Billionaires update

There are so many who could be a president. Why not to choose one of them?

1 Jeff Bezos $111B +$6.10B -$4.04B United States Technology
2 Bill Gates $102B +$4.02B -$11.1B United States Technology
3 Warren Buffett $75.9B +$5.75B -$13.3B United States Diversified
4 Bernard Arnault $69.2B +$796M -$36.1B France Consumer
5 Mark Zuckerberg $65.3B +$5.81B -$13.1B United States Technology
6 Larry Page $58.9B +$4.25B -$5.74B United States Technology
7 Steve Ballmer $58.2B +$6.56B +$102M United States Technology
8 Sergey Brin $57.1B +$4.11B -$5.56B United States Technology
9 Larry Ellison $54.1B +$7.04B -$4.67B United States Technology
10 Amancio Ortega $52.2B +$123M -$23.3B Spain Retail
11 Rob Walton $51.1B +$3.55B -$3.11B United States Retail
12 Jim Walton $51.0B +$3.59B -$3.12B United States Retail
13 Charles Koch $50.8B +$2.44B -$11.3B United States Industrial
14 Julia Flesher Koch $50.8B +$2.44B -$11.3B United States Industrial
15 Alice Walton $50.3B +$3.56B -$2.71B United States Retail
16 Francoise Bettencourt Meyers $48.4B +$101M -$10.6B France Consumer
17 Carlos Slim $47.8B +$1.42B -$12.4B Mexico Diversified
18 Jack Ma $43.9B +$1.18B -$2.75B China Technology
19 Mukesh Ambani $41.8B +$1.78B -$16.8B India Energy
20 Pony Ma $37.6B +$136M -$1.05B China Technology

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Eat the rich.

Roughly the GDP of Australia.

And then there are the bankers and industrialists / robber barons that don't have to declare their wealth; Rockefellas; Rothschilds; Astors; etc.

These Are The 13 Families In The World That Apparently Control Everything - From Politics To Terrorism

After all, nobody likes a nationalization and a free health care and education, we are not in Cuba. We better help the poor billionaires with their collapsing business, we will not let them down neither we did it in 2008 ...


Debt Forgivness and Nationalization Are the Answers to the Economic Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts

The US airline companies have bankrupted themselves by buying back their stock in an enrichment scheme for CEOs and board members (The Crony Capitalist Thieves Are Back - LewRockwell). With the impact of the virus on their revenues, Congress is handing them a $50 billion bailout. Instead of being bailed out they should be nationalized.

In the health and economic crisis in which we find ourselves, the government is going to need all the public trust it can get. Bailouts of those who caused their problems and ours won’t meet the fairness test.

As I previously wrote, nationalization is a four-letter word for many, but it actually offers a chance to correct for the decades of deregulation and concentration and thereby restore competition to the economy. Nationalized banks too-big-to-fail, for example, can later be broken up and the pieces sold back into private hands. Commercial banks can again be separated from investment banks, and concentrated financial power can be broken.

Now that we know that markets are not self-regulating, we can restore sensible financial regulation and require banks to lend for productive purposes, not for financializing and leveraging existing assets. The US financial system has not served the productive side of the US economy for a long time.

While ordinary heavily indebted Americans are losing their jobs right and left as businesses close, shopping center lobbyists are asking for a $1 trillion guarantee. The hotel industry wants $150 billion. The restaurant industry wants $145 billion. The National Association of Manufacturers wants $1.4 trillion.
Coronavirus: $1 trillion rescue package might not be enough for businesses

Food service distributors are in trouble. Boeing wants $60 billion funded in part by loan guarantees. Local and state governments need support. The US conference of mayors wants $250 billion. The list is endless.

And what is to be done for the 40% of Americans who, according to a Federal Reserve study, cannot raise $400 in cash without selling personal property? How are the large number of uninsured going to be cared for during this health crisis? Where will hospitals and medical practices get the money?

