Occupy Wall Street protest in New-York

[Oltz]

Grigory Perelman comes to mind. Also Douglas C. Prasher who contributed to discovery that won a Nobel prize and had to work as a driver, since he could not find a job.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/science/16prasher.html

Farnsworths, one of the inventors of TV died financially broken.
There are many people, who contributed a lot to humanity by their discoveries and hard work, but did not get a penny from it. Other people, not original inventors, profited from their labour and made plenty of money . For example: http://www.therichest.org/business/they-could-have-been-billionaires/

And these are just famous inventions, I guess there are many people that we just do not know who contributed a lot to humanity and never seen a penny of profit from it.

Not making a profit and working hard and using your full potential are 3 separate issues. Do we know what other choices theser people made did Farnsworth try to do it all by himself and fail to market or budget properly? Maybe he did not have enough production capacity that even if he sold every unit it would not cover the costs? Maybe he liked gambling?

Lots of people work hard and make bad choices. Some people use their full potential and make bad choices.
Some people only do enough to make a profit but live in their means and are able to save enough and have a diverse portfolio and realize long term growth.

I do not know anyone who does not want to make a profit do you? Plenty of people in history have contributed but died in the gutter because of choices they made.

 

[FlexGunship]

Even in a hands-off capitalistic system, luck plays a huge role.

I find that I hear this most from people who are having trouble succeeding with their chosen life plan.

Don't get me wrong, your post is insightful and truthful. Certainly, a safety net for entrepreneurs is important; but it's not a good final resting place. The problem is that they're rewarded for failure, and punished for success.

 

[mheslep]

... except that the US uses a rather big credit card?

Agreed!

 

[mheslep]

There is a reason, after all, that Europe has a larger small business sector than the US.

Could you please point to a reference on that?

 

[WhoWee]

I see what you are saying, and I do agree that it is ridiculously hard to start a business or generate personal wealth for yourself nowadays than it used to be. If you or anyone had ideas for making it easier, even if it was just legally to start a business and commence trade with ease, then this environment would provide everyone a fairer way to do the above.

Part of this problem is debt and how it is issued and controlled. All debt is not created equal. Special interests borrow at nearly zero, and the rest of us are borrowing at double digit rates: in a fair and equitable society, this wouldn't happen.

Also since credit is the lifeblood of a business, they are forced to take on debt, which further exacerbates the problem.

It's interesting though because most of us are as you say risk-averse, but the people access to lots of this stuff, like some people in banks, are really not that risk averse at all.

Peter Schiff gave a good statement to members of congress that outlined some of the problems and some solutions to help encourage business activity in the United States and I thought his suggestions were very good.

Also one thing you should realize is that being able to run your own business and generate your own wealth (I am talking about true wealth) is not something that everybody wants.

I say that with complete honesty, and if you really need to see this in action, then look at the riots happening, look at what institutions like the IMF are doing when they lend money to governments and look at the exact conditions of the loan. Look at what real assets are being used as collateral against a made-up debt.

If everyone had the chance to start a business of their own in a truly free and fair way, we would all prosper like no other time in the history of the world, and if I had one suggestion to make this happen, it would be to abolish the whole system of the creation of debt and credit and get a lot of people with diverse experiences and roles across many areas to structure something that gives people a fair go.

It sounds great - not realistic - but great.

 

[WhoWee]

Feeding Time occupiers - here's the one guy you wanted. Can you go home now or is there something else?

http://news.yahoo.com/us-seeks-record-sentence-hedge-fund-boss-ny-070133030.html

" A hedge fund founder once recognized as one of the country's richest citizens would serve the longest sentence in history for an insider trading conviction if a federal judge grants the government's request to send Raj Rajaratnam to prison for two decades.
Rajaratnam's sentencing was scheduled for Thursday in Manhattan."

 

[ParticleGrl]

Ever heard the quote "The harder I work, the luckier I get"?

Of course I have, but I've met very hard working, very smart people who did everything right and failed to get lucky. Anyone who has ever spent some time working in science knows these people. A small bit of luck is the difference between a nobel prize and working for $8.50 as a shuttle driver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

Certainly, a safety net for entrepreneurs is important; but it's not a good final resting place. The problem is that they're rewarded for failure, and punished for success.

Only if you decide to spin it that way. Failing doesn't mean 'reward' it just doesn't meant crippling punishment. Right now, if your business even STARTS to fail you probably don't have health care (everyone i know who has started a business has gone without health insurance in bad times to cut costs). Also, you aren't 'punished' for success, no one is suggesting 100% marginal rates, so maximizing profits puts more money in your pocket.

