Complex Systems
I wouldn't consider China, which tries to maximize employment and output a particularly good model of economic activity.
China's horribleness largely comes from their concurrent effort to minimize wages, workplace safety and health, environmental protections, personal freedom, and the free flow of information.
One doesn't have to be China to increase one's output, however. As China's approach is not in fact the most efficient model - being unsustainable, as it is, in the long term. It mainly depends on a very large and completely expendable workforce. Also an outside market for your goods with a lot of money and very little social conscience.
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Secondly, it is not the role of an investment firm to care about people. Again, finance is weird. I'm sure on some level individuals do, and should, care, but anyone who places it as a primary prerogative is foolish.
Th'ultimate extension of this, however, is Fisk and Gould - since their higher responsibility is to maximize profit, actively and intentionally destroying wealth for other people remains on the table.
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Finally, the weight of the financial crisis doesn't rest solely on the banks. They ******** up, and they should have paid the price for that debacle, but there were any number of policy and demand side issues that make financial crises polycentric and hard to lay blame.
I certainly wouldn't make the argument that it was 100% banks. More like 80% banks. 8% speculators buying houses as an investment over any term shorter than a decade. 5% people who already owned homes and wanted to sell, adjusting their asking prices based on the "fair market price." 4% people who should never have purchased homes in their financial situation taking out mortgage loans. 3% other.
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Not only on banks, no. Finance ******** up, but if you look at countries that have open financial markets, versus ones that don't, those with open financial markets tend to grow faster, deal with less economic crises of all sorts, and generally have faster rising incomes.
Open financial markets as in investments from/going to elsewhere, yes? Doesn't make a difference to me, personally.
Now, when it comes to financial markets where you can sell insurance against a company's debts that anybody can buy, or financial markets where you can sell homogeneous slices of hundreds of heterogeneous properties which don't precisely convey ownership of anything in particular, it's probably time for somebody (like Mark C. Brickell, or Phil and Wendy Gramm) to be in prison.