Make Hole

I'll offer all sorts of excuses for my lack of activity here, from housal unit maintenance to garden tending to lack of "air-time" due to house guests, but the bottom line is I've really had a block of sorts...writing about the things that used to piss me off. Nothing has changed, really. I'm just finding it more difficult to develop an opinion. Many things continue to piss me off.

My own retirement, or at least a part of it, is tied into a long-held fantasy belief system that says that my contributions and my employers contributions should have 8% returns every year, ad infinitum. If CALPERS, prolly the largest retirement pension system in the world, can't get an 8% return on its own then the State of California covers the gap. Without knowing, I presume that when CALPERS was investing in hot-shit mortgage backed securities in 2006 and earning 15%, they didn't have to reimburse the state for earlier years' less-than-8-% returns. No, 8% guaranteed, and if it did better, well, good for them.

I question the wisdom of people who set up this fucking thing while GDP growth in the US has never, not even once, approached 8%. That CALPERS could invest in things that forever gained 8% while the broader economy at large plodded along at 3-4% (in good years) and that they thought it could be continued forever is unbelievable to me.

How can CALPERS gain on bonds when interest rates have fallen as far as they're gonna fall and can't fall any further? They can't...so my retirement gets sloshed into the stock market, the last and only hope for an 8% return in a 0.2% economy...which of course fuels all those fantastic two hundred million dollar Wall Street salaries.

I'm the 1%. At least, by working as a lowly electrical engineer for a quasi-public utility in California I'm actively taking your taxpaying dollar and funneling it directly to Morgan Stanleys' executors of multi-billion dollar CALPERS investments, earning a slice for each and every transaction along the way. Wait...does MS even still exist these days? I can't be for sure.

Morgan Stanley for decades, decades!, provided a reasonable service alongside the rest of our financial sector -- they used to provide capital allocation, or something that serviced the production of goods, to marry producers with consumers. But geez, the last thirty years has seen this service morph into a leech, skimming a larger and larger share off the economy at large -- through securitization, through high frequency trading, and credit default swaps entirely on margin.

I hear these dumbass right-wing commentators wondering aloud why the occupy movement isn't outside Mark Zuckerburg's office/housal unit, protesting his 1%. Perhaps because he, alongside the 1% from thirty years ago, is/were involved in the production of shit that people want, not involved in vacuuming up the "endless supply of loose nickels" to be had from everyone with a bank account for no net societal gain. Right wing commentators are most decidely in that 1%, and of course want every piece of the pie they themselves have acquired to which they are so entitled.

And I. I get to leech off you, too, Miss Taxpayer, by forcing you to "make hole" the CALPERS portfolio's earnings to 8% in an economy barely able to return 0.2%. Not make whole, make hole, because that's where your taxes are going, down the hole, right into my future condo with the fabulous yacht moored outside.