>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 10/04 7:15 PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>Am I wrong in thinking that Greenspan's
>rationale is illogical ? How is it "risktaking"
>if when you fail, you don't lose ?
>Isn't the "risk" that you might lose ?
When you're really rich and really dangerously leveraged, your failure may take out lots of innocent people with you. ____________
Charles: So actually, all of those innocent people were taking the risk with the rich person, and they should have been compensated for taking risk too, no ? So, when an LTCM is successful, they should be required to distribute their profits among all of the other people that took the risk with them.
But my question is somewhat rhetorical. I didn't mean that you, Doug Henwood, should have to justify Greenspan's statement.
I am thinking more that the next times bourgeois propagandists justify huge income by the idea that the rich supposedly take more risks, left economists should debunk it with the many examples that disprove this myth. ___________
But people are losing big money on LTCM - less than they would have without the bailout for sure, but the banks, investors, and partners are all taking big hits. Not that they're worth a tear, but you can't say no one's losing anything. ____________
Charles: This speaks to the efficiency of private enterprise myth. When the bourgeois ideologists claim that private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise, they don't count the big losses in history.
Do left economists do much empirical work to challenge the notion of the superior efficiency of private enterprise ? (besides _Wallstreet_ ?) You know the constant monopoly media refrain about things like "inefficient" government bureaucracies. What about the inefficiency of private bureaucracies ? The LTCM operators seem like inefficient bureaucrats to me.
Charles Brown
>From the market to the Marxit