Could you please point to a reference on that?

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2009-08.pdf

 

[FlexGunship]

Only decide to spin it that way. Failing doesn't mean 'reward' it just doesn't meant crippling punishment. Right now, if your business even STARTS to fail you probably don't have health care (everyone i know who has started a business has gone without health insurance in bad times to cut costs). Also, you aren't 'punished' for success, no one is suggesting 100% marginal rates, so maximizing profits puts more money in your pocket.

You're right, of course. I didn't mean to make it sound black-and-white, but the fact remains... a government will give you money when you falter, and take your money when you succeed. It's absolutely true that the amount taken and the amount given are vastly different, and the circumstances under which it happens leads to very different outcomes, but the premise is the same.

I make no judgments about whether it's good or bad (or even fair) with the above paragraph.

 

[WhoWee]

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2009-08.pdf

Interesting link - couldn't help but notice Greece is the clear leader in self employment on the chart.

Also, don't they have a social safety net in place? Given they are (financially) near collapse - I'm not sure what can be learned from this information?

 

[WhoWee]

I never said the TEA Party wasn't helped by organizers or promoters - and that's exactly what is happening to the Occupy Wall Street group.

It started out local and small (without a coherent message) and now the political heavy weight promoters are helping them organize bigger events - such as the 10/5/11 event. They might not have "organized" the original meeting or the core group - but the aforementioned heavies and the unions are certainly organizing and promoting activities to move them onto the national stage.

It seems reporters are starting to "follow the money" - we'll see where it leads.

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-behind-wall-st-protests-110834998.html

"There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

"I can understand their sentiment," Soros told reporters last week at the United Nations about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which are expected to spur solidarity marches globally on Saturday.

Pressed further for his views on the movement and the protesters, Soros refused to be drawn in. But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, "George Soros money is behind this."

Soros, 81, is No. 7 on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $22 billion, which has ballooned in recent years as he deftly responded to financial market turmoil. He has pledged to give away all his wealth, half of it while he earns it and the rest when he dies."

 

[russ_watters]

Only if you decide to spin it that way. Failing doesn't mean 'reward' it just doesn't meant crippling punishment.

I really hate liberals' abuse of these words. An objective definition would have a positive incentive be an award and a negative incentive a penalty. Only when you infuse a liberal sense of entitlement can you shift the baseline to the right and call money given a penalty.

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2009-08.pdf

Interesting and surprising data, but incomplete, seeing as how "...every measure of small business employment..." does not include a measurement of total small business employment!

It is also tough to use self employment as a proxy, since the difference between self employed contractor and employee is a simple matter of paperwork motivated primarily by govenment regulation.

 

[russ_watters]

Here's that missing data. It doesn't change the conclusion much.
http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/09/2...usiness-sector-in-the-world’s-rich-economies/

Something still unclear to me is how government employment fits into the data. It is either hidden or excluded and if excluded, would probably explain the deviation from conventional wisdom.

 

[ParticleGrl]

I really hate liberals' abuse of these words. An objective definition would have a positive incentive be an award and a negative incentive a penalty

If you read the post, I was suggesting LESSENING the negative incentive of failure. Even with universal healthcare (for instance), there are plenty of negatives associated with having a business fail.

Similarly, there is no penalty for success. If your business does better, you make more money, regardless of the marginal top rate.

By your definitions, there is still a punishment for failure and a reward for success.

And besides semantics, we need to ask ourselves a policy question- Do we want to encourage small business growth and entrepreneurship? If we do, the current policy is not working. As far as I can tell, there is very little (basically no) data suggesting that top marginal tax rates have much impact on productivity or entrepreneurship- so why focus on top marginal tax rates as any kind of driving factor? There appears to be a stronger correlation between health care and a thriving small business sector.

This shouldn't be about ideology, it should be about goals. Do we want to encourage small business growth? If no, then fine, reduce healthcare spending and cut taxes. If yes, then maybe we should look at a universal healthcare system.

Something still unclear to me is how government employment fits into the data. It is either hidden or excluded and if excluded, would probably explain the deviation from conventional wisdom.

Its total employment, so it should be included. You can do some of the analysis yourself if you like on the OECD stats page. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx We live in an age of data.

Also, I'm not sure why the conventional wisdom is US dynamism. Europe had been closing the unemployment gap for years, and now is comparable to our unemployment rate.

 

[John Creighto]

It seems reporters are starting to "follow the money" - we'll see where it leads.

