Once again I have to turn to my old friend Aesop and see what he says about the current multiple worldwide economic crises. If you make it through the fable, I will expand on it's relevance to our current situation past the squiggle.
Today's Fable for Our Times is THE MISER AND HIS GOLD
A Miser had a large store of gold which he buried at the base of an old oak tree. Once a week he visited the tree, dug up his store and let the coins run through his fingers. When he was through gloating over his fortune, he reburied it . His neighbor noticed the miser left once a week and followed him and saw the hidden cache of gold, which he promptly stole.
The next week when the Miser returned to the tree, he saw the hole and that his gold was gone. He wept and screamed and tore at his hair. An old woman heard the commotion and came to investigate and the Miser told her of his loss. "There, there," she said "put this handful of acorns in your hole and visit them weekly. They'll do you the same good your buried gold did."
Moral - Wealth gets it value from it's use, not it's possession
How does this relate to what is going on today? Well, I am thinking specifically of the mountains and oceans of cash that our banks and corporations are sitting on. Those banks that we bailed out. Those banks and institutions that used the free TARP money, bought treasuries and paid us back with the mney they made from the spread.
How smart are they? How dumb are we?
Bailout Banks Buying Treasuries Help Keep Rates Low
Talk about a generous spin!
Banks Use TARP Money to Buy US Bonds
But this guy gets it.
But now what good do those mountains of cash do for anyone if they are essentially buried under a tree for the banks to run their fingers through?
The banks and investment banks should have failed due to their own immoral, incompetent and corrupt dealings and we should have nationalized them. Now they are sitting on piles of ill-gotten gains while they arrest their customers and scheme for ways to chisel $5 more dollars a month from us - adding insult to injury.
The people who complain that the TARP money would have been better spent as a bonus to every American have it 100% correct. We would have taken the money and injected it into the marketplace. We would have jobs right this minute of that had happened. We would have put the gold in the economy and not under the tree.
Demand Creates Jobs and Jobs Create Demand - we have to attack from both ends.
To the corporations sitting on their piles of dollars, because they are waiting for the visit from the Confidence Fairy to wave her wand - here I am!
Here's a sprinkling of Confidence Dust for you. You can drop the BS excuse that you don't know what the regulatory environment will be. When have you ever known, and more importantly when have you ever cared or has it really mattered?
You and I both know that regardless of who is in the White House or what Party is in control of Congress that regulations are passed in order to be ignored or unenforced or rewritten by your lobbyists turned regulators. Feel better?
Go ahead, build a plant, create a new product. Hire some people. You can hire a lot of people if you will take your concern over labor costs and direct some of that concern right into your own executive suites. Those guys are paid so much money that all they can do is hoard it like the miser in the fable. Get a grip and stop beating down the wage of the guy on the line and beat down a few CEO salaries.
Ok, that's the end of Modern Fables for Today.