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This has been around a while. Funny if it did happen.
I would have dropped my favorite F.A. Hayek quote-
"The disdain of profit is due to ignorance"
Oops, if it was a re-post!
This was in Das' book Extreme Money. Some banker reacted to the average Joe being upset about overpaid Wall Streeters. It was from an e-mail in 2010. Anyway here it is copy-pasted again:
"We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, it’s not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5 a.m. & work till 10 p.m. or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it.…We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive."
I obviously don't support the protestors but sympathize with some of their concerns. Perhaps those 22 year-olds shouldn't be paid six figures to work on spreadsheets and some senior execs or traders don't deserve million dollar compensation packages for taking short-term, tail risks. I'm against privatizing the profits and socializing the loses. Against the protestors, however, they do not understand the function of capitalism or even economic incentives. Stop asking for handouts.
It's been said again and again: Fuck OWS. Where's that predator drone strike?
OWS has no message, it mad with "banksters". Well, how about people getting mad with the government? The government incentivized making shitty loans. The government created the student debt crisis, the government is there with an implicit back stop "We will bail you out". If anyone on here believes in capitalism, they should write their congressman and senators and tell the government to cut back on regulation and to state that there will no longer be bailouts, you fail, you fail.
Someone has been watching too much FOX News. There is a very clear message that has garnered the attention of multi-national corporations, celebrities, businesses, the federal reserve, and more. It's pretty straight: protesters want more and better jobs, more equal distribution of income, bank reform, and a reduction of the influence of corporations on politics.
Bro they are a leaderless, decentralized organization, they want a hodgepodge of things, there is no clear message. Let me deal with each issue you bring up in order.
More and better jobs: Americans won't get them for a simple reason, they're too damned expensive. Old School manufacturing has gone the way of the dodo, from now on it will be capital intensive and new hires in that sector will be skilled and semi-skilled. The days of lifetime employment and $25 an hour for HS grads simply aren't likely to reappear. People could elect to buy only American, but that seems unlikely as most people prefer cheaper Chinese imports.
More equal distribution of income: Income should never be equal, inequality of income to a certain extent is a good, not a bad thing. These people are mad at financiers making 7 or 8 figures, well that's what traffic will bear. As long as people are free to choose their destiny (and to be honest we are) then income inequality is completely acceptable and a product of society placing differing value on different jobs.
Bank reform: This is so incredibly vague, what ending "too big to fail"? No more prop trading? Banks are global if prop trading can't be done in the US IBs will simply move it to London/HK or create subsidiaries. The only thing this does is drive tax revenues overseas. There are far too many regulations, how about we start cutting down on them and making sensible one rather than just adding more?
Reduction of corporations influence on politics: I love the term corporations, this includes everything from the one man LLC to massive companies like Walmart. I agree that there should be fairer rules, but the way you do this is ironically enough stripping out regulation. The reason is regulation benefits big boys, they have actively in the past pushed for it simply because they are better able to comply with its expensive implementation. OWS wants more government to deal with an issue due to big government, makes lots of sense.
This letter has been around for a while and the guy who wrote it is a delusional sociopath who wouldn't be qualified to work as a cashier at a convenience store. I think I wrote a response somewhere on WSO.
I suspect this was dropped in Chicago. The CBOT has had at least one firm acting like 14-year-old idiots posting signs like "We are the 1%" and dropping McDonald's applications on protesters. These acts of immaturity do nothing but make the situation worse. IMHO, the police should let the protesters up to that trading firm's floor and let them bang on the doors for a while. Wall Street isn't doing this- THEY ARE, and they deserve to take some heat for taunting the protesters. If I were a CME member, I'd gladly be voting to let the protesters up to that floor's elevator section, because these guys are way out of line on the message they're sending on behalf of everyone else.
Best thing to do is ignore them and demonstrate that we are carrying on with business. The signs and McJob apps do nothing but help them grow the movement in the long run and/or increase the likelihood of this turning into a Greece-like situation.
All we have to do is be decent, hardworking people and I don't need the protesters to tell me that. Most of the people on Wall Street are just willing to work jobs that require more time and effort than other jobs, and I see nothing wrong with that. As far as the protesters go, I'd offer the same opinion to actual financial services employees: if you're not part of the solution, shut the hell up and get back to work.
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