How We Value the Super-Rich - Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/weekinreview/28stone.html?ref=weekinreview

by robg • 18 years ago

51 36 18 years ago

jmtame2• 18 years ago

I'm taking a Money, Media, and Power class that looks at the history of the United States since the 80s in great detail. It considers how America has become extremely capitalistic, which isn't bad as long as open, competitive markets are encouraged.

What we've seen happen in history is the massive consolidation of companies. Look at the media industry, for example. It is now impossible to create your own TV network, and it will probably soon be impossible to compete freely on the Internet because the same conglomerates that dominate the cable and phone industry are trying to do the same thing with the Internet. I have two words that can summarize the entire thing: network neutrality. Complete deregulation is a bad idea; what happens if you take all the rules out of a football game? Everyone will cheat.

How does this relate to the topic? We don't like people who get their money for two reasons, in my opinion. We don't like people who are anti-competitive, and who try to dominate markets (such as the Internet, cable, and television industries) and intentionally want to stifle innovation. That's not contributing to society, and we all know that once a monopoly is established, a company has no incentive to innovate.

The other reason I personally dislike people with great wealth is because they're not being fiducially responsible. If America is going to be more capitalistic, the people with the money should be driving innovation, not stifling it. They need to act responsibly with their money, and that includes being philanthropic and charitable. When they just hoard it all and it becomes a competition to see who can hold the biggest pot, I don't think you deserve to have it in the first place (think Elon Musk, and how much money he has invested into SpaceX and Tesla Motors). What we have now is a massive gap in income disparity, and that's pissing off the lower and middle class. It's actually driving the middle class out of existence, and I would say at that point the wealth isn't being distributed evenly enough.

That's my take on why we dislike wealthy people. At least some of them. As the article pointed out, I really do think some self-made rich individuals rightfully deserve it and are acting responsibly.

Hexstream• 18 years ago

"What happens if you take all the rules out of a football game? Everyone will cheat"

Technically, if you take all the rules out of a football game then nobody can cheat.

jmtame2• 18 years ago

Ha! That is true. I should have said what happens if you take all the regulation out of a football game. I was trying to emphasize the point that deregulation (or taking away neutrality rules) is bad and will allow larger media companies free reign to do whatever they want. With that much power, they're bound to exert absolute control over the whole system.

The idea of regulation is not to stifle younger, newer innovators. It's to prevent the larger players from taking over and locking out competition. At one point, it was illegal to own more than 40 TV stations.

elai• 18 years ago

The thing is that the current rules in the USA for telecom & cable companies encourage monopolization and got us in this telecom mess in the first place. Municipalities giving local monopolies, huge government subsides to a small few companies, preferential laws, the FCC, and a long history of acting like monopolistic assholes. If all legal advantage and monopoly was REMOVED from telecom, you would all of a sudden see a huge change in the system.

abstractbill• 18 years ago

It is now impossible to create your own TV network

Justin.TV to the rescue! ;-)

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

You make a lot of popular assumptions in your post that are not supported by reality. I would be skeptical of the value that you are getting for your tuition in "Money, Media, and Power".

>What we've seen happen in history is the massive consolidation of companies. Look at the media industry, for example.

The media market is fluid and competitive. The top players today are not the same top players of 10 or 20 years ago. The industry has also not become much more consolidated over the past few decades.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29001.html

>we all know that once a monopoly is established, a company has no incentive to innovate.

A sluggish monopoly is a ripe target for new competitors, as long as the government or other barriers to entry don't get in the way.

See Firefox/Internet Explorer.

> If America is going to be more capitalistic, the people with the money should be driving innovation, not stifling it. They need to act responsibly with their money, and that includes being philanthropic and charitable.

I have rarely seen innovation come from philanthropic or charitable acts. The vast increase in technology, efficiency, and productivity of the last 50 years can largely be attributed to selfish, for-profit actions.

>When they just hoard it all and it becomes a competition to see who can hold the biggest pot, I don't think you deserve to have it in the first place

In the process of "hoarding" wealth, they create value. See my previous point.

