If the Occupiers became super rich...

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Oh please. Most people can't do theoretical physics or professional-level math (or any science, for that matter) and scientists and mathematicians don't make multiple millions of dollars a year.

100-hour weeks? There are likely a lot of people working 3 minimum wage jobs at the same time who do 100 hours a week.

Also, after the bankers crashed the economy they paid themselves bonuses. That doesn't sound like meritocracy at all.

There are supporters of the movement who have money - perhaps not super-rich - although Warren Buffett comes to mind as a super-rich person who also thinks the rich don't pay enough taxes. There are other people, millionaires, who believe the banking system is out of control and that the rich should pay more taxes.

In light of that, I think that many of those in the movement who are serious and passionate about it, if they suddenly found themselves wealthy, would probably still fight for the changes they currently do. But I'm sure it could differ from one individual to another.

I love how you project, assuming everyone has the exact same motives as you. It's not that I have something against all managers. I simply don't like the idea of dealing with people subordinate to me due to the stress involved. I prefer to do everything myself.

On the topic, if bank CEO's were all the great visionaries you assume them to be, why did they appear to be so obliviously blind to the systemic risk they were exposing the entire economy to? It looks like there was a lot of tunnel-visioned hubris to me. Even the mathematicians they paid to analyze risk were unable to tell them something they didn't want to hear. Only idiots create a culture where blind optimism is enforced from the top.

Or, it could be that they got their money regardless and couldn't give a s**t about anything else. Dick Fuld is sipping an expensive bottle of red wine in one of his many houses right now with most of the money he got through his years at Lehman intact in his investment portfolio. Who was buying like crazy during the crash? Banks like Goldman, investors like Warren Buffett who realized "Hey, in a few years we'll be making a killing as we are buying these companies for 70c on the dollar for working capital"

I'm more interested in knowing where the government was, isn't it the job of regulators to make sure banks aren't overleveraged and the jobs of politicians to ensure that markets that total more than all the money in the entire world are regulated? Goldman saw it, hence the shorts placed prior to the financial crisis, multiple other banks saw it as well. The funniest bit is that the stupid politicians that stupid people voted for played right into the hands of the banks and gave and is still giving them free money to invest and make a nice return on. The U.S government in it's wisdom for instance is lending the banks money at a record low interest, which the U.S government then borrows at higher interest.

Give it up for bankers, they are smarter than the average politician and voter when it comes to getting your money into their pockets.

LOL, overleveraged? Yeah, because Goldman et al paid politicians a sh**load of money to get the legal reserve requirements for banks and Glass Steagle changed. That is a concrete example of what their intense lobbying for "deregulation" means. Also, if the gov't hadn't bailed out AIG Goldman would've been f***ed. They did not see what was coming; they blew it, but we're living in a country where "too big to fail" means more than "moral hazard."


Having lots of money to get your crimes made legal and to buy politicians is clever, but not worthy of the word "smart."

Leverage is a fancy word for debt in comparison to something, usually equity. Let's say I have 1.000.000 in my brokerage account, I can leverage this x10, meaning that I can buy stock for 10.000.000, but if the stock goes down I lose a lot more money. Now let's say that instead of stocks I buy a derivative with built in gearing, that reacts much more than the market, let's say a bull derivative that is X30, that mean that if the goods the derivative is tied to goes up 1%, my derivative goes up about 30%. So, with my 1.000.000 I would have made about 333k minus commission. However with the leverage I get 3.3 million instead. When you consider that multiple institutions were leveraged x70, in derivatives with built in gearing, I think you can see what there goes. In the same way, many homeowners prior to the financial crisis over leveraged when they purchased houses they could not afford on credit.

However, to guard themselves against heavy losses, they insured themselves with Credit Default Swaps, meaning that if things go tits up, AIG would pay them, much in the same manner that if your house burns down your insurance company will pay you. However, AIG in turn insured way too many of these papers, meaning that when they actually had to pay up they didn't have enough money. Again, regulators should have been involved at all these steps.

