what business is wall street in? (401k, mortgages, corporation, investment)
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Funny, no one complained about it when wall street was making 12% annual returns on all of our 401k's. I guess we are OK sharing in the benefits from wall street but not the losses....
Funny, no one complained about it when wall street was making 12% annual returns on all of our 401k's. I guess we are OK sharing in the benefits from wall street but not the losses....
there may be more people noticing it now, but people have been speaking about this for a while. not everyone turns a blind eye simply because they see 12% returns. i know plenty of people who questioned the idea of the returns and the way our economy works in this regard.
The stock market’s fastest electronic firms boosted trading threefold during the rout that erased $2.2 trillion from U.S. equity values, stepping up strategies that profit from volatility, according to one of their biggest brokers.
The increase from Aug. 1 to Aug. 10 over their 2011 average surpassed the 80 percent rise in U.S. equity volume, showing that high-frequency traders made up more of the market during the plunge, Gary Wedbush, executive vice president and head of capital markets at Wedbush Securities, said in a telephone interview. Wedbush is the largest broker supplying bids and offers on the Nasdaq Stock Market, according to exchange data.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of high-frequency trading,” said Wedbush, whose company is one of the biggest execution and clearing brokers catering to high-speed firms. “Their business is a trading business, and volatility creates far more opportunities. Some of their algorithms and automated systems are trading two, three or five times as many shares as they would have in a more normalized volatility environment.”
an example:
In simple steps and much faster than the human eye can see, sellers entered QCOM at 9:54:03 am CT and took shares down nearly $2.00 in less than two seconds. The machines, that can cancel bids in nanoseconds dropped both bid size and price in those fractions of a second as they simultaenously joined the sellers. The result was a $3.2 billion cut in market capitalization of this $84 billion tech giant.
I doubt any of you think that is what you signed up for when you sought to invest your capital, but it is what HFT can do and how quickly it does its voodoo (optionmonster)
is this what capital investment has become? which brings me back to post #!-
The important issue is recognizing that Wall Street is no longer what it was designed to be. Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses--in other words, an investment vehicle to MOVE AMERICA FORWARD, not this.
Last edited by floridasandy; 08-16-2011 at 04:56 PM..
there may be more people noticing it now, but people have been speaking about this for a while. not everyone turns a blind eye simply because they see 12% returns. i know plenty of people who questioned the idea of the returns and the way our economy works in this regard.
No....most people don't care what happens as long as they make a decent return. I mean...look at the deficits americans are OK running up just to have government-backed entitlements. As long as the average citizen gets something for themselves, they don't care about the consequences.
Funny, no one complained about it when wall street was making 12% annual returns on all of our 401k's. I guess we are OK sharing in the benefits from wall street but not the losses....
who is really getting the "benefits" when you think about it? here is a really good segment from max keiser in 2009 on goldman sachs:
how do you fix it when our elected officials are part of the scam?
as well, things are changing in the US:
In the U.S., the planned takeover of NYSE Euronext by Germany's Deutsche Boerse made waves because it means ceding the storied trading floor on 11 Wall Street to foreign control. (side note for those who don't know, larry leibowitz, Chief Operating Officer, NYSE Euronext, is jon stewart's brother).
Anybody can explain to me why it is still legal that all the mortgages wind up and Freddy M and F Mae? I thought they figured that it was illegal and dangerous to allow one company to accumulate so much power over the economy...
why is that still going on? has anything changed at all, huh? or .. nothing? the matematicians and wall street experts will continue to warrant themselves huge compensations for their super extra smartness... and we are going to bail them out over and over again?
what is to be surprised...
the guy, ex president of Goldman sax , Henry Paulsen who brought his company to ruins was then working for Buh administration and then re- appointed by Obama as a secreraty of treasury..
backwardsevolution
"Consumer Metrics Institute, a painstakingly reliable organization reported some interesting data Monday. First they attributed the rise in consumer credit primarily to Student Loans. Further, on a “back of the envelope” estimate they suggest roughly $100 billion of consumer stimulus is in the economy from “rent free” mortgagees’. So with many homes in default banks aren’t pursuing foreclosure as a remedy thus providing those folks with disposable income. It’s that pesky Moral Hazard thing again. It’s unfair to all paying their mortgages faithfully knowing their neighbor and others aren’t. For those living rent free it’s more rationalized cash for iPads and other stuff."
$100 billion in stimulus right there, plus ZIRP so the bankers can speculate some more, which is killing the retirees and those on fixed incomes. Lee Adler of the Wall Street Examiner said:
“For every dollar in interest that someone does not have to pay, that's a dollar that someone isn't receiving and consequently can't spend."
So by artificially keeping interest rates low, we save the banks and the marginal home buyers (which is really just about saving the banks again), and the savers get nailed. The prudent bail out the stupid. And of course the stupid are really the ones who either can't lose (the banks who are bailed out) or they had nothing to lose in the first place (the marginal buyers who had nothing down and can just walk away).
Inflation is under-reported, again nailing the fixed income people, and then ZIRP just finishes them off. (end)
continually rewarding bad behavior is not a plan.
Last edited by floridasandy; 08-19-2011 at 04:33 AM..
how do you fix it when our elected officials are part of the scam?
as well, things are changing in the US:
In the U.S., the planned takeover of NYSE Euronext by Germany's Deutsche Boerse made waves because it means ceding the storied trading floor on 11 Wall Street to foreign control. (side note for those who don't know, larry leibowitz, Chief Operating Officer, NYSE Euronext, is jon stewart's brother).
"globalization" makes it easier to move illicit money around.
Put your tinfoil hat away. I have studied (from a financial and mathematical point of view) quantitative trading (including HFT). Are there dangers? Absolutely, as there also are when driving a car. That doesn't mean you take a horse and buggy when you have to go somewhere.
Not everything is a conspiracy.
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