The cynic in me wanted to post this with only the message, "Breaking: Americans discover class", but I'll say a bit more than that.
The gist of the video is that an American sociologist has been making waves in academia with a new book. It argues that the professional class themselves are a part of the 'elite' and that their perpetuation of the culture war has harmed those who it pays lip service to; namely the really economically and socially disadvantaged.
I'm hoping this is part of a broader awakening in the U.S. (especially alongside that case of the well-educated young kid who shot that CEO) that inequality is not a party-based issue, that their activism has been ineffectual and counterproductive, and that class-consciousness and solidarity are the way forward.
>>100724 I like to believe in British Sensibility, namely that any influence from the American states will pass through the nuanced scrutiny of our best people.
Was waiting for a thread about that CEO thing and US class conciousness, though I have nothing to add to it. Goes to show that for all the race baiting and divisive initiatives seen in past years, public conciousness isn't so easily defused. Talking out of my arse, I would assume a doubling down or even evolution of tactics from here onward.
It's certainly promising to see regular people noticing and quite validly questioning how one type of person's murder awakens the full power of the surveillance state, where a different class of person would simply be chalked up as an unfortunate statistic. I'm not saying it's a good thing to cheer violence but it has certainly been heartening to see a general response of "had it coming".
I doubt it will be much of a tipping point on its own, if it isn't just completely washed away in another few months of perma-disaster news coverage. But it did highlight that as much as the establishment tries to inhibit any discourse around wealth inequality and class privilege with diversionary racial and sexual etc divisions, it's only ever really serving to drown it out in white noise. It's still there underneath.
>>100722 A lot of Americans want to start a class war against the elites to protect the lower and MIDDLE classes. Aside from the problem that the middle class consists of wealthy people who cavort with the elites, and there iS OVERLAP, along the lines of Savile sucking up to Trump (to give you an idea of the tax bracket I'm referring to) - you have the fact they want a class WAR. They're not going to win over the middle classes with that, because they're treating them as allies to the working class but talking about violence that will see them targeted. Because they failed to notice the overlap caused by debateable thresholds between working, middle and upper class. The middle classes get on my tits, but they're not all bad people. A lot of them often come up from the working class and you have to talk these lower-middle types round.
But then their war consists of telling you a billionaire's niece deserved to die in some boating accident, while doing precisely nothing else. They talk about shooting Trump but tell you that taking little pot shots at him is 'legitimizing' him. They act like they're educators but fly off the handle the second a rightwinger says something ignorant.
Having talked to ignorants and bigots a lot it's understandable, but that would make me a crap educator. They're right to say they can't be friendly with working class people who voted for a literal fascist that's going to target them. But they need to have patience with them, and understand that a lot of them have been lied to, so they can educate them. That's the only way to build a smarter electorate for the long term good of the country.
And? I didn't even mention him in the post. I was referring to the victim. The fact that a multi-millionaire CEO getting murdered is a huge investigation involving the top levels of state security, but your average pleb getting killed is just another case file at the top of some overworked local officer's pile.
>>100755>>100764 It really makes you think why the mods are trying to discredit one of the only politicians willing to call out and tackle rape gangs and with such a dirty association too.
My point was more about having any kind of roof over your head at all. Paying monthly rent to a profiteering landlord is still better than being homeless.
The problem is that rents even for modest flats are so high in the U.S. now that many low-level full-time jobs pay less than the amount of that rent. And public housing is a complete joke there, compared to our council flats. Most urban communities there don't want to bother with public housing at all because of the lowlife that it attracts. And even trailer park lot fees have skyrocketed in recent years, turning trailer parks from an affordable option for the lower classes into a money pit. Because, capitalism, you know. You've got private equity firms buying up the land and then jacking up fees.
There just isn't a baseline safety net of affordable public housing in the U.S. ensuring that people don't have to be homeless, like in the UK.
>>100767 Many politicians are willing to call out rape gangs. This might surprise you, but most voters don't like rape gangs. Jess Phillips worked for Women's Aid before she became an MP, the smug woke leftist slag. What a ghastly cow.
You might notice that I said politicians are willing to call out rape gangs, whereas you wrote "call out and tackle rape gangs." Tell me, what has Nidge Fridge done to actually tackle rape gangs? Incendiary posts on his bumboy Elon's spam site don't count.
