OWS
S. Jibreel
Note for HSBC to employees:
Recent media attention has focused on increased protest activity
toward U.S. government institutions, private banks and the financial
services industry. Though protest activity to date has been mostly
peaceful and on public property, some recent protests have led to
violence and damage.
At this time, a protest rally point is being organized for Bryant Park
on Friday, October 28 at noon ET. While HSBC is not specifically
mentioned within the communications, the focus of the rally is on
boardrooms, and financial institutions in particular. HSBC is at
increased risk of protest activity due to our proximity to the rally
starting point. To help ensure the safety of our employees and
visitors to HSBC buildings, enhanced security and access control
measures will be implemented around HSBC Midtown facilities in New
York City.
Wajahat Gilani
From: S. Jibreel <s.jibree...@gmail.com>
To: Market Musings <market-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 5:24 PM
Subject: OWS
S. Jibreel Hussain
I better not see any of you there tomorrow.
Sami Shaban
S. Jibreel
how social mood drives people into herd mentality and irrational
behavior. We're all educated self thinkers here, right? No mindless
herding behavior here, right guys?
jk ;)
On Oct 27, 5:56 pm, Sami Shaban <ssha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> anyone have a sleeping bag I can borrow???
>
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 5:32 PM, S. Jibreel Hussain <
>
>
>
> s.jibreel.huss...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I better not see any of you there tomorrow.
>
> >> get them Alex, get them!!
> >> *From:* S. Jibreel <s.jibreel.huss...@gmail.com>
> >> *To:* Market Musings <market-...@googlegroups.com>
> >> *Sent:* Thursday, October 27, 2011 5:24 PM
> >> *Subject:* OWS
Sami Shaban
Sami
S. Jibreel
behalf for helping the herd buy houses, cars and go to college with
relative ease.
On Oct 27, 6:07 pm, Sami Shaban <ssha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sometimes the herd is right, and the bankers are wrong...sometimes.
>
> Sami
>
Ilyas
Typical bankers overstepping bounds. All those things are the job of government.
S. Jibreel Hussain
move to the soviet union....oh wait it doesn't exist anymore.
Ilyas
-Ilyas Alexander Lahoz
S. Jibreel Hussain
free markets, in which ever capacity they were allowed to exist, improved standards of living for the masses to heights never seen in history.
you can't thank your govt for your cell phone....you only have the free market to thank for that.
Ilyas
-Ilyas Alexander Lahoz
Wajahat Gilani
Sent from my iPhone
Ilyas
Taxing Job Creators
Mark Thoma sends us to the new Journal of Economic Perspectives paper
(pdf) on optimal taxes by Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez. It’s a
tough read (I’m still working on it myself), but there’s one
discussion that I think helps make a useful point about current
political debate.
In the first part of the paper, D&S analyze the optimal tax rate on
top earners. And they argue that this should be the rate that
maximizes the revenue collected from these top earners — full stop.
Why? Because if you’re trying to maximize any sort of aggregate
welfare measure, it’s clear that a marginal dollar of income makes
very little difference to the welfare of the wealthy, as compared with
the difference it makes to the welfare of the poor and middle class.
So to a first approximation policy should soak the rich for the
maximum amount — not out of envy or a desire to punish, but simply to
raise as much money as possible for other purposes.
Now, this doesn’t imply a 100% tax rate, because there are going to be
behavioral responses – high earners will generate at least somewhat
less taxable income in the face of a high tax rate, either by actually
working less or by pushing their earnings underground. Using
parameters based on the literature, D&S suggest that the optimal tax
rate on the highest earners is in the vicinity of 70%.
OK, I hear loud screams from the right side of the room. Parsing those
screams, I hear the following arguments:
1. Theft! Tyranny! OK, I hear you. This can’t be argued on rational
grounds; I think there are a lot more important moral issues in the
world than defending the right of the rich to keep their money, but
whatever.
2. They’ll go Galt! This amounts to saying that D&S’s estimate of the
“behavioral elasticity” is too low. Maybe, but they’re pretty careful
about that, and your gut isn’t better than their econometrics.
3. You’ll kill job creation! This is where it gets interesting.
Right now the official rhetoric of the right, and a fair number of
people who consider themselves centrist, is that high-income
individuals are “job creators” who must be cherished for the good they
do.
Yet textbook economics says that in a competitive economy, the
contribution any individual (or for that matter any factor of
production) makes to the economy at the margin is what that individual
earns — period. What a worker contributes to GDP with an additional
hour of work is that worker’s hourly wage, whether that hourly wage is
$6 or $60,000 an hour. This in turn means that the effect on everyone
else’s income if a worker chooses to work one hour less is precisely
zero. If a hedge fund manager gets $60,000 an hour, and he works one
hour less, he reduces GDP by $60,000 — but he also reduces his pay by
$60,000, so the net effect on other peoples’ incomes is zip.
Of course, he doesn’t actually lose all of that $60,000, since he ends
up paying less in taxes. So there is a loss of revenue from that
withdrawal of effort. But that’s precisely what the Diamond-Saez
calculation takes into account, and the reason the optimal top tax
rate isn’t 100%.
So, are conservatives comfortable with this analysis? I would guess
not, that they have a deep-seated belief that the 1%, by working
harder, are doing the 99% a big favor, creating jobs and raising
incomes — and that this gain isn’t fully (or even largely) captured by
the money they’re paid.
My point, then, is that this claim — and the lionization of high
earners as people who make a vast contribution to society — is not, in
fact, something that comes out of the free-market economic principles
these people claim to believe in. Even if you believe that the top 1%
or better yet the top 0.1% are actually earning the money they make,
what they contribute is what they get, and they deserve no special
solicitude.
.
On Oct 27, 8:01 pm, Wajahat Gilani <wajgil...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The problem is in the implementation of the free markets. A good analogy is the way Islamic finance is practiced.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 27, 2011, at 7:52 PM, Ilyas <andaluc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > :-)
> > I only have Allah to thank for any of it. More importantly, I'm doubtful about all this prosperity* being something for which we'll be thankful in the long run.
>
> > *....a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive.
> > -Tariq Ramadan.
>
> > On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 7:44 PM, S. Jibreel Hussain <s.jibreel.huss...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > free markets, in which ever capacity they were allowed to exist, improved standards of living for the masses to heights never seen in history.
>
> > you can't thank your govt for your cell phone....you only have the free market to thank for that.
>
> > On Oct 27, 2011 7:41 PM, "Ilyas" <andaluc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Move to a working free-market... oh wait, it never existed.
>
> > On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 7:27 PM, S. Jibreel Hussain <s.jibreel.huss...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > move to the soviet union....oh wait it doesn't exist anymore.
>
> > On Oct 27, 2011 7:06 PM, "Ilyas" <andaluc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Typical bankers overstepping bounds. All those things are the job of government.
>
> > -Ilyas Alexander Lahoz- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
Wajahat Gilani
From: Ilyas <andal...@gmail.com>
To: Market Musings <market-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:56 AM
Subject: Re: OWS