Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big money guys screwed up and got caught with their pants down by a middle class dad from Boston. He then told a message board what he discovered.
Hedge funds gambled that the stock price of a mall retailer would drop. They were so confident in that bet that they borrowed millions and exposed themselves to unlimited downside. The internet nerds figured this out and took advantage.
Yeah but all the people buying at the top the past few days? Regular investors. Now that the price is crashing, they’re losing money.
So it’s not so clear cut as David vs. Goliath with David winning.
I get the feeling the little guys mostly don’t care if they lose their money, as long as they’re sticking it to the hedge funds who were doing naked short selling. It’s very much an “eat the rich” moment, and the hedge fund guys should be glad they’re just losing their shirts, not their heads. One of their peers called them out for the unbridled greed that he was seeing, and how it was going to lead to civil unrest if it wasn’t corrected. He’s been shouting this from the rooftops since 2014, and now we’re seeing it come to fruition.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014
And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.