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Even Billionaires Now Agree: Capitalism Sucks


ReeferMadness

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Ray Dalio, Founder of the World's Largest Hedge Fund, Says the System is Broken

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Like many other market observers, Dalio has noticed that stock prices no longer have much to do with the health of the company the stock represents ― markets move depending on whether or not investors expect central banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve to flood the market with even more money. 

Of course, most progressives know what Dalio and others like him have been blind to all along.  Without strong measures to restrain the worst of capitalism and force redistribution of wealth, this is exactly how capitalism always works - or rather fails to work.  When you define success as being richer than everyone else, people will find a way to do just that.  Whether it's fair, whether it's moral, whether it's legal; those are things for lawyers and ethicists to quibble over.  Only ideologues and idiots think that it's relevant that capitalism is transparently not a meritocracy.

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9 hours ago, ReeferMadness said:

Only ideologues and idiots think that it's relevant that capitalism is transparently not a meritocracy.

The same morons will also insist that equal opportunity means equal outcomes without realizing that the inequality is at the front end of the process and is due to the unequal access that wealthy people have to people in power.

 

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Without strong measures to restrain the worst of capitalism and force redistribution of wealth, this is exactly how capitalism always works - or rather fails to work.

The only strong measure I can see that will work remains the same, switching from a surveillance state to a souveillance state and turning the Telescreens around.

Of course the stupids on the right will be told this sort of accountability is an attack on their right to free speech or some such thing.

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10 hours ago, ReeferMadness said:

Ray Dalio, Founder of the World's Largest Hedge Fund, Says the System is Broken

Of course, most progressives know what Dalio and others like him have been blind to all along.  Without strong measures to restrain the worst of capitalism and force redistribution of wealth, this is exactly how capitalism always works - or rather fails to work.  When you define success as being richer than everyone else, people will find a way to do just that.  Whether it's fair, whether it's moral, whether it's legal; those are things for lawyers and ethicists to quibble over.  Only ideologues and idiots think that it's relevant that capitalism is transparently not a meritocracy.

I’m not sure what you mean by capitalism sucks.  Capitalism is just the voluntary exchange of goods and services, and private property rights.  I don’t really know how anyone can be against those basic freedoms.  One can debate how and what things should be taxed.  But those fundamental freedoms still exist.  And we would still be operating under a free market capitalist system.

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5 hours ago, bcsapper said:

I suppose capitalism sucks in the same way democracy sucks.  It doesn't always work to everyone's satisfaction.

Democracy sounds like an interesting idea.  I think we should give it a try.

Know what gets in the way?  Capitalism.  Governments are for sale to connected insiders.  Just the way capitalists like it.

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5 hours ago, Shady said:

I’m not sure what you mean by capitalism sucks.  Capitalism is just the voluntary exchange of goods and services, and private property rights.  I don’t really know how anyone can be against those basic freedoms.  One can debate how and what things should be taxed.  But those fundamental freedoms still exist.  And we would still be operating under a free market capitalist system.

Wow, Shady.  It looks like you're having difficulty with the concepts in this thread.

Did you try reading the article?

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16 minutes ago, ReeferMadness said:

Democracy sounds like an interesting idea.  I think we should give it a try.

Know what gets in the way?  Capitalism.  Governments are for sale to connected insiders.  Just the way capitalists like it.

Well, there you go see.  Neither of them are perfect, but we all wish they were.

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22 minutes ago, ReeferMadness said:

Wow, Shady.  It looks like you're having difficulty with the concepts in this thread.

Did you try reading the article?

Yes, but did you?  He isn’t saying that capitalism should be abandoned.  He isn’t saying that capitalism sucks, as you did.  You’re editorializing on the back of the article, and misrepresenting it.

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27 minutes ago, ReeferMadness said:

Democracy sounds like an interesting idea.  I think we should give it a try.

Know what gets in the way?  Capitalism.  Governments are for sale to connected insiders.  Just the way capitalists like it.

Any type of government is at risk for being up for sale to the connected insiders.  It’s just that in governments like communism and socialism, the connected insiders are the government.

