Saturday, October 15, 2011

Post this on the locker room bulletin board

This is a good piece, and it could be important. I hope it gets widely circulated. Obviously, the bankers' cluelessness stands in pointed contrast to this. Money quote (pun intended): “'I have no problem with capitalism. I have no problem with a market economy. But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical,' Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin."

That's the key point, the one embodied in Occupy Wall Street's brilliant name, the one that opens the door to a successful global movement, the one to keep hammering home: This is not about the failure of capitalism; it's about the need for financial capital to cede the stage in favor of production capital. Banking needs to become boring again. Innovation needs to move from financial instruments to transformative technologies. The rules of the road need to favor those who actually create something of value -- a product or a service -- rather than those who get rich from surfing the economy itself, from arbitrage.

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