What’s up with the Wall St. protestors and now that it’s gone global? What is their objective?

What’s up with the Wall St. protestors and now that it’s gone global? What is their objective? –@StealthAviator

The Wall Street protestors are angry. They are so angry it hurts. Let me tell you an example. A good friend of mine has a credit score of 817. Which means he’s not only returned every penny he ever owed he probably gave the lenders even more money and said, “hey, go have a big party or something. I’m paying for it.” I’ve never even met someone with that credit score. To be honest, before I spoke to him (yesterday) I thought the top score was 800. But he says he has 817 so I believe him. He also made 300k last year. He wants to buy a house for 500k and put 30 or 40% down.

Guess what? The banks won’t lend to him. The banks have $1.6 trillion in cash. The banks CEOs took home about a trillion in bonuses since the bailout. And yet they won’t give my hardworking friend a loan so he can live in a house with his wife and three kids.

And that’s the cream of the crop. There are a thousand stories of foreclosures, layoffs, etc that are much worse. So people are angry. I get it.

But nothing the protestors do are going to change the banks. It’s like all the people who protested the Vietnam War at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Guess what! You won. Nixon got elected. You were protesting the wrong thing at the wrong place and towards the wrong people to get what you wanted accomplished.

The banks want to make money. They want to lend to people.

I can go two ways from here: personal or public.

I’ll do public first:

A)    The Fed needs to stop paying the banks to hold onto money. The Fed was so paranoid that the banks were going to lose all of their money that they started paying the banks 0.25% to hold onto their reserves. Why would the banks lend that out? The Fed should just get out of the way. By the way, the Fed is located in Washington DC.

B)    Why did we give any bailouts without some restrictions on executive compensation? By the way, Congress and the President are in Washington DC.

C)    There are 6mm private small businesses in the US. Instead of randomly printing money and giving it to the defense industry ($3 trillion already spent in Iraq and Afghanistan – two countries I still can’t find on a map if you had a gun to my head) why not do one single little stimulus that incentivizes each of these 6mm small businesses to hire one more person? Bam! Unemployment solved.

And now, more importantly, the personal:

A)    Why are you so angry? Corporate America has always sucked. Think how much better it is now than a century or so ago before child labor laws. Women garmentos would go on fire and the bosses would keep them locked in until everyone died. Children would work 80 hours a week for pennies. Heck, we had slaves.

B)    If you want to walk comfortably, you can’t cover the entire  world with leather. You put on sneakers.

C)    Get my post out: The Nine Ways to Succeed (which really should be called “The Nine Obstacles to Success” http://bit.ly/jxz9pM) and start following them. Start being grateful for what you have. Start being the smartest person in the room.

D)    Plug all your leaks http://bit.ly/lbFfUW. Anger, even if justified, is a leak. I get scared also. I’m scared every day. I don’t want the world to end. I want to have opportunity for myself also, and my daughters, and their daughters. But that means I have to work at it. The banks will never give it to me. Eventually a boom will come again, like it always does, and the banks will throw money at all of us. But first, let’s get ready to take it and this time, let’s not lose it.

So what about those big CEOs who took the bailout money? Should they be put in jail? Who knows. Why did Washington DC give them that money? I don’t know anything. I’m only worried about what’s in my pocket right now. I don’t care about Obama (other than that I think we should Abolish the Presidency) and I don’t care about Lloyd Blankfein (other than that he didn’t return my email several years ago but that’s another story). I worry about what’s in my pocket, not yours and I trust will consistently do the wrong thing, like they always have.