The only solution is to nationalize health care so that the bills can be paid. We cannot survive large numbers of infected and jobless people roaming the streets raiding for food and whatever they can take.

The only solution for the economy is debt forgiveness for the ordinary people and nationalization for the companies. Trump indicated that aid might be given in the form of an equity stake, and later sell the government’s stake for a profit in a privatization when things return to normal. This would be a partial nationalization. Much better to go whole hog as it allows a cure for concentration and deregulation.

The pandemic has made it clear that a society of self-seeking individuals is not a society. A society is a social system. A successful social system is one that can support its members. Once a self-sustaining social system exists, then there is a basis for people to branch out on their own. But without a sustainable social system, there can be nothing.

To create a sustainable society in the United States requires the abandonment of dogmatic ways of thinking. Old ideologies are in the way. We and our leaders must think creatively if we are to successfully deal with the health and economic crisis.

Debt Forgivness and Nationalization Are the Answers to the Economic Crisis - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Billionaire wealth reaches new high during COVID-19 pandemic - UBS
by Reuters
Wednesday, 7 October 2020 01:00 GMT

ZURICH, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Billionaire wealth reached record high levels amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a report by UBS and PwC found, as a rally in stock prices and gains in technology and healthcare helped the wealth of the world's richest break the $10 trillion mark.

The report, covering over 2,000 billionaires representing some 98% of the cohort's total wealth, found billionaire wealth grew by more than a quarter during the early months of the pandemic to reach $10.2 trillion in July, breaking the previous record of $8.9 trillion at the end of 2019.

The figure represents a five- to ten-fold rise over the past 25 years, the span covered by the UBS and PwC database, when billionaire wealth stood at just over $1 trillion.

Between April 7 and July 31 this year, billionaires across every industry covered by the study saw their wealth rise by double digits, with billionaires in the technology, healthcare and industrial sectors leading the pack with 36%-44% gains.

The pandemic accelerated a trend of technology and healthcare entrepreneurs, and other business innovators, pulling ahead of their ultra-rich peers.

From 2018 through July 2020, tech billionaires saw their wealth rise 42.5% to $1.8 trillion, the report found, while billionaires deriving their fortune from healthcare similarly saw their wealth rise 50.3% during the period to $658.6 billion.

Just over 200 of those billionaires publicly committed some $7.2 billion to help tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, the study found, noting that billionaire donations to combat the medical crisis as well as the societal and economic turmoil it caused were likely actually higher.

Billionaire wealth reaches new high during COVID-19 pandemic...

I am by no means left wing. But capitalism is so crony now thanks to the policies that this scum supports - like govt controlled interest rates - that id like to see them all herded into a barn and set on fire. I would take a seat ,light a cigarette and watch.

That wouldn't change anything, their wealth passes on to others.

Amazon workers outside Jeff Bezos' home call for a Prime Day boycott

UPDATED ON: OCTOBER 5, 2020

Less than two weeks before the start of Amazon's annual Prime Day sales promotion is set to start, protestors rallied outside CEO Jeff Bezos' Beverly Hills home to call for higher pay for Amazon warehouse workers and higher taxes on wealthy Americans.

Nearly a hundred protesters marched on Sunday, according to organizers of the rally. Former and current Amazon workers were joined by groups including United Teachers Los Angeles, Sunrise LA and Extinction Rebellion, which lobbies for action to combat climate change.

"The richest man in the world made $88 billion in the course of the pandemic. It's time to fight back," Chris Smalls, one of the protest's leaders, told CBS MoneyWatch.

Smalls worked at an Amazon warehouse in New York City until March, when he organized a walkout and was fired shortly thereafter.

Protesters issued a series of demands, including that the e-commerce giant boost worker pay by $2 per hour, provide more personal protective equipment and overhaul how the company does business. They are also urging consumers to boycott Amazon's Prime Day event, which is set to take place October 13-14 this year.

