First off, capitalism is a pretty effed up system when a market can almost crash on someone's interpretation of the words of one individual in regards to one company. I mean, do you really want a stock market that could send the whole economy reeling because rich people who are probably bilking the little people get a case of the heebeejeebees?
Well, this is not exactly "one individual". This is a guy who has the power to convert his words into actual action detrimental to companies, as demonstrated in the past.
So he's saying that he might send the tax inspectors onto the company, and they can bankrupt it, so suddenly the shares of that company are suddenly worth a lot less, because there is suddenly a pretty high probability that they might be worthless.
Fourthly, why is this all Putin's fault and not the company that was probably screwing up on some level (all companies probably do until they get caught) or the guy who called in sick to the meeting in which Putin was going to take him to task? No one saw this coming?
Markets react to new information. That companies do that and might be caught is already priced in, in the abstract (with, say, a statistical probability of 5 or 10 or whatever %). But if certainly one company is designated as a fraudster, than the probability for this particular company to have to pay extra taxes or worse suddenly becomes a lot higher, and thus its market cap falls. Markets react to new information, and more precisely to the unexpected difference between facts whn they come up and the expectations prior to the fact. Thus the sometimes strange reactions when a company announces big profits and its stock plummets: it's just that markets were expecting more (and were at prices that reflected that "more")
Free marketers are whiny freaking idiots. That's right. They reserve the right to behave with total lack of responsibility or accountability. Any government interference is oppression. YET, they expect, demand, that the government opperate with responsibility & accountability. B.S. It's not even an ideology, is it? It's a game where the rules are, "the rules apply to everyone but me."
Yep.
Thirdly, why would doing what was done to Yukos to Mechel be a bad thing for the country, for the Russian people?
The market does not care about what's good for the country or for the people, it only cares about how much money can be made from owning a share of a company.
When the power of private corporations is left unchecked by law, and then takes an interest in the markets, it's called a "free market."
Yep. The Anglo Disease in a nutshell. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Is there a way we can conduct societies without markets? J
I think it's possible to have a market economy without "profits".
In fact, I think that such an economy is a logical and inevitable consequence of the direct connections of the Internet.
And from there, maybe in a generation or two, we may move to a "gift economy". "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
I don't think profit itself is the problem, anymore than a market economy is a problem, or even share-capitalism is a problem. The problem in all of these systems is 3rd party parasitism, and the extent to which the they encourage this aspect to the detriment of the original trade.
My view is that anglo-disease is about prioritising 3rd party parasitism to the extent that it became the main focus of all trading and the actual transactors were bled to death. keep to the Fen Causeway
then some bright spark invented money as a unit of exchange in complex barter societies.
What money achieved was not so much a "unit of exchange" but a "split barter" transaction with a time delay between the two parts of a barter transaction.
While a value unit or unit of exchange is implicit as a reference in a monetary transaction, it need not be money.
Wherever you have a barter system (eg the Swiss WIR or a proprietary system, like Bartercard) with built in credit, then the result is a monetary system.
Helen:
The problem in all of these systems is 3rd party parasitism
"Profit" and "share capitalism" are integral to Anglo Disease "finance capitalism" and constitute an unnecessary overlay on the "real" productive economy.
The key point about a "Peer to Peer" economy is that the "3rd party parasites" are cut out, or "dis-intermediated" in the jargon, and with them go not only "for profit" share capitalism, but also credit intermediaries aka banks as middlemen...... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Well, a market economy without profit is probably how we started out after we stopped being hunter gatherers. That was barter, then some bright spark invented money as a unit of exchange in complex barter societies.
There's not much to prove that. Early agricultural societies were at least as likely to depend on gift economies, some sorts of centralised planning, or plunder, as means of economic organisation and exchange. The narrative of the inevitability of barter then currencies is just a narrative. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
I don't have a problem, nec. with profits. It's profits made by gambling and what is done with those profits I have a serious issue with. "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
