Um, because they're the ones that actually do the work to invent, create, test, debug, develop, and pour their hearts and souls into their work.
You know, the ones that actually create the products and not just order people around, do interviews, and make videos talking about how "magical" stuff is.
"income inequality" is a semantic trap created by socialist politicians and unions to push their agenda. It's utter nonsense. No one "deserves" anything simply because they exist. Please do not bring up that drivel here.
Everyone's work or assets are valued inside a man-made system. If that man-made system is flawed and promotes inequality then it can and should be restructured. Equality is really the wrong term to use as the aim is not equalising income, it's creating a fairer reward relative to contribution. It should be obvious to anyone that Carl Icahn doesn't deserve (or rather hasn't earned) over 70x the reward of all Apple's executives combined when he has contributed nothing but hassle and the executives are driving the gains in Apple's value. What have Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Icahn contributed to Apple's success? Absolutely nothing and yet they have a claim to a far greater portion of the financial gains that come from the executive team and all the staff at Apple for their contribution of spending a long time making great products than the people making them. I think that's fundamentally wrong. It would be like giving people on welfare 70x more earnings than the working class they take money from. Just because a non-contributor is a millionaire/billionaire, that shouldn't turn parasitic behaviour into something positive. Of course people say their contribution was the investment but there's no sacrifice when someone puts $3.5b into a company with $150b in cash and where is there ever a point of value creation? I say reward the value creators and not the parasites who feed on it.
The core root of the problem is that the folks who approve the lavish salaries, bonuses, options, and perks are execs themselves. Execs are board members and board members are execs. It's one big good-ol'-boys club.
It's apparently impossible to break this, the execs won't have it.
Let's face it "big capital" has an outsized and unfair advantage in almost everything, and can even manipulate the market to it's favor. In general, rich people do indeed have an advantage in the world over the rest of us.
Of course I, on the other hand, deserve the gains I have made by investing my life's savings in Apple stock years ago. Right?
Any of us can take the risk and invest our hard earned money in AAPL, or anything else. The profits we earn are ours, are they not?
How is Icahn intrinsically different, other than being rich from the start?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
Everyone's work or assets are valued inside a man-made system. If that man-made system is flawed and promotes inequality then it can and should be restructured. Equality is really the wrong term to use as the aim is not equalising income, it's creating a fairer reward relative to contribution. It should be obvious to anyone that Carl Icahn doesn't deserve (or rather hasn't earned) over 70x the reward of all Apple's executives combined when he has contributed nothing but hassle and the executives are driving the gains in Apple's value. What have Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Icahn contributed to Apple's success? Absolutely nothing and yet they have a claim to a far greater portion of the financial gains that come from the executive team and all the staff at Apple for their contribution of spending a long time making great products than the people making them. I think that's fundamentally wrong. It would be like giving people on welfare 70x more earnings than the working class they take money from. Just because a non-contributor is a millionaire/billionaire, that shouldn't turn parasitic behaviour into something positive. Of course people say their contribution was the investment but there's no sacrifice when someone puts $3.5b into a company with $150b in cash and where is there ever a point of value creation? I say reward the value creators and not the parasites who feed on it.
Let's face it "big capital" has an outsized and unfair advantage in almost everything, and can even manipulate the market to it's favor. In general, rich people do indeed have an advantage in the world over the rest of us.
Using terms like 'rich people' as a target of criticism sends the wrong message. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy, the problem is the reward/contribution ratio, which is a symptom of already being wealthy or being put in a privileged position. Take really bad CEOs/execs/middle managers for example, they get paid high salaries relative to their front-line staff. The front-line staff can easily be doing a great job and the top-level staff sitting back doing very little, much like in a war. The top-level military staff stay in comfort and safety and the people actually winning the war are suffering for it (long hours, poor conditions, poor reward). But the people at the back claim the victory and large reward. The shareholders are right at the back in the most comfort.
There's an example here of a single trader in Japan who has traded over $17b and is just 35 years old:
As you rightly said, he is able to move markets with his trades but the real problem is the risk/reward ratio:
"The man who made the market for SoftBank that winter morning was sitting in pajamas in a bedroom cluttered with comic books. He was leaning into the glare of four computer screens and munching a carrot -- something to calm his stomach.
Betting on rebounds was dangerous, but he’d watched SoftBank lose a fifth of its value over nine days, and a drop in U.S. markets overnight had driven the shares even lower. The odds were tilting further in favor of a bounce, by his reckoning. He decided to pull the trigger, rat-a-tat-tatting the orders in, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November issue.