Also, Glass-Steagall wouldn't have made one shred of difference as Lehman and Bear-Sterns were pure investment banks, as was Goldman. As far as I know, Countrywide, Fannie and Freddie, were pure commercial banks. Actually, with Glass-Steagall in place, there would have been no way to solve the issue.

"“If you look at what happened, with or without Glass- Steagall, it would have made no difference,” said H. Rodgin Cohen, chairman of New York-based law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, who represented one side or the other in more than a dozen transactions stemming from the financial crisis last year, including the rescues of Bear Stearns Cos., Fannie Mae, Wachovia Corp., and American International Group Inc.

Cohen and others say the law wouldn’t have saved Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., both of which were pure investment banks, from collapse. And the government would not have been able to enlist JPMorgan Chase & Co. to take on the assets of Bear Stearns or allow Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies, giving them access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window."



It's only a crime if it's against the law! And again, why are voters casting their votes for representatives who clearly have no integrity? The "smart" bit is having the U.S government provide them with cheap capital which they can easily get a return on.

Sorry but the end benefit of theoretical physics is absolutely useless, it garners no profit its amazing it even pays at all. so its useless and actually people with phd's in math tend to be some of the highest paid on wall street. Like what do you think black scholes is? the amount of maths involved in high finance is huge.
Then you say people on minimum wage? why are those jobs minimum wage? because anyone can do them, this is why communism doesn't work, because if all jobs pay the same why bother exerting yourself?
if everyone got paid 10$ per hour, wouldn't we all just be farmers? or civil servants? hence when benefits pay better than work nobody works

yeah the bankers gave themselves bonuses for failure, that shouldn't have happened, I'm actually agreeing that the big banks should have gone under, all this crap about systemic risk is stupid, there would have been some banks good enough to pick up the slack, the bad banks would have died, if not we would have had a depression, which if we are honest we probably need to clean out all the rubbish ceo's

1) To the OP, I think that if they simply magically got rich, their opinions wouldn't change. if they moved into a high-earning career in business, then I think their opinions would change due to circumstances in a lot of situations. In some cases, they'd entirely flip, but in a lot of cases, we'd probably see them more on the establishment left. I think a some of them would stay put, or would fundamentally balk at the kind of high-earning career, I'd think about.

2) I do think TM is being a bit elitist. I mean, yes, hard work matters, but so does luck, so does neetworking(which doesn't relate strictly to productive ability either). It's definitely a much more complicated situation than he's portraying it, and most people know that. If psychoanalysis is an open option(as he did towards Marshall), I think it's fundamentally that TM has this perception that he's a lot more brilliant than he actually is, and that he really doesn't have a clue how the world works, only this absurd pro-business ideology to guide him. As much as he may argue about how others think, his entire posting style betrays his lack of life experience. His education background also contains large enough gaps where he can substitute in his ideology and not realize he's missing something, even when people try to argue otherwise(which he tends to dismiss because of his egocentric love of his own perceived brilliance).

Wouldn't networking be a part of "hard work" it's not directly related to production activities, however it's something that most people recognize as a needed part in any career. Luck does matter, but I find it a hard variable to quantify, Bill Gates was lucky in a sense that he started up Microsoft at a time where it was possible for him to gain such a large market share. However, he also had to do the work to make sure that his operating system was the one picked by manufacturers of computers, which includes networking.

Buffett in the same manner, put a lot of hard work in to get his degree, working for different companies, but his networking with among others Benjamin Graham had a huge impact on his career. There is an argument to be made that he did get into the market "at the right time" and was lucky to do so, since the 50s to 2000s were more or less one long bull market, with the exception of a few drops here and there.

I mean work is defined by the free dictionary as "1. Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something." So I suppose, that one could draw a line of separation depending on goals. If your goals is to get somewhere through purely doing the tasks your contract states, then networking would not be a part of that. However, if your goal is to get somewhere through "Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something" spending 5 hours playing golf with your boss is work related.

