Wall Street and the Silence of the Lambs

 

 

By Nicholas Stix

In the summer of 2008, I came up with a modest investment strategy. I didn’t tell The Boss about it, because she would have gotten very loud and aggressive about not doing it, but I started studying the Forbes 100 with my then eight-year-old, future chief of research. I’d check out each firm’s Forbes profile, including its dividend prices and rate of return on investment. But as I felt ready to pull the trigger, the meltdown happened, and Bush started bailing out Wall Street firms. As I was convinced that once the government intervened in the market, the whole shebang would be corrupted based on who had inside information, with everyone else left holding the bag, I flushed my investment plans. As it turns out, the rot has since gone much deeper than I feared.

The following article can be rough going for those of us unschooled in finance, but the summary is, Not only are governmental financial institutions like Social Security, Freddie Mac, and Sallie Mae Ponzi schemes but so, too, are a great many private financial institutions.
 

Stock Buybacks and the Wall Street Sharktank: “A Whole Lotta Stealin’ Goin’ On”
By Mike Whitney
• January 25, 2016
UNZ.com
• 30 Comments

Let’s say you lend your brother-in-law, Pauli, 5,000-bucks so he can get his fledgling construction business off-the-ground. Then, you find out a week later that ‘good-old Pauli’ has shot the wad playing the horses at Long-acres and buying cocktails for his loafer-friends at Matt’s Mad Dog tavern? Would you feel like you’d been ripped off?

Sure you would. But when some slick corporate fraudster pulls the same scam, no one even raises an eyebrow.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the way that corporate bosses are allowed to take the hard-earned money from Mom and Pop investors and divide it among their freeloading shareholder friends via stock buybacks….

[Read the whole thing at UNZ.com.]