Remember how Zuckerberg tried to sue the inhabitants of an island so that he could force the sale of their family divided properties ?
I am imagining a day when the rich become so rich that they can sue one off of this planet.
Cosmically rich.
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I don’t mean to jump in, but those literacy rate stats!
I’m getting flashbacks of soviet-era ice skating judge scores.
Best Korea at 100% and the former-eastern-block posse owns it in the 99%+
And I guess the US is still recovering from their knee-capping as they didn’t provide a score.
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It did create two centuries of incredible growth, innovation and increase in longevity. The five years haven’t been awesome but you’re not starving.
Nope, but that’s a nice deflection. That growth would have occurred without the stock market and all the financial shenanigans. Most of the recessions of the last hundred years that set us back were direct results of that gambling market failing massively. The people suffer… but the rich, of course, figured out how to socialize their losses so it doesn’t affect them.
I’m sorry America is having to share it’s wealth with the billions that capitalism has lifted out of poverty in China, India and across Asia in the last three decades.
Not sure what that has to do with my comments. But I’m not sorry, I’m glad we’ve been able to assist.
But America doesn’t own capitalism, or innovation. Or the right to pursue happiness.
Again, has nothing to do with my comments about the gambling system known as the stock market, nor is it something I would disagree with.
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1.The growth might…
2. Because that’s why you’ve got a rust belt - wealth has been redistributed to the poor from the rich.
3.That you can see.
4. Ciao ciao bello! Good luck with the commune.
Honestly, you’re better off just using the mutescript to ignore them.. Life’s too short to spend it fighting shills.
What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!
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There’s another thing you are leaving out – American retail is absurdly, vastly, catastrophically overbuilt. The US has ten times more retail square footage per capita than Germany. This is due to tax policies that made building shopping malls close to a no-lose proposition for more than half a century.
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What sort of reasons do these supposed stewards have for building debt for these companies? I assume they are somehow borrowing to fuel large shareholder payouts? How can obvious payouts like this not crash the stock value?
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In this process the hedge funds take the company’s private so there are no stock values made public. They simply borrow in the name of the company and pocket it, then leave the company to flounder and die.
The discussion of the evil or not of Corporations kind of misses the point that it’s how you run the business that matters not its organizational type. You can build a house with a hammer or bash someone’s brains in. Financial markets can provide tremendous good raising capital for businesses that would not have that capital in their normal growth structure. But then they’re capable of being gamed and run off the rails. It’s perfectly clear that something like high-frequency trading does nothing for anyone except the traders bleeding money from everyone else. This is the purest form of parasite.
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Look at Cuban medicine, for instance. Please.
Look at the average quality of life in France, for instance. Effectively, a socialist state.
Capitalism on the leash is great. But you can’t ignore the people living in poverty. You can’t play statistical games and quote only averages. You need to look at the left side of the distribution curves.
It is beyond question, in fact, laughable to suggest, that Goldman Sachs did not drive the world to the recession commencing 2008.
I’m no communist, but by god, Marx made a good few points.
Besides, the numbers speak for themselves. The accretion of capital and income to an ever smaller group of individuals (who, by the way, roll eachother over the barrel) is becoming ever more disgusting.
But there is a simpler way out.
Everyone just stop consuming the crap these businesses pump out. Who needs it?
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Depending on how the GOP tax bill comes out, heavily leveraged businesses will take a huge hit by the reduction, if not the elimination, of the deduction of interest on their debt.
The 30 Years War wiped out close to half of Germany’s population; it was started and fed by the “1%”.
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@ Barafundle: Your point 2 is a fallacy.
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That’s why so many people are flocking from around the world to live there, innit???
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Except it has been largely kept within those in the high levels of power there. Leaving there most in the dust. You have fantastic wealth over there but still a paltry per capita.
We don’t have capitalism in most of the developed world anymore. We have oligarchy. Monopolistic strangling of markets and predatory financing destroying the ability to produce and sell effectively.
Better examples of places which grew from capitalism would be Taiwan and South Korea. Places where the average person earns somewhere between 8-10X that of the average Chinese or Indian person. Places which insulated themselves from global economic upheaval twice by breaking up large, unwieldy and too powerful mega-corporations.
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Yes.
Yes.
If true, I’ll gladly concede the point. Hyundai and Samsung are pretty damned big though.
Most of Samsung’s international growth came after the breakup of the Chaebols (huge mega conglomerates) following the 1997 Asian currency crisis.
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IIRC the big demise of Toys R Us is they were bought using a huge loan, and the company was already massively in debt. So, yeah. Even though sales weren’t horrible, they weren’t any where near enough to pay back the loan.
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Emphasis mine. That’s not how a leveraged buyout (LBO) works… The mgmt or outsider entity doesn’t get to borrow in the name of the company and simply take the money and run. My intention isn’t to paint LBO investors in a particular light but it serves everyone to stick to facts.
EDIT: also, I would add that debt covenants don’t allow for borrowing to simply hand the cash over for shareholder payouts (dividends). No matter how subordinated the creditor, they still have a prior claim to cashflows or assets of a company over equity holders.
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I miss walking in and being hit with the smell of popcorn (which presumably made money for them; it’s how movie theaters have made money for decades).
I have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old, and (except for a few online orders) I’ve spent their childhoods not shopping at Toys R Us. When the 12-year-old was a toddler, I went in to buy a pinwheel. I don’t know which was worse: that Toys R Us didn’t sell pinwheels, or that the person they hired to sell toys didn’t know what a pinwheel is. I guess my anecdote doesn’t prove anything, but if my experience was typical, then the toy store not being very adept at selling toys (for whatever reason) might have something to do with it.
I can see why that happened with most bookstores, for example, but why should it happen with clothing stores? Has anyone else here tried shopping for clothes on Amazon? Especially for another person, like as a gift? Searching for a particular item might give 100 results, but only 10 or 20 distinct items. There might be 12 results with the same photos, same model, etc. but a different brand name. (And the same model keeps turning up for disparate products.) Each of those listings will say something like “this is the only brand xyz on Amazon! Don’t buy xyz from anyone else on Amazon.” And then when the item arrives, it might resemble the photo, but the one in the photo sure didn’t look like the piece of cheap polyester one now holds in one’s hands.
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