-oriented strategy, the firm was largely able to avert the first bear market of the decade. "The 2000 to 2002 bear market was all growth and tech, and American barely touched that, whereas they had lots of value, dividend payers, and bonds, which did very well," Kinnel says. Recently, the tables have turned for American. In 2009, it lost the most of any fund family (more than $25 billion). No fund family, including American, was able to avoid the bear market of 2008. The same strategy that allowed American to bypass most of the first bear market failed because many well-known dividend-paying companies, like big financial firms, experienced huge losses.
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In a decade with two bear markets and lackluster returns for many investors, American Funds created the most wealth for investors, while Janus destroyed the most wealth, according to a survey released by Morningstar. For the survey, Morningstar looked at the 50 largest mutual fund families and their total net assets at the end of 1999. Then the fund tracker subtracted each fund company's total cash flows over the decade and deducted their total net assets at the end of 2009. Numbers were calculated in dollar terms so that any funds that were liquidated during the decade would also be included.
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Get this! Mutual funds, where most American's have their 401Ks, IRAs, and retirement savings, performed pitifully in the "great economy" of the 2000's (brought to you by Republican deregulationists starting with Ronald Reagan). The "best" made $191 million (but lost $25 billion in 2009!), the worst lost around $50 billion! What a great way to transfer all that hard earned savings, mostly by the "little guy", from them to the Wall Street gamblers. Another socialistic Republican "redistribution of wealth" of the corporate criminal rich, by the corporate criminal rich, and for the corporate criminal rich.
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Stock Tips For Today - 0 views
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Stock market is a market where each and every person want to try his/her own luck and want to become rich easily and faster. But this is partially true in stock market, here no one becomes rich easier, but yes they can become rich faster by good Stock Tips. http://beststocktipsindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/stock-tips-for-today.html
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They Only Have 400 Votes | MichaelMoore.com - 0 views
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Michael Moore's comments today delivered and relayed at the "We Are One" rally at the State Capitol in Honolulu: Greetings! I want to thank you for turning out today to make your voices heard -- and they ARE heard, even across ocean and land. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans are joining with you to honor Dr. King by standing up for working people all over America. It was what he was doing in Memphis when he was killed 43 years ago today, supporting sanitation workers on strike. Today everywhere is Memphis, and it's not just sanitation workers being attacked. It's teachers and firefighters and social workers -- yes, all those greedy public workers who caused the Great Recession we are in! It was the greedy teachers who caused the crash on Wall Street! It was the greedy firefighters who sent millions of jobs overseas! It was the greedy social workers who insisted that GE pay no taxes and that CEOs should make 500 times what the average employee makes! No, my friends, it wasn't! It was the top 1% of the country who did this. THEY brought on the mortgage crisis. THEY made off with billions of dollars from our economy. THEY have systematically destroyed the middle class. And THEY have bought and sold the very people elected to represent us! America is not broke! It's just that the wealthy have absconded with the money! They've removed it from circulation and left us begging for school supplies and fire trucks and libraries. Even the Wall Street Journal admits that the uber-rich are currently just sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash. They're not creating jobs with it. They're not re-circulating it. They're just hanging on to it hoping to make more money off it by continuing their casino games in the stock market, the derivatives market, the credit default swaps market and any other crazy scheme they can invent. This has to stop. But it won't stop unless we make it stop. 400 wealthy Americansnow have more wealth than 150 million Americans COMBINED! But what
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Commodity Tips - 0 views
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Commodity Tips services offering tips on commodity market to their customer for earning high profit on small investment. We at Commodity Tips provide commodity market trading tips and giving the maximum return on investments for our customer Its said a bull run in stocks remains 4 years similarly in commodity and MCX trading bull run last till 10-15 years. Therefore it can be said we are in middle of the bull run with still 7 years to go. People who trade in MCX (Gold,Silver etc...) and Commodities (Crude, Oil Etc...) hereby having a golden egg in their hands if they trade wisely. Even for a proper diversified portfolio one should keep a balance between Stocks and Commodity trading such that maximum returns can be ploughed in any kind of market BULL OR BEAR. Commodity Tips
