18 Apr 2009

Wall Street - a bunch of bright people with little responsibilities to the community...

Watching a TV programme on Wall Street, a young hedge fund entrepreneur who earned more than a million dollars out of his parents 13K while still in college said:

‘I am not a bad guy; I am just taking advantage of the bad guys in the market.’

He is an expert in short selling. [so it claims in the programme.]

Another person was filmed saying ‘the market is not happy.’

What does this sound like? These are the kind of thoughts that control the stock exchange worldwide, and so with it, everyone – especially the non-professionals - who plays the stock market.

Listening to these Wall Street professionals, it seems that a bunch of folks using various tools / software decides whether to buy / sell a listed company’s shares. They take a position on the value of a company – on a moment to moment frequency.

It struck me that they do not really care about the company, its employees, its products, its business, and much less the business owners. They are doing the mechanics to arrive at one goal – make money. To make lot of money fast!

The business owner may have a dream / vision, wanting to create a value or impact for society, family or self. The moment the company gets listed and institutional buyers begin to take ownership via equity, it is these Wall Street professionals who will do the mechanics. They care about their own portfolio and their money making appetite. To the business owner, it is like selling the ‘soul’ of the company to total strangers who might destroy it eventually.

Basically, to sum it up

It is a group of individuals who put their hard earned monies into equity, thinking to earn more than interests from savings, and give the monies over to a bunch of folks, who are either the bad guys or a not so bad guy taking advantage of the bad guys.

Totally incomprehensible!

Brings to mind, content without context is pretext!

When people reduce themselves to just doing the menial, no doubt exciting, tasks at hand ie just the mechanics and ignore the wider implications of their actions [self gain at the expense of the wider community], and totally in a moral vacuum, what can we expect the world to become.

Brokers, salesmen, cosmetic surgeons, soothsayers, fengshui consultants, loansharks, luxury related businesses, etc are some of the many trades / services that are in danger of bringing more harm than good, if they are not already in that state.

Anyone who focuses on making money fast, instead of genuine care of people, no matter how altruistic the original intent was, eventually burn / bury themselves.

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