nehru jackets: Occupy Wall Street
People in my ask section keep asking me what I think about Occupy Wall Street. I think it’s fun! Wait I should really do this right? ITS COMPLICATED BUT NOT SO COMPLICATED THAT I THINK ITS DUMB OR UNNECESSARY.
I’ve always been “progressive” and “liberal” but have always wanted to “make money” and “live well” so my parents don’t feel like they came to “America” for “no reason”. I think its important Americans gather and voice their complaints of big business. The more people do this, in New York and elsewhere, the more attention the efforts gather and the more people outside this country can see we’re not all terrible people. Also, the more people inside this country can see we are all terrible people. Although the problem isn’t Wall Street as much as it is “America” or “capitalism”. I feel a lot of people who talk about their hatred for Wall Street have no idea what they’re talking about.
It’s no secret I “worked on Wall Street” although I’d describe it as “to the periphery of Wall Street.” Also, “Wall Street” functions mostly in midtown. In 2007 I graduated from Wesleyan University where I paid entirely too much money to be taken from Queens, New York to isolated Middletown, Connecticut to be surrounded by white people and other people of color who hoped to learn their extremely profitable codified language. I had a great deal of debt and parents I didn’t want to have to pay for said debt. I had an offer to paralegal at a corporate immigration law firm and an offer to take no salary and live off of commission, hiring traders, sales people, analysts, portfolio managers, and other executives in the financial services industry. I chose the latter. I liked the idea of working with other South Asians. I liked the idea of having to hustle and not being restricted by a salary and paying my debt off and hopefully helping my parents do the same for themselves. My firm was owned and operated by two South Asians (a first-generation American and an immigrant) in 1992 and by the time I worked there had grown into one of the largest executive search firms in the space. We had 12 global offices, including Sao Paulo and Mumbai who I worked closely with. Starting in research, I spent a couple of months calling investment banks and lying to personnel to attain lists of employees in certain groups - emerging markets debt, oil trading, gas trading, foreign exchange, collateral debt, us equity, quantitative analysts, asian bond trading, etc. Within a couple of months I was made an analyst and worked under a pair of headhunters (“search consultants”) focusing in commodities. One of the pair was an Indian immigrant (the brother-in-law of the ceo) and the other came from heading up the commodities group at a investment bank. I helped them find trading and sales executives for oil, gas, and power for Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse mostly. I took a personal interest in Latin America and the Emerging Markets as well and carved a niche at the firm for myself. I hired several people older, better educated, and wealthier than me for jobs that would sustain that wealth. I sat across the table from executives twice my age who I would help hire or help hire for. I saw Bear Sterns fall and helped place some of them at RBS. I saw Lehman Brothers fall and placed some of their employees at Societe Generale and Credit Suisse. I saw Merrill Lynch, along with Goldman our biggest client, fall and I saw a new client rise, Bank of America.
Many of the people I was dealing with - co-workers, clients, and candidates - were terrible human beings and I couldn’t stand to be around them. Many of them were great people. Many of them were the children of immigrants like myself. Many were far from pedigreed and want not much else besides building a good life for their family like the participants of any industry. Wall Street is an industry like automobiles, hospitality, or medicine. In the financial industry like those others several people have risen from poverty to profitability and prominence. Whereas in other industries there is a product that is sold with the end goal of profitability in mind, the product in the financial services industry is profitability WHICH IS INSANE KIND OF. The people at the top of Wall Street who build a culture of greed that permeates through trading floors across Wall Street are the same people who speak on our House and Senate floor where a different codified language does the same thing: spread wealth unevenly to preserve capital for a small selected few. Wall Street is a problem. America is a problem. The IMF is a problem. The developing world should OCCUPY AMERICA (while they can before Arizona and Alabama’s immigration laws spread across the majority of this country and red states continue to change their voting laws to prevent the working class from voting). The sentiment is the same but the semantics aren’t - occupy wall street is confusing.
They really could have used a good marketing consultant on the name I guess is what I’m saying.
Paul Krugman on Occupy Wall Street
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: October 16, 2011As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?
The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting.
On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from an unnamed money manager who declared, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”
This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn’t the question be why, and whether it’s a trend we want to continue?
For the financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.
Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.
Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.
All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation — and that was true even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following World War II, even though the postwar economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under political discussion.
Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the Great Depression.
And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.
Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing America does well also complained that New York’s two Democratic senators aren’t on his side, declaring that “They need to understand who their constituency is.” Actually, they surely know very well who their constituency is — and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers are employed by nonfinancial industries.
But he wasn’t really talking about voters, of course. He was talking about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.
Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently — as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s shock over recent events.
You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.
And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.
America, fuck yeah…
