All Posts Tagged With: "capitalism"

Markets – free markets – are meant to be unstable. They are meant to crack-up from time to time. And thank God they do. Otherwise, we’d be stuck forever with zombie industries and dead end investments.

The US economy entered a period of debt destruction – a Great Correction, we called it. The question then was how long the Great Correction would last…which depended on what it was correcting.

Instead of allowing capitalism to fix the problem, the feds made it worse. They gave more money to the very institutions and managers who had proved they couldn’t be trusted with it.
We don’t want to rehearse the whole sequence of events that got us to where we are. But it’s important to understand what happened.

The Financial Times led off its series on ‘Capitalism in Crisis’ with a wandering piece that attempted to outline the problem. Unfortunately, the FT writers don’t seem to understand what capitalism is, let alone what is wrong with it. They say they are “rethinking capitalism.” But it doesn’t appear that they ever thought about it the first time.

More and more people are coming to the same conclusion. The bull market is a fraud. And the system is corrupt. And they’re right. But not for the reasons they think.

Here is Number One on the “Capitalism as we know it doesn’t work” hit parade. From Forbes: “Top 0.1% of the Nation Earn Half of All Capital Gains”

Few people really like capitalism — even people who call themselves capitalists. The feds could probably round them all up and gun them down in an afternoon. Capitalism is too chancy…too unpredictable…and too uncontrollable. No wonder so few people are fond of it.

A trip home to the Sunny Coast revealed several things. One of them was the SKI principle. This sophisticated philosophy allows people to retire in comfort…

Readers may know Mikhail Gorbachev as a fellow who advertises Louis Vuitton luggage. But before he made it big as a mannequin, he was the top man in the Soviet Union. It was not an easy job.