This Is Good News!

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aE.gTBUxj82Y&pos=3

Wall Street expecting bigger bonus chex this year!

 

[rosco rathbone]

Compensation is set by the market.

Shrug.

 

[off2bed]

Dems should be happy that income tax revenues from these guys will go up.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

All these people do is move money from one place to another; they dont create anything, they dont create value, your average forklift driver does pretty much the same except he isnt paid a million bucks every time he moves a crate of womens panties across the warehouse.

I mean, if it was LIT GIRLZ BIO-HAZARDOUS DRAWERS I could see some extra money for the risk.

 

[koalabear]

All these people do is move money from one place to another; they dont create anything, they dont create value, your average forklift driver does pretty much the same except he isnt paid a million bucks every time he moves a crate of womens panties across the warehouse.

That will teach the forklift guy to join the Union.

 

[GrumpyOldGoat]

All these people do is move money from one place to another; they dont create anything, they dont create value, your average forklift driver does pretty much the same except he isnt paid a million bucks every time he moves a crate of womens panties across the warehouse.

I mean, if it was LIT GIRLZ BIO-HAZARDOUS DRAWERS I could see some extra money for the risk.

Are you pissed that they are taking something you are entitled to, or jealous that you aren't smart enough to figure out how to get paid for doing nothing?

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Wah. And Jesus says I don't have to wear seat belts if I don't wanna.

 

[rosco rathbone]

All these people do is move money from one place to another; they dont create anything, they dont create value, your average forklift driver does pretty much the same except he isnt paid a million bucks every time he moves a crate of womens panties across the warehouse.

I mean, if it was LIT GIRLZ BIO-HAZARDOUS DRAWERS I could see some extra money for the risk.

What a passel of nonsense.

They allocate capital to its most efficient uses.

 

[KingOrfeo]

All these people do is move money from one place to another; they dont create anything, they dont create value, your average forklift driver does pretty much the same except he isnt paid a million bucks every time he moves a crate of womens panties across the warehouse.

I mean, if it was LIT GIRLZ BIO-HAZARDOUS DRAWERS I could see some extra money for the risk.

I won't defend bloated bonuses to Wall Street execs, but this whole line of thinking is based on the pseudoeconomic fallacy known as producerism -- the idea that only people who make things you can hold in your hands are producers of "real" wealth and all others are parasitic on them.

This kind of nonsense is actually very old in American populist thought. British conservative Paul Johnson commented in his A History of the American People:

The Founders, particularly the Virginians, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, et al., equated property, as a moral force, with land. Their views were articulated by John Taylor (1753-1824), like them a Virginia landowner who served in the Senate and published in 1814 a monumental work of 700 pages, An Inquiry in the Principles and Policy of the United States. Taylor distinguished between 'natural' property. such as land, and 'artificial property' created by legal privilege, of which banking wealth was the outstanding example. He saw the right to issue paper money as indirect taxation on the people: 'Taxation, direct or indirect, produced by a paper system in any form, will rob a nation of property without giving it liberty; and by creating and enriching a separate interest, will rob it of liberty without giving it property.' Paper-money banking benefited an artificially created and parasitical financial aristocracy at the expense of the hard-working farmer, and this 'property-transferring policy invariably impoverishes all laboring and productive classes.' He compared this new financial power with the old feudal and ecclesiastical power, with the bankers using 'force, faith and credit' as the two others did religion and feudality. What particularly infuriated Taylor was the horrible slyness with which financiers had invested 'fictitious' property, such as bank-paper and stock, with all the prestige and virtues of 'honest' property.

Taylor's theory was an early version of what was to become known as the 'physical fallacy,' a belief that only those who worked with their hands and brains to raise food or make goods were creating 'real' wealth and that all other forms of economic activity were essentially parasitical. It was commonly held in the early 19th century, and Marx and all his followers fell victim to it. Indeed plenty of people hold it in one form or another today, and whenever its adherents acquire power, or seize it, and put their beliefs into practice, by oppressing the 'parasitical middleman,' poverty invariably follows. Taylor's formulation of this theory fell on particularly rich soil because American farmers in general, and the Southerners and backwoodsmen in particular, already had a paranoid suspicion of the 'money power' dating from colonial times, as we have seen. So Taylor's arguments, suitably vulgarized, became the common coin of the Jeffersonians, later of the Jacksonians and finally of silver-standard Democrats and populists of the late 19th century, who claimed that the American farmer was being 'crucified on a cross of gold.' The persistence of this fallacy in American politics refutes the common assumption that America is resistant to ideology, for if ever there were an ideology it is this farrago.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I won't defend bloated bonuses to Wall Street execs, but this whole line of thinking is based on the pseudoeconomic fallacy known as producerism -- the idea that only people who make things you can hold in your hands are producers of "real" wealth and all others are parasitic on them.

This kind of nonsense is actually very old in American populist thought. British conservative Paul Johnson commented in his A History of the American People:

Finance is the economic twin of nominalizations in writing. Nominalizations dont exist, either. You can be full of shit but you cant be full of empathy.

Stock brokers and bankers are paper shufflers. Modern finance is a confidence game. Ditto for law and academia. Court orders and diplomas are good for wiping your ass.

 

[Daehreppoc]

What a passel of nonsense.

They allocate capital to its most efficient uses.

The most efficient use of capital is executive compensation. For some Wall Street firms, it is almost 1/2 of total revenues...