Doug Casey: Keeping capital in a depression

[Dame]

Back post WW2, tax-deferred pension plans became fashionable as a way, IMHO, of intervening in the inter-generational transfer of assets and skills.  

These pension plans were then managed by professional fund managers, and grew and grew and grew ...  These funds are operated in a mostly speculative manner for the better interests of the fund management.  And now the individual contributors (notice how they are not referred to as investors, the investor is the fund (managers)) want to retire and withdraw their money.

So, now who is going to purchase the stocks and bonds required to 'invest' in capital projects?  So much for capitalism, first one would need a pool of capital.

[Beeherder]

Johnny Knoxville (actor - Jackass The Movie) has done a 3 part video about Detroit. Many interesting aspects of this review of failing mega factory environment. If you want to know what happens to those old factories this is really what happens. It is a 3 part series, here is part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMysMDHdb4

oops, sorry about that mistake, it really is a Johnny Knoxville video and it really is worth watching ... really!

language warning he likes the F word even thought they manage to bleep it mostly.

[darwinslair]

part one of the series on detroit is a story about cholesteral?

Tom

[Lady Lilya]

If the first factory owner couldn't survive, what would make a future factory owner have a better chance?  Simply a far superior business model?  How likely is that?  I guess subsidies would be a factor, though.

[Mike]

Government butting in didn't help any in the realm of cars.  Cash for junkers took a few paid-for usable cars out of the market and replaced them with new cars bought with new debt, and subsidized with more taxpayer debt.

If the auto industry had been allowed to fail we would have witnessed exactly the price-clearing Tigger envisioned.  The bankrupt pension funds would not have survived the bankruptcy and liquidation. 

The alternative reality we are living is exorbitant auto-worker pensions bleeding their hosts and requiring occasional taxpayer bail-outs.

I feel for the workers who put in a life-time at an auto plant and is destined to lose their pension to default via inflation or their insolvent pension.  It is a lesson.  We not only need to bargain for a pension, but be vigilant that it is solvent.

[Beeherder]

all it would take to restore faith to the system is some hard time in a real live prison for felons for the TOP bankers. A year for Jamie Diamonds and Lord Blankyerfine in with some of those hard core homosexual dominant males and this stuff stops.

The only way to be sure its solvent is for it to be in your full control no shared risk, no shared benefits, its all whatever you can do for yourself and your family that's all the pension you will ever be able to trust, imo.

failed detroit is coming back for artists and creative thinkers but the old factories are not recoverable as seen in this Johnny Knoxville video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMysMDHdb4