Hello all,

I have developed a business plan that has been praised by analysts at Microsoft, Amazon.com and top venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The plan presents a business case for a start-up provider of:

* online markets that provide people with new and improved ways to customize education, and to showcase and earn money from expertise

* media and software that complement said markets

Canonical research findings (i.e., not mine) suggest that the best implementations of the plan will catalyze a lot of job creation.

Toward raising awareness of this info re: job creation, I have adapted the plan at OpportuniTV.com.

Any chance that you(r organization) can help to spread the word? If so, please contact me at your earliest convenience with any questions, comments, etc.

Thanks kindly for your consideration.

Best regards,

Frank Ruscica

I sometimes play devil’s advocate because many of the popular bashing arguments are not particularly well put together.

Your comments make me think a little more about this.

Thanks.

As I found out more about our monetary and financial system I was quite surprised that there is even a debate about the wisdom of allowing a relatively small number of private actors the authority and privileges we do. It demonstrated to me just how effective and pernicious propaganda can be in providing cover for corruption.

I’m glad you brought up the good point that you did because it points to what I think is the crucial debate: if the gov’t engages in the same sort of behavior for actual public benefit, would that be an optimal approach?

I think not. There is an underlying deception to our monetary system that is one of its more serious flaws. Also, it is next to impossible to control for any length of time. Most serious, I think, is that it redirects many (at times perhaps most) productive investments to unproductive pursuits (with mcmansions only the current example.)

Setting aside the separate debate on the merits of gov’t redestributing wealth, it’s the destructive manner in which it’s done that makes our monetary and financial system particularly bad.

You argue your points well.

I’m afraid my best response is to ask another question:

Is there a difference in your view in inferring the motivation or behaviour of the Richard Fuld who held onto $ 1 billion in stock of his firm, versus an alternative Richard Fuld who took the same amount of money out of the firm along the way?

Knowing what you know, would you tend to “assign blame” any differently between these two cases?

His behavior can further be explained by his ability to easily extract ample amounts of cash from his business because of its favored status. Gambling recklessly with other people’s money that one misappropriated for himself is not that unusual, to put it mildly.

To your point, I must be missing it. If you’re highly confident either that Uncle Sam will prop up your stock or that everybody and their brother believes that (thus effectively socializing losses that would materialize absent such intervention) and that you and your company have favored status such that you can engage in criminal conduct with impunity to goose your profits and even create fictitious profits, why wouldn’t you eagerly load up on that stock with the intent of dumping it at the right time? You may get the timing wrong, but that doesn’t mean your entire calculation was incorrect.

This is before considering the vast sums of cash these people awarded themselves in bonuses from fictitious profits that were generated (if you can say that about something fictitious) with taxpayers bearing the risk of losses.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has repeatedly pointed out that Lehman’s negligible recovery in bankruptcy is evidence in and of itself that there must have been accounting fraud. I haven’t heard of any investigations, let alone prosecution of Dick Fuld and/or his lieutenants and auditors. Have you? If you have, please, do share. If not, is there nothing wrong with this picture?

Again, what am I missing in what you’re saying?

Another way of putting the question:

If a man puts a billion of his own money at risk, how much does it affect his risk taking behaviour to know that the government may step in after he loses that billion?

My point is that those who willingly accumulate stock in their own company are not behaving in a way that is consistent with entirely socializing the losses that might be incurred by the risks they take in managing the company.

What’s so closed minded about that?

And how do you think those near the top got “their own” in the first place? Aside from the easy come, easy go aspect, even the savviest “investors” don’t always get out in time. That doesn’t mean they misunderstood the system.

“I don’t think they calculate the socialization of losses to the taxpayer before calculating the privatization of losses to themselves.”

The evidence suggests that they had grown accustomed to getting bailed out (“socialization of losses”) and indeed most of them were. No miscalculation there.

“I think the story is oversimplified. Call it hubris and incompetence. But it’s not entirely the heads they win tails we lose story that is popularly depicted.”

Simplified, certainly, even greatly. Oversimplified? I don’t think so. See my comment above. Sure, it’s not _entirely_ the story, just a huge and critical part of it.

You may be interested in the unofficial history of the creation of the Fed and even the first Bank Of U.S. to see how far back and how baked in to the system the “heads they win tails we lose story” is. I’ll deliberately leave out specific references because there is so much propaganda out there and appropriate suspicion of various sources. Good material is not that hard to find, if you approach the search with an open mind and the requisite critical thinking, combined with multiple independent sources. You know, the usual when one isn’t looking only to confirm their established point of view.