Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Pity us poor chickens

The door to the henhouse is now ajar. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/business/21lobby.html?th+

“As President Bush prepares to disclose the details of his plan to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars of future Social Security funds into privately held investment accounts, Wall Street has begun a muted lobbying campaign, chastened by bolder forays that failed in years past.”

Can you imagine just how much money stands to be made by those who are friends of this administration? Those that just might be the lucky recipient of this government largesse…kind of reminds me of Halliburton and friends.

“The first salvo was launched by the Securities Industry Association, which recently issued a research report arguing (Arguing means that there is another opinion) that the private accounts would not be a financial bonanza for Wall Street. In the paper, the association calculated that firms would collect at least $39 billion in fees, and perhaps considerably more, (What does “Perhaps” mean?) from managing such accounts over the next 75 years. But the group noted that the fees charged would be significantly below the fees that investment firms receive these days from low-cost mutual funds.
And even if the fees rose significantly as more people chose actively managed accounts, the association's report argued, they would still pale in comparison with the $3.3 trillion in revenues Wall Street firms are projected to earn from their core securities business over that period.”
-But we’re not comparing them; we’re talking about adding to them!

Doesn’t anybody remember the story of the fox and the henhouse?

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