Furthermore, these are, famously, Muslamic rape gangs. He's not having a go at them for being rapists, but rather for being Muslims. He's hardly the most outspoken opponent of Donald Trump, who has been accused of multiple counts of rape, sexual assault, and lesser but more generalised degeneracy. If Bagel Garage hates rapists more than he hates Muslims, you'd think he would stick up for non-rapist Muslims more than he does for Trump. But he doesn't. I therefore think it's acceptable to mock him in any way we want, because he is a duplicitous grifter who exploits rape victims to sell racism to imbeciles.
The other thing about it with Americans is that for many, a car really is a more important and valuable lifeline than a home. We might see this more often over here if it wasn't for the fact we generally have okay public transport and people can get jobs in walking/cycling distance; if people are going into the red and a car is an expense they can no longer afford to keep up, they'll sell the car sooner than let the insurance bill put them behind on rent. But lots of places in America, people are forced to flip that priority- If you give up the car you won't be able to get to work and you'll end up homeless anyway.
>If you give up the car you won't be able to get to work and you'll end up homeless anyway.
That's true for some more rural areas and states that are very spread out, but most major cities do have rudimentary public transport. You'll probably have to get up at 5am for a job that starts at 9am, but it can be done in many places.
The root cause is that the social safety net is a joke in the U.S.. In the past, this was mainly a problem during times of economic stagnation and high unemployment, but nowadays, with relatively stable economic growth and an unemployment rate that is along the lower band of historic unemployment of the last 30 years, even middle class families are living paycheck to paycheck with few savings, because everything is so exorbitantly expensive. A lot of Americans earn two to three times what you make in the UK for the same kind of work, on paper, as a nominal figure, but in real terms, divided by consumer prices, it's just about the same, if not less. I've read that in many of the more expensive major-city areas, you'll struggle with a $100K annual salary. Which is just about £80K, and therefore not normally an amount that gives anybody in Britain cold sweats in bed at night. But in the U.S., you'll barely be middle class.
In that kind of climate, it's far easier to become homeless than in previous years or pre-pandemic. And it's something that America's social safety net isn't equipped to handle. And much of the increase of the U.S. homeless population in recent years wasn't driven by lower class people who have always straddled the poverty line, but by formerly middle class people who had a decent house and a decent job to pay for it.
>A lot of Americans earn two to three times what you make in the UK for the same kind of work, on paper, as a nominal figure, but in real terms, divided by consumer prices, it's just about the same, if not less.
The median American has 47% more income than the average Briton after adjusting for purchasing power. Americans feel like they're struggling, rents in a handful of major cities really are bonkers, but Americans are objectively much richer than us by any measure.
>>100774 That settles it. The Americans are our class enemy and classlad is a counter-revolutionary wrecker. I recommend immediate liquidation, both of America and classlad.
>>100771 I'm well aware that Jess Phillips has talked a good game on rape but her party just walked away from its manifesto commitment to make rape more illegal, I guess because the former DPP was unfamiliar with the criminal lawyer labour market.
>That's true for some more rural areas and states that are very spread out
The thing is, that's actually the vast majority of the country. The big east coast cities are very much an exception rather than the norm, because they are the oldest and still exist on a sort of semi-European blueprint. The cities over on the west coast and southern states like LA, San Francisco, Austin, etc are places that you really can't do without a car. The public transport that exists there is so rudimentary as to be almost entirely vestigial.
It's not the entire of the problem but it's genuinely a big part of the issue. It's hard to understand from our perspective but the US is so spread out and the infrastructure so completely, utterly centred around the car that it is genuinely hard to exist without one in most of the country.
Give it a rest. The "vibecession" rhetoric is just pure myopic cope. The line might be going up but that doesn't mean ordinary people aren't struggling, and struggling badly because America is just everyone for themselves and if you slip through the cracks, good fucking luck. The ordinary American is loaded with debt and their livelihoods are so precarious that it's entirely possible to go from living a comfortable suburban life to homeless in a tent under a freeway overnight just because you needed some dentistry done.
America's inequality is so vast that they are able to hide their fundamentally collapsing economy underneath the big numbers of a handful of silicon valley firms and high roller banks; but make no mistake it's absolutely like the meme where Homer Simpson looks slim but from behind you see all his fat scrunched up.