It was the latest in a series of protests near Bezos' many residences. Protesters in August gathered outside the Amazon chief's Manhattan mansion and later that month protested at his Washington, D.C. residence.

"COVID has exposed a lot about this country," Smalls said. "This country's in shambles right now. Everybody's losing their jobs, small businesses are being closed because of Amazon, people's lives are being destroyed."

Bezos' personal fortune has increased $70 billion this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, as masses of American consumers moved to online shopping while sheltering at home. The company is set to double its warehouse footprint this year, as well as expand its workforce by nearly 300,000 across its warehouse and corporate divisions.

Despite Amazon's growth during the pandemic, employees have accused it of ignoring their safety concerns, lacking transparency about the extent of coronavirus infections at its facilities and barring workers with health problems from working at home. The company briefly raised workers' hourly pay and expanded its time-off policy at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., but rolled back both policies this summer.

Last week, Amazon revealed that nearly 20,000 of its workers had contracted COVID-19. That's lower than the positivity rate in the U.S. at large, the company said.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said: "Nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our employees, and we are doing everything we can to keep them as safe as possible."

She added: "The fact is that Amazon already offers what unions are requesting for employees — industry-leading pay, a variety of benefits packages and opportunities for career growth, all while working in a safe, modern work environment."

Amazon workers outside Jeff Bezos' home call for a Prime Day boycott - CBS News

Pandemic profiteering.

Shouldn't surprise.

Attachment 58624

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HuangLao

Pandemic profiteering.

Shouldn't surprise.

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That's not where this is coming from. It's all the result of the money being printed by the central banks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Klondyke

Attachment 58624

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I'm not defending the piece of shit, but his paper wealth isn't what it's cracked up to be. His wealth is an inch deep and a mile wide. It's the result of leveraged money printing. He couldn't cash out this "wealth". It's a pyramid of the ponzi process.

If/when the ponzi process exhausts itself , and everyone sells out of Amazon stock , his "wealth" will evaporate.

Jaysus, Backspin, you truly are a financial fuckwit. Virtually every comment you make on people, commodities, and the markets is so wide of the mark it’s embarrassing to read.

Get yourself a monopoly set, and a mate -once you have gone around the board a few times you will have increased your knowledge exponentially.
(Ask the wife if you can stay up late as sometimes this game goes on for a few hours)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Backspin

It's the result of leveraged money printing.

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Although it could be true for some neat portion the vast part of the sudden income increase is due to the COVID restrictions when people do not go out to see that their stone shop has been closed anyway, so they increasingly buy by Amazon (and also by other online shops).

That's also why the COVID has helped to China (and other Asian countries, Thailand as well) where most of the Amazon supplies come from.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Iceman123

Jaysus, Backspin, you truly are a financial fuckwit. Virtually every comment you make on people, commodities, and the markets is so wide of the mark it’s embarrassing to read.

Get yourself a monopoly set, and a mate -once you have gone around the board a few times you will have increased your knowledge exponentially.
(Ask the wife if you can stay up late as sometimes this game goes on for a few hours)

---

Funny you say that. I have a financial Twitter account with 2000+ followers. I have hedge fund managers are former Fed officials (Peter Bookvar) following me.

It must be because I don't know anything about finance or economics

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Klondyke

Although it could be true for some neat portion the vast part of the sudden income increase is due to the COVID restrictions when people do not go out to see that their stone shop has been closed anyway, so they increasingly buy by Amazon (and also by other online shops).

That's also why the COVID has helped to China (and other Asian countries, Thailand as well) where most of the Amazon supplies come from.

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Not really. It's all monetary.

