http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010 ... ct_cassidy
It's an 8 page monster of a read, but the upshot is that banks don't really pursue any of the functions for which they get treated the way they do. Financial manipulation trumps providing services to customers, and we're all suffering for it.
What good is Wall Street?
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- Wuffle Trainer
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What good is Wall Street?
Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, become critics. They also misapply overly niggling inerpretations of Logical Fallacies in place of arguing anything at all.
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Which has no impact or change on what Willy mentioned, but sure, let's trout out the old excuses.Ancient History wrote:At rock bottom, a bank is a business, and most businesses are aimed at making a profit.
Screw liquid diamond. I want to be able to fling apartment building sized ingots of extracted metal into space.
Except they're not really making a profit. They arn't increasing the capital of society so much as they are concentrating it in their hands. Which, you know, could have bad repercussions.Ancient History wrote:At rock bottom, a bank is a business, and most businesses are aimed at making a profit.
We're not talking about them just, say, making some money, but in fraudulently scamming people out of money by selling shit that they knew wasn't worth what they were saying it was.
The funny thing is, the guys who pulled for the bail-out? They're also the ones who typically hold that the government shouldn't be involved in their operation. It's like a college kid who tells his parents he doesn't want them to be all up in his shit, cuz he knows what he's doing. But after he's spent all his tuition money on dope and hookers, he moves back home. And to make it worse? He continues to demand that his parents stay out of his basement bedroom! He knows what he's doing!
I suspect that people who speak or write properly are up to no good, or homersexual, or both
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I think y'all are reading slightly more into my piddly little sentence than it merits. It's a general truth of banking, not a condemnation of the article or a sweeping summary of every financial institution. Finance revolves around the continuing flow of money, on smaller and smaller fractions of interest on larger and larger collections of debts and assets. In the normal course of things some people will get greedy and short-sighted, and some people will default, and then the money men get it in the shorts. And if enough of them are doing it on a big enough scale, major financial organizations fail, and we get the current mess. That's the cost of growth-driven economic systems instead of sustainable economic systems.
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I think most of us were pretty much aware that a bank is a business, and business generally shoot for profit. Was there some need to remind the class?Ancient History wrote:I think y'all are reading slightly more into my piddly little sentence than it merits.
Screw liquid diamond. I want to be able to fling apartment building sized ingots of extracted metal into space.
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Re: What good is Wall Street?
Absolutely. The funny thing is, they kind of never have. This has always been what banks do, it's just that they've gotten very good at it, and had time to get money and people in the right places in government to get what they want.WillyGilligan wrote:It's an 8 page monster of a read, but the upshot is that banks don't really pursue any of the functions for which they get treated the way they do.