@scottalanmiller said in Mobile Payments:
Traditionally, the "poor", meaning those with less than $1m in liquid investment capital, invest via standard vehicles like banks, mutual funds, and so forth. Because the poor have so much wealth to invest as a group (mostly in IRAs, pensions and so forth) the highest paid fund managers and financial experts worked for the investment banks because even though individual customers were small, their total size was quite large. So this is where the money was. So the poor got the best investment skills that the rich could not afford at their smaller sizes.
So what was done? Once the government nationalize the banks, they used that position to claim that financial advisors were being paid way too much. They never talked about how they earned that money, only stated huge salaries and convinced the public to put caps on their earnings - punishing the people who were helping them most or cutting off their noses to spite their faces. It is a common factor in American ethics that we tend to value fairness over both total value or self preservation. Most Americans would vote to hurt people they see getting ahead unfairly, even if it hurt everyone innocent in the process, rather than see everyone benefit from one person getting away with something. It's not wrong, but it is unique to American thinking.
So what was the result? The top financial advisors had to move to hedge funds (which legally require $1m in cash to use) so that the top talent in the industry was available exclusively to the ultra rich (even an average millionaire can't produce $1m in cash all at once) and the poor using investment banks had to make do with the second string people who weren't good enough to work at the high paying, unregulated hedge funds. It was a coup. The rich managed to get the best talent while the poor lost their top resources for gaining retirement wealth. But it all happened at the will of the poor, so the rich didn't have to feel bad about it.
I'm one of those people who moved from the investment sector to hedge funds. I used to head cash exchanges for the US government, but after that move, they couldn't afford me and had to hire a team of people to replace me at much higher cost and hedge funds got me instead where they couldn't attract me before.
It was just a thinly veiled ploy to use government intervention to keep the best of the best for the richest of the rich, while getting the public to decide to do it thinking that they were "sticking it to the man."
This is honestly an explanation I have never heard before. Your claim is that the banks were "nationalized" for the sole purpose of benefiting the rich, and not due to the fact that these banks were going under and the whole credit system was about to collapse.
But yes that's a common theme these days. (Insert individual here) makes too much money and there's no reason anyone should make that much money, let's cap earnings at $XXX because FAIRNESS. Majority of this is BS if you ask me.
