Suppose that a company earns $1 million dollars of profit in a year. About $400,000 must be paid in income tax. A corporate raider will buy the company’s stockholders (equity owners), for $10 million in junk bonds. The entire $1 million dollars of profit will now be paid to the banker or the bondholder in the form of interest. The company won’t report a profit, so there is no tax payment. The financial manager will hope to increase the company’s price (to re-sell it on the stock exchange) by cutting costs or selling off its pieces to make a capital gain. This is how Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital made money. It is “balance sheet” engineering, not aimed at raising production or living standards. Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/michael-hudson-on-how-finance-capital-leads-to-debt-servitude.html#KJSbTH6uiL7EHqKz.99
I worked for an asset-stripper in the 80s. The rationalisation back then was that what we did was good for the economy because our activities sharpened-up competitive practices and cleaned-up weak companies with dud management. We knew this argument was a dud back then. The essential way we worked was to use private detectives and to bribe insiders to learn about likely targets. We did spend time looking a company accounts and what Moody's records might have to say. Key issues were to identify large cash drains to LOMBARDS (loads- a-money but are right dicks), undervalued properties and 'dirt on senior management leverage'. I'd vote for Don or rigsy for President or PM well ahead of clowns like Romney, Obama, Cameron and Blair (seriously - me and Al are mad enough to be fit only for foreign policy jobs). The article the quote above comes from says most of what is wrong - but I can remember the time when Labour politicians in Britain sounded the same - talk was of the 'Gnomes of Zurich', selective employment tax (to encourage manufacturing) and investing North Sea Oil. I take the criminality of financial services as read these days. The metaphor in my head comes from the westerns in which the bad guys sold whiskey and guns to the Injuns. The financial sector villains have armed China and probably armed Hitler's Germany (see 'Conjuring Hitler'). Germany is probably the most efficient manufacturing nation these days, but the ultimate contradiction on all th urging towards efficiency leads to super-manufacturing countries like Germany and China (Britain and the US once) that have to sell products to inefficient countries like Britain, the US, Greece, Spain and so on. As a model this is an obvious non-starter. You can get some idea where manufacturing now is by looking at steel production here - http://www.worldsteel.org/statistics/statistics-archive/2011-steel-production.html It's pretty obvious we have the rules of competition and money wrong and that political discussion about this is either ignorant or just plain lying. Backs have been broken for all kinds of pathological leadership whim throughout history. Easter Island statues, Stonehenge, Pyramids and all variety of ape wars we call history. Economics lacks questions like 'how much work should rigsy have to do to be able to live in peace and make blueberry pie'? I suspect the answer in the broader case of what percentage of our effort goes to providing water, food, shelter, proper protection from a hostile environment (earthquakes, historical global warming etc.), the advancement of science and technology and freedom from bandits, religious and otherwise is less than a quarter of what we generally think it is. The issue is about producing a leisure society for all that works and can make work happen given slacking potential and free-riding. I am totally demotivated at the thought of both earning more per hour than the next ten people around me in the pub and of contributing anything to rich donkeys like Romney or some soccer star (which happens without doing anything as direct as watching a soccer match). I also prefer to holiday where the lager louts don't, where the attraction is a brilliant German bakery with a couple of tables for coffee and excellent cakes and a Bavarian lady who won't serve me more than two and shares a chateaubriand with me in the evening. Sorry Don, it's rigsy for President - I'm sure you follow the argument! --
