The idea was to protect the owners of companies from lawsuits. Actually the rich saw it as a way to lower their taxes, fool the uneducated, and to be irresponsible for their cheating and lies. Wal-Mart, which started out selling all American made products, soon started selling products made in sweatshops in foreign counties and we the people did not care and we scooped up the bargains. Now, these Super Corporations, who answer only to the board members and owners, cut the employees pay, use part timers to avoid benefits and count their billions while families are starving. We the people allowed these corporations to get the upper
Federal Reserve Paper Michele Whitney ECO 212 July 19, 2010 Blake Bennett Federal Reserve Paper Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. once said, “This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on Earth. When the President [Wilson} signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized....the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill” (Lindbergh, 1913, p.1). The Federal Reserve (Fed) controls and manages the United States money supply. The Feds also try to direct monetary policy, and put actions into place to follow that policy. These policies effect the country’s economy production and employment.
The strength of the economy encouraged Americans to take out more loans and buy more stocks, making them susceptible to future changes in the economy. The freedom caused financial markets to crash globally which helped power the Great Depression. Another example of lack of government intervention was the robber barons, a term referring to the wealthy and powerful businessmen in the 18th century. They were also known as “pure capitalists”, because they believed in an economic system that involved minimal interference from the government. Those working for robber barons were beaten and threatened, and the working conditions were terrible.
The book Dumb Money, written by Daniel Gross describes the era of “Dumb Money” and even “Dumber Money” causing the credit bubble that occurred prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Gross explains that it wasn’t “skeezy money managers” that caused the recent financial tsunami, but rather Ph.D. economists, central bankers, CEO’s and investment bankers. Gross reveals that the four factors that precipitated the Dumb Money era were low decreasing interest rates, increasing asset prices (real estate in particular), plentiful borrowers, and a strong debt market. He explains that due to the “shadow banking system” American financial culture was too fixated on short-term gains rather than long-term gains and encouraged excessive borrowing, lending, and trading. Gross criticizes
According to this view, the root cause of the Great Depression was a global over-investment in heavy industry capacity compared to wages and earnings from independent businesses, such as farms. The solution was the government must pump money into consumers' pockets. That is, it must redistribute purchasing power, maintain the industrial base, but re-inflate prices and wages to force as much of the inflationary increase in purchasing power into consumer spending. The economy was overbuilt, and new factories were not needed. The common view among economic historians is that the Great Depression ended with the advent of World War II.
When corruption occurs it damages the reputation of the employees and the business. Society relied upon this firm to assist in making them money but the firm was more concerned with their bottom line. Many of the individuals doing business with these firms lost their life savings and destroyed some of the trust that investors have with the Wall Street firms. It makes people have second thoughts about investing in the stock market. Another effect this unethical behavior had on these organizations been they agreed to pay a penalty of over $1.43 billion dollars as compensation to the victims.
401(K) has become ineffective because of the corruption of big business, the misunderstanding of and as a result a mishandling of the 401(K) accounts, and its correlating dependency on the market’s success. Making profit is important to people. Most of all, improving the bottom line is the primary objective for major companies. “For Robert Shively, learned that his employer, Occidental Petroleum Corporation, or also-known-as Oxy Pete,” wanted to forgo the guaranteed-employer pension plans for the less demanding 401(K) system where it is based on contributions from employee’s pay rather than from the employer’s profit. This forces the employee to save without any effort but, due to this, workers began to neglect the social security and entirely dropped the use of the original pension plan.
Bartender Bailout The Missing Piece of the U.S. Economic Bailout Plan By: Derek Hubenak Bartender Bailout: The Missing Piece of the U.S. Economic Bailout Plan The United States congress decided to enact an economic plan to rebuild the U.S. economy and, in turn, has directly affected my income extensively. I have seen the effects of our economy slowing as consumers hold tight to hard earned money because of a fear the markets may crash any day. The Dow drops continuously and consumer spending drops just as fast. One can not thrive without the other. The US economic bailout plan is unethical and outright criminal.
By buying on margin, the investor had to pay a fraction of the quoted price of any particular security. The additional money needed to cover the purchase was supplied by the broker, who obtained these funds from a bank with which he had deposited his customer’s stock as a collateral” (Doc G). While people thought of this as a good idea at the time, buying on a margin really caused more damage than good once the stock market began to crash. So rather than earning money, they were losing more money than they put in, which inevitably caused problems because they could not successfully pay the bank all the money that they owed. However, as bad as that may seem, being in debt was
President Roosevelt was there every step of the way after the crash during Hoover’s presidency. The start of the crash began with “Bull Markets”, meaning, stocks were becoming overpriced and not based on the actual value of the company. A stock market crash was bound to happen but at that time people didn’t care. People were buying loans like crazy in order to buy stocks, over 10 billion dollars was loaned to these people. In a lecture by Professor Newman, it was made known of the concept “selling short”, meaning, big businessmen would try to make more money on a market they knew was going down, and with that came a lot of common people losing money.