Is Barack Hussien Obama purposely trying to destroy the US economy?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I think this whole depression is caused by speculations of stock market. Stock market is exploiting the efforts of government´s to save companies in their individual countries. This just clearly shows that unregulated capitalism is not working. If investment trends can create world wide depressions, there is something clearly wrong with the system. First i cant understand how stock exchance, which was greated first to support funding companies, has turned in a leech that pumps money in certain target in order to raise its value and when a certain marginal has been reached, the investors sell and create profit out of nothing. That is clearly exploitation of system, which only harms economy. In a global economy, companies are forced to to downgrade the benefits of workers, because there is always another place, where products can be made cheaper and if a company fails to do that, investors withdraw their funding. Basically this kind of system is only an automatic to create mysery.

I think that both US and EU should stamp a healthy tax to any stock exchange, so the leeching and speculating would end and investors would go back on investing money to enterprises in order to gain shares from their profits and not jsut to speculate with margins when to buy and when to sell. Both communism and capitalism fail like any extremes. Only reasonable option is mixed economy.

While, in the short term, speculation can end up distorting stock values, over longer periods of time the process of speculation (as well as the futures markets) serve to stabilize market changes. They are investing in what they think will improve, and stopping that investment when the believe it has peaked.

Example: as oil soared over 140 USD, futures investors and stock investors began to shift funding AWAY from companies that were making profits based on that price. They predicted, accurately, that consumers would shift behavior and moderate their consumption of this product at that price. By shifting their investing, these investors actually cushioned some of the inevitable dropoff by shifting funding to companies which were bound to pick up business from a market looking for less costly energy.

While I think that markets need regulation -- actually not so much in the way of new regulations but more support to actually enforce the ones we have -- I cannot see how taxing market investment does anything but siphon money from consumers. Capital Gains taxes and the like simply let the government "take its cut," while corporate taxes are passed along to consumers as an expense.

The real role of government shouldn't be to manage the market, but to work (and a lot better than it has) to minimize and punish fraud while providing a maximum of transparency. Caveat emptor will always be relevant, but their is nothing wrong with the government making the buyer as informed as possible.

[Kagemusha]

While, in the short term, speculation can end up distorting stock values, over longer periods of time the process of speculation (as well as the futures markets) serve to stabilize market changes. They are investing in what they think will improve, and stopping that investment when the believe it has peaked.

Example: as oil soared over 140 USD, futures investors and stock investors began to shift funding AWAY from companies that were making profits based on that price. They predicted, accurately, that consumers would shift behavior and moderate their consumption of this product at that price. By shifting their investing, these investors actually cushioned some of the inevitable dropoff by shifting funding to companies which were bound to pick up business from a market looking for less costly energy.

While I think that markets need regulation -- actually not so much in the way of new regulations but more support to actually enforce the ones we have -- I cannot see how taxing market investment does anything but siphon money from consumers. Capital Gains taxes and the like simply let the government "take its cut," while corporate taxes are passed along to consumers as an expense.

The real role of government shouldn't be to manage the market, but to work (and a lot better than it has) to minimize and punish fraud while providing a maximum of transparency. Caveat emptor will always be relevant, but their is nothing wrong with the government making the buyer as informed as possible.

Well if we look at what the stock market did during last autumn, before the last major leap downwards. I am not quite sure from where it started, probably from Wall Street. The trend was that overall it would be not profitable to invest in stocks and the capital should be moved to gold or other raw materials, which will keep their value well. The drumming in all medias, sucked in also the small investors, thus pushing the market on downward spiral.

Now ofcourse investors that had played with loaned money went panic as they could not stand the loss of value of their stocks and started selling like grazy, which further dropped the value of the stocks, while companies did not get investments, which has resulted in bankrupcies and severe cuts on production. Now govermnents are spending tax payers money to loan money to companies.

I wonder how good money was made by those who actually had capita and how much money they will make in the future, when they will start buying dirt cheap stocks, once the rock bottom has been hit, thus enabling the economy to start growing again. The only difference being that again after this economical depression, majority of funds are again in fewer hands. Thus works the wonderful global capitalism.