Ninety minutes later, he cashed out with a profit of 140.6 million yen. Then it was on to the next trade for the former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS. The 35-year-old day trader says he made 6 billion yen, after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year."
What is the contribution to those businesses of sitting in pyjamas eating a carrot doing these kind of trades? Yet the reward is staggering and far above people putting in the shifts at the companies he's betting on.
Of course I, on the other hand, deserve the gains I have made by investing my life's savings in Apple stock years ago. Right?
I don't really think that people deserve the accumulation of wealth if they never contribute to the value creation process. If an investment occurs at a point where a company is strapped for cash and could go under without it then that's a sacrifice made by an investor to make the difference between the value creation happening or not.
Any of us can take the risk and invest our hard earned money in AAPL, or anything else. The profits we earn are ours, are they not?
How is Icahn intrinsically different, other than being rich from the start?
There's the word 'earn' again. If you bet on a racehorse or in a casino, they are winnings, not earnings. The financial community has so many euphemisms to legitimise it from gambling it's unreal:
Icahn isn't different from lower-level stakeholders as you correctly state, he just has a bigger stake but for one person to gain over 70x all of the people who helped make those gains happen highlights the very real problem between reward and contribution that is destroying the entire economy. The man-made system needs to be rebalanced to reward the value creators otherwise the incentive is to be a non-contributor. Why aspire to be a Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, an engineer, developer, designer or anything when you can do nothing and get more reward than any of them?
Using terms like 'rich people' as a target of criticism sends the wrong message. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy, the problem is the reward/contribution ratio, which is a symptom of already being wealthy or being put in a privileged position. Take really bad CEOs/execs/middle managers for example, they get paid high salaries relative to their front-line staff. The front-line staff can easily be doing a great job and the top-level staff sitting back doing very little, much like in a war. The top-level military staff stay in comfort and safety and the people actually winning the war are suffering for it (long hours, poor conditions, poor reward). But the people at the back claim the victory and large reward. The shareholders are right at the back in the most comfort.
There's an example here of a single trader in Japan who has traded over $17b and is just 35 years old:
As you rightly said, he is able to move markets with his trades but the real problem is the risk/reward ratio:
"The man who made the market for SoftBank that winter morning was sitting in pajamas in a bedroom cluttered with comic books. He was leaning into the glare of four computer screens and munching a carrot -- something to calm his stomach.
Betting on rebounds was dangerous, but he’d watched SoftBank lose a fifth of its value over nine days, and a drop in U.S. markets overnight had driven the shares even lower. The odds were tilting further in favor of a bounce, by his reckoning. He decided to pull the trigger, rat-a-tat-tatting the orders in, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November issue.
Ninety minutes later, he cashed out with a profit of 140.6 million yen. Then it was on to the next trade for the former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS. The 35-year-old day trader says he made 6 billion yen, after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year."
What is the contribution to those businesses of sitting in pyjamas eating a carrot doing these kind of trades? Yet the reward is staggering and far above people putting in the shifts at the companies he's betting on.
I don't really think that people deserve the accumulation of wealth if they never contribute to the value creation process. If an investment occurs at a point where a company is strapped for cash and could go under without it then that's a sacrifice made by an investor to make the difference between the value creation happening or not.
There's the word 'earn' again. If you bet on a racehorse or in a casino, they are winnings, not earnings. The financial community has so many euphemisms to legitimise it from gambling it's unreal:
Icahn isn't different from lower-level stakeholders as you correctly state, he just has a bigger stake but for one person to gain over 70x all of the people who helped make those gains happen highlights the very real problem between reward and contribution that is destroying the entire economy. The man-made system needs to be rebalanced to reward the value creators otherwise the incentive is to be a non-contributor. Why aspire to be a Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, an engineer, developer, designer or anything when you can do nothing and get more reward than any of them?
I'll simply say that there is "room" for ALL kinds of economic activity and professions and the 'risk versus reward' is much, much, much higher for those traders versus those who work on assembly lines collecting an hourly wage. Obviously, these stories of massive returns are the exception, not the rule and risking capital is hardly doing "nothing". The rewards for the Japanese trader (whom you seem to be criticizing) are completely rational and if other people are willing to take identical risks, a successful outcome is still not guaranteed.
Comments
Why would they?
Um, because they're the ones that actually do the work to invent, create, test, debug, develop, and pour their hearts and souls into their work.
You know, the ones that actually create the products and not just order people around, do interviews, and make videos talking about how "magical" stuff is.
