2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Bill Clinton Gave a Six-Figure Speech to a Controversial Vulture Fund as His Wife Ran for President [View all]trudyco
(1,258 posts)Vulture Capitalism is another legal loophole we need to close. To me, stocks and investments should be about investing in companies and not gambling. I don't know if we should rid ourselves of Hedge Funds that don't have an actual commodity associated with it (like you can't hedge on a hedge), derivatives, selling short and other means of basically gambling instead of investing. Maybe it's like temperance, it will just go underground, so we should tax the hell out of it. I think that's Bernie's thinking. But we should protect pension funds, and I think we should eliminate vulture capitalism - maybe every state has a state bank and the venture group has to get their debt from that bank. If the bank deems it disastrous to the company then they can chose not to lend the money. If a company spans multiple states then the venture capitalists have to convince each state bank to loan them a percentage based on the size of that company's presence in the state. That should slow down mergers and swallowing of big companies. The bigger they are, the more states they span, the harder to get the debt. And the money is kept in the local areas.
Similarly if a company wishes to move into a neighborhood and build it's big box, it needs to get the capital for that from loans from the state bank. The company may lure local politicians into giving sweet deals on tax breaks, but the bank may decide to loan the company money at one rate if they make good on their promises of cash flow and jobs into the state, and a higher rate if the company doesn't make good on their promises. If the bank makes a profit for the year it can give out higher interest to the savers who bank there. So the money is given back to the residents of the state.
I think we need to bring the exchange of money back to the local level. Just like we need to bring CEOs and executive staff back into sharing the same pain as the other employees of a company. Exact same retirement plan, exact same layoff plan, exact same insurance, if the company is public then the exact same stock plan - just with a higher multiplier to recognize the higher position.
The 1% have been walling themselves off from the rest of us. It's time to tear down those walls and make them realize what neighborhood they live and work in. It's really the same neighborhood as us.