> It's actually driving the middle class out of existence.

Bullshit:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/08/26/new-income-and-pov...

yummyfajitas• 18 years ago

>It's actually driving the middle class out of existence, and I would say at that point the wealth isn't being distributed evenly enough.

I think you are using the term "middle class" in an atypical way.

Consider a person who has "a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded...his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs"

Would you categorize this person as middle class? I think most people would (I certainly do). (If not, please explain.)

It turns out the person I just described is the median poor American. Everyone is now middle class, even the poor.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm

krakensden• 18 years ago

Reminds me of Paul Graham's `cities and ambition' essay...

newt03113• 18 years ago

The article makes it look like bankers get paid for nothing. That is simply not true. Wall Street allocates capital. Somebody has to decide how the capital available in the US gets distributed. For startups, its VCs, for mature companies, it is large institutional banks and the stocks and bond markets. The salaries are large because of the sheer amount of money that floats around. Consider the banker(s) who decide whether to give a loan to GE or handle a mutual fund. Chances are good that that single transaction has several million USD attached to it. Even a few %age of that is a very large amount. The larger comercial banks like JPM and Citigroup have upwards of half a trillion dollars of deposits. Suddenly multi-million dollar salaries don't seem that extravagant anymore.

Furthermore, if top level execs were really overpaid, we would see competition from outsiders capable of offering similar quality at lower price. It is not unusual for corporations to hire outside the company. That executive pay is still high is an indication that maybe, CEOs really are worth a few million dollars a year.

This is further complicated by federal regulation surrounding this sector of the economy. Banking regulations make it nearly impossible to start a bank. Other financial institutions are similarly constrained (though maybe not to such an extent). This artificially decreases supply and therefore, increases prices.

Are there some abuses in pay? Sure, just like there are abuses in everything else. However, because business execs are paid X times the average American and some demonstrably bad CEOs are rewarded extravagantly for their incompetence does not imply that capitalism has failed and all high-level pay needs to be regulated.

gruseom4• 18 years ago

To me your comments make the article seem more convincing, not less. Like when it says:

To folks in Silicon Valley and those that share their business values, a big payday for steering your company into catastrophe smells.

I share their business values.

Conversely, "Heads I win tails I win" is a business value I don't share. It doesn't seem very entrepreneurial at all.

Edit: Who's saying that "all high-level pay needs to be regulated"? I didn't see that in the article.

Edit 2: changed wording in response to comment below.

npk• 18 years ago

>that doesn't seem very free-markety at all.

You're wrong. The free market comes from the board of directors who approve such the "heads I win, tails I win" package. The board was not forced by any non-free-market laws. Thus, these compensation packages show the free market working.

ardit33• 18 years ago

Absolutely not true. It seems that a lot Wall Street allocated the money where THEY would make the most profits. And this happen to be the housing mania. For few years the profit from housing was so juicy, that they decided to ignore the fundamentals, and their myopia brought us to this situation.

In a good scenario, wall street will be allocating money to where it is more efficient, in our case, they just shuffled money around in esoteric papers, and pinched a bit of it every time it changed hand, which contributed nothing to the economy, except their own pockets. Now the music has stopped, and a lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand, and brought us to this mess.

gruseom4• 18 years ago

Now the music has stopped, and a lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand

Now that you mention it, hot potato and musical chairs at the same time could make a pretty good game. :)

newt03113• 18 years ago

Actually this offers an interesting case study. Lets look at the results of this crisis.

Three major financial institutions (Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Merryl Lynch) had their shareholders loose most of their assets and are no longer operational or independent. The remaining two investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs abandoned this business models and are now on their way to become bank holding companies.

In all cases, shareholders have seen massive (>50%) declines in the value of their shares due to excessive risk taking.

Do you seriously think that any institution except for Hedge Funds will ever leverage themselves 30:1 based on shaky opaque assets in the near future (I say near because every ~10 years, wall street goes haywire).

