Gordon Gecko Moved To London To Finish Where He Left Off

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Howard Hollem Sears Gasoline June 1943 “Virginia Lively, beauty operator, now works at filling station, Louisville, Kentucky” Last week I saw a headli
[See the full post at: Gordon Gecko Moved To London To Finish Where He Left Off]

[Ken Barrows]

Note to David Cameron: The machines don’t pay for themselves (must…keep…borrowing) and the profits are merely a redistribution of income.

[Variable81]

Take any government you want in North America, Europe, and capitalist Asia: none act in the interests of their poorer citizens anymore. Even if one would insist on still calling them democracies, it should be clear they’re severely out of balance. And that does not bode well. Even the Southern European countries, desolate and desperate as they are, play along, and how could they not, all their ruling politicians come from the financial industry.

Anyone aware of any countries who DO act in the interests of their poorer citizens anymore (assuming they ever did)? Or even a country that acts in the interest of the plurality / relative majority as opposed to the power-and-moneyed elites? :dry:

[Chrissie]

Anyone aware of any countries who DO act in the interests of their poorer citizens anymore (assuming they ever did)? Or even a country that acts in the interest of the plurality / relative majority as opposed to the power-and-moneyed elites

Bhutan apparently…

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Bhutan apparently…

My first thought too. Some South American countries perhaps? Bolivia, Ecuador?

[Viscount St. Albans]

Ilargi said:
“The current shutdown in the US is nothing but another piece of theater performed for this purpose. Capitol Hill will do what Gordon Gecko tells it to. He owns the Hill.”
———————————–

This theater is setting up a great profit machine for the Geckos. Like proper Hollywood A-listers, Obama and Boehner should demand a % of the gross on the back-end. With the 1-month t-bill rate now > 0.3% (it was 0.01% a few weeks ago), geckos are poised to rake-in taxpayer dough on a totally risk free bet. Baring meteor strike, there is 0% probability that the interest won’t be paid on 30 day t-bill.

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department sold $30 billion of 1-month T-bills at roughly 0.35% interest. If my math is correct, that’s about $9 million in rent on money that should have been virtually rent free.

The ripple effect in the derivatives markets must be massive. How much do you want to bet that pension funds take the wrong side of bets in those opaque markets. CDS on 1-month T-bills anyone? (selling fire insurance on concrete block houses).

[gurusid]

Hi Folks,

I think the best bit was this from the ‘[strike]Son[/strike] Clone of Thatcher’:

“The mortgage market today isn’t working,” Cameron said [..] . “There’s a market failure going on which the government is helping correct.”

So your saying that the ‘free market’ doesn’t work and that ‘gov’t ‘ has to step in and help it? 😆

Talk about a myth eating its own tale… I wonder if this is how the Aztecs went down after sacrificing all those people and things to Huitzilopochtli. After all it was considered a form of debt payment, according to ‘Wiki’:

A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice…

While not the most reliable of sources, I thought it too ironic to miss… :dry:

This is the nature of corruption and how systems fail. As if to prove a point, a Monsanto executive and the founder of Syngenta are to receive Nobel prizes of agriculture, for a ‘technology’ that impoverishes farmers by making them buy the seeds and chemicals every year, and poisons the land and water with those same chemicals. I guess this is the icing on the ‘legitimisation’ cake which Ilargi talked about earlier in this article: Time To Stop Monsanto And The US Supreme Court.

You can protest to stop it here:

Please join in telling the World Food Prize Foundation not to reward Monsanto and bee-killer Syngenta’s outrageous practices.

Here’s the url if you want to tell others: https://action.sumofus.org/a/world-food-prize-monsanto-syngenta/?sub=mtle

L,
Sid.

[backwardsevolution]

Good chart showing Total US and UK crises, as well as Total World Crises Ex US and UK.

https://i.cubeupload.com/j094i7.png

[TonyPrep]

Profit should always have been a dirty word. If you charge more for your goods and services than they cost (including costs of living for the providers), then growth is the outcome. And we all know where growth leads.

I cringe at the notion that “anyone can reach the top” if they apply themselves. What that meaningless phrase doesn’t capture is that not “everyone can reach the top”, otherwise, there would be no “top”. Thus we have inequality, which is growing.

[Nassim]

Tony,

“Profit” is the opposite of “Loss”. To have “Capital”, you have to have profits that were not consumed. If you make losses, or you consume more than your profit, you run down your capital. Capital is a requisite to create wealth (i.e. food, clothing, housing etc.) The less capital you have, the poorer you are and the lower your quality of life.

Take your choice, but don’t try to impose your choice on me. 🙂

[Ken Barrows]

Profit’s great, but everybody’s borrowing in order to make that profit. Which isn’t very profitable for society.

[TonyPrep]

I’m not trying to impose my choice on anyone but nature will have the last say.

If some retained earnings are needed for the business that that should be priced in, also. But clear profit drives growth. Let’s just take the fictional hypothetical world where there is only one product that can be bought. Charging more than the overall cost of producing that product means that the extra money can only be spent on … buying more of that product (and making the extra, of course), thus growing the economy and wrecking the planet.

So far as I can tell, profit will result in growth, so there will not be any profit at some point (since growth is unsustainable). However, I’m not optimistic that humans can ever learn that lesson, so, following a large contraction of people and economies, profit (of some sort) will probably wiggle its way back into the minds of the greedy.

[p01]

In pure mathematical terms, completely ignoring terms of right or wrong, wealth or poverty, profit is an exponential function that can only exist if exponential money supply exists to satisfy this growth (cost plus profit). Any hard currency is incompatible with profit, that’s why it was always replaced by something that allowed the exponential inflation of the money supply.
The root driver of our demise is indeed profit, more specifically the production of food for profit, because this generates an exponential inflation of … you guessed it: people.
I’m amazed that long time readers/commenters have problems grasping simple mathematical facts. This may indeed go against everything we’ve been taught and would like to believe, and it can be debated if this is “right or wrong” and for whom it’s a good thing, and for whom it’s a really, really bad thing, but arithmetic is not debatable, and arithmetic says profit is an exponential function.

EDIT: Oh, before I forget, the moneylenders are also doing it for profit.

[SteveB]

p01 post=8089 wrote: The root driver of our demise is indeed profit, more specifically the production of food for profit, because this generates an exponential inflation of … you guessed it: people.

The root is the use of money and the concept of exchange. The concept of profit arises from those.

[Author]

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