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-behind-wall-st-protests-110834998.html

"There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

"I can understand their sentiment," Soros told reporters last week at the United Nations about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which are expected to spur solidarity marches globally on Saturday.

Pressed further for his views on the movement and the protesters, Soros refused to be drawn in. But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh summed up the speculation when he told his listeners last week, "George Soros money is behind this."

Soros, 81, is No. 7 on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $22 billion, which has ballooned in recent years as he deftly responded to financial market turmoil. He has pledged to give away all his wealth, half of it while he earns it and the rest when he dies."

What is the point you are trying to make. So, someone with money may have contributed some to getting it started. So what?

 

[Galteeth]

What is the point you are trying to make. So, someone with money may have contributed some to getting it started. So what?

Soros donates to Ad-busters. Soros donates to lots of liberal/progessive outfits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters

Adbusters came up with the original idea for the protest. The idea got picked up by AnonOps and it went viral.
It is a stretch to suggest this means Soros is "funding" the protest. The idea implies that he would be giving money to supply the food protestors eat, or that he was involved in the planning somehow. He supports the magazine

"So, someone with money may have contributed some to getting it started"
In a very roundabout way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Occupy_Wall_Street

 

[WhoWee]

What is the point you are trying to make. So, someone with money may have contributed some to getting it started. So what?

The someone mentioned is number 7 on the Forbes 400 and the wealthiest hedge fund guy on the list - isn't that a tad bit ironic?

What did Nancy Pelosi call the TEA Party - "astro-turf"?

 

[mheslep]

... There is a reason, after all, that Europe has a larger small business sector than the US...

Thanks for the reference.

... Interesting and surprising data, but incomplete, seeing as how "...every measure of small business employment..." does not include a measurement of total small business employment!

It is also tough to use self employment as a proxy, since the difference between self employed contractor and employee is a simple matter of paperwork motivated primarily by govenment regulation.

Yes the notion that the small business sector in the US is smaller than Europe's is contrary to my understanding. So off to the http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html" . Some chart work:

US Firms broken down by size, showing firms 1-4 employees make up 61% of all US firms.

US Employment by firm size, showing 18% (21M) work for firms of less than 20, and 49% (60M) work for firms of less than 500 employees

US Employment by coarse firm size: 1-499 (50%), 500-9999, and 10k+.

With regard to the CEPR reference I notice a couple points. The ambiguous 'self-employment' category to which RussW drew attention is not broken out from the other small business categories, spreading around that ambiguity. Then the US is compared to NZ, Portugal and like w/ populations less than 5M. How many firms of 100,000+ might be expected in those countries? For instance, the "Employment in Firms with fewer than 100,000 employees" might well be 100% in Portugal and (say) 10% in the US, but that tells us nothing about US small business. Finally, I see no mention of 'public' or 'government' employment in the reference, indeed the words do not appear. The NHS alone in the UK employs over one million. Neglecting government employment would skew the statistics more than a little. This CEPR report is misleading.

 

[ParticleGrl]

The ambiguous 'self-employment' category to which RussW drew attention is not broken out from the other small business categories, spreading around that ambiguity.

See the link Russ provided, using more specified data. Notice the total small business employment used in said link matches your census data pretty much exactly.

"Employment in Firms with fewer than 100,000 employees" might well be 100% in Portugal and (say) 10% in the US, but that tells us nothing about US small business.

Thats why the categories examined include things like <9,<50 and >250 (for large corporations),<500, etc. and not <100,000. You are right, if they had done that, it would be misleading. Luckily, they didn't.

Finally, I see no mention of 'public' or 'government' employment in the reference, indeed the words do not appear. The NHS alone in the UK employs over one million. Neglecting government employment would skew the statistics more than a little. This CEPR report is misleading.

The report is simply a combing of OECD data. Government/public sector employment is included in OECD data, you can go through the OECD stats page I linked to and do the analysis yourself however you like. You can also look at the relatively new OECD entrepreneurship publications for other interesting data (employee churn, enterprise survival rates,etc).

Can you point to any data that contradicts the OECD data in the report and in Russ's link?

 

[vici10]

Not making a profit and working hard and using your full potential are 3 separate issues. Do we know what other choices theser people made did Farnsworth try to do it all by himself and fail to market or budget properly? Maybe he did not have enough production capacity that even if he sold every unit it would not cover the costs? Maybe he liked gambling?

Lots of people work hard and make bad choices. Some people use their full potential and make bad choices.
Some people only do enough to make a profit but live in their means and are able to save enough and have a diverse portfolio and realize long term growth.

