One of the best possible features of this transaction tax is that it could be as high as 100% (or even more!) for the casino equivalent high frequency trading. These type of trades only encourage short term speculators and undermine the long term investment that is the most helpful to the economy at large. The tax… Read more
I would swear that we had this very discussion about five or six years ago. By we, I mean you, Hamilton and me, Jerry; both strongly in favor of this essential tax. Not only would it raise a lot of revenue (with virtually no pain), but - and this is especially pertinent right now - it could minimize market volatility… Read more
Amazon treats their workers employees and independent contractors like slaves. What they tell the independent contractors on the FLEX program is to return any remaining packages back to the warehouse once the shift is over and that is said in their training video. However that being said that is NOT what Amazon Flex… Read more
The unmentioned (and probably largest) sector of Amazon workers who need unionizing are the final-leg delivery staff. The USPS workers are unionized (not sure about UPS and/or FedEx), but Amazon is creating their own fleet of drivers, specifically doing local runs from fulfillment centers. In Los Angeles, they’re… Read more
And what makes it even more encouraging with those 25,000 white-collar jobs is that those people have the sort of innate leverage that not many other categories of workers can claim. If you’re working a low-skill job, it may be a bit of a pain, but if you’re in a major metro area, they can replace you with scabs in… Read more
It is PARAMOUNT that the unions pierce Amazon, and you are 100% correct in saying that Amazon labor is and will be the vanguard of the economy. Forget Walmart. What Amazon will do in the next 20 years will make Walmart look like a mom and pop shop. This is the place and this is the time. If the unions substantially… Read more
Want the unvarnished truth? Being known as pro-Trump is a career killer for 95% of financial services employees. Read more
Every moderately intelligent Trump voter I’ve spoken with gives me the necessary evil line, i.e. as long as he keeps giving me what I want (conservative judges/tax breaks/regular run of the mill republican stuff), they could care less about everything else. Politics is a zero sum game for too many folks nowadays. Read more
Wall Street types support Republicans because of Republican economic policy. Republicans are always attempting to implement, not the most efficient stimulus policies, but stimulus policies. Since at least Reagan deficits have increased under every Republican President and decreased under every Democratic President. Read more
There is an adage used in the U.K. that a Labour (usually left wing except under Tony Blair) government will allow you to make money by big rounds of spending while a Conservative (right wing) will allow you to keep it, by cutting taxes and in theory spending less. Read more
I worked from 1984 to 2007 in the brokerage industry (EF Hutton, Shearson Lehman Bros, Paine Webber, and others). Stock brokers are salesmen and gamblers and con men (and women). The vast vast majority are not, and never have been, interested in the financial well being of their clients. Their primary motivation is… Read more
the reality of finance depend on the idea that the richly-paid people who make all the strategic buying and selling and investing decisions are very smart, and that they are uniquely positioned to deploy capital wisely because they have superior access to facts about the world, which they presumably use to analyze the… Read more
Every single day some sort of economic figure is released, and every single one of these figures are seasonally-adjusted or otherwise distorted to get rid of outliers and non-trend bumps or dips. Tomorrow we have Non Farm Payrolls and Unemployment, you will see this number pimped somewhere as it is every month. It… Read more
I live in a town surrounded by “Wall Street” people (plenty of banks, law firms, PE firms etc in midtown). Read more
Supporting Trump means backing a man who does not in any way subscribe to the existence of objective, verifiable reality. How does that work in the world of finance, exactly? Read more
It’s been remarkably eye-opening to me (a total economic naif) to realize how purely emotional Wall Street is, despite their heavy emphasis on data! and facts! and other manly factors! — it was clear when the markets held back under Obama with the explanation that “business needs to be able to rely on the future and… Read more
My experience in the financial sector is that among capital markets folks (i.e. the “Wall Street” guys) or among more senior operational/accounting/finance people, is that if they are Trump supporters, they just sort of wince at the stupidity of most of what he says and hope that the tax cuts and regulatory scheme… Read more
While we’re contemplating a carbon tax on fossil fuels, we also need to have a plan to change over and wean ourselves from fossil fuels.
Read more
