Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:29:39 +1100
Subject: Re: AUT: Workers' Credit
From: Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine-AT-yahoo.com.br>


On 14/12/2004 11:08 PM, "Lowe Laclau" <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Found this link to a talk he did in 95:
> 
> http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/010.html
> 

Thanks for this Lowe; anything in French, Italian or Spanish would be good
too.

Guttmann writes:

> "Deregulation of money has turned many Americans into investors (see
> especially the role of pension plans and mutual funds), and has allowed  the
> middle class to join the rentier class (the money class). This  change in
> class composition is reinforced by aging baby boomers going  from being
> debtors in the 1970s (favoring inflation) to becoming savers  (favoring low
> inflation and high real interest rates). This  gives the Federal Reserve a
> political constituency for the hard money course of the last fifteen years,
> which favors financial  investors".

I suppose that he must be talking about a subsection of the baby boomers
themselves, because in Australia (and in the US - but places like the
Netherlands are even more extreme) deregulation has increased the debt load
of just about everyone.

There is also the question that people have become investors through the
agency of mutual funds; I own shares through my university pension fund - I
have not once bothered finding out what they are. They must by law give at
least x return, so why should I care? How does this form of ownership affect
my ideology? Admitedly, I am more resilient than most to the charms of a
super fund, but they were not winning popularity contests around the place
last time I checked.

This is also not appropriate for Australian conditions, where the
'financialisastion' of class has been strongly tied with real estate. Most
of the working class real estate investors don't become savers - they become
indebted, and since the whole point is to sell the house at a higher price
than it was bought for, my guess is that they are very much in favour of
asset price inflation. They are also fanatical about low nominal interest
rates.

A lot of this, I think, has to do with people thinking they are richer than
they are. They probably think they own things they don't and are vulnerable
to things that don't harm them too, like progressive taxation and terrorism.


Thiago






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