Amazon makes no profit
The Amazon Era: No Profits, No Problem

But it doesn't need to make a profit. Because it takes ponzi capital from its bubble stock price and uses that leveraged ponzi capital to expand the business. Then it grows it's revenue which causes more ppl to invest in the ponzi stock. So the stock goes even higher and it can expand even more , with no profit. It's upside down ponzi capitalism. The cart is before the horse. And it can only keep going this was as long as the Federal reserve is subsidizing the credit markets with an ever expanding balance sheet. If interest rates ever rise, Amazon will collapse. Like it did once already when the 1999-2000 bubble collapsed because the Fed raised interest rates

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Iceman123

Jaysus, Backspin, you truly are a financial fuckwit. Virtually every comment you make on people, commodities, and the markets is so wide of the mark it’s embarrassing to read.

Get yourself a monopoly set, and a mate -once you have gone around the board a few times you will have increased your knowledge exponentially.
(Ask the wife if you can stay up late as sometimes this game goes on for a few hours)

---

Hmmm Adam Tooze, author professor and director of the European Institute follows me. Must be because I know nothing about economics and finance..:chitown:

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported...vdgi9nxfeknh7i

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Iceman123

Jaysus, Backspin, you truly are a financial fuckwit. Virtually every comment you make on people, commodities, and the markets is so wide of the mark it’s embarrassing to read.

Get yourself a monopoly set, and a mate -once you have gone around the board a few times you will have increased your knowledge exponentially.
(Ask the wife if you can stay up late as sometimes this game goes on for a few hours)

---

Peter Bookvar, former New York Fed official, follows me on Twitter. Must be because I know nothing about finance and economics :chitown:
https://teakdoor.com/images/imported...tzxvarioepb9t8

Come on Backspin, get real - These people only tick the box to follow you because you ticked to follow them. Are you really trying to imply that your words of wisdom caused these people to follow you initially?

Don't get confused with followers and intelligence on the interwebby, my son has over 120K followers and is just as big a half wit as you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Klondyke

Debt Forgivness and Nationalization Are the Answers to the Economic Crisis

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You may wish to read some of this Professors articles. 7/10 year cycles and all that.;

Michael Hudson

One of his most recent:

Debt Deflation and the Neofeudal Empire

By Michael Sunday, October 4, 2020

Attachment 58692

"The money that you pay for debt service to a bank isn’t spent back into the economy. The bank bond holders are basically the 1% of the economy. They’re rich enough that they’re not going to take all this extra money they get to buy more goods and services. They’ll buy shitty trophy art, Andy Warhol junk. Who is the dumbest economic Nobel Prize winner? [Paul Krugman?] Paul Krugman. That’s right. He was given a Nobel Prize for not understanding what money was. If he would have understood it, that would’ve excluded him from getting the Nobel Prize.

Geoff Ginter (01:26):

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro and Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine. Steve Grumbine (01:34):

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today, we are bringing on none other than Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson is the president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street financial analyst and distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, UMKC, and author of “J is for Junk Economics,” “Killing the Host,” “The Bubble and Beyond,” “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire,” “Trade, Development and Foreign Debt,” and of “The Myth of Aid,” amongst many others. And without further ado, let me just say thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today, Michael.

Michael Hudson (02:18):

It’s good to be here. And I look forward to it.

Grumbine (02:21):

We’re in some very troubling times and one of the things that has jumped out at us, you’ve been a longterm proponent of having a debt jubilee, and as we’re watching the crushing economic conditions that are being brought around based on the pandemic and lots and lots and lots of malfeasance that has gone on forever, it seems like a debt jubilee might be the most important thing for regular people that we could even think of at this point. Can you tell us a little bit about what a debt jubilee is and your research behind that?

Hudson (03:00):

Well, what my research basically is about is that the debt has grown so rapidly for the private sector, that if you don’t write down the debt, if you insist that all the mortgage debt and credit card debt and student loan debt be paid, then you’re going to have almost a constant depression. It’s called debt deflation. And I described that in “The Bubble and Beyond” and “J is for Junk Economics.”

The problem is that as people owe more and more debt service, they have less and less to spend on goods and services and so they’re not able to buy what they produce, and so employment shrinks and the economy shrinks. And part of the problem is not simply the growth of debt, but what the debt is for, and in the textbooks debt is supposed to be for productive purposes. The myth is that it’s for building factories and means of production and increases everybody’s prosperity, but that’s not what debt’s about. That’s what maybe stock issues are about, but it’s not what debt is about.