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1 minute ago, Shady said:

Yes, but did you?  He isn’t saying that capitalism should be abandoned.  He isn’t saying that capitalism sucks, as you did.  You’re editorializing on the back of the article, and misrepresenting it.

He said it isn't working.  I know that sounds hurtful to members or the holy church of capitalism but he's right.

What I said (and I quite clear in my post that I was diverging from him on this) was that this is exactly the way it works.  Unless you have strong democratic controls to keep it in check.

I know that right wingers aren't big on "science" or "evidence" or "knowledge" or even "intelligence" but all of the evidence points to exactly that conclusion.

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3 minutes ago, Shady said:

Any type of government is at risk for being up for sale to the connected insiders.  It’s just that in governments like communism and socialism, the connected insiders are the government.

Hmmm.

I guess we need pure socialism then so there is nobody to sell the government assets to.

Did you notice how readily the communist bosses of the Soviet Union became crony capitalists who are now embraced by right wing politicians like Trump and Johnson?  It's almost as if they were never socialists at all....

Which is what anyone with a few brain cells said all along.

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52 minutes ago, ReeferMadness said:

Hmmm.

I guess we need pure socialism then so there is nobody to sell the government assets to.

Did you notice how readily the communist bosses of the Soviet Union became crony capitalists who are now embraced by right wing politicians like Trump and Johnson?  It's almost as if they were never socialists at all....

Which is what anyone with a few brain cells said all along.

It’s already been tried.  It was called the Soviet Union.  It didn’t work for shit.  

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53 minutes ago, ReeferMadness said:

Hmmm.

I guess we need pure socialism then so there is nobody to sell the government assets to.

Did you notice how readily the communist bosses of the Soviet Union became crony capitalists who are now embraced by right wing politicians like Trump and Johnson?  It's almost as if they were never socialists at all....

Which is what anyone with a few brain cells said all along.

Maybe you need to re-read the article.  He’s not advocating for the abolishment of capitalism.  Changing tax structures and other things doesn’t discount the fundamental principles of capitalism, which is the voluntary exchange of goods and services, and property rights.

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11 hours ago, bcsapper said:

I suppose capitalism sucks in the same way democracy sucks.  It doesn't always work to everyone's satisfaction.

Like democracy, capitalism works just fine for people who game them to their own advantage.

Same with communism, fascism...you name it.  If we've seen corruption once we've seen it a thousand times stretching back to he dim mists of time and it probably works the same way on the other side of the universe.  It's just a function of power and privilege and many have called it a natural law that shouldn't be messed - why would we want to stop doing something that's served our betters us so well for so long? 

"If we don't someone else will" is another time/ideologically honoured ethos that comes to mind.

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No system works to everyone's satisfaction, this is not exclusive to capitalism, which works to more people's satisfaction than any other economic system. If you think capitalism is broken, everything else is more broken, so you are just whining about life not being perfect with no practical solution if that is your big takeaway.

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7 hours ago, ReeferMadness said:

Hmmm.

I guess we need pure socialism then so there is nobody to sell the government assets to.

Did you notice how readily the communist bosses of the Soviet Union became crony capitalists who are now embraced by right wing politicians like Trump and Johnson?  It's almost as if they were never socialists at all....

Which is what anyone with a few brain cells said all along.

Still Trying to #ResistCapitalism?

 

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12 hours ago, eyeball said:

Like democracy, capitalism works just fine for people who game them to their own advantage.

Same with communism, fascism...you name it.  If we've seen corruption once we've seen it a thousand times stretching back to he dim mists of time and it probably works the same way on the other side of the universe.  It's just a function of power and privilege and many have called it a natural law that shouldn't be messed - why would we want to stop doing something that's served our betters us so well for so long? 

"If we don't someone else will" is another time/ideologically honoured ethos that comes to mind.

I disagree.  No system works for everyone, and all are open to curruption, but the reason capitalism benefits the corrupt so very much is that it benefits (pretty much) everyone else too.

What did a corrupt commie get?  A bit bigger dacha to try and get the power to work before they shipped him off to the gulag.  Not quite a billionaire hedge fund investor.

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On 11/10/2019 at 2:04 PM, ReeferMadness said:

Democracy sounds like an interesting idea.  I think we should give it a try.