I do not know anyone who does not want to make a profit do you? Plenty of people in history have contributed but died in the gutter because of choices they made.

I already mentioned people who did not want to make a profit. You did not pay attention. Perelman,Tesla, Prasher and many others for whom creating things that people need is more important than profit.

And it is not about bad choices, it is about what society encourages and supports. Being creative and hardworking by producing new things, making break through in science, it is a different skill set than being a good businessman. Businessman's goal is making money, engineer's goal is inventing useful things. Very often these skill sets conflict. Good engineers are not usually good businessmen. And businessman is usually a bad engineer. Present society encourages businessman, who makes profit from other people labor but not an engineer. In some cases engineer can also be a businessman like Edison in whom businessman conflicted with an engineer.

Equating rich people with hardworking, creative people means that such people as Perelman,Tesla, Prasher are loosers, lazy etc. And this is a fallacy what JDoolin was talking about.

 

[WhoWee]

The good news is that with 99 weeks of unemployment benefits - a great many people have had ample time to work on their inventions. Perhaps the Government will allow a few dollars of investment capital to re-enter the country and the ideas will somehow meet the cash?

 

[mheslep]

See the link Russ provided, using more specified data. Notice the total small business employment used in said link matches your census data pretty much exactly.

Yes the US census data ~matches CEPR's Schmitt's 2011 data for the US (i.e. Russ's link). The US census data matches my expectations: 21 million employed in firms less than 20, 42 million (35%) employed in firms less than 100 - hardly small. It is the other country data I suspect as not telling the story, in particular I am curious how those reporting as "self-employed" shift the small business figures.

Also, I'm curious about the EU equivalents of Google, Apple, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook? None of these spun of from monsters like a Microsoft or GE, they started from nothing and are now wildly successful and, yes, large. Perhaps the OECD data reflects some limitation on small companies ever becoming successful and growing large.

 

[WhoWee]

It's time to clean up the park.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-13/wall-street-protesters-can-t-return-gear-to-park-after-cleaning-nypd-says.html

"Wall Street protesters won’t be allowed to return gear such as sleeping bags to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan after the privately owned space is closed for cleaning beginning tomorrow, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
“People will have to remove all their belongings and leave the park,” Kelly said today after a memorial ceremony in Battery Park. “After it’s cleaned, they’ll be able to come back. But they won’t be able to bring back the gear. The sleeping bags, that sort of thing, will not be able to be brought back into the park.”"

 

[OmCheeto]

Anyone hear of the "We are the 1%" yet?

I just heard it on the radio. (I :!) Randi Rhodes)

Just curious if http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/" is a spoof or something.

We are the 1 percent
We stand with the 99 percent

not sure if that's the right website, or some psycho spin-off.
I was driving.

 

[chiro]

Of course I have, but I've met very hard working, very smart people who did everything right and failed to get lucky. Anyone who has ever spent some time working in science knows these people. A small bit of luck is the difference between a nobel prize and working for $8.50 as a shuttle driver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

If scientists are measuring their success by things like winning the Nobel Prize, or not having enough papers published (even if they are rushed), I think needs to step back and really evaluate why they are doing what they are doing.

If you are doing science to win the nobel prize, then in my mind, you should not be doing science. If you are doing science to find some measure of truth in the world, and want to build a career using and expanding on scientific knowledge, then you are probably in the right field.

You can apply this to the business case as well. If your idea of success is becoming a billionaire entrepreneur when your company IPO goes public, I think you are in the wrong profession.

Both my parents used to own small businesses, so I saw first hand what had to be done in owning a business. It is a 7 day a week commitment and although there are benefits, it's far from a world of luxury. Instead of zoning out on Sunday, you are busy going over accounts, or doing a stocktake, or making food for Monday (one business was a restaurant), or doing some other thing that you didn't have time doing Monday to Saturday. They did this for about a decade, and later decided to become employees for someone else and in some ways they missed some of the benefits, and in others they were happy with their new roles.

Its very sad if some scientists are basing their success on what awards they get or how many papers they have published. Look at all these new things that are being created each and every day: it might be some really nice dish at a great restaurant, it might be an invention for a farming device that helps many farmers get their job done a lot quicker and more cheaply, or it might even be a teacher introducing a new technique for teaching certain types of people, which then gets passed on to other teachers in similar circumstances.

A lot of these people will not win awards, will not have published papers, and quite frankly don't care if they had them or not. These are all successful people, and most of the world has no idea they even exist, and these people don't really care if most people don't know they exist.

