tirsdag 25. oktober 2011

Occupy Wall Street



Endelig ser det ut til at amerikanerne, vel noen av dem i alle fall noen av dem, har skjønt tegninga!


"Occupy"-bevegelsen ser ut til å ha fått fotfeste. Foreløpig synes jeg de ser for naive, planløse ut; men det er et skritt i riktig retning.


En ikke helt uviktig flis å spikke er at det er ikke den øverste 1% som er problemet, men den øverste promillen.

An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1% (anonym, postet av sosiologi-professor G. William Domhoff)


The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well
...
The higher we go up into the top 0.5% the more likely it is that their wealth is in some way tied to the investment industry and borrowed money than from personally selling goods or services or labor as do most in the bottom 99.5%. They are much more likely to have built their net worth from stock options and capital gains in stocks and real estate and private business sales, not from income which is taxed at a much higher rate. These opportunities are largely unavailable to the bottom 99.5%.

Recently, I spoke with a younger client who retired from a major investment bank in her early thirties, net worth around $8M. We can estimate that she had to earn somewhere around twice that, or $14M-$16M, in order to keep $8M after taxes and live well along the way, an impressive accomplishment by such an early age. Since I knew she held a critical view of investment banking, I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities. Her answer was that no one talks about it in public but almost all understood and were unbelievably cynical, hoping to exit the system when they became rich enough.

Folks in the top 0.1% come from many backgrounds but it's infrequent to meet one whose wealth wasn't acquired through direct or indirect participation in the financial and banking industries.
(min utheving -- takk til Iaato på TOD for peker)