they'll still get rich, and in fact they quite often get richer when they do pay everybody, and pay well, but it's the difference, the width of the gulf, between the haves and the have-nots that excites so many of them, not the absolute amounts they can gather for themselves.

That don't realize the host needs to be fed or it won't live, and they don't even seem to realize they are parasites on the working people. They don't produce anything.

They just push numbers and pieces of paper around, gambling day after day, then expect everyone to think they are worth more than those that actually have something to show for their work.

"not paying anybody" makes it sound like something was actually done, produced. i grok you're point, sort of, but the problem here is fake "wealth," not unpaid services for the production of something.

you just can't have $600T of "value" when the world only makes ~100T a year. what i want to know is what kind of cokehead's paradise was going on, and for how many people, that such a belief could be maintained. it's not that they didn't pay people, it's that they made up a number, and decided that we are going to pay them that much.

Needs Waldo gloves to discuss this, but Anglachel puts ’em on…

It's been a sad and disappointing, infuriating and disgusting political season. I watch people continue to do and say things that they found totally offensive when others said and did it. No one wants to listen to constructive criticism. Thoughtful analysis is ignored.

Dems are a totally undisciplined bunch. How are we to "unify" with repubs or each other? I say forget the former and work on the latter, but that will take strong leadership and not a "Do as I say, not as I do" example.

what the "stockholders" have been all about since Iacocca paid back the loans early.

Wall Street rewards layoffs with bigger bonuses for the execs who send people to the unemployment lines. Has done for years.

Time they had to pay the piper. Call your Representative.
Write and email and fax. Picket the local office if you have to. Don't let up.

We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0

are the people who lost their homes and the American taxpayer. The operators of this ponzi scam - Wall St. and their pet politicians - all made out like bandits. Even if Lehman went away, for years those who composed that company stashed the cash hand over fist. Their only regret is that the cash cow finally expired. And now Congress is coming along and restocking the pond. Show me the suffering of the upper 1%. Their only pain is coming from having to wait a few weeks for the teet to reload with milk. And that's more entertainment than anything else.

That $700T could have gone to paying off every one of those bad mortgages. That would put people back in their homes (those freeloaders! those welfare queens!) and eliminate the underlying mess. So where is it going? Well, nobody knows. All they know is it's going to the right people.

Howzzat???

For example, let's say ABC Corporation in New York makes a deal with XYZ Corporation in Singapore for $1B worth of widgets. The agreement is made, the deal is signed, and the financial people are notified. They inform ABC's bank, and with a couple clicks of a mouse $1B of credits are transferred to XYZ's bank in Singapore. Does this money really exist? Who knows? But everyone involved just assumes it does. That's the way most high-level finance works in the world today. Corporations just trade credit back and forth between banks, which can be drawn against for what cash might be needed. The biggest need for cash by far in most corporations is payroll, since those pesky workers won't accept their pay in electronic credits. That's why it pisses them off to pay you; if they didn't have to make payroll they might not need to deal in cash at all.

Let's use Bill Gates as another example. Bill Gates is said to be the world's richest man, worth $400B, more or less. But Bill Gates couldn't lay his hands on $400 billion in cash if his life depended on it. 85% of Gates' net worth is Microsoft stock. There's no way he could sell all of his stock for anything like what it's valued at, for if he tried, it wouldn't take long before word got around that Bill Gates was selling off large quantities of stock, rumors would start that something must be seriously wrong with Microsoft, and before long Microsoft stock would be near-worthless. What Bill Gates can do, though, is walk into any bank on the planet and open an unlimited line of credit to deal with whatever cash needs he might have.

The dirty little secret that's starting to get out, and has everybody scared, is that through issuing credit as they have, banks have literally been printing their own money for the last couple of decades, at least. The game worked because everybody agreed to honor everybody else's credit. That's why our government kept saying deficits didn't matter; they were confident nobody was going to ask for the money to be paid back, anyway. Now everybody's freaked out because a few small-fry mortgage companies couldn't handle their cash obligations, knew the holdings they had were worthless, and started ratting the game out as they were going down. Everybody's now scared that the rubes are about to find out that the entire world economy has been run on Monopoly money for the last few decades (at least since the end of Bretton Woods), and that the whole house of cards is about to come crashing down.

...for the rest of us