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.

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.