>>100778 >America's inequality is so vast that they are able to hide their fundamentally collapsing economy underneath the big numbers of a handful of silicon valley firms and high roller banks
That's not how median income - which is what he posted - works. Maybe Americans need to pay for more stuff themselves, but they really are richer. It's a shit place to be poor, but most countries are.
The US spends nearly $5,000 more per person on social welfare than we do, again after adjusting for purchasing power. They spend more on welfare than Germany and only slightly less than France. "The US has got no welfare state" has never really been true, but "we've got a bigger welfare state than the US" stopped being true even before austerity. We spend a larger share of our GDP on welfare, but our GDP is so low that it doesn't matter.
You can assert whatever you like, but the data are shockingly clear.
>>That's not how median income - which is what he posted - works.
And? How many times- Income is only half the picture. And even then it's never simple how they arrive at that number. You are taking a single statistic for 350 million people, here.
No it's really not. What's shockingly clear is that the US is spending a lot of tax dollars on something, but that money is not making it through to the people who need it. The British government spent £310 billion on the pandemic and we know how effectively that went- The US "welfare state" is much the same.
>but that doesn't mean ordinary people aren't struggling, and struggling badly because America is just everyone for themselves and if you slip through the cracks, good fucking luck. The ordinary American is loaded with debt and their livelihoods are so precarious
This. America is pretty much a pay-to-play society. Everything costs money, especially the things that are near enough free in this country and that the poor benefit from in particular, like the NHS or other public services. And healthcare isn't just not free in the U.S., but the cost is so high that a single course of specialist treatment not backed by health insurance, like chemotherapy or complicated surgery, can cripple you financially for years to come.
Also though, from what I've seen during my visits over there where I actually got to observe average Americans and their families, most of them have a piss poor grasp of personal finances and how you can make money and your monthly budget go further. It's all about consumerism, about buying exciting new things all the time, with little thought given to whether they can actually afford them or the additional consumer credit they have to take on for them. A lot of people there just have a complete happy go lucky attitude about their personal spending. I saw somebody who already had heaps of high-interest credit card debt take out financing for a late-model truck which cost them another $700 a month. Because, you know, they had to have a new truck to keep up with their neighbours. I wouldn't call it financial illiteracy, it's more like an absence of worry. Where you just shrug at the thought of your car getting repossessed at some point if or when you default on your payments.
>>100781 >Income is only half the picture.
And the other half is presumably the prices of things, right? I don't have any official data, so I went on the Walmart website and looked up the price of Pepsi, since that's something available everywhere. The prices certainly aren't 47% higher; they look about the same. Petrol is famously much cheaper over there too. So if we ignore regional cost-of-living details like rents in Silicon Valley, can you name some things which are much more expensive across the entire USA? Remember also that healthcare costs won't count if you have health insurance, which every American with a decent job has.
But that more than evens out when you consider fuel economy, which is still dismal compared to European cars. Especially in recent years where over half of vehicles on the road in the U.S. are trucks and SUVs. A 500-mile journey in a Ford F-150 pickup truck through the U.S. will probably cost you near enough the same as driving that same distance in a Vauxhall estate through Britain.
In simple terms, yes. But "prices of things", much like income itself, isn't an easy figure to boil down into a single statistic, although either way, the general gist is Americans will, in general, end up paying a lot more for their day to day existence than we do.
You have to remember they are driving much larger distances, on average, too. It's not out of the ordinary for a Californian commuter to drive the equivalent of Manchester to Hull without even leaving the LA metro area. It is THAT much of a sprawl. And they do it in clapped out cars with 300k+ miles on the clock. It's barmy.
Have you bothered to look into the level of coverage medicare/medicaid actually gives people?
A lot of it can be described as inefficiency, if you like. Just look at how much Americans spend in total on healthcare compared to the rest of the world, it's shitloads; and then ask yourself why their outcomes are so much worse. Because ultimately if you want to boil it down and oversimplify, that's the same thing as what's going on with their military, their welfare, their supermarkets, their cars... Compared with most other economies, every dollar an American pays for every product or service, a higher proportion of that dollar is being skimmed off by the shareholder. Put simply, Americans get more ripped off than anyone else, and to economists, that's a good thing.
I don't know why you have such a hard on for America but it's fucking weird, Americans themselves wouldn't even delude themselves this hard about how well thair country is doing nowadays.
