Keith wrote:
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9985673/Tobin-Tax-is-madness-for-Europe-and-economic-war-against-Britain.html
>From the article:
One French banker told Les Echos that the Tobin Tax was 'a weapon
of mass destruction that is going to ruin our financial sector'.
Once again confessing my ignorance of financial operations, it
nevertheless seems to me that these guys are saying, "Our whole casino
finance system depends on minute by minute arbitrage moving vast sums
from one notional asset to another. Of *course* it has nothing to do
with the real world, 'Main Street' or ordinary people but it's how we
get rich. It's *our* bubble, OURS, !!OURS!! and you can't be allowed
to interfere! Certainly not for some archaic and outmoded reason like
'the common good' or 'national interest'."
It has amused me to note that the Globe & Mail's financial section
uses unabashed casino terms -- bets, in play -- in its front pages
that carry news for Bay Street suits but switches over to homely,
thoughtful terminology in the middle pages where "middle class" folks,
those in the lower reaches of Keith's 20% with money to invest, may be
looking for reasonable arguments for or against this weeks fashion for
or against mutual funds, gold, bonds, foreign securities, pension
funds etc. etc.
Assuming, once again, the mantle of "fiction guy", here's a quote from
Bruce Sterling's "The Littlest Jackal" (1996). The speaker is a
lower-echelon functionary of the Russian mafia:
"We're past the Marxist thing," said Kohklov, warming to his
theme.... "Now it's different. This time, Russia has a kind of
craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the
whole world. Massive, total, institutional corruption. Top to
bottom. Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that
will sell *anything*: the flesh of our women, the future of our
children. Everything inside our museums and our churches.
Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We'll sell
the forests and the Russian sky. We'll sell our souls."
Are we "past the Capitalist thing" in the USA? Does Canada's PM
Harper have a burning desire for Canada to get "past the Capitalist
thing" so's not to fall behind his southern neighbors in "absolute
corruption"?
Thirty-five years ago, a friend loaned me a few thousand bucks to buy
and refurbish a new studio. She could have asked (but didn't) to have
me set up as a corporation and held equity. (The latter would have
been a bad choice because one of the two large commissions that
justified buying the studio fell through due to the client's health.)
I repaid the loan on schedule. But either way, that's what I think of
as "capitalism".
The daily swapping around of notional money in quantities an order of
magnitude or more greater than the global GNP [1] isn't capitalism.
The effect of such swapping is, as far as I can see, (see "ignorance",
supra) intrinsically bubble-producing. That's what it's all about.
So unless the governments that putatively represent "real people" are,
as in the Sterling frame, entrained in "a new kind of absolute
corruption", it's high time that a little anti-foaming agent should be
applied in the form of a tax on financial transactions.
- Mike
[1] I can't find the figures off hand. But isn't that about right for
the size of money-trading market?
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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