Executives need to get off their high horse.
Everyone's work or assets are valued inside a man-made system. If that man-made system is flawed and promotes inequality then it can and should be restructured. Equality is really the wrong term to use as the aim is not equalising income, it's creating a fairer reward relative to contribution. It should be obvious to anyone that Carl Icahn doesn't deserve (or rather hasn't earned) over 70x the reward of all Apple's executives combined when he has contributed nothing but hassle and the executives are driving the gains in Apple's value. What have Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Icahn contributed to Apple's success? Absolutely nothing and yet they have a claim to a far greater portion of the financial gains that come from the executive team and all the staff at Apple for their contribution of spending a long time making great products than the people making them. I think that's fundamentally wrong. It would be like giving people on welfare 70x more earnings than the working class they take money from. Just because a non-contributor is a millionaire/billionaire, that shouldn't turn parasitic behaviour into something positive. Of course people say their contribution was the investment but there's no sacrifice when someone puts $3.5b into a company with $150b in cash and where is there ever a point of value creation? I say reward the value creators and not the parasites who feed on it.
The core root of the problem is that the folks who approve the lavish salaries, bonuses, options, and perks are execs themselves. Execs are board members and board members are execs. It's one big good-ol'-boys club.
It's apparently impossible to break this, the execs won't have it.
Let's face it "big capital" has an outsized and unfair advantage in almost everything, and can even manipulate the market to it's favor. In general, rich people do indeed have an advantage in the world over the rest of us.
Of course I, on the other hand, deserve the gains I have made by investing my life's savings in Apple stock years ago. Right?
Any of us can take the risk and invest our hard earned money in AAPL, or anything else. The profits we earn are ours, are they not?
How is Icahn intrinsically different, other than being rich from the start?
Quote:
Everyone's work or assets are valued inside a man-made system. If that man-made system is flawed and promotes inequality then it can and should be restructured. Equality is really the wrong term to use as the aim is not equalising income, it's creating a fairer reward relative to contribution. It should be obvious to anyone that Carl Icahn doesn't deserve (or rather hasn't earned) over 70x the reward of all Apple's executives combined when he has contributed nothing but hassle and the executives are driving the gains in Apple's value. What have Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Icahn contributed to Apple's success? Absolutely nothing and yet they have a claim to a far greater portion of the financial gains that come from the executive team and all the staff at Apple for their contribution of spending a long time making great products than the people making them. I think that's fundamentally wrong. It would be like giving people on welfare 70x more earnings than the working class they take money from. Just because a non-contributor is a millionaire/billionaire, that shouldn't turn parasitic behaviour into something positive. Of course people say their contribution was the investment but there's no sacrifice when someone puts $3.5b into a company with $150b in cash and where is there ever a point of value creation? I say reward the value creators and not the parasites who feed on it.
Using terms like 'rich people' as a target of criticism sends the wrong message. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy, the problem is the reward/contribution ratio, which is a symptom of already being wealthy or being put in a privileged position. Take really bad CEOs/execs/middle managers for example, they get paid high salaries relative to their front-line staff. The front-line staff can easily be doing a great job and the top-level staff sitting back doing very little, much like in a war. The top-level military staff stay in comfort and safety and the people actually winning the war are suffering for it (long hours, poor conditions, poor reward). But the people at the back claim the victory and large reward. The shareholders are right at the back in the most comfort.
There's an example here of a single trader in Japan who has traded over $17b and is just 35 years old:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/mystery-man-moving-japan-made-more-than-1-million-trades.html
As you rightly said, he is able to move markets with his trades but the real problem is the risk/reward ratio:
"The man who made the market for SoftBank that winter morning was sitting in pajamas in a bedroom cluttered with comic books. He was leaning into the glare of four computer screens and munching a carrot -- something to calm his stomach.
Betting on rebounds was dangerous, but he’d watched SoftBank lose a fifth of its value over nine days, and a drop in U.S. markets overnight had driven the shares even lower. The odds were tilting further in favor of a bounce, by his reckoning. He decided to pull the trigger, rat-a-tat-tatting the orders in, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November issue.
Ninety minutes later, he cashed out with a profit of 140.6 million yen. Then it was on to the next trade for the former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS. The 35-year-old day trader says he made 6 billion yen, after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year."
What is the contribution to those businesses of sitting in pyjamas eating a carrot doing these kind of trades? Yet the reward is staggering and far above people putting in the shifts at the companies he's betting on.