>Put simply, Americans get more ripped off than anyone else, and to economists, that's a good thing.
I'm an economist, and to me that's not a good thing at all, because it leads to ever increasing inequality. Consumers aren't getting their money's worth, and the elite and shareholders are inordinately leeching off the other 99 percent.
Well they can't have learned that attitude in the seminar room.
Unlike a business degree, which, if we're talking about monetary profit, often mainly teaches you how to extract maximum wealth from economic activity, economics as a science tends to take a broader view and see the entirety of an economy. Which is where you also ask questions of wealth and distribution, and how something also benefits the consumer and not just a commercial business, or those who own that business as per their shares.
Naturally, with an economics degree, you will earn the most money if you go on to work in elevated positions for private companies, and don't stay in your ivory tower at some university or research organisation. And true to the idea that you won't bite the hand that feeds you, you'll probably come to align more with Big Business than the ideas that you were originally taught, including that a one-sided distribution of wealth and prosperity in a society or an economy is usually a bad thing, if not a very bad thing.
>>100790 >Economics as a science tends to take a broader view and see the entirety of an economy. Which is where you also ask questions of wealth and distribution, and how something also benefits the consumer and not just a commercial business, or those who own that business as per their shares.
I think you may be overestimating how representative your education is of economics as a field, then. Most people I know who have taken economics, and the economics courses I've taken, have overwhelmingly focused on using algebra and agent-models to turn the field into a sophisticated but direly limited mathematical parlour game.
Great economists exist out there, but it seems to me like for every one Amartya Sen there's a dozen thinktanks like the Insitute of Economic Affairs.
>true to the idea that you won't bite the hand that feeds you, you'll probably come to align more with Big Business than the ideas that you were originally taught
That's exactly what I am getting at, and combine that with the fact that the hand that feeds is often very right-leaning media institutions or big banks or investment firms or what have you...
I am sure you don't need to be patronised here but it's easy to understand why the economics as your average layperson hears it, off some dour looking bloke being interviewd for five minutes on breakfast news or as a side-column in their daily rag, tends to paper over a lot of very real problems, and just generally tell everyone "Line go up! Economy good!"
I have no formal education in economics whatsoever, but I really would have assumed that the best economic practice would say that when there isn’t much money in general, as seems to be the case, the best place for the existing money to go would be into the hands of those who will turn it into more money for everyone else. Plebs will just waste it; you need to give the money to the businesses so that they double the money that exists and then all of us get double the money too.
If this isn’t what’s meant to happen, why the bloody fuck have we been trying to do this for the past 45 years?
>Most people I know who have taken economics, and the economics courses I've taken, have overwhelmingly focused on using algebra and agent-models to turn the field into a sophisticated but direly limited mathematical parlour game.
You actually do a lot of maths in economics, and not all of it is immediately beneficial. Part of it has to do with the fact that as an academic science as it is taught today, economics has its roots in the 19th century when rapid advances in natural science, technology and engineering encouraged the idea that the entire Universe could be described using equations. Which is why most economic models you study for your exams today are still pretty much applied maths. It's been the bane of economics students ever since, and not few end up dropping out because they can't handle it. It's decidedly above A-level maths, most of the time anyway, so you better make sure you know what you're in for.
What it does offer is a succinct way of describing an economy and economic processes and relationships within that economy. There are few real-world applications for the Stackelberg theorem or the Cobb-Douglas production function, and yet, they are robust models that help understand that economy and what goes on within it.
The real take-away from it all, once you're a few years out of uni, isn't an ability to solve differential economic equations. You'll probably never need to use that skill again. But what remains is a thorough general understanding of the mechanisms of an economy.
>That's exactly what I am getting at, and combine that with the fact that the hand that feeds is often very right-leaning media institutions or big banks or investment firms or what have you
In the end, it comes down to what you want to do with your degree. Become a university professor, and you'll have a decent salary, especially with all your advisory functions and other side jobs and engagements. But the real money is in the private sector, where incomes can dwarf what the average professor makes. Economists who stay firmly within the academic field will usually be far more reserved when it comes to singing the praise of Big Business.
>but it's easy to understand why the economics as your average layperson hears it, off some dour looking bloke being interviewd for five minutes on breakfast news or as a side-column in their daily rag, tends to paper over a lot of very real problems, and just generally tell everyone "Line go up! Economy good!"
