One thing I do not get. So there are bunch of guys promising the world. As we all know being good at promising the world is a sure way to rake in tons of cash on the stock market. Not only because there are enough stupid rich guys, but also because increasingly poor or lets say middle class people are stupid enough to believe that they know how the system works, or that their local bank representative actually cares about them. At any rate with the housing market plummeting, this happy bubble has burst.
While banks left and right are filing for bankruptcy, I am sure overall bank's across the world have made millions with this. Did I say millions? I meant billions .. or probably even trillions. Trillions sounds more reasonable considering the daily double figure billions that are being pumped into the market from government funded banks world wide to keep "the system" from collapsing. At the same time Peru, which was just struck several times by severe earthquakes, is getting a few hundred thousands or in some cases even millions in promises. We all know how these usually play and the promises are mostly not fulfilled in the end. Same story with the Tsunami catastrophe not too long ago.
So who will be held accountable here? Who will have to accept the consequences of having made false promises to people that put their entire future on the line to get a credit for a home, which they will now surely loose, even though they have held their side of the deal. Government run banks have to clean up the mess, while thousands of managers across the world have stuffed their overfilled pockets with yet more cash that they so cleverly extracted from the hands of middle class fools playing stock broker.
IANAL, and I am also not a stock broker (aka IANASB) or world market financial expert, so I might be missing how much we all benefited from these geniuses that have driven our world markets forward by their valiant efforts. However I think I understand enough to realize that this all stinks.
I am very confused about what I am supposed to do in order to secure my retirement. In the past I tried to stay away from stock funds until I realized that which ever insurance company is getting my money will be playing on the stock market with that money. So I decided to get more control over where my money is going by directly getting funds driven retirement plans, where I can choose a category (like renewable energy, midsized european companies or whatever). But I am beginning to wonder if there is even any reasonable thing to do, besides spending all your money on buying a farm, getting tons of children and more or less become self sustained.
This entire stock market crap is just a way for people to remove responsibility from their plate. CEO's can always claim that they had to do everything for the bottom line or their stock holders could sue them. The stock holders can always claim, that the CEO is the guy calling the shots, they are just providing the money (albeit often indirectly like through insurance funds). In the end everybody can sleep well knowing that they are never at fault while most people in the world get lied and cheated out of their hard earned money.
Amen. The very reason why decided against putting my savings in the stock market. The system is plainly flawed and while IANASB, I just couldn't see how I could sleep well.
On a related note: The GLS bank is founded around the principles of ethical and ecologic investments. This is where I have two business accounts (Look for "English" in the lower right if you can't read German).
I am not a stock broker, but spend all my working hours with them.
There is nothing wrong with the stock market, the problem is simply with capitalism and greed.
I can't agree with you on condemning the stock market for bad company decisions. Once you have opened your company up to private investments it is truly out of your hands. Although I do agree that it's the very big players who make the power moves and the small players who loose the money.
A typical example of the volatility of the stock market was the crazy last week. A lot of the best stocks got hit the hardest, not because there was anything wrong with the company but because some big players lost a LOT of money on other stocks, and had to sell off their earning stocks to cover their margin calls. This sent perfectly good stocks into free fall and lost a lot of small investors a lot of money.
Yay capitalism!
I think Google is a perfect example. They start off all lofty with the "don't be evil" mantra. I guess nowadays its rated down to "you do not have to do evil to make money". But they are all over the place now, meddeling in everything and anything, even if its getting a hard strech to relate it to their "we want to provide search to the world". As a matter of fact their business model is marketing and data mining and their privacy handling is getting more and more questioned. I am very sure that Larry and Sergey have the best of intentions, but because they are now a stock company, they are no longer in control. All they wanted was provide their smart algorithm to the world.
Good old family companies were not necessarily the beacon of goodness, but at least they could not deny personal responsibility. I was actually looking for a fund that only contains stocks that do not give any voting rights to the stock holders. I have not found anything like this so far. Maybe GLS is an option. I will need to research this a bit more.
Let me close with stressing once again that the evilness I see in the stock market is in the abstraction of responsibility that makes it sufficiently blurry for all people involved that they can easily make themselves believe that they are not responsible for any wrong doing that is made so that they can increase their personal wealth.
