And it’s not just the billionaire CEO bank manager. It’s his centimillionaire lieutenant bank managers. It’s the dozens of decamillionaire sub-lieutenant bank managers. All of them made generationally rich from stock-based compensation in a company where the government guarantees their success. None of them entrepreneurs. None of them risk-takers with their own skin in the game. All of them … lifer managers of a too-big-to-fail bank.
But, hey, the stock is up! They’ve done a good job! What’s the problem, Ben?
That’s exactly the problem. The problem is that we have redefined capitalism to mean “the stock is up”. We have redefined capitalism to NOT mean Smith’s invisible hand or Schumpeter’s creative destruction or productivity-enhancing and risk-taking investments in the real economy. We have redefined capitalism to ONLY mean financial asset price inflation in the here and now. By any means necessary. So that’s what we get. From the Fed, from the White House, from corporate management … that’s what we get in the Long Now … an endless series of policies and decisions in service to capitalism-as-financialization, where capital markets are maintained as a political utility."
Link here.
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