It's a bit like the weather report at the end of the news. You'll get a 20-second sound bite that can help you decide what to wear tomorrow, but it doesn't teach you an understanding of weather dynamics. And it's the same whenever a studied economist or economic expert is on TV. Who is given a small three- or four-minute window to explain exactly why the economy is doing badly, and oftentimes, that just isn't enough. And without wanting to be elitist, there are certain things that are just difficult to explain to a layperson who's sitting in front of their TV at night. It's almost like a game of Taboo, where you can't use certain words. In this case, it's not a good idea to use them because you know that they will only raise more questions for those viewers than you'll answer.
Trickle-down doesn't work. It's a nice concept in theory, but when you look at what's been happening, with decades of supply-side economics behind us, well. The idea that economic policy must favour business so the latter can create wealth for everybody has only led to one of the biggest wealth inequalities since WWII.
Pretty sure the other lad knows that and was being sarcastic, but quite deadpan about it. Because a lot of people (particularly Americans, to drag it back around to the thread topic) do just eat that up, despite how comprehensively we can see and demonstrate that it doesn't work. It's so spectacularly obvious that it's really not unreasonable to assume the people who endorse the theory are doing so in bad faith and have ulterior motives.
The question for America, and western economies in general, is how to get that money circulating again, without the rich people throwing a tantrum and running away to Mars or New Zealand or whatever and taking it all with them. "Wealth generation" has always been something of a euphemistic term because I bet not even economics lad can adequately explain exactly where money comes from; neither Smith nor Marx or Keynes or Friedman or any of them exactly agree on the exact mechanism by which stuff happens and it translates into wealth. But I think what all of them can agree on it that a healthy economy needs it to circulate, and the more it circulates, in general, the better off everyone feels.
> Because a lot of people (particularly Americans, to drag it back around to the thread topic) do just eat that up, despite how comprehensively we can see and demonstrate that it doesn't work.
It's not just middle class people who have been indoctrinated to think unflinchingly pro-business, even if they know that pro-business has made their job almost as precarious as that of the fast food worker. You'll hear the same even from lower class Americans, and you can tell them about wealth inequality till you're blue in the face, and they'll still say something like, "Yeah... but... Murrica! Freedom!!".
Evidently, that would be a place to start. Educating people about the fact that pro-business has only cheated them out of their fair share. But with a view to the coming new Trump presidency in particular, don't expect help from anybody. Not the government, and certainly not the fawning mass media, who all just want to have their place at the table as the clown show resumes.
>>100796 >>100797 >Pretty sure the other lad knows that and was being sarcastic, but quite deadpan about it.
That's me, and I am well aware that it doesn't work because look how poor I am, but I did honestly think that economics textbooks must claim that it works, and they must explain it in a way that makes it sound like it works, because if the economists agree that it's bollocks, I will repeat:
>why the bloody fuck have we been trying to do this for the past 45 years?
I was hoping for a reply that said that ackshually, everything would be even worse if millionaires had to pay taxes. That way, I would still be poor but at least I could have faith that the past half-century of governments in the entire Western world at least knew what they were doing. You can accuse me of smoking copium if you must, but the alternative is so devastating that I refuse to believe that there is no evidence at all that laissez-faire austerity is a good thing for people.
> but I did honestly think that economics textbooks must claim that it works, and they must explain it in a way that makes it sound like it works, because if the economists agree that it's bollocks, I will repeat:
>why the bloody fuck have we been trying to do this for the past 45 years?
Again, in theory, it can work. You can reduce supply-side obstacles for companies that make it easier for them to turn a profit. Which, again in theory, they could use to pay their employees more, or even hire more staff. But, evidently, they don't, and instead of hiring more staff or paying them better, they largely line their own coffers with record breaking earnings.
It's not that nobody saw it coming, it was more that market liberals, who were giving politicians all these crazy ideas, were wilfully ignoring the impact that their school of thought was having on the demand side of the economy, i.e. consumers and in the end wage-receiving employees. All the job market reforms we saw from the mid- to late 90s under Blair, but also around the rest of the EU, were only superficially in that spirit of making it easier for companies to earn money so they could better pay their workforce. What it really did, that deregulation of the job market, was that it eroded both job security and wage (and career) certainty for the average employee, and in the end reduced their ability to participate in the wealth creation their employers were achieving, through the work of their employees. And corporations and CEOs were laughing all the way to the bank, many of whom had helped politicians pen the employment law changes underpinning those job market reforms.
