Wall St

I was absolutely intrigued by Sophie Mirabella’s attack on the growing “Occupy Wall Street” movement yesterday. In case you missed it, she basically dismissed these peaceful protesters as nothing more than a bunch of angry, anti-capitalist losers, looking to place the cost of their own failings into the hands of others:

“…There’s a strange dichotomy about this movement. These “occupiers” want other people to earn less, while presumably they are supported by the Government or benevolent families so they can spend their days creating sanitation problems in the street rather than earning a living themselves.

“They want other people to pay for their “free” college education. They want to hold others to account for the way they believe the world has failed them. There is an underlying sense of entitlement that just jars with the “other people are greedy bastards” protest.

Continue reading "Mirabella and the hypocrisy of the shoutier-than-thou" »

This Saturday the self-described “organic” Occupy Wall Street movement will be coming to a capital city near you.

They boldly claim “we are the 99 per cent” - it’s their official catchcry - so unless you consider yourself among the uber rich and powerful, these folks are your new voice.  So they’ll be speaking for you when they wave their glib and nebulous placards declaring “people not profits” and “be the solution”.  (I am not making these up – this is the print-ready poster artwork available on their website.)

Their initial beef was apparently with the financial sector – hence the occupation of Wall Street in protest.  But their list of demands goes beyond the remit of the corporate fat cats and includes free education and a type of Utopian redistribution of wealth.

Continue reading "Protesters occupied with glib, childish, pointless fantasy" »

LEWIE Ranieri was one of the stars of Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s fantastic expose of excess on Wall Street and in London in the 1980s.

At his best, the Salomon Bros trader, who pioneered the kind of mortgage-backed bonds that brought the financial system to its knees last year, was taking home somewhere between $US2m and $US5m a year. He famously owned more powerboats (five) than suits (four). He was, in the vernacular of the times, a big swinging dick. A master of the universe. A Gordon Gekko before Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas brought the fabulous rogue to life.

You didn’t get much more colourful or successful than Ranieri (who, incidentally, is still mooching around Wall Street as a fund manager). But, for anyone with more than a passing interest in matters financial, his salary, so celebrated at the time, now looks absurdly small. Telstra’s David Thodey, who’s running a regulated utility at the bottom of the planet and drives a Toyota Corolla, will earn more most years.

Continue reading "How did we end up with all these zeroes?" »