Luck wouldn't but then it's very hard to base an argument on such an unquantifiable variable. For instance, was Buffett's job at Benjamin Graham's firm luck, or a result of his work? Work in this case includes networking.

I'm not a believer in magical forces so the idea that there is some perfect financial justice meted out by the invisible hand is a little too much fantasy for me.

If you work at the right level in a big pie industry and get a slice, it's a big slice. Hollywood, Sports, Wall Street, High Finance, some internet concerns. It's a matter of recognizing that life isnt fair in the least and then making a choice to pursue a small slice of the largest pie available. THere is no perfect justice on planet Earth so why would mysterious forces regulate the apportionment of compensation? Many people with degrees in advanced subjects chuck it in and go pursue careers where the money is. They don't pretend it's just. "Just reality" maybe.

I heard a comment from an engineer turned successful investor recently on the state of his alma mater, and he said "It used to be that the smartest engineering graduates used to go work for oil companies, now most of them pursue careers as financial analysts".

I largely agree with what you're saying here, a person could pursue a masters in contemporary English literature, or a masters in science for business or engineering.

I have worked in that kind of environment and in my experience yes you do long hours and are expected to. BUT, I have to say that if you could compress the actual productive time you would narrown it down to a couple of hours a day, if that.

These kind of places like to have long meetings where alsorts of non related work issues get discussed. Time is wasted travelling from one place to another when its not strictly necessary. And a lot of these people are not even bright, they all pool what ever small ideas they have.

I would not presume that wearing a suit and carrying a laptop was the sign of a respectable hard worker.

I think you're problem is this BS just-world hypothesis. I.e., just let capitalism do it's thing and allow the chips to fall as they will and everything will go well. The bad guys will always get punished and the virtuous will take over. The thing is it's a bunch of rubbish. When big banks fail small businesses and ordinary wage earners are hurt far more than those CEO's calling the shots.

Also, on the topic of "hard work" it's pretty ridiculous to compare financial tycoons who "work hard" doing something they love to someone forced to "work hard" at shoveling s**t for the rest of his life. I mean, come one, making money is a finance CEO's special interest. Honestly, for a CEO, their work is the next best thing to sex. They aren't primarily motivated by the ability to have a lavish lifestyle either, that's just a secondary perk. In my mind, truly "hard" work is work that causes misery, but you have to do it in order to live.

The world isn't just and capitalism needs to be controlled by government. For instance, in the financial crisis, regulators should have been on top of derivatives among them CDO and CDS. There should have been laws that prevented banks from giving people loans they could not pay back unless they literally won the lottery.

There should have been fraud laws for investment firms and analysts that prevent conflict of interest, such as an analyst recommending a stock or financial product that they themselves are selling.

Bonuses should come in the form of long-term stock options, IE options with a lifespan of let's say 3 - 4 years with strike prices set in such a manner that the performance of the company would be linked to the bonus. Ideally, bonuses should be split between multiple years (for instance 10% year one, 20% year 2, 30% year 3, 40% year 4), be European style (exercisable at a set date only) as opposed to American (exercisable at any time prior to a set date), and with strike prices at a level that requires good company performance. I'm also in favor of employee options plans that let's every employee get access to share in the companies success since it tends to motivate people.

You can't make a law for funds, but personally I'm hesitant about investing in any fund where the manager(s) do not have significant amounts of their own capital invested as well, to ensure that their interest is also my interest. Many mutual funds tend to make their money of managing fees rather than getting returns for customers.

There are a lot of things that need to be done in order to keep capitalism stable and beneficial, most of them by governments. However, it's also important that governments do this in a good way, instead of in a manner that serves little purpose.

I wouldn't even say he has a pro-business ideology. People with a genuine pro-business ideology tend to defend free and unregulated markets as a force of good in the world. TM's ideology is just pure machiavellian might-makes-right social darwinism. He's argued that communism doesn't work in the long run, but if the poor can use government force to further their own interests they are idiots not to try. He's also defended outright fraudulent medical malpractice while blaming the victim. lol I think he is from the narcissist/sociopath forum or something.