Can someone tell me how Wall Street helps the normal Joe?

Because as I see it, the good things for them are usually bad for us lately. Maybe in the old days Wall Street was good for this country, but not anymore. Stockholders take precedent over morals, responsibility , ethics and peoples jobs.

You want to point to the bad guy in the new economy, point towards Wall Street.

you why Presbyterian deacons are the target audience for Lou Reed's music.

Where there is big money changing hands, that average Joe or Jane are rarely invited in.

in my direction.

... but after years of sitting on the fence on the issue, I have to say the "investor class" on Wall Street has finally decided they are a whole different species than the rest of us who do the work.

I mean, watch the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," listen to their behind-the-scenes recorded conversations, and tell me they even realize they are on the same planet as the rest of us. And these guys weren't aberrations, they were the standard executive types who run everything. They just got caught at it.

I mean, who in their right mind thinks, "I sit at a desk all day and smile for the stockholders, so I DESERVE a half a billion dollars"? NOBODY!!!

Read this and try not to get sick...

ExxonMobil CEO fills tank with huge pay perks
By Brett Arends
Boston Herald Business Columnist
Thursday, April 13, 2006 - Updated: Apr 14, 2006 09:07 AM EST

The tale of Texas oil industry greed that unfolded yesterday is a wonder to behold.
I’m not talking about the Enron trial, but the executive pay figures released by ExxonMobil.
Chairman Lee Raymond, who retired on Dec. 31, walked away after 12 years running the company with more than $430 million.
You read that right. It includes $48.9 million he collected last year.
With gasoline prices now $2.63 a gallon, guess who paid for it?
Raymond left with shares worth $220 million, options worth another $70 million, and a pension plan valued at $98.4 million, along with a host of other goodies.
And we’re not even counting past salaries, bonuses or stock sales.
Out of all that you’d think he was able to afford his own membership fees to swanky clubs, but apparently not: Exxon customers and shareholders paid $67,035 for that last year, a rise of nearly 50 percent.
What did they get for the money?
During Raymond’s tenure, Exxon stock handily beat the market, of course, thanks to the soaring oil price. One reason oil is so high is that companies like Exxon spent so much money buying back their stock, to boost the price, instead of drilling for more oil.
More relevantly, Exxon’s shares also beat Chevron’s - but did far less well than those of many other oil companies, including Occidental, BP and Shell.
Nonetheless Exxon says the pay is “appropriate” given the shares’ performance.
Imagine what he would have gotten if the stock had done really well.
Several thousand people in and around Boston depend on newspapers for a living - including around 2,000 at the Globe and 1,600 at the Herald and its corporate cousin Community Newspaper Company.
How are things doing? We’ll get a better picture this morning, when the Globe’s parent company, New York Times Co., comes out with its latest quarterly figures.
If the stock market is to be believed, the outlook isn’t great. Times shares have fallen another 11 percent since the start of March. They recently touched a seven-year low.
“The New England Media Group . . . is not showing signs of improvement,” writes JP Morgan analyst Frederick Searby, according to the Associated Press.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the Globe chose yesterday to announce a shake-up in its advertising department, including the appointment of two new vice presidents, Peter Ockerbloom and Timothy Murphy.
Gannett, owner of USA Today, is faring even worse on Wall Street. Last year, the company blew $1.3 billion of its shareholders’ money trying to keep the stock price afloat by buying back shares.
Average price paid: $74.43. The price now? Um . . . $57.76.
In other words, they could have saved themselves $300 million by waiting.
By curious coincidence, $300 million is also the amount of online advertising Gannett raked in last year. The headlines from Gannett’s latest quarterly figures looked gloomy yesterday: revenues and profits fell. But if you dig deeper, there were some signs of hope.
The bad news only came from USA Today and the company’s British papers. The 90 U.S. local and community papers saw ad sales rise.
As for online advertising revenues, they rose by 40 percent in 2003, 60 percent in ’04, 56 percent last year, “and we’re on track for similar increases this year,” says communications V.P. Tara Connell. The performance is being driven by the local papers’ sites, she adds.

There isnt a person alive or dead, that deserves that kind of compensation. And its these types who bitch about the wages of an hourly worker. Self important aholes.

stocks and stock market are inherently neutral. it is individuals and specific comnpanies that may or may not be all the evil things you so blithely apply accross the board.

the primary function of stocks is to raise money to invest in a business so the business can grow. in return for your investment you get to share profits AND LOSSES if any.

as in all human endeavors there is corruption and dishonesty in some cases.

Let's use a parable to explain why wall street and stocks may not in fact be the primary cause of problems in the new economy:

a man spends $2 on a soda, $2 on a donut and coffee, and $3.99 on a bag of greasy cheetos with practically no food value. While he is sitting on the toilet, watching his $100 a month cable tv with an extra $10 fee to get a hookup to his bathroom, he complains that he is broke and has no money.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

the primary function of stocks is to raise money to invest in a business so the business can grow
****
And the stockholders seem to have taken precedent over the business itself.

They do anything they can to get more money to the stockholders. And the business seems to have become second in line behind those shareholders imo.

sigh... they should be farming potatoes while the fucking CEOs of the company that laid the poor sap off are vacationing in Scotland playing golf.

It wasn't always that way. The stock market used to be a place to put your money when the economy wasn't really all that hot.. it was a safe spot. Then.. suddenly, with the advent of 24/7 "what the hell are we going to talk about constantly on a financial tv channel" everything lived and died by the stock market numbers. Then.. corporatism took over, as well, the bottom line became the gospel. Forget loyalty to your employees, forget the little towns in America that churned out your product for generations, it only mattered how much return you could get on your stocks. The CEOs were elevated to mythic status financially, and the Board served as nothing more than cheerleaders for anti-breadwinner polies. It sickens me to hear personally ever day of companies taking trips overseas to see how CHEAPLY they can make the same products they make here in the US. There is no thought of the people who are left behind, and the children that grow up in near poverty.. children who.. years before.. would have had a shot at college. I remember when people used to be concerned that machines would take over their jobs someday... it was not really machines after all.. it was people in impoverished companies willing to work like machines for 1/3 of what American workers need to raise a family or simply live in America. Corporatism is killing America.