J. P. Morgan Chase warns that rich might be forced to share in losses with the rest of us
March 9th, 2009
Talking Points Memo quotes this interesting key passage from a new Wall Street Journal piece on the market woes:
In a report over the weekend, analysts from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said they had expected government intervention to help protect the interests of bondholders at financial institutions. However, they noted that “in the extreme, losses can be so large that the political willpower to continue bailing out banks and insurance companies evaporates, forcing senior creditors to share in losses or producing other unorthodox outcomes.”
Obviously, these folks are playing us for saps to continue supporting their enormous wealth. Any government institution that go along with this plan is complicit.
UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has another example of how the rich and powerful are reacting to the crisis:
“They are laying off older workers to reduce their pension exposure and their health-plan exposure,” he said. “The young people are being hired in without medical plans and pension plans.”
What is clear, said economist Joel Naroff, is that companies are using the recession to reconfigure their workforces – and that is what they should do.
“There is a popular phrase – ‘don’t waste a perfectly good crisis’,” said Naroff, chief economist with TD Bank N.A. “The idea behind that is you can do things you couldn’t do under a normal set of circumstances. You have the opportunity to make the changes that you really should have made before.”
Companies that cut jobs just to shave expenses will not be prepared when the economy rebounds. The cuts should be strategic to position the companies for the future, said Naroff, of Holland, Bucks County.
If companies are going to announce layoffs of 5,000, he said, it does not give them much more of a publicity problem if they say they will lay off 5,500, with the idea of getting rid of “dead wood” or entire unproductive divisions. “It looks the same to the public.”
“Now they’ve been given free hand to do it,” Naroff said. In a sense, “the economy gives them cover.”
Either there will be mass movements fighting back or living standards will fall precipitously in the next few years as a massive assault on ordinary Americans [and Germans, and Italians, and Chineese, and Korean, and Kenyans ...] is waged.
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