The technology revolution has delivered Google searches, Facebook friends, iPhone apps, Twitter rants and shopping for almost anything on Amazon, all in the past decade and a half.
What it hasn't delivered are many jobs. Google's Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had at the end of last year a total of 74,505 employees, about one-third fewer than Microsoft Corp. even though their combined stock-market value is twice as big. Photo-sharing service Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012.
Hiring in the computer and chip sectors dove after companies shifted hardware production outside the U.S., and the newest tech giants needed relatively few workers. The number of technology startups fizzled. Growth in productivity and wages slowed, and income inequality rose as machines replaced routine, low- and middle-income, human-powered work.
This outcome is a far cry from what many political leaders, tech entrepreneurs and economists predicted about a generation ago. In 2000, President Bill Clinton said in his last State of the Union address: "America will lead the world toward shared peace and prosperity and the far frontiers of science and technology." His economic team trumpeted "the ferment of rapid technological change" as one of the U.S. economy's "principal engines" of growth.
The gap between what the tech boom promised and then delivered is another source of the rumbling national discontent that powered the rise this year of political outsiders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
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Eventually there'll be only decent jobs for maybe 20% of the population: What economic system is needed for that??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @08:40PM
You're missing the whole point.
The bankers weren't happy about losing out on their loans; that's normal. But it wasn't the bankers who were most involved in the whole bailout discussion; it was Greece. Do you remember why? No? Let me refresh your memory.
The eurozone has rules about its members, and their fiscal and monetary probity. You can quibble about how consistently those rules have been applied, but the basic idea is that if Greece were to default on a major level, they would have to leave the Euro. Like, ASAP. At that point the banks would get to pick them apart, based on those default clauses, to recover what they could on those contracts, and do it in euro terms because the loans were euro denominated. For a point of reference, check how comprehensively Argentina screwed itself in an analogous situation; except that Argentina wasn't part of a currency union. Bear in mind, the contracts were absolutely not silent on the point of default. Greece would not just be able to walk away, consequence-free.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth resulted from a few factors:
* Greece would have an immediate budget crunch based on all the above, plus suddenly having a junk bond rating and no prospects of any loans to bridge the gap
* The bankers wouldn't be made whole, and would lose a lot of money
* The terms of the eurozone's creation meant no bailouts, so that was off the table
* The people who would lose the most would probably be the little people, especially in Greece, because ...
* With their holdings suddenly converted back to worthless drachmas (or whatever), with banks shutting down to prevent bank runs, with government transfers stopped in their tracks, they'd be pretty much robbed
* A major related risk would be the coherence of the whole monetary union
I don't know how much you read (or remember) about the resulting debates, but there were speculations (still not resolved!) about doing things like kicking the PIIGS countries out of the euro, splitting the union into a north eurozone and a south eurozone, and just dumping Greece as a warning to others.
So no, this isn't about table-flipping banksters doing the mo' money dance while greek orphans cried long, salty tears. This is about Greece having gone deliberately into the hole, and then wanting to change the rules at the last minute, to get bailed out of a catastrophe of their own making. If anyone was holding a gun to anyone's head, it was Greece saying: "Bail us out, suckers, or the little people get it." This is why Merkel had to find a way to create a bailout-that-wasn't-a-bailout, a fact which still rankles her voters and was one of the major reasons for the progressive weakening of her governing coalition.
Again, totally missing the point. They were pretty darned willing to let the banks take it in the shorts, except for the little people who would suffer as a consequence. Even if you ignore (hah!) the greek banks and all the misery that came down on the greeks, what with the shutdowns to forestall bank runs and so on, killing german banks to, in effect, punish the german people (and dutch, and finnish, and danish, and ... and ...) for the choices of the greek government makes even less sense.
As for your suggestion that the claim is that the bankers should never experience punishments, that was never in the cards. Let them suffer; the problem is that unless you do some bailing out, the little people get shafted as well. And guess what a deal behind the eurozone was? No bailouts. Hence, the greek government was holding a gun to the little people's heads, and the gun just happened to look like a banker. Now, the smart thing to do may very well have been to call the loans, refuse any rollovers, and tell Greece that they fucked it up and needed to re-apply for membership to the eurozone, once they got their fiscal house in order, but this had less to do with greek plutocrats than it did with those plutocrats buying the loyalty of voters with stupid transfers.
So what do we have now? The bankers' hands are tied, because they have to pass huge stress tests, on top of a lot of non-performing loans. The greeks can't get loans worth a damn anyway because nobody wants to lend them anything without a clause stating that in the case of default, they get to bend greece over the back of a chair, and the greek government stubbornly refuses to fix the worst parts of the greek economy for fear of annoying their own voters. That's the problem: Greece has successfully turned itself into the deadbeat, couch-surfing cousin who's permanently in debt and thinks he's too good to pick up a janitorial job. Trying to blame the credit card companies for extending him a line of credit is like blaming a municipal pool for letting a drunk idiot break in at night and need rescuing.
No demonic bankster malice needed, and no bankster kneebreakers asking for anything that wasn't in the default terms anyhow.