The financial sector produces little or nothing of value. It takes wealth (in the form of ones and zeros in a computer) and turns it into more wealth while siphoning off a portion of that wealth to further enrich and grow itself (i.e. financial sector businesses and the people who work in them). That's not producing anything tangible. It's not truly "production" in the materialist sense. Instead, it represents a theft of the value of the real production going on in the rest of the economy. Most of the growth in the U.S. economy since 2001 has been in the financial sector. That means the real economy barely grew at all. The U.K. and the U.S. erred in the late 1990s by passing laws that encouraged the rapid growth of this vampire. Personally, I'd like to shrink the financial sector down to the size where we could drown it in a bathtub.

-Laelth

Thank you.

-Laelth

hosted a small social gathering to celebrate the completion of what should become an important legal case involving public education in NYS. School teachers, social workers, and university students gathered here. One of our topics of discussion was, of course, the state's economy. Being the oldest, I was able to identify how, in the 1980s through '90s, the only two growth industries in our state were casinos and prisons. (I suspect there is a relationship between the two.) And how the "assembly" jobs from a large defense industry had gone from union jobs that paid $14 to 20 an hour, to prison labor, paying roughly 10 cents an hour.

that is all

They have almost ALL the capital and are running out of things to invest it in, hence the urge to buy out lucrative government functions.

This also explains why stock prices are so high--with P.E. Ratios that my grandmother would have instantly rejected as evidence of an over-priced stock. There's plenty of capital laying around to invest but very little with guaranteed returns to invest in.

-Laelth

and is unsustainable. They will keep taking until there is nothing else to take, but then what happens?

and economy, but to the very concept of America. Its reactions to economic events are completely counter-productive and thanks to decades of conservative idiocy, the more urgent the need, the less likely it will attract any capital.

In what world does this make sense? If a company is well run, pays its people well, has a strong customer base, reliable repeat business, and is profitable with no debt, it is a dog.
Take that same company, FUBAR its business model, give all the executives a huge payday, loot all the employee's funds, bury the company under insurmountable debt, fire all the good workers that know their jobs and the industry, and start ripping off your customers, and overnight the company becomes a strong buy.

-Laelth

And that is not just a slogan.

You're working for capitalism. Is capitalism working for you?

were really just about being able to live.

they were hijacked in some instances -- but a price increase in onions can cause civil unrest -- depending on where you are.

every thought, every learning experience to its dollar value and turned into a portfolio element