It’s already happening, your living it now. Do you call what’s been happening right now smooth? It’s a bumpy ride down a rough hill, fasten your seat belts.

If the equation keeps going up we will have civil unrest, this happened at the end of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. This is how unions were born and the 40 hour work week with a day off.

We need to hear REAL people, not those so-called experts whose job is to colonize( pollute!)the air in order to help shape our opinion.Harvard’s,Yale’s,Princeton’s,ect…are just foot soldiers of the world wealthy 10%, they’re in charge of”manufacturing our consent”.
We’re screwed folks! They own the airwaves,the newspapers and the government.

Another thing that makes me sick and should be illegal is paying CEOs $20 million to leave a company. They are being fired. They shouldn’t be getting anything, but the rich take care of the rich.

Maybe next we can move on to how colleges pay gross amounts of money for coaches yet the academics make nothing close to that despite the fact that they are the ones preparing students for the working world.

America is circling the drain and China and India are moving up and ahead while we sit here watching TV and pretending none of this is going on.

I don’t know what is going to happen but I see another Great Depression over the horizon.

Today’s show was a huge disappointment, it would have been good to have had Senator Schumer on so he could explain how his secret meetings with the bankers and wall street CEO’s helped make these deals.

I would have also like to have heard from Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.

Listen to me. They have absolutely nothing to add to the discourse! Self-correcting markets? Laissez-Faire Capitalism? Lifting world populations out of poverty? We have poverty right here in America, and it’s growing, not shrinking. We have infants and children right here in the U.S. who go to bed hungry every night while the top 50 employees at American Business, Inc. cart away a collective $5-or-$10 billion annually. You did not mention this, nor perhaps another dozen reasons why a case could be made for presenting Uncle Sam to the International Tribunal in The Hague to account for humanitarian and androgyny charges.

Oh, no? You think not? Ask Professor Kaplan to explain to the American people and the rest of the world exactly how the U.S. Government went about COLLAPSING the economy of Haiti with America’s good old, home grown rice export policy. . .like selling the Haitians a new, super-duper rice hybrid variety guaranteed to produce high yields, but without telling them that the crops would require a tripling of the amount of fertilizer usage. Oh, and of course who is going to sell them the fertilizer? And when it turns out that they can’t afford the fertilizer but have no choice but to plant the new hybrid–mainly because their thousands-of-years-old domestic variety has all but died out–their yields are far lower, not higher, and barely sufficient to feed even half the population.

Ask the good professor to explain away the starvation that has occurred and is still occurring thanks to the stubbornness of farm-state representatives in Washington D.C. and their American farm subsidy policies. He’ll probably insist that this is just the “magic of the markets” exerting itself. Wow. Some magic.

“Don’t forget about foreign aid,” would be another response by the professor and those of his ilk. “Plus we do other good works as well.” No we don’t. Not without first doing the usual exhaustive cost-benefit analysis. Never mind the fact that we’re talking human starvation here.

This stuff is all “self-correcting,” I can hear the professor saying. Uh-h, huh–self correcting all right. There’s another way of saying the same thing, professor, and one that’s far more apropos. Repeat after me–”W h a t g o e s a r o u n d c o m e s a r o u n d.”

As a Chicagoan originally, now living in Southern California, I am truly chagrined that this man could be in any way connected to the venerated University of Chicago brand.

Certainly, NO NEW SECURITY PRODUCT should ever be legal at all until after it has been scrutinized by dispassionate, non-ideological regulators.

Explicitly criminal enterprises either extract wealth (extortion, “protection”) or thrive by selling a product (drugs) with short term “benefits” to its clients who, however, damage the community by engaging in overtly damaging accumulation – theft, mugging, extortion. Ponzi schemes are illegal, but can be hidden beneath a bed of legal activities. Some other sometimes not legal enterprises (Casinos) are devoted to wealth accumulation at the expense of their customers, and are sometimes legal because the customer is (theoretically) aware of the dangers. Some Wall street enterprises (mortgage securities) extract wealth, but were not illegal because we had not awoken to their damaging effects. “Network marketing” looks a lot like a Ponzi scheme, and has in the past been tightly regulated, even though they do in fact sell products. Pay-day lenders are being carefully scrutinized because of the uncertain balance of values. Banks, because they handle money, have in the past been tightly regulated, because the use of that money can add or subtract value from the community of which it is a part. Other service businesses, like lawyers and plumbers, require a license, to guarantee the quality of the work, but are free to charge what they want to, and spend their money anyway they want to. Other businesses sell or make products, and the public interest resides in the healthfulness of those products, and the effects of its production on the natural environment and the workers who produce them.

In all of these examples, the great schism is between activity which improves the quality of life and activity which damages the quality of life. The salient question when looking at any economic activity is first “Is this a method of creating new wealth? Or a method of concentrating other people’s wealth?” And second “Does this activity contribute to the general prosperity, or reduce it?” While related, they are not the same question.

The failure of the market and of the government was to foresee that the Wall Street securities brokers would strike out on both counts, in fact to even ask the questions. Any business devoted to concentrating wealth without providing an obvious public benefit deserves to be regulated *per se*, and any time a new product or enterprise is to be introduced, we have a right to ask how that product or enterprise fares on those questions.

2) Free market people talk about the market being “self-correcting”, but people behave individualistically. It may be that “the market” has a self-interest in stability and sustainability, but individuals will do what they can get away with to gather in what wealth they can. Free market theorists have failed to note the distinction between the behavior of “the market” (an aggregate behavior conducted in an economic commons) and that of individuals. How, without strict controls, can we expect individual self-interest to align with the interests of the commons?

We have homeless people in this country and children who literally are starving. Funny how that has never mattered as long as the more educated and affluent continued to make money, have solid investments and been allowed to do well.

If executive compensation and bonuses are so out of line, then why, oh why has no one complained during the go-go years?

What a greedy country we are!

Also, what does going to Harvard or Columbia have to do with really understanding markets and having a sense of responsibility?

No one will make prudent long term decisions when their feedback loop is a quarterly report. No auto executive will push for mileage efficiency when they are selling (at a huge margin) SUVs.

What decisions would CEOs make if their compensation was based on 5 or 10 year returns?