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Former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, creator of the Doug Jones Average, and perennially witty guy Jim Hightower writes via The Union Democrat of Sonora, California:
If tiny groups of Wall Street bankers, billionaires, and their political puppets are allowed to write the rules that govern our economy and elections, guess what? Only bankers, billionaires, and puppets will profit from those rules.
[...] They've rigged the rules to let them feast freely on our jobs, devour our country's wealth, and impoverish the middle class.
"Take On Wall Street" is both the name and the feisty attitude of a nationwide campaign that a coalition of grassroots groups has launched to do just that: Take on Wall Street. The coalition, spearheaded by the Communication Workers of America, points out that there is nothing natural or sacred about today's money-grabbing financial complex. Far from sacrosanct, the system of finance that now rules over us has been designed by and for Wall Street speculators, money managers, and big bank flim flammers. So--big surprise--rather than serving our common good, the system is corrupt, routinely serving their uncommon greed at everyone else's expense.
[...] A growing grassroots coalition of churches, unions, civil rights groups, citizen activists, and many others are organizing and mobilizing us to crash through those closed doors, write our own rules, and reverse America's plunge into plutocracy. The "Take On" campaign has the guts and gumption to say enough!
[...] The campaign has laid out a five-point [sic] people's reform agenda and are now taking it to the countryside to rally the voices, anger, and grassroots power of workers, consumers, communities of color, Main Street, the poor, people of faith... and just plain folks.
- Getting the corrupting cash of corporations and the superrich out of our politics by repealing Citizens United and providing a public system for financing America's elections.
- Stopping "too big to fail" banks from subsidizing their high-risk speculative gambling with the deposits of us ordinary customers--make them choose to be a consumer bank or a casino, but not both.
- Institute a tiny "Robin Hood Tax" on Wall Street speculators to discourage their computerized gaming of the system, while also generating hundreds of billions of tax dollars to invest in America's real economy.
- Restore low-cost, convenient "postal banking" in our Post Offices to serve millions of Americans who're now at the mercy of predatory payday lenders and check-cashing chains.
There's an old truism about negotiating that says: "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu". The "Take On Wall Street" campaign intends to put you and me--the People--at the table for a change.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday September 01 2016, @03:58PM
Impose a transaction fee that is inversely proportional to how long you hold a position: 1 second or less = 100% of the transaction value, 1 day = 50% of the transaction value, 1 year = 1%, 10 years = 0%.
There are a few problems with this. The first is that all of these systems are run by computer scientists now, and if there's one thing that we're good at it's inspecting a set of rules and working out how to get around them. If you make it advantageous to hold stocks for a long time, then you just create a market for derivatives. People don't trade the stocks, they trade tokens that can be redeemed in 10 years for the stock. Goldman Sachs makes a huge amount of money from creating this kind of thing. For example, before Facebook went public, they had a fund that owned a percentage of Facebook (a single entity owning private shares, not pushing Facebook over the number of shareholders that would have forced it to go public). The terms of this fund allowed the shares in the fund to be traded privately, and in the event that Facebook went public the fund would be dissolved and the owners would be given shares in Facebook in proportion to their ownership of the fund. If you try to regulate this kind of thing, then people create derivatives of these derivatives and you end up trying to enforce regulations on almost completely abstract transactions that, after you follow a few dozen contracts, eventually translate into trading something of value.
The second problem is working out where to draw the line. Trading in stocks and shares increases liquidity, which is a good thing. It's also fairly obvious that the increase in liquidity from trades happening every millisecond vs every second is of little or no value. It's probably true that having trades take place every second, vs every minute is not really valuable. It's possibly true, but less obvious, that having trades take place every five minutes vs every hour is advantageous. It's almost certainly true that having trades require a month would be very bad. Working out the exact place where you want to draw the line is difficult, and if you draw it in the wrong place then you crash your economy.
sudo mod me up