Haigh

Looting Goes Mainstream: The Trouble with Government-Backed Risk

Knowingly supporting an involuntary Ponzi scheme is tantamount to looting. The baby boom is guilty as charged.

Just wait till baby-boomers living in million dollar homes, with a large percentage of equity, begin drawing Social Security, paid for by the younger workers living on far less means. Those younger workers are going to feel they are being looted and vote accordingly.

The money the baby-boom put into Social Security is as gone as the money handed off to Bernie Madoff. It's a damn shame, but the baby-boom has to be responsible for their own failure to manage their retirement responsibilities. The inability to confront this reality is part of the problem.

Looting Goes Mainstream: The Trouble with Government-Backed Risk

Tesa,
Nothing in my post aims to cover up all the fraud of private institutions.

>>Those Social security are not looting anyone, they are merely receiving the results of their labor agreements and their contract with the government. <<

What you describe is a Ponzi scheme, and any Ponzi scheme that is involuntary is looting. If Social Security's inflows were preserved in a trust, and the outflows paid from that trust, then it would no longer be looting. As part of the fraud that is Social Security a Trust is occasionally mentioned, but everyone knows there is no Trust.

We all know in the end Social Security becomes a poverty prevention program when the retirement of the baby boom overwhelms the tax paying capacity of the baby boom's children and grandchildren. The looted will begin to vote against the looters.

Looting Goes Mainstream: The Trouble with Government-Backed Risk

Looting is firmly institutionalized and applauded with the Social Security system. A younger generation is looted for the benefit of an older generation. That bubble is still being inflated.

What's Going to Replace the Dollar?

A good case can be made for the incompetence of the US government and its sycophants in managing this crisis. But on the threat of hyper-inflation I propose that just like the Fed was able to create massive liquidity out of thin air with keystrokes on their computers, they will be able to pull liquidity out of the system as fast and maybe even faster. Any really bad burst of inflation will be relatively short lived. I expect the Fed to fuel inflation as a tool for floating all the under water mortgages, but once thats done they will start tapping the brakes. It will surely be spastic, but it will work. I think we can agree on two things with gold, first its will value will never go to zero, and second its future price movements will be volatile.

U.S. Unemployment: Is Media Hype Missing the Point?

" highly effective government intervention"

Isn't that an oxymoron?

After all isn't our government responsible for the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of the free world, Social Security ?

Citibank: Too Big to Fail?

The scale of the currrent crisis for finanicial institutions was precipitated by extreme levels of leverage. Are there any per company or sector metrics for tracking the leverage?

Theres much talk about deleveraging but no one seems to know whether we are 1% or 25% into this financial cleansing process.

Just getting a number on this could play an important role in the recovery process.

Congress Offers Big Three Automakers Help, Makes Demands in Exchange

Taking money from the productive sector and spending it on the incompetent sector is indicative of the long-term committment of congress to the decline in America's standard of living.

GM Bailout Would Be Agony for Taxpayers

The bailout of GM is going to turn out just like "democracy" bailout of Iraq. The $25B is just the first installment on a demand for hundreds of billions.

Taking money from the productive sector and channeling it into a business that has a proven track record of failure is a sure way to perpetuate a recession/depression and sustain the downward trend in America's standard of living.

The Reagan Counterrevolution

You have to be a bumbling idealogue to think that government can set a moral-operational standard.

Just take Social Security, the idea that the burden of one generation's retirement should weigh on the shoulders of another generation.

Blind faith in the efficacy of government is no less ideological than blind faith in the free market.

And what happens to a blind man when he negotiates dangerous terrain? Bodily harm.


On Nov 09 09:37 AM russ wrote:

> The bias and Pollyanna view of Reagan undermines everything that
> follows in the post. The fact remains that the so-called free markets
> are often manipulated and abused for short term personal gain, whether
> it be by the John D. Rockefellers of yesterday or of today. Unfortunately,
> we need government to set a moral-operational standard to prevent
> excess and greed and when they do not, the result is a loss of confidence
> and market value, just as we have seen. Reagan was a bumbling ideologue
> confusing his movie lines with reality and eventually confusing everything.
> In the end, his mental deterioration was such that he was a functioning
> movie prop