For trickle down to truly work, governments and legislature would have to be very restrictive about how companies are allowed to use profits, and how they can treat, as well as hire and fire their staff and employees. You'd practically have to roll back close to 30 years of job market deregulation and start over. And even then, more likely you'd have droves of major companies fleeing the country to places where everything would remain a bit more lax.
It has long dawned on many economists, if they weren't already of the opinion in the first place, that trickle down as it was put in practice simply isn't good economics with respect to the other 99 percent. And we're actually seeing a revival of demand-side economics, helped by external shocks like the Financial Crisis or the Covid pandemic. We're even seeing a little bit of it with the new Starmer government. But all in all, market liberals are still firmly in charge. Both in Britain and the U.S..
>>100799 It's possibly worse than you think. In my opinion, governments do see that our current system doesn't work. However, they are paralyzed by a fear of the The Markets. They think that if you tried to introduce a wealth tax, bump up capital gains taxes and just generally tried to redistribute some wealth (not even through directly giving people money, just repairing the damage done to local government funding, for example), The Markets would go apeshit. Yes, the right-wing print media would run stories about a bloke who grew up on a council estate and made millions in The City who now can't afford the newest Ferrari, or that the children of the elite were having to slum it in Harrow, instead of going to Eton. But the real problem would be all the economists going on the telly and saying words to the effect of "these new taxes may curb investment coming into Britain", at which point The Markets would lose their minds, because the economists had scared them. The Markets would all be attempting to get as much money out of the UK, or be betting against the UK economy, as quickly as they could. Not out of any sense of malice, but because that's what the rest of The Market was doing.
Now, unfortunately, here is where I run out of railroad (economistlad maybe think I did that long ago). What I don't know is if the stock market shitting itself inside out is Ragnarok for the UK, or if their wellbeing is now so disconnected from the day-to-day reality of Britain's economy that it would no more bother us than a man in Chengdu getting up to go for a piss at 3am would. The truth is likely somewhere inbetween, but it's plain as day is that what's good for the FTSE 100 isn't inherently good for the common schleps of Britain and Northern Ireland. And forgive me if this is one thing you were being sarcastic about earlier, but those common schleps are the ones who spend all their money. They don't horde it like dragons, or turn it into opportunities for rent seeking, they buy meal deals, clothes, go to the cinema and build sheds. This puts more money back into the economy, which allows businesses to grow, which means a larger tax base and fewer town centres that look like something out of a STALKER game. Probably. Again, I'm getting a bit out over my skis here, but I'm, at the very least, less wrong now than the Treasury has been since 1979.
>>100800 >>100801 Thank you, both of you.
>What I don't know is if the stock market shitting itself inside out is Ragnarok for the UK, or if their wellbeing is now so disconnected from the day-to-day reality of Britain's economy that it would no more bother us than a man in Chengdu getting up to go for a piss at 3am would.
That's another thing I've wondered: if lots of money is in the stock market, and the stock market plummets and everyone withdraws their money, then won't they spend it on other things? And won't that actually benefit the economy?
>if lots of money is in the stock market, and the stock market plummets and everyone withdraws their money, then won't they spend it on other things?
Most likely, no. Because retail investors will probably have sold their stocks at a loss, and not only will they have less money than before, but the stock market crash will instill in them a feeling of uncertainty. And at times of great uncertainty, perceived or real, people will tend to save money and spend less of it.
The opposite often happens when the stock market rallies. Not only will they objectively have more money as the value of their portfolio increases, but they will spend their other cash more freely, as they expect their increased spending to be compensated by continued value increases of their stocks.
The stock market isn't a pot of money. When you buy shares in a company, you literally own a piece of the business. If that business makes a sustained long-term profit and doesn't re-invest that profit in growing the business, it pays out that profit to shareholders in the form of dividends.
If the price of a share drops, it's because the market as a whole thinks that the company is worth less than it used to be - either because people think that the company isn't going to make as much money in the future, or because people think that we had previously over-estimated how much money they would make. Share prices aren't a made up number, but a best guess at the actual value of a business.
