[p2p-research] Post-Depression first: Americans get more money from government than they give back | csmonitor.com

[Michel Bauwens]

sounds like a wonderful system, at least to bankers and lawywers <g>

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

>  On 11/25/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> and were this pensions so exagerrated ... I've read articles that show how
>> private corporations have raided pension funds for speculative investements,
>> leaving workers high and dry ...
>>
>> in general, labor incomes have been stagnant for the last 30 years, only
>> compensated by the entry of females in the workforce, and productivity has
>> risen, so blaming workers for the current crises, (while all the evidence
>> points to the fiancial system, and the credit strategies that compensated
>> for income stagnation), seems really strange to me,
>>
>> it resembles the theories of the us right, that the blacks are to blame
>> for the subprime crisis ...
>>
>> Michel
>>
>
>
> Pensions are a complex topic.  Like Social Security.  Defined benefits were
> always a fantasy.  No system can afford to pay out more than it gets in plus
> investment growth.  Sadly, the bankers convinced the states to implement
> these programmes and then monetized the management fees (which were huge) in
> expensive mutual funds, hedge funds and bond sales and trading schemes.
> "Tell 'im the good news, Randolph..." if you've ever seen the Eddy Murphy
> movie Trading Places.
>
> The good news is that the bankers made tons regardless of whether the
> pension schemes were realistic or not.  It was government that got saddled
> with the risk.  Now that the risk has (inevitably) caused the systems to be
> underfunded...the bankers point to the system and say it is greed and excess
> for the retirees to get their promised benefits.  Pretty typical US politics
> really.
>
> The real question is, how do you back out of the crisis.  There is no easy
> answer.  In short, you've got to pull back benefits.  But the bankers don't
> like that because they don't get the guaranteed income of managing money on
> behalf of the government.  Instead, people choose their investments and they
> often choose low cost management products.
>
> It's tricky stuff.  The politics are fierce because so much money is
> involved.  Name calling is inevitable.  The best option of course is to
> socialize it across the whole of society, but that doesn't happen in the
> US.  Never will in all likelihood.  So we get complex systems that are
> continuously gamed by bankers and lawyers who change the rules to suit their
> current point of view.  The unions hire another set of lawyers to guarantee
> their benefits.  And the lawyers then get their share.
>
>
>
>
>
>




-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20091125/fe9bbf7d/attachment.html>