Comments on: Casino finance – Wall Street lost $1 trillion in wealth before recovering most of it because of a missed keystroke? The cronyism and gambling of the banking financial sector.

By: Jess Sayen

Jess Sayen — Wed, 12 May 2010 03:21:32 +0000

What an amazing loss of American spending power. This is a truly deflationary force, which has affected millions of americans. We've seen it time and time again as we track the Sell My Home listing data with ever decreasing home listing prices. It's astonishing to see if you go to sites like Zillow and such. Thank you for helping to clarify the magnitude of this economic force that is the housing market.

By: fajensen

fajensen — Mon, 10 May 2010 06:00:59 +0000

“They” couldn’t use the USD 12++ Trillion bailouts to pay back the mortgages because that would destroy bank “assets” AKA The Debt.

The bailouts are there to *protect* those assets, keep the the debt growing in fact, and support the spending by the very wealthy – “Consumer Spending” is irrelevant in an economy where the top 1-3% controls 80% of the economy; The top 1-3% IS The Economy therefore they must get their bonuses in spite of their dire performance, to boost “consumer spending”!

By: Maloc

Maloc — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:18:21 +0000

Everyone who spit their coffee out when they hear Thursday’s unprecedented break in the stock market are correct, the “fat finger” error is impossible to occur. Systems to enter orders have confirmation boxes, quantity and price limits hard-coded in the trading front-end to prevent this type of error. Besides you can’t get off a $16 billion order in any market, especially the e-minis.

CNBC showed how f’**ing clueless they are by repeating this rumor multiple times through the afternoon and evening. There are a big break in 2 currencies just before the stock market break, the yen an pound sold off and then the equities followed soon after. . .

By: Blogger Bob

Blogger Bob — Sat, 08 May 2010 23:41:48 +0000

LAer: I agree that many people have reduced income. But you are not taking into account that 35% of the workforce are government workers. Except for a few furlough days, which affect only about 3% of workers, their income has not gone down.
In Alameda, CA. the teachers are complaining because they got “only” a 4% raise this year, not the usual cost of living raise, AND a 4 % raise. This will be fixed by a parcel tax of around $1,000. per house, which will allow normal raises to go through, and pensions to increased, again.

By: Howard

Howard — Sat, 08 May 2010 04:21:14 +0000

It would be interesting to see the graph that shows industry profit growth, also created for other industries, such as health care for example. If shown for the major industries in the economy, it would illustrate where exactly the wealth increased (and decreased) over the past 40 years.

One other comment. That same graph shown on this page:
http://pragcap.com/the-trilliong-dollar-reversion
has the vertical axis indexed to 1970=100. This makes it easier to evaluate the relative growth. It shows that financial profits have grown at about twice the pace of the overall economy since 2010. Interesting discussion there whether this is good or bad for the country.