A drop in share prices means that those investors now have less wealth than they thought they did. Imagine going to bed one night thinking you have £40,000 in your savings account, only to check your balance in the morning and see that you've actually got £30,000. If that happened to you, would you think "fuck it, I might as well spend £30,000 on a car"? If you aren't fucking mental, you're probably going to think "oh shit, I'm not as well off as I thought, I'd better tighten my belt".
Are more businesses publicly traded than there used to be? Because I was thinking about this, everything we have been saying about The Markets and whatnot. And I came around to the thought "how come we don't just have a way of running businesses where they don't have to make retarded counter-productive decisions that kneecap their long term prospects just to please investors in the short term", and I remembered... We do. It's just that anybody who is anybody is a publicly traded business, and that always inevitably goes one way for them in the long term.
Has the ratio changed over the last few decades? Why aren't more businesses private, and is there a way we could encourage businesses to remain private and generate investment via alternative means, and not tie everything up in the stock markets?
There hasn't been a significant increase in the number of publicly traded companies in recent decades. There has been a significant shift towards private equity - smaller, privately owned companies being bought up by investment groups.
There isn't clear evidence that publicly-traded companies are more short-term oriented than privately held companies. While some shareholders are speculators looking for a quick return, the largest shareholders in most big companies are pension funds and national wealth funds, who overwhelmingly care about dividend yields and long-term stability rather than short-term capital growth.
Private equity may contribute to short-term orientation, because a large proportion of PE deals are significantly leveraged, which is to say that the money used to buy the company is mostly borrowed. Leveraged buyouts potentially have very high rates of return, but they also carry significant risks that are usually managed by aggressively optimising the business for immediate profitability.
>>100805 Selling off tiny percentages of your company (as shares) is, unfortunately, a great way for a company with not much money to rapidly make money that it can invest in growing the business. So the companies that do sell shares tend to have more money, which they spend on making even more money, so privately-owned companies struggle to compete.
I tried to find some numbers for you, but I failed completely. There are 1,775 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (https://www.statista.com/statistics/324547/uk-number-of-companies-lse/), but some companies might be on other stock exchanges, and also you can even get something called an "unlisted public company", which has publicly-traded shares that are not traded on any stock exchange.
>Leveraged buyouts potentially have very high rates of return, but they also carry significant risks that are usually managed by aggressively optimising the business for immediate profitability.
Which is a nice way of saying that private equity firms take midsize companies to the cleaner's when they acquire them. The loans in conjunction with the leveraged buyout are then put in that company's name, not in the name of the private equity firm, which means crippling debt and debt service on the acquired company's balance sheet, while the private equity firms carry very little actual risk themselves. The PE firm usually also charges exorbitant recurring consultant or management fees that are paid from any residual profit the acquired company still makes.
A large percentage of companies acquired by private equity eventually declare bankruptcy, but long before that, both their product and service quality as well as HR management and wages and salaries will suffer drastically, all in the name of streamlining, or "optimising" the company for profitability, as you said. That company was very likely doing quite well before it was acquired, in any case it was probably more financially healthy before it was bled dry by crushing debt and management fees.
Private equity is a cancer growth, and in the greater scheme of things, it's a way to transfer wealth from the average person or even midsize company owners to the super rich. Because you don't just become a private equity investor like you buy publicly traded stocks. It's usually an elite circle of Big Money who own or invest in those private equity firms. And then reap all the benefits, while the acquired company soon ends up as an empty husk that is cast aside.
My employer, a company of ~15 people, was bought out a couple of years ago by an even smaller company which had just been bought by a bank. I looked us up on Companies House recently, and we (the two companies together which have now merged into a 30-person corporate behemoth) are currently repaying a loan to the bank that owns us. Despite being perfectly trustworthy companies, the interest rate to our own parent company is 12%. That's awful. It feels so shady, partly because it's obviously some kind of tax trick that I don't understand.
If the bank owns your company, then it's a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul. What it does do is that the 12% interest reduces your company's profits. You'd have to really get into your company's earnings statements versus corporation tax brackets, but in some way it's probably more profitable for the bank that owns you to move profit from your company to itself, by charging you higher interest. Which lowers your profits and increases theirs. If done cleverly, it can reduce the overall tax that your conglomerate has to pay.