Know what gets in the way?  Capitalism.  Governments are for sale to connected insiders.  Just the way capitalists like it.

Globalism is not real capitalism. Globalism means world global domination over the economy of every country, and to be held and owned totally by a few so called capitalists. Capitalism has been high jacked by world globalists, and have given capitalism a bad name. Communism is okay if practiced as preached. But sadly, it is not. Real communism has been high jacked by globalist communists also who do not believe in real capitalism. The capitalist system is great if it were practiced as it was preached. At least that is the way I see it. 

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On 11/11/2019 at 8:26 AM, bcsapper said:

I disagree.  No system works for everyone, and all are open to curruption, but the reason capitalism benefits the corrupt so very much is that it benefits (pretty much) everyone else too.

I suppose if capitalism as a system lasts a couple decades longer than communism it wins. Whoop di doo.

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What did a corrupt commie get?  A bit bigger dacha to try and get the power to work before they shipped him off to the gulag.  Not quite a billionaire hedge fund investor.

Go tell that to Putin or Jinping.

 

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1 hour ago, eyeball said:

I suppose if capitalism as a system lasts a couple decades longer than communism it wins. Whoop di doo.

Go tell that to Putin or Jinping.

 

Aww, I'm sorry your wall fell down. 

Putin and Jinping kinda make my point.  With Jinping, that's why Hong Kong hasn't been Tiananmened.  As for Putin, he's just a new Tzar, which was all most Russians wanted anyway.

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35 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

Putin and Jinping kinda make my point.

They fly in the face of your point actually and serve to underscore the degree to which corruption enhances wealth and power.

Despite what the handful of billionaires in the OP article say its pretty clear most powerful and wealthy people act as if its honesty that sucks.  And they always seem to have a lot of support from the usual suspects. Their sycophancy enhances corruption - like an additive to grease that makes it even slipperier.

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On 11/10/2019 at 1:45 AM, ReeferMadness said:

Ray Dalio, Founder of the World's Largest Hedge Fund, Says the System is Broken

Of course, most progressives know what Dalio and others like him have been blind to all along.  Without strong measures to restrain the worst of capitalism and force redistribution of wealth, this is exactly how capitalism always works - or rather fails to work.  When you define success as being richer than everyone else, people will find a way to do just that.  Whether it's fair, whether it's moral, whether it's legal; those are things for lawyers and ethicists to quibble over.  Only ideologues and idiots think that it's relevant that capitalism is transparently not a meritocracy.

Yes, Ray Dalio says the system is broken, but I'm glad that I first saw the story at the Naked Capitalism blog, where they linked directly to the article Dalio wrote on his Linked In page, rather than go through the muddled and manipulative translation at Huffpo! The point he is trying to make is that globalized financial capitalism has pushed its way to a peak where the entire system is about to collapse under its own weight and erase book values of stocks, real estate, currencies....pretty much everything you can think of is about to get wiped out because central banks all over the world (not just the Federal Reserve members) have been busy on their computer terminals in recent times trying to quantitatively ease their way out of each and every financial jam they see coming their way with the lack of real economic growth. 

