Does Capitalism thrive on Main Street or Wall Street?

[Kirkland Laing]

Printing money from nothing and then printing more money based upon the debt that you issue and giving all of the benefits to your rich banker cronies who extract and extract and extract is not exactly capitalism. I call that bullshit.

Capitalism is where you buy and sell things that people need. Wall Street has nothing to do with capitalism and going on the bail outs they have had over the past century they would likely agree. It's cronyism.

Printing money from nothing and lending it out to make a profit -- banking -- is fine. Banking is a necessary thing. Bankers are credit intermediaries. They match borrowers and savers and mean all the capital created by an economy is put to its most productive use.

And there's a case for a well regulated stock exchange where people can invest in shares and even a derivatives market where firms and individuals can hedge risk and plan future costs effectively, insure against losses and so on.

Those things are all good. It's just when we use all the money we make to capture regulators and legislators and that's when things start to go wrong. A well-regulated noncorrupt financial system, great, a big plus for society. What we have now, not so good.

[Gandalf]

Printing money from nothing and then printing more money based upon the debt that you issue and giving all of the benefits to your rich banker cronies who extract and extract and extract is not exactly capitalism. I call that bullshit.

Capitalism is where you buy and sell things that people need. Wall Street has nothing to do with capitalism and going on the bail outs they have had over the past century they would likely agree. It's cronyism.

Printing money from nothing and lending it out to make a profit -- banking -- is fine. Banking is a necessary thing. Bankers are credit intermediaries. They match borrowers and savers and mean all the capital created by an economy is put to its most productive use.

And there's a case for a well regulated stock exchange where people can invest in shares and even a derivatives market where firms and individuals can hedge risk and plan future costs effectively, insure against losses and so on.

Those things are all good. It's just when we use all the money we make to capture regulators and legislators and that's when things start to go wrong. A well-regulated noncorrupt financial system, great, a big plus for society. What we have now, not so good.

Boom and bust cycles are the consequence of fractional reserve banking. Money created from nothing means the dollar has devalued 98% in a hundred years. The non stop printing creates the distortions seen in the cost of property.It is a ponzi scheme.

There is nothing wrong with lending as long as it correlates with deposits, but this does not happen. Money backed by nothing is the root of all that has gone wrong.

All financial trickery is immoral and ultimately harmful to all except the parasite.

[Kirkland Laing]

Printing money from nothing and then printing more money based upon the debt that you issue and giving all of the benefits to your rich banker cronies who extract and extract and extract is not exactly capitalism. I call that bullshit.

Capitalism is where you buy and sell things that people need. Wall Street has nothing to do with capitalism and going on the bail outs they have had over the past century they would likely agree. It's cronyism.

Printing money from nothing and lending it out to make a profit -- banking -- is fine. Banking is a necessary thing. Bankers are credit intermediaries. They match borrowers and savers and mean all the capital created by an economy is put to its most productive use.

And there's a case for a well regulated stock exchange where people can invest in shares and even a derivatives market where firms and individuals can hedge risk and plan future costs effectively, insure against losses and so on.

Those things are all good. It's just when we use all the money we make to capture regulators and legislators and that's when things start to go wrong. A well-regulated noncorrupt financial system, great, a big plus for society. What we have now, not so good.

Boom and bust cycles are the consequence of fractional reserve banking. Money created from nothing means the dollar has devalued 98% in a hundred years. The non stop printing creates the distortions seen in the cost of property.It is a ponzi scheme.

There is nothing wrong with lending as long as it correlates with deposits, but this does not happen. Money backed by nothing is the root of all that has gone wrong.

All financial trickery is immoral and ultimately harmful to all except the parasite.

Boom and bust cycles are a result of economic cycles. That's what economic cycles do. They did it forr centuries before fractional reserve banking came along. The dollar has devalued 98% over the last hundred years but purchasing power, which is how we measure long term wealth, has increased by several thousand percent over the last hundred years. You no longer have to send your kids out to work instead of sending them to school, can afford housing, indoor plumbing, cars, holidays, gadgets, big boys toys etc. Our system is not a Ponzi scheme. It's out of whack due to no regulation or oversight but if well regulated it's as good as you're ever going to get.