It’s too late for Tonisha Howard, the mother of three in Milwaukee who was fired for leaving work to be with her hospitalized two-year-old. And forFelix Trinidad, who was so afraid of losing his job at Golden Farm fruit store in Brooklyn that he didn’t take time off to go to the doctor—even after he vomited blood.
In the latest anti-HFT salvo, a 12-year veteran of Goldman Sachs Monday applied a new definition to the essence of high frequency trading, seeing it as a purposeful distortion of the flow of market information rather than just a successful trading technique. With that he also prescribed a financial transaction tax as part of a cure.
You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.
During an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Charlie Munger, deputy to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, had some harsh words for high-frequency trading, the practice used by huge financial firms to trade stocks in milliseconds. “Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with the computer algorithms,” said Munger. “Those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a granary.”
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, plenty of Americans have seen their credit scores tank. But can that really affect your ability to get a job? Yes, because employers increasingly are relying on workers' credit histories in screening applications.
Though technology and innovation have squeezed trading costs, the industry's profits are accounting for a bigger share of U.S. GDP, a former Goldman banker says, needlessly diverting some $635 bln from the broader economy. It lends credence to ideas like a transaction tax.
Before the Great Recession, the financial sector had consistently been eating up a greater and greater share of the economy. In 2007, it accounted for a whopping 40 percent of corporate profits. Before 1950, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of GDP; now it makes up more than 8 percent.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren is likely to focus her efforts on the Senate Banking Committee in areas that go far beyond her bread-and-butter expertise in consumer protection, analysts say.
It is really terrific to see retailers here giving critical attention to the Demos study. As a former business owner in the health services industry, I do realize that these problems are more than just abstract theory. That's one of the reasons why Demos and I thought it would be useful to evaluate the possibilities for adopting this business model across the retail sector, especially as the importance of retail to the US economy continues to grow.
“Black Friday” sales are debt traps for people to rush out and buy on credit.
But we can fix this on both the wage and profit ends of the continuum. It’s not that complex a fix, but it requires seeing our country as a whole, as one people who rise and fall together.
We can fix this whole mess and have something for which we could really give thanks, if we just paid workers a little more.
Walmart has been on something of a charm offensive where the public is concerned (and anintimidation offensive where its workers are concerned), hoping to blunt the impact of the Black Friday rebellion.
"Everyone is part-timed to death at these stores," Walton said. "When they sign up for these shifts, it's 'I don't get enough hours, I'm dying for hours, so I'll work these shifts.' Until we do something to stop the part-timing of the workforce, we're going to see this happen."
"Workers want to stop this before it becomes an absolute standard to work on Thanksgiving," Walton added.
More broadly, the widening inequality reflected in the gap between the pay of Walmart workers and the returns to Walmart investors, including the Walton fammily, haunts the American economy.
A new study released by the progressive think tank Demos on Monday estimated that if retail workers were given a living wage, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be lifted out of poverty and the wage boost would significantly bolster the economy.
Will you drive on over to your local Wal-Mart on Black Friday morning, only to find yourself confronted by capitalism's misdeeds, in the form of protesting Wal-Mart workers demanding something approaching a living wage? Here is a list of planned Wal-Mart Black Friday actions around the country.
With the holiday shopping season fast approaching,Demos has released a new report showing how raising wages in the retail sector would benefit not just workers but the economy as a whole. The study looks at what would happen if the lowest-paid retail employees earned $25,000 a year (the current average is $21,000 for retail sales people and just $18,500 for cashiers).