Furthermore, you are happy bashing wall street but have you ever taken a look at the balance sheet of the US government?

Look at your own last paragraph:

"lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand, and brought us to this mess."

Capitalism at work. These banks took foolish bets and now they are paying for it. The biggest blot in this picture is the $700 billion bailout which is sponsored by ... the US government.

vitaminj• 18 years ago

Yeah true, Wall St bankers provide the service of capital allocation and liquidity (and in a perfect world, they would be allocating capital efficiently, but that's a story for another day). However I think what rankles people is three things (and most of these were touched on in the article):

1. They don't risk their own money. The true capitalist risks his own money for some productive enterprise, and is rewarded if it comes off, or walks away with nothing if it doesn't. Most investment banker chiefs walk away with millions even if they run the company into the ground.

2. They don't produce anything tangible. Ultimately they just move money around. It's worth something, but multi-million dollar salaries? Probably not. Also, the things they produce don't have visible impacts on normal people unless it goes belly up.

3. The intrinsic value of an investment banker's production is arguably a lot lower compared to how much they are compensated. I'm not going to go into this, but how much is capital allocation intrinsically worth? In my opinion, the work they do is probably more comparable to the value of a tax accountant.

The article was about why people hate bankers. You've argued why the market values them so highly, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the vitriol of the common man is unjustified.

anamax4• 18 years ago

You don't get it. And, frankly, you sound like someone who played junior high football 10 years ago and is claiming that you're just a set of cleats away from playing for an 0-4 NFL team.

There are lots of people willing to do those jobs for a lot less money. The problem is that no one in a position to hire such people trusts the "lot less money" folks.

Instead, they hire the few folks who have demonstrated success on the ladder up to those jobs.

If you think that's easy, go for it and turn down the big bucks when it's offered.

time_management• 18 years ago

"Rich" isn't the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they hear about Steve Jobs, any more than "powerful" comes to their minds when they hear about Barack Obama. People think of them as "successful", because they like those who have vision and succeed at implementing it, but "the rich" and "the powerful" have negative connotations. There's a one-step mental transition in realizing that, in fact, Steve Jobs is rich (but that's okay) because he is successful, and likewise for Obama.

Silicon Valley is ostensibly positive-sum. Some of what occurs on Wall Street is also positive-sum: for example, arbitrage and market-making provide liquidity to markets. Some financial activity, however, is not. Unfortunately for Wall Street's reputation, people tend to focus on the activities that are excessive and destructive, such as the subprime mortgage fiasco.

In general, people tend to resent most those who make money in manners that are zero-sum (or negative-sum). Examples of this would be NYC landlords, who are becoming inordinately rich based entirely on others' pain and misfortune, and health insurance executives, who enrich themselves by charging ridiculous premiums and then denying care to sick people. Most people, when they think of Wall Street, think of traders; few would draw the distinction between, say, corporate finance and what traders do. Trading isn't actually zero-sum, given that it provides liquidity, but it seems to most people like a zero-sum game, and so it's not well respected.

asdf3332• 18 years ago

I agree w/ your point except the part about trading being a value-added activity. Liquidity, if you ask Warren Buffett, is overrated.

When people trade AAPL, for example, there is a loser and a winner. The real value is not created by those trading AAPL it is created by Steve Jobs and those working at AAPL. While trading is not zero-sum, it is a mostly zero-sum activity.

You might say. AIG may beg to differ, since it went under for liquidity, rather than solvency reasons. However if you don't employ dangerous amounts of leverage, it is not an issue. There are plenty of insurance companies in business who didn't dance too close to the edge like AIG did.

gaius• 18 years ago

Yes and no. The price of AAPL is whatever people are willing to pay for it. AAPL is effectively a currency; Apple can use it to acquire other companies. Without an active secondary market, stock can't play this role at all.

furiouslol• 18 years ago

In light of the Wall St bailout, here's a question to ponder: Is Google too big to fail?

