Tag: capitalism
In the years leading up to the economic crisis in 2008, banks increased the funding for the riskiest loans (called subprime loans), from $30 billion a year to over $600 billion a year, rigged even higher interest rates on those loans, and then, while the bankers were making billions of dollars of profits off the borrowers’ high interest repayments, they made further profits betting against their customers ever being able to pay back the loans they had just been given. The FBI warned the government about this in reports as early as 2006, the IMF’s chief economist, Raghurum Rajan, presented a paper to the men in charge of all the world’s major banks, including the Federal Reserve, warning of the potential collapse of the system due to dangerous incentives, and journalist Allan Sloan published articles in Fortune magazine and The Washington Post in 2007 – nothing was done.
Paul Tudor Jones II loves capitalism. It’s a system that has done well by him over the last few decades, and he has no desire to do away with it. Nonetheless, he sees a widening gap between the “haves” and “have nots” as our country’s laser focus on profits widens the gap between those who own the companies and those who work for them.
In light of the corporate scandals over the past several years, it is refreshing to hear that the new paradigm of conscious capitalism has emerged. This is due in large part to the evolving spending power of Millennials, the generation of 95 million or-so Americans born between 1982 and 2004. Millennials are more health and socially conscious than other generations, meaning that we put a strong emphasis on healthy living and well-being, and our consumer trends reflect this.
Democracy has been, in effect, turned upside down. It’s supposed to be a government by the people and for the people and all the rest of the sort of rhetoric we’re used to, but it’s become now so patently an organized form of government dominated by groups which are only vaguely, if at all, responsible or even responsive to popular needs and popular demands.
Hundreds of protesters crammed the streets of Lower Manhattan, clashing with the NYPD as they attempted to march down Wall Street. Kmele Foster, co-host of Fox Business’ The Independents, met up with Pulitzer-Prize winning author Chris Hedges for a heated debate on the merits of capitalism.
Ahead of UN summit, organizers of direct action say the planetary crisis of global warming ‘is a result of an economic system that is based on endless extraction, endless growth, and ceaseless exploitation of the earth and people.’
![We Don’t Have Free Markets Or Capitalism – Mike Maloney [MUST SEE 2MIN VIDEO]](https://i0.wp.com/consciouslifenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/We-Dont-Have-Free-Markets-or-Capitalism-Mike-Maloney.jpg?resize=640%2C240&ssl=1 "We Don’t Have Free Markets Or Capitalism – Mike Maloney [MUST SEE 2MIN VIDEO]")
Mike Maloney: “We don’t have free markets, and we haven’t had since 1913. You cannot have free markets if you don’t have free market money. The currency is 50% of every transaction there is in society, and if you have a small group of men at the central bank having a meeting each month (in the United States it’s the FOMC) deciding how much currency there is going to be in the system, and what the cost of that currency is (the interest rate) – that’s a manipulated market by definition. There is no transaction in society that is not manipulated. When people say that the free markets are failing – we do not have free markets. When people say that capitalism isn’t working – we don’t have capitalism, we’ve got cronyism. We’ve got special favors being granted by Congress to the people that lobby them. It skews the economy, and creates all of these artificial bubbles that end up popping, and everybody loves living in a bubble – so they just want the Fed to create the next one.”
