That's two jobs for every unemployed or underemployed American for one year. It's staggering, and someone please check my math. But Corporate America refuses to put that money into circulation. While we've been led to believe that tax cuts are THE incentive to invigorate the economy, nothing will do as much good as opening the flood gates and setting free this motherlode of cash.
So if tax cuts aren't working as an incentive, why isn't anyone proposing tax increases as a disincentive? Really if our congress wanted to get people back to work, they could simply levy a tax on the $2 trillion starting January 1. If it's not put into circulation toward employing Americans, it gets taxed at 75 percent. No write-offs, no exceptions.
But there is one place where money is flowing. It's the closed economy of Wall Street and their hedge fund geniuses. Of course, to be considered brilliant in this world, all you need to do is have access to the system and repeat the mantra "what we do here on Wall Street is way too complicated; you couldn't possibly understand."
Here's how it works. These investment banks are hired by the wealthy to manage their wealth and keep them all in charge. The banksters have access to all the trading systems and they've got billions of dollars to trade. So they buy a million dollars worth of Apple stock and when it rises an eighth of a percent, they sell it. They've made $1250 in a matter of a few seconds. Of course with a billion dollars on the table, they can have a thousand million dollar plays going at any one time. If they make $1250 on each million dollar bet, they can make $1.25 million with the house money they've been given. And this can happen hundreds of times an hour.
Even if this only happens once a day, a good trust fund manager is turning his client's billion dollars into $1,001,250,000 at the end of the day. He takes a $100,000 commission for the day's work and the next day he has $1,001,150,000 to bring to the table.
When you hear them talk about "derivatives" here's how that works. For every investment you can also buy an insurance policy against it. Every insurance investment is a bet, and when you buy a derivative you're betting an investment will fall in value. And when we talk about placing bets on bets, and bets on bets on bets, then we're talking about derivatives. It's Calculus 101.
The initial bet that a stock will fall will look like this:
y= -x^3
Its derivative (the bet on the bet) looks like this:
y= -3x^2
and its integral (the bet on the bet on the bet) looks like this:
y= -6x
Every one of these insurance policies is a tradable commodity, and the most recent global estimate of this market is beyond comprehension - $1.5 quadrillion. We get all bent when we hear the word "trillion," this is 1,500 trillion.
Of course, this is easy money, but only if you're on the inside. You're making $500,000 a week as a broker for gaming a system you freakin' own. And all this money stays there. It never makes its way to the people who work for the companies whose stocks are being traded, and more importantly, the customers who could be buying their products.
But it doesn't matter because the institutional investors run the market. Stock prices are no longer a function of a company's profitability or even its cash flow. They are a function of the market that the banksters control.
And here's a picture of a cop holding a handcuffed woman who was on Wall Street this week protesting what I just described.
