Thursday, September 13, 2012

Uber rich economics, a strange analogy, QE what

I started thinking about this analogy awhile back. To me it is a simplistic explanation of how bad our economy is being manipulated. I do think it brings the point home. I was reading a tad bit about the Fed stimulus and I didn't have that in mind when I was thinking about this analogy, but some of it ties in and I will try to show that point after the analogy. It seems to me the uber rich pretty much have built their control over our economy for over a century. They use events to consolidate more and more of their wealth and prevent others from being able to create their own wealth. And if you have read my posts you know I am a big believer that spreading the wealth to many helps democracy thrive, conversely concentration of wealth is dangerous to democracy. Think about the board game Monopoly. Like every game you play for awhile and there is a winner and losers. At the end you either put up the game or start over ( for this analogy I am not talking about we have to start our economy over). Pretty straight forward, everybody loves the game, and normally it is just a game. Now imagine you decide you don't want to quit playing or at least the person winning doesn't want to quit playing. So you start adding features to the game. Usually the game ends because someone has most of the property and money. Normal economics says once that happens and for the game, pretty much there is nothing else to do. Once someone has all the money, you can't play anymore. If in real life someone was to have all the money then what would you do. Well in the game you now decide that you can keep going around the board and everytime you land on the leading person's property you just write down on a piece of paper how much more you owe that person. So basically you build unending debt. This person does keep it going by throwing the false bone that you still have a monopoly, you never know, we could keep playing and maybe I will land on your property enough times that you get back in the game, all the while you would have to avoid landing on his property so you don't build anymore debt. Even if there were four players, three all fighting with one monopoly more or less beating each other up, and continually landing on the person with most of the property. That person just keeps adding up the money coming in and the other three hoping they can become like him, but he gets bored. So he decides its okay now to have more than one hotel on each property ( if you know the game you know this is a major change). And since he already has most of the money he buys up more and more hotels to place on his properties. Now even more bored he says I want to create more rules (for his benefit) so he uses the paper money from what you and the other two players owe him to buy more hotels. All the while convincing you you still have a chance because you do have one monopoly. So you buy this,but now he decides he wants no consequences for his actions so he convinces you its okay to take out the chance and community chest card that charges fees for the number of houses and hotels a person owns. So now there is no risk to buying more, so he does over and over again till he is now playing monopoly, but having hundreds of thousands of dollars on paper that well is worthless because there is no way anyone could pay. The three other players keep trying to catch up with their one monopoly, but there is no way you can build wealth because any resources you get eventually go to the winning player because the deck is stacked against them by the new rules. Now think about the last recession. What was lost, people's savings, jobs, value in their house, etc, more of what they could build from has been taken away and the people who did it want to continue to change the rules for their benefit. The Monopoly analogy is simplistic, but think about it. It shouldn't take you long to figure out the game needs to be leveled again for it to be a benefit for everyone. And to tie in the QE 3 or whatever, now the banks have a guarantee of long term low interest rates. They can borrow money invest in oil, gold, volatile stocks, other commodities etc to make outsize profits with very little risk to them. They have hired the people that know how to play the game, whether the market goes up or down they have got it covered. They pay them bonuses to make them feel like they are super rich, but all the while controlling who has access or limiting to who can reap these benefits. And these bonds the Fed is buying are mortgage back securities, so mortgage investments now have lowered risk (again) supposedly. And this lowered interest rate money has no tie in to making people use it to benefit the whole economy. This is just one piece of a puzzle that has been going on for decades. If we want change we have to change the rules. Again I don't think we need to make everyone start over, but the rules have to be changed. And you start by holding the winners accountable to investing back into the game. If they do that you don't have to tax the heck out of them,their investments into real economic growth makes up for taxation, but if they don't help the economy then they need to be held accountable for their actions and what it truly costs society in increased poverty, decaying infrastructure, more prisons, (that is what they seem to think solves problems), moral decline and general loss of the concept of a free nation. Basically if they don't want to play then maybe they should pay.

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