Financial Predation
Payday lending, Short Selling Stocks, Ridiculously Leveraged multiple Credit Default Swaps, all of these are evil on different scales. Payday lending preys upon the vast American Middle Class who live pay-check to pay-check, more than 1/2 of all American households. The Payday lender (pronounced as "loan shark") is a small scale plutocrat wanna-be with an office in a struggling part of town, who works for his soul-less corporate masters. Short Selling voraciously feasts upon the not-quite-dead-yet but starting to decay stocks of companies to further concentrate tremendous wealth into the hands of a few manipulative bastards at the expense of the company creators, employees, and suppliers, all of whom don't matter at all to the short seller. There's probably less than 10,000 full time, hard core short sellers in America. CDSs, which in singular instances are not inherently evil on an occasionally necessary transactional day-to-day basis to help a specific business you personally know and trust and deal with, but they end up raping and bankrupting Joe Taxpayer when they are also abused by obscenely wealthy plutocrats and are bought & sold en masse for profit, and not for need.
Wouldn't it be nice, if there was a Jurrasic Park like Island preserve, where Payday Loan Corporate Officers & Branch managers, along with dedicated short sellers, and financiers who derive more than 1/2 of their personal and corportate wealth from CDSs were used to feed the island's carnivorous theropads? That would be a "Survivor" I would watch & enjoy.
Lacking a fictional island, it would be enjoyable to see them go up against mix martial artists, in ones and 2s, in televised octagon steel cage matches to the death, without referees. At least then they would be providing some benefit to society, in entertainment, and in improving the gene pool, while setting an example of "that what happens when you base your whole life upon evil predation". I am not calling for their destruction & dismemberment. I'm just saying, that if we lived in a world where such fictional scenarios were possible, I'd pay to watch, or at least set my DVR to record it for later viewing.
9 years ago
Payday lending and check-cashing services have always seemed particularly egregious -- taking advantage of the poor with no good access to banking and no base financial savvy. It's a shame their aren't more accessible banking avenues for low-income neighborhoods, and more basic financial education in primary and secondary school.
ReplyDeleteShort selling isn't actually that hard to regulate into sensibility, but it's not done for some reason.
There, not their
ReplyDeletesheesh
...not to mention the loan sharking techniques of the credit card industry. 33% for a Visa card? What happened to the usury laws in this country? Oh yeah...Reagan the Messiah got rid of them.
ReplyDeleteFrank Partnoy, now is trying to confess and warn of the wrongs and evil he used to propagate:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/Fiasco-Inside-Story-Street-Trader/dp/0140278796
When you say "now" you mean "more than 10 years ago".
ReplyDeleteFiasco is being re-released. He's nicely explaining on the radio this afternoon how Phil Gramm, Greenspan, and a lame-duck Clinton all combined to deregulate derivatives, and how 15 people generated a billion dollars of inflated wealth over a period of 2 years by betting on risky investments and lying to customers. "Banks cannot make money in the light, it has to be made in the dark".
ReplyDeleteHe's also warning that the new Obama plan goes back to the 1911 regulation law that enabled mercenary credit rating agencies to rate AIG and other total crap companies as AAA, as recently as the middle of 2008.
He sounds like a very intelligent and well informed guy, with a troubled conscience.