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    • Money is free for those who are creditworthy because the investors who are giving it to them are willing to get back less than they give. More specifically investors lending to those who are creditworthy will accept very low or negative interest rates and won’t require having their principal paid back for the foreseeable future. They are doing this because they have an enormous amount of money to invest that has been, and continues to be, pushed on them by central banks that are buying financial assets in their futile attempts to push economic activity and inflation up. The reason that this money that is being pushed on investors isn’t pushing growth and inflation much higher is that the investors who are getting it want to invest it rather than spend it. This dynamic is creating a “pushing on a string” dynamic that has happened many times before in history (though not in our lifetimes) and was thoroughly explained in my book Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises. As a result of this dynamic, the prices of financial assets have gone way up and the future expected returns have gone way down while economic growth and inflation remain sluggish. Those big price rises and the resulting low expected returns are not just true for bonds; they are equally true for equities, private equity, and venture capital, though these assets’ low expected returns are not as apparent as they are for bond investments because these equity-like investments don’t have stated returns the way bonds do. As a result, their expected returns are left to investors’ imaginations. Because investors have so much money to invest and because of past success stories of stocks of revolutionary technology companies doing so well, more companies than at any time since the dot-com bubble don’t have to make profits or even have clear paths to making profits to sell their stock because they can instead sell their dreams to those investors who are flush with money and borrowing power. There is now so much money wanting to buy these dreams that in some cases venture capital investors are pushing money onto startups that don’t want more money because they already have more than enough; but the investors are threatening to harm these companies by providing enormous support to their startup competitors if they don’t take the money. This pushing of money onto investors is understandable because these investment managers, especially venture capital and private equity investment managers, now have large piles of committed and uninvested cash that they need to invest in order to meet their promises to their clients and collect their fees.
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    • At the same time, large government deficits exist and will almost certainly increase substantially, which will require huge amounts of more debt to be sold by governments—amounts that cannot naturally be absorbed without driving up interest rates at a time when an interest rate rise would be devastating for markets and economies because the world is so leveraged long. Where will the money come from to buy these bonds and fund these deficits? It will almost certainly come from central banks, which will buy the debt that is produced with freshly printed money. This whole dynamic in which sound finance is being thrown out the window will continue and probably accelerate, especially in the reserve currency countries and their currencies—i.e., in the US, Europe, and Japan, and in the dollar, euro, and yen. 
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    • At the same time, pension and healthcare liability payments will increasingly be coming due while many of those who are obligated to pay them don’t have enough money to meet their obligations. Right now many pension funds that have investments that are intended to meet their pension obligations use assumed returns that are agreed to with their regulators. They are typically much higher (around 7%) than the market returns that are built into the pricing and that are likely to be produced. As a result, many of those who have the obligations to deliver the money to pay these pensions are unlikely to have enough money to meet their obligations. Those who are recipients of these benefits and expecting these commitments to be adhered to are typically teachers and other government employees who are also being squeezed by budget cuts. They are unlikely to quietly accept having their benefits cut. While pension obligations at least have some funding, most healthcare obligations are funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, and because of the shifting demographics in which fewer earners are having to support a larger population of baby boomers needing healthcare, there isn’t enough money to fund these obligations either. Since there isn’t enough money to fund these pension and healthcare obligations, there will likely be an ugly battle to determine how much of the gap will be bridged by 1) cutting benefits, 2) raising taxes, and 3) printing money (which would have to be done at the federal level and pass to those at the state level who need it). This will exacerbate the wealth gap battle. While none of these three paths are good, printing money is the easiest path because it is the most hidden way of creating a wealth transfer and it tends to make asset prices rise. After all, debt and other financial obligations that are denominated in the amount of money owed only require the debtors to deliver money; because there are no limitations made on the amounts of money that can be printed or the value of that money, it is the easiest path. The big risk of this path is that it threatens the viability of the three major world reserve currencies as viable storeholds of wealth. At the same time, if policy makers can’t monetize these obligations, then the rich/poor battle over how much expenses should be cut and how much taxes should be raised will be much worse. As a result rich capitalists will increasingly move to places in which the wealth gaps and conflicts are less severe and government officials in those losing these big tax payers will increasingly try to find ways to trap them.
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    • At the same time as money is essentially free for those who have money and creditworthiness, it is essentially unavailable to those who don’t have money and creditworthiness, which contributes to the rising wealth, opportunity, and political gaps. Also contributing to these gaps are the technological advances that investors and the entrepreneurs that I previously mentioned are excited by in the ways I described, and that also replace workers with machines. Because the “trickle-down” process of having money at the top trickle down to workers and others by improving their earnings and creditworthiness is not working, the system of making capitalism work well for most people is broken. 
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    • This set of circumstances is unsustainable and certainly can no longer be pushed as it has been pushed since 2008. That is why I believe that the world is approaching a big paradigm shift.

     

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-has-gone-mad-system-broken-ray-dalio/

The capitalist system that has been used by the ruling classes to run this world is about to collapse under its own weight- so if there is a world left after the fall of capitalist empires, what kind of economic system will it use so that human activity is finally able to work within the limits that nature allows and will not make exceptions for!

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