Also with anything, if you want to do something that requires a significant commitment of time, and other resources like financial ones, then you damn well should find out what you are getting yourself into. If people do not do that, then I dare say they deserve what they get. It doesn't matter if you are going to university, or starting a business, or changing a career, anyone in their right mind would find out what they are getting themselves into, and in the case for science, people, (if they did their research), would find out what science is really all about.

There is no certainty in life, but part of our jobs as human beings is to take in the uncertainty, and try to make some level of certainty out of it.

 

[OmCheeto]

Equating rich people with hardworking, creative people means that such people as Perelman,Tesla, Prasher are loosers, lazy etc. And this is a fallacy what JDoolin was talking about.

Yes.

 

[ParticleGrl]

If scientists are measuring their success by things like winning the Nobel Prize, or not having enough papers published (even if they are rushed), I think needs to step back and really evaluate why they are doing what they are doing.

If you are doing science to win the nobel prize, then in my mind, you should not be doing science. If you are doing science to find some measure of truth in the world, and want to build a career using and expanding on scientific knowledge, then you are probably in the right field.

My point was simply that no one goes into science in order to drive a bus for $8.50 an hour. There is no definition of success that includes this. If he had caught one small lucky break (one more year of funding to finish the work he started), he would have been included on a nobel prize, and would be a tenured professor somewhere (tenured prof being the usual definition of success- the freedom to work on the ideas you want).

The hardest worker with the best idea doesn't always succeed. Brilliant, hard working scientists wash out of science everyday. Brilliant entrepreneurs with life-changing ideas go bankrupt everyday. A mix of natural talent (which involves winning the birth lottery), hard work and dedication is enough to buy you a ticket, but after that its a lottery. We need to acknowledge the huge role luck plays in life. Social insurance IS the attempt to add some certainty to an uncertain world.

 

[mheslep]

...
The report is simply a combing of OECD data. Government/public sector employment is included in OECD data, you can go through the OECD stats page I linked to and do the analysis yourself however you like. You can also look at the relatively new OECD entrepreneurship publications for other interesting data (employee churn, enterprise survival rates,etc).

Can you point to any data that contradicts the OECD data in the report and in Russ's link?

It took awhile, but I was able to find a bracket lopping off the bottom and thus the single person "self-employed" category in the OECD data. The OECD data has omissions so as it happens I had to use 2004, 2005 data to include the US and then only for manufacturing firms.

Here's again is firm size 1-20, and as before showing the US next to last as a percentage, exactly the same as shown in the http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2009-08.pdf" .

And here is firm size 20-49, eliminating the single "self-employed" contribution. Suddenly the US jumps up to near the top:

So there's a game being played here with the counting of the smallest, or perhaps one person, firms.

 

[mheslep]

...
Also, I'm not sure why the conventional wisdom is US dynamism. Europe had been closing the unemployment gap for years, and now is comparable to our unemployment rate.

Europe has been dumping pieces of its welfare state for years. In particular with this recent financial crisis and recession, Europe, especially Germany, refused to go along with stimulus at the levels pushed by the US, now apparently to a better result for Germany at least.

 

[WhoWee]

Social insurance IS the attempt to add some certainty to an uncertain world.

A few thoughts.

Insurance is the transfer of risk from one party to another.

Accordingly, if the business owner transfers all but a limited amount of risk (becomes passive for tax purposes) - maybe the losses (for tax purposes) could be transferred to the party that assumes the risk? (similar to the way depreciation can be stripped out in a lease - structured to attract investors)

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p925.pdf

Ironically, I'm sure Wall Street could find a way to bundle that concept.

 

[chiro]

My point was simply that no one goes into science in order to drive a bus for $8.50 an hour. There is no definition of success that includes this. If he had caught one small lucky break (one more year of funding to finish the work he started), he would have been included on a nobel prize, and would be a tenured professor somewhere (tenured prof being the usual definition of success- the freedom to work on the ideas you want).

I think I should ask an important question for clarification: What do you think success means for you, and how would you define a "consensus" based idea of success?

The hardest worker with the best idea doesn't always succeed. Brilliant, hard working scientists wash out of science everyday. Brilliant entrepreneurs with life-changing ideas go bankrupt everyday. A mix of natural talent (which involves winning the birth lottery), hard work and dedication is enough to buy you a ticket, but after that its a lottery. We need to acknowledge the huge role luck plays in life. Social insurance IS the attempt to add some certainty to an uncertain world.

Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Everyone has ideas, and many people have good ideas. The hard part is to follow up on these ideas and make them a reality. It is hard for most people to plod along with an idea and put everything they have into it.

It is even harder to go on, even in the midst of knockbacks. Lots of people have the tendency to stop in the face of knockbacks.

I do agree with you that there is no silver bullet, and that the uncertainty is extremely high, and that there are many instances of people with good ideas going bankrupt (the whole VHS tape vs the Beta Technology comes to mind), but part of the follow up in business is marketing, selling, and creating a wide adoption of your product. If you want to start a business, selling is the number one thing. If you have an idea and want to make money, then that is the compromise, and I don't think anyone that owns a business or works for themselves would tell you otherwise.

One good thing that people should do if they want to become good at something is to get a hold of postmortems that people or even companies publish if you can get a hold of them.

For those of you who don't know, a postmortem is basically an analysis of what went right and what went wrong with a particular venture. It could be a software project, it could be the lifetime of a particular product, it could be a new management policy. Chances are if you are lucky to get some good postmortems, you will learn areas where not enough attention was placed on key areas and how that affected the final result.

The reason I brought this up ParticleGrl, is because reading business postmortems can be a very good source for understanding where things go wrong, especially when it involves technical people who do not place enough emphasis on the "business" side of things.

The above doesn't change the certainty argument, but it can give insight into why certain classes of people with certain values, personalities, and other attributes can have the tendency to fail, even when they have other positive things going for them.

 

[gravenewworld]

You probably all missed it a while back. Even former CFTC judge George Painter blew the whistle about the corruption of the CFTC before he retired:

http://www.abajournal.com/news/arti...d_against_complainants_so_dont_reassign_my_ca

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/26/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20101026

Painter, 83, detonated that bombshell recently in the course of announcing his retirement as an administrative law judge for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, effective in January. In a public notice, he accused his lone colleague on the CFTC bench, Bruce Levine, of having made a vow nearly 20 years ago never to rule in a complainant's — that is, an investor's — favor.

In 1998, during the Clinton administration, then-CFTC Chairwoman Brooksley Born urged Congress to place over-the-counter derivatives, then a $100-trillion business, under the agency's control. She was rudely slapped down by her fellow financial regulators, who said things were fine. That was before derivatives helped bring down Enron Corp. in 2001 and the world financial system in 2008.

One of Born's predecessors as CFTC chair was Wendy Gramm, wife of former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who pushed through key financial deregulatory legislation while he was senator.

After leaving the CFTC, Wendy Gramm joined the Enron board. She was still there when the company went under. The CFTC chair to whom Judge Levine supposedly made his pledge, according to Painter, was Wendy Gramm. (I couldn't reach her or Levine for their comments on Painter's remarks.)

Yup, nothing to protest about on Wall Street there.

 

[WhoWee]

You probably all missed it a while back. Even former CFTC judge George Painter blew the whistle about the corruption of the CFTC before he retired:

http://www.abajournal.com/news/arti...d_against_complainants_so_dont_reassign_my_ca

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/26/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20101026


Yup, nothing to protest about on Wall Street there.

Just out of curiosity - and as per your specific post - what exactly is your complaint with Wall Street - again based on your post?

 

[chiro]

A few thoughts.
Insurance is the transfer of risk from one party to another.

This is a good thing to bring up.

I'm wondering about what you guys (and gals) think about what should constitute legal bounds for insurance products.

Normally most people think of insurance to be things like insurance against loss of life, home and contents, and things like motor vehicle insurance.

Most people don't think about (or even know about) things like credit default swaps or credit default obligations.

In my mind, I think the legal definition for insurance to be issued, is that in order to insure something, you have to have legal ownership of whatever you are insuring. Any comments are more than welcome and definitely encouraged.

Ironically, I'm sure Wall Street could find a way to bundle that concept.:rofl

Jeez dude, don't give them any more ideas.

 

[gravenewworld]

Just out of curiosity - and as per your specific post - what exactly is your complaint with Wall Street - again based on your post?

Hmm, maybe because big business on Wall Street and our government are in the same bed? Maybe because of the fact that people within our government that are in charge of regulating our most important financial monitoring instruments have been corrupted and rule against small investors like you and me constantly or make decisions while having extremely questionable conflicts of interest? You have to be really thick to not be able to connect the dots.

 

[GRB 080319B]

Here we go again:

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/10/12/wall-street-protester-proclaims-the-jews-control-wall-st-in-zuccotti-park-rant/"

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