> ravi wrote: > ... where did the money go?... me: > ...A lot of the "money" (i.e. financial wealth) was simply "on > paper." It represented a situation where "the market" attached an > unsustainably high price to paper promises (stocks, bonds, etc.) and > various businesscritters (so-called "entrepreneurs") and finance guys > naively counted this high value as adding to their assets... > ...In sum, a lot of this wealth was merely on paper and disappeared as > the paper lost market value.
Shane Mage wrote: > Actually, all this "paper wealth" was recorded as profit over the last > six-seven years by the FIRE firms. The salaries and bonuses and options of > their executives and managerial employees, plus a lot of their dividends and > taxes, were based on those "paper profits," but they were paid in real > money, tens--maybe hundreds--of billions of it. The salaries, bonuses, and > dividends remain in the pockets of those swindlers, as do the proceeds of > those options that were cashed out. The taxes have now been more than > returned to the swindlers' firms. right. I didn't contradict what ravi said. But to the extent that these companies based real salaries on now-departed paper profits, they either got into debt or had to sell assets. And whoever ended up buying toxic assets found that they lost a lot of value of late. The paper profits (or, more accurately, capital gains) were so large that they could not be totally realized. -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