80% of debt is issued in the form of mortgages and they’re lent to real estate and the effect of real estate debt – making credit, loosening the credit terms more and more, lending more and more against properties, higher proportions, lower down payment, lower amortization rates – is that property prices are inflated. Housing prices are inflated. Commercial real estate prices are inflated.

So debt is being created for all the wrong things. It’s been decoupled from the economy at large, and it’s being taken on for things that really used to be considered public services like education. Used to be that all economies provided schooling free as a public service because they realized that education is how you increase productivity. But now, more and more, education is just to get a job sort of like a union card.
By getting a degree is a kind of criteria, has to be gotten. And even worse, getting an education is sort of like buying a house, just like a house is worth whatever a bank is going to lend against it. And as banks lend more and more money to people to buy houses, they’re lending more and more money to finance education as education has been privatized. So what you have is that in order to get a job, you have to get an educational degree. It’s a criterion.

And that means you have to go into very heavy debt and you have to go so deeply into debt that you don’t have any income left to pledge to the bank, to get a mortgage loan, to buy a home of your own. And the whole problem just crowds out all other forms of spending. The same thing occurs with medical debt because public health is not a social service here.

There is no public health because it’s been privatized and it’s been privatized on terms where if you get sick, there’s a high probability if you’re not wealthy that you’re going to have to declare bankruptcy. Especially when I think half of Americans reported to the Federal Reserve that they can’t raise $400 in an emergency. Well, $400 won’t even cover the cost of getting a COVID test here in New York these days.

So you can imagine the problems that people have, especially when they lose the job. So people lose the job, if they’ve borrowed to buy a house, they’re falling into arrears. Already mortgage arrears have been rising in the last six months. If you’re a renter and you can’t pay the rent, you’re in danger of being evicted. And the problem of homelessness is looming for sometime in December or January.

So what I’ve discussed about a jubilee is that if you don’t write down the personal debts, I’m not talking about mortgage debts or business debts. The jubilee left all of the commercial business debts in place. They were only the personal debts. And the logic for that was if you don’t write down the personal debts, way back in antiquity and Judaic times, and even before in Mesopotamia, if you didn’t write down the debts of cultivators who couldn’t pay because of a flood or disease or whatever problems were caused during the planting season, then they’d fall into bondage to their creditors.

And if they fell into bondage, they couldn’t pay their taxes anymore. They’d owe their labor to the creditors, and they couldn’t work on corvee
work to build basic public infrastructure, and they couldn’t serve in the army. So almost all the rulers of antiquity realized that if they didn’t write down the debt, number one, they’d create an oligarchy that would use its power to overthrow them, as occurred in Rome, or they’d find the population falling into bondage and next time they were attacked by another city, the population would go over to the side of the attackers who would promise to cancel the debts.

So that was the original jubilee. The jubilee today is basically writing down debts that can’t be paid without imposing bankruptcy and poverty on the population. Most of the attention has been paid to third world debt. And there’s a basic principle I think that should be written into international law: if a country cannot pay its foreign exchange debt without causing unemployment, without changing its society, without selling off its infrastructure, forfeiting it to creditors to pay the debt, then the debt’s considered a bad loan.

So a jubilee basically is based on writing off the bad loans and making the lender responsible for lending money that cannot be paid. Such loans are basically fraudulent. In the case of third world debt, I can guarantee you, having worked for years at Chase Manhattan Bank as their balance of payments analyst, I saw that countries could not afford to pay the debt except by either borrowing the money to pay, which they did either from the banks or from the government, or privatizing and selling off their national infrastructure. And that is basically a violation of national sovereignty."

Continues:

Debt Deflation and the Neofeudal Empire | Michael Hudson

Attachment 65294