Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

  

Capturing the surplus

Capitalism is a giant machine for pumping out the surplus from workers—just like feudalism, slavery, and other class-based economies before it.

That’s from one perspective. But the capitalist machine isn’t just about the “vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.” It also involves various mechanisms for capturing that surplus—in the form of dividends, CEO salaries, interest payments, and so on.

Another, increasingly important such mechanism is hedge funds. And boy are they capturing a lot of the surplus these days!

source

The hedge-fund industry continues to balloon in size (after a dip during the financial crash in 2008, and even though 2015 was by all accounts a rocky year), with something like $3 billion dollars in assets under management.

And, as the New York Times reports, the pay of the industry’s leaders has soared.

JPMorgan Chase paid its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $27 million in 2015. In another Wall Street universe, the hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin made $1.7 billion over the same year.

Even as regulators push to rein in compensation at Wall Street banks, top hedge fund managers earn more than 50 times what the top executives at banks are paid.

The 25 best-paid hedge fund managers took home a collective $12.94 billion in income last year

Yes, billions, with a “b.”

That’s the list of the top 10 (courtesy of Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine)—from Griffin (at $1.7 billion) to Joseph Edelman (at $300 million) in 2015.

Not only are Griffin and company capturing a large share of the surplus (even when some of their funds actually lost money for investors last year, just by virtue of their sheer size).* They’re spending it—on everything from art and luxury housing to funding politicians and political campaigns.**

So, with the rise to prominence of hedge funds and other financial instruments, it’s time to revise our definition: capitalism is a giant, vampire-like machine for pumping out, capturing, and spending the surplus from workers.

*Ray Dalio made $1.4 billion in 2015 through Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund firm with $150 billion of assets under management. Dalio, who founded Bridgewater, is frequently quoted promoting a strategy he calls risk parity. Yet Bridgewater’s risk parity fund, called All Weather, lost investors 7 percent in 2015.

**Griffin was the biggest donor to the successful reelection campaign of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cry them a river

Apparently, the super rich feel victimized by Obama.

Chrystia Freeland quotes from an open letter Leon Cooperman, the founder of a hedge fund called Omega Advisor, wrote to the president.

You should endeavor to rise above the partisan fray and raise the level of discourse to one that is both more civil and more conciliatory. . .Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. As a group we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving. To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment.

But Freeland is as mystified as I am:

The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar tarp rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners. Those seated around the table at dinner with Al Gore had done even better: the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each.

Notwithstanding Occupy Wall Street’s focus on the “one per cent,” or Obama’s choice of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as the level at which taxes on family income should rise, the salient dividing line between rich and not rich is much higher up the income-distribution scale. Hostility toward the President is particularly strident among the ultra-rich.

This is the group that has benefitted most from the winner-take-all economy: the 0.1 per cent, whose share of the national income was 7.8 per cent in 2009, according to I.R.S. data. Moreover, even as the shifting tides of the global economy have rewarded the richest while squeezing the middle class, the U.S. tax system has favored the very top, as the tax returns of the Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, have illustrated. In 2011, Romney paid an effective tax rate of just 14.1 per cent, and his income of $13.7 million places him in the 0.01-per-cent group.

Cooperman and company imagine themselves as masters of the universe—and they want the rest of us to bow down and pay homage. Otherwise, they feel victimized.

Cry them a river. . .

Update

See, also, Steven Pearlstein’s “I am a job creator: A manifest for the entitled”:

I am a corporate chief executive.

I am a business owner.

I am a private-equity fund manager.

I am the misunderstood superhero of American capitalism, single-handedly creating wealth and prosperity despite all the obstacles put in my way by employees, government and the media.

I am a job creator and I am entitled. . .

I am entitled to be treated with deference and respect by investors I mislead, customers I bamboozle, directors I manipulate and employees I view as expendable.

I am entitled to be lionized in the media without answering any questions from reporters.

I am entitled to the VIP entrance.

I am entitled to everything I have and more that I still deserve.