I don't think there is such a thing as American Fascism, but we can call it that for the sake of argument. What's the argument?
What about Clear Channel and their connections to the Bush family? Todays politicians might as well wear advertisments on their business suits like European soccer players! You can't dismiss it that easily. Just who is that senator representing when he writes legislation? His constituents or his crack deal..., err, campaign contributor?
While we're pretending, let's pretend that George Soros is the only Democrat businessman in America, and only Republicans are getting over. Nah, let's not.
What's exceptional about America is the 'investor class'. Let's not forget about them. The investor class is everybody who thinks that they may be able to retire and has some assets socked away in any financial instrument which is subject to market conditions. Real estate, stocks, bonds, pensions, commercial paper, annuities, term life insurance... OK? All Americans above the poverty line are invested in some small way with the functioning of this economy. We are a nation of millionaires, and these are the millionaires you meet in nice restaurants any day of the week. But I'm mixing too many metaphors. Bottom line is that a lot of business interests are everybody's interests.
First of all, way back when I had disposable investment cash, a cat named Peter Lynch dominated my attention. I was a Progressive at the time and I was stunned at the amount of money Fidelity Investments had in the markets, notably with the famous Magellan Fund. I basically followed the money and that's where it led. You may recall the mid-late 80s too, that's when just about everybody put their money into mutual funds - at least all of my whitecollar professional colleagues. By the mid 90s I found myself in the company of more stock players and then the infamous day traders. Then in Silicon Valley I found myself one degree of separation from warrant holders and angel investors, company principals and their pals that got inside stock before companies went public. Around 2000, I was invited to be a warrant holder, all it would cost me was 50k. Interestingly enough, I had the cash at the time but I decided against it. Lucky me. My friend lost 300k or so when his company went into legal hell with the FCC. Suffice it to say that I recognized that smart, rich people lose money too, but I was already a contrarian during the Bubble, not least because I had the good fortune to meet a real life Wall Street guru in Vail - but that's another short story.
But back to Lynch. I had enough familiarity with basic investing to know that there are various classes of stock and various classes of mutual funds. And there are also rules that investment consultants and portfolio managers have with regard to the way that their funds are managed. That straightened me out quick fast and in a hurry.
I went to my boy at Merrill Lynch and said I wanted in to one of their high tech mix mutual funds. So you know they do the whole balanced risk portfolio management thing and say you should keep some money in government strips and some in REITs and some in dividend paying blue chips and some in raw stocks and some in mutual funds. So I end up into a Class B of some high growth mid-cap high tech mutual fund, because I don't have 10K cash to dump in and get into Class A. Plus this fund is already a high performer which means it's oversubscribed. Think of it like the price of a Miata. Everybody wants one so rich people get in first and raise the price. I ask the guy if maybe in 6 months I can flip it or take out half and he looks at me like I'm smoking crack. Bottom line was I was in or out and if I wanted to flip stuff, I should play pure stocks and do trading with Brown & Company (which it turns out has been acquired by ETrade). We're conservative here at Merrill, and he shot my wife a look like, calm your boy down ma'am.
See, when you run a mutual fund, you have to keep a certain number of classes open and blah blah. There's a buttload of rules that the SEC enforces. My understanding is that this cuts both ways for the company maintaining the portfolio. They buy and sell stocks in and out of the fund as a block and this information is public. So the companies know what's going on. When subscribers to the fund (investors) find out the fund is not doing well, they liquidate. The fund manager has to sell it to suckers or close the fund. There are so many mutual funds, so many companies and so many investors that it's impossible to manipulate the market. Not impossible meaning rhetorically impossible, impossible meaning practically impossible and legally impossible.
I met an Indian dude with 2 PhDs who figured out how to juke the system, so let me describe that in a quick aside, while I'm at it. Since mutual fund movements are public and many of them trade according to well established rules, you can figure out which of those rule disfavor a particular individual company and then bet against it, but this is a pure stock play. Here's an example. Let's say you hate WalMart and you love Sears. Furthermore you know that Fidelity's Retail Fund holds WalMart and Sears and a dozen other retailers. You hear news that WalMart is having a bad quarter. So the whole Fidelity fund goes down, and since it's the largest institutional holder of WalMart stock it's bad news for the whole sector and it drags down the stock price of Sears too. But you know Sears is run by a brother who has his head on straight and you understand that the fundamentals are good with Sears, so you buy Sears stock individually. Depending on the amount of Sears that's held by insiders, institutions and individual investors, Sears stock will bounce back when they announce good results. You can also play the game in reverse and short Sears when WalMart does well. The trick is understanding the math underneath, fine tuning the model and determining how much you want to risk. Plus the real bonus was when a company got dropped from an institution or was in play for buyout..etc. Just like Vegas, there's a million ways to play it. Me? I didn't bother, but it was a good lesson, and I have done channelling.
So. What about Clear Channel? The stock ticker is CCU. Who owns that stock? The facts are here. It's 90% owned by institutional investors. It's a public corporation, the books are open. If you've got something to prove, then prove it. But you can't because it's a waste of time. There are too many people whose money is tied up into such entities to let something like some crazy scheme involving the President to manipulate a public company for his own personal or partisan benefit. The fact of the matter is that everybody with money invested in Clear Channel wants the company to do well. But you cannot manipulate business with politics, that's what socialists do, that's what communists do, that's what people like me are against.
Can you manipulate politics with business? You can't do anything more as a Republican than you can as a Democrat. But honestly, I don't pay so much attention to that, and politically it's a non-starter. I mean opinions are easy to change but fortunes are not. People have an unlimited supply of political opinions but only a few they can bet their money on. Would you bet money on the results of elections? Would you bet money on the outcome of opinion polls?
This post hasn't gone exactly where I thought it would, it's kind of overkill on the openness of public companies and free markets and the inability for anyone to control their value. But I hope it has given people an understanding of how many people are actually involved in capitalism in America and that conspiracies just don't work. Bet money on it.
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