I don't really think that people deserve the accumulation of wealth if they never contribute to the value creation process. If an investment occurs at a point where a company is strapped for cash and could go under without it then that's a sacrifice made by an investor to make the difference between the value creation happening or not.
There's the word 'earn' again. If you bet on a racehorse or in a casino, they are winnings, not earnings. The financial community has so many euphemisms to legitimise it from gambling it's unreal:
'lock in profit' = 'cash in chips'
'investment' = 'bank roll'
'broker' = 'dealer'
'insider trading' = 'card counting'
'analyst' = 'bluff'
http://www.thegoodgamblingguide.co.uk/glossary/pokerglossary.htm
I like this one: Apple, the = (U.S) The biggest game in the house. http://www.pokernews.com/pokerterms/apple.htm
Icahn isn't different from lower-level stakeholders as you correctly state, he just has a bigger stake but for one person to gain over 70x all of the people who helped make those gains happen highlights the very real problem between reward and contribution that is destroying the entire economy. The man-made system needs to be rebalanced to reward the value creators otherwise the incentive is to be a non-contributor. Why aspire to be a Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, an engineer, developer, designer or anything when you can do nothing and get more reward than any of them?
Using terms like 'rich people' as a target of criticism sends the wrong message. There's nothing wrong with being wealthy, the problem is the reward/contribution ratio, which is a symptom of already being wealthy or being put in a privileged position. Take really bad CEOs/execs/middle managers for example, they get paid high salaries relative to their front-line staff. The front-line staff can easily be doing a great job and the top-level staff sitting back doing very little, much like in a war. The top-level military staff stay in comfort and safety and the people actually winning the war are suffering for it (long hours, poor conditions, poor reward). But the people at the back claim the victory and large reward. The shareholders are right at the back in the most comfort.
There's an example here of a single trader in Japan who has traded over $17b and is just 35 years old:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-25/mystery-man-moving-japan-made-more-than-1-million-trades.html
As you rightly said, he is able to move markets with his trades but the real problem is the risk/reward ratio:
"The man who made the market for SoftBank that winter morning was sitting in pajamas in a bedroom cluttered with comic books. He was leaning into the glare of four computer screens and munching a carrot -- something to calm his stomach.
Betting on rebounds was dangerous, but he’d watched SoftBank lose a fifth of its value over nine days, and a drop in U.S. markets overnight had driven the shares even lower. The odds were tilting further in favor of a bounce, by his reckoning. He decided to pull the trigger, rat-a-tat-tatting the orders in, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November issue.
Ninety minutes later, he cashed out with a profit of 140.6 million yen. Then it was on to the next trade for the former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS. The 35-year-old day trader says he made 6 billion yen, after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year."
What is the contribution to those businesses of sitting in pyjamas eating a carrot doing these kind of trades? Yet the reward is staggering and far above people putting in the shifts at the companies he's betting on.
I don't really think that people deserve the accumulation of wealth if they never contribute to the value creation process. If an investment occurs at a point where a company is strapped for cash and could go under without it then that's a sacrifice made by an investor to make the difference between the value creation happening or not.
There's the word 'earn' again. If you bet on a racehorse or in a casino, they are winnings, not earnings. The financial community has so many euphemisms to legitimise it from gambling it's unreal:
'lock in profit' = 'cash in chips'
'investment' = 'bank roll'
'broker' = 'dealer'
'insider trading' = 'card counting'
'analyst' = 'bluff'
http://www.thegoodgamblingguide.co.uk/glossary/pokerglossary.htm
I like this one: Apple, the = (U.S) The biggest game in the house. http://www.pokernews.com/pokerterms/apple.htm
Icahn isn't different from lower-level stakeholders as you correctly state, he just has a bigger stake but for one person to gain over 70x all of the people who helped make those gains happen highlights the very real problem between reward and contribution that is destroying the entire economy. The man-made system needs to be rebalanced to reward the value creators otherwise the incentive is to be a non-contributor. Why aspire to be a Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, an engineer, developer, designer or anything when you can do nothing and get more reward than any of them?
I'll simply say that there is "room" for ALL kinds of economic activity and professions and the 'risk versus reward' is much, much, much higher for those traders versus those who work on assembly lines collecting an hourly wage. Obviously, these stories of massive returns are the exception, not the rule and risking capital is hardly doing "nothing". The rewards for the Japanese trader (whom you seem to be criticizing) are completely rational and if other people are willing to take identical risks, a successful outcome is still not guaranteed.
I trust that, if so, it has increased with inflation plus a performance bonus. Maybe it's about $1.50 now.