In the event of capital inadequacy due to fraud/investments-gone-wrong, should the government bail out Google with taxpayers' money since Google is so integral with the Internet economy?

yters• 18 years ago

Great point. Their integrality is dependent on all their data servers. Should data storage become a government regulated utility to guard against this?

neilk• 18 years ago

The whole Internet economy is small enough to fail. It's still just a tiny sliver of the US economy. And ready substitutes for Google's wares exist all over the place; not as good in some cases, but more than adequate.

Besides, Google is mostly a facilitator of transactions. The might get fractions of a penny from every dollar spent on the interwebs. So if that price is fair, presumably we would just have to pay a few micro-pennies more per item for distributors to find alternative ways to market their goods or spend a few micro-pennies more effort in searching for it ourselves.

That seems wrong to me somehow, as it can be very hard to find some things on engines other than Google. But it seems to make economic sense. Unless we consider the very low "cut" that Google is taking to be an anti-competitive measure?

jasonlbaptiste• 18 years ago

This also goes back to pg's article on where you live and what defines "power". In the past 7 years, I've lived in the following places and definitely have seen what constitutes wealth/doing well:

Cambridge- Definitely education, but in a weird place. I studied for the summer at Harvard. Everyone was unique, some cases weird, but absolutely brilliant in their specialty. It was about being the best in their area of study.

New York/Northern NJ- I grew up here, and this is where I was before going back to Boston. It was about more traditional routes of money, and nothing earth shattering. You were a dentist, a doctor, or wall street trader. There were some celebrities around too. It was all about the traditional path. Go to a private high school, go to a good college, get the right internships, slave away 9-5, then become rich via Goldman Sachs or something. Boy did I break that mold...

(Went to Boston College next, but not adding that in since Cambridge covered that area well enough)

Miami- Now this is interesting. The whole Miami Vice attitude you see is 100% real. My thoughts on this area are indicative of it as a whole, NOT the technology sector, which is flourishing very nicely down there. Success was measured by how nice your material possessions were. Lamborghinis, bottles of Cristal, and overpriced penthouses. Most money here wasn't really earned, but through family inheritance or foreign overseas money. Yes, drug money still powers part of the town.

Silicon Valley- This can include SF, even though my experiences are from living in Palo Alto. It's all about what you're building, who you're going to help, and what the "delta" is. How were things before hand, and how are they once you're done? No doubt money is important, but it's a by product of the previously mentioned statement. In my 5 months here, I've met the founders of insanely successful companies, billionaires,etc. Honestly, you wouldn't know it, if it wasn't for the companies they founded. Everyone is also willing to help out here. In short, wealth is valued by what you have created and the people you help achieve that same goal.

hsuresh• 18 years ago

This is on similar lines to PG's essay on wealth -> http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html (One of my all time favorites, wish i had learnt about it earlier).

geebee2• 18 years ago

This reminds me of PG's essay on how to create wealth:

"his essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it. There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these."

There was a time when inheritance was considered more honorable than trade (typical of most aristocratic societies), but that's been pretty well dismissed by now. In most free market democracies, the social respect for huge fortunes tends to be closely correlated with the proximity of the activity to the direct creation of wealth.

So high tech tends to be viewed very favorably. Seeking wealth through marriage is viewed unfavorably ("gold-digging"). Flipping condos is tolerated but not highly respected, but renovating for a profit is viewed more positively. Vast sums won through litigation tend to be irritating (though people generally reserve their scorn for the big share taken by the attorney, less so for the litigants). These activities aren't despised, but they are respected less than the true wealth creators.

And lastly, of course, there's genuine hatred for the illegal (or legal but predatory) practices like extortion, robbery, cartel-building, and so forth.

Finance probably isn't despised (or at least wasn't until the recent bail-out), but because it's perceived as further down the chain from high-tech, it will generate more resentment than admiration.

By the way, high tech isn't completely clean here - Carly Fiorina did receive a huge retirement package - worth about $40 mil, I think.

How We Value the Super-Rich - Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley

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