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Gary Gensler's Conversion to Financial Reformer - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Today, he is emerging as one of the nation’s archreformers, pushing to impose some of the most stringent new financial regulations in history. And as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the leading contender to oversee the complex derivatives contracts that played a central role in the financial crisis and, in turn, the Great Recession, he is in a position to influence the outcome. It may seem an unlikely conversion, but it is one that has won the approval of Brooksley E. Born, of all people, a former outspoken head of the commission. She sounded alarms more than a decade ago about the dangers hiding in the poorly understood derivatives market and was silenced by the same Washington power brokers that counted Mr. Gensler as a member. Mr. Gensler opposed Ms. Born, according to people who worked at the commission in the 1990s, and in 2000 played a significant role in shepherding through Congress deregulation measures that led to explosive growth of the over-the-counter derivatives market. That was then. These days, Ms. Born is convinced of Mr. Gensler’s reformist zeal, as he takes on Wall Street in what is becoming one of the fiercest battles over regulation in the postcrisis era. “I think he is doing very well,” she said in an interview. “He certainly seems to be committed to robust oversight of derivatives and limiting excessive speculation and leverage.” The proposals championed by Mr. Gensler, if adopted by Congress, would substantially alter what is now a largely unregulated market in over-the-counter derivatives, financial instruments used by companies and investors to protect themselves and bet on moves in variables, like interest rates or currencies, and to speculate. The proposals include forcing the big banks that sell derivatives to conduct their trades in the open on public exchanges and clear them through central clearinghouses, so that any investor can see the prices that dealers charge their customers. Today, those transactions are bilateral and private.
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For 18 years, Gary G. Gensler worked on Wall Street, striking merger deals at the venerable Goldman Sachs. Then in the late 1990s, he moved to the Treasury Department, joining a Washington establishment that celebrated the power of markets and fought off regulation at almost every turn.
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Maybe he has "SEEN THE LIGHT" (had an almost "religious" conversion to the benefits of regulation). Then again, maybe his old employer (Goldman Sachs) - having become the "biggest and baddest" in the regulation-less free-for-all (including getting bailout funds through AIG for credit-default-swap "insurance" on derivatives) - wants to "cement" their position with regulation preventing any other party from doing what they did (and he is willing to help them in that regard)!?
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Maybe he has "SEEN THE LIGHT" (had an almost "religious" conversion to the benefits of regulation). Then again, maybe his old employer (Goldman Sachs) - having become the "biggest and baddest" in the regulation-less free-for-all (including getting bailout funds through AIG for credit-default-swap "insurance" on derivatives) - wants to "cement" their position with regulation preventing any other party from doing what they did (and he is willing to help them in that regard)!?
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The Haves and Have Nots of the Stock Market - Seeking Alpha - 0 views
One Bear's Prediction: Massive Market Selloff Coming - 0 views
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Trade4Target.com always aim at providing services in accordance with the comfort levels of all traders/investors in stock market ranging from small investors to HNI's , who trades in vast domain of share market such as Intraday, Delivery, Swing Trading ,Index Trading (NIFTY & BANK NIFTY ),Equities, F&O.
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Trade4Target.com always aim at providing services in accordance with the comfort levels of all traders/investors in stock market ranging from small investors to HNI's , who trades in vast domain of share market such as Intraday, Delivery, Swing Trading ,Index Trading (NIFTY & BANK NIFTY ),Equities, F&O.
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Trade4Target.com always aim at providing services in accordance with the comfort levels of all traders/investors in stock market ranging from small investors to HNI's , who trades in vast domain of share market such as Intraday, Delivery, Swing Trading ,Index Trading (NIFTY & BANK NIFTY ),Equities, F&O.
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Trade4Target.com always aim at providing services in accordance with the comfort levels of all traders/investors in stock market ranging from small investors to HNI's , who trades in vast domain of share market such as Intraday, Delivery, Swing Trading ,Index Trading (NIFTY & BANK NIFTY ),Equities, F&O.