Grantham wonders if Marx was right after all (Barf)

MarketWatch ^ | 2/29/12 | Al Lewis

[illiac]

DENVER (MarketWatch) — With all the news focused on Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter, it was easy to miss Jeremy Grantham’s more urgent missive.

Like Buffett, Grantham is a legendary value investor. He’s co-founder of the Boston-based investment firm GMO LLC, which manages $97 billion. That’s about half the market value of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Buffett, in his widely anticipated letter, is content to repeat platitudes, such as “America’s best days lie ahead.” The Oracle of Omaha proclaimed “the banking industry was back on its feet” and even managed to find the bright side of foreclosures: “Large numbers of people who have ‘lost’ their house through foreclosure have actually realized a profit because they carried out refinancings earlier that gave them cash in excess of their cost.”

Grantham, however, takes a longer view, and isn’t so “aw shucks” about the future of our broken economic system.

“Capitalism,” he writes, “threatens our existence.”

[BigEdLB]

One can also wonder if lobotomies are a proper course of treatment for dementia as well...

[RJS1950]

Of course he would say that; for the same reasons the oligarchs of the old Soviet Union supported the system that kept them in financial and political power. Buffett and his butt-boys have little to do with or desire for capitalism and are primarily concerned with payoffs and contributions to politicians who enable them to make large profits from the economic destruction of this country and true capitalism.

[Lazamataz]

Capitalism,” he writes, “threatens our existence.”

Then, Grantham, you POS, resign IMMEDIATELY from your capitalist position in this capitalist company, give all your capitalist money to a communist government, and move there.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

If that's what you believe, then Grantham agrees with you. He believes that capitalist societies will tend to degrade into crony capitalist ones. But then it's been said before and even has a name: The Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Russia wasn't ever truly communist. It was just a succession of oligarchs: the czars, the commisars, and now the "oligarchs".

We had a long run of a relatively free market, but it appears that the oligarchs are finally getting their hands around our throats as well.

The large corporations are not our friends. They owe it to their shareholders to make as much profit as possible. We have passed a threshold where it makes more sense for businesses to spend money on managing the government than on managing their businesses. Schumpeter talked about this. As businesses become very large they become almost indistinguishable from large government bureaucracies. They being to think and act like large bureaucracies. They become kindred spirits with governments.

The little guy is left to fend for himself.

[mjp]

Governments must step in. “To interfere with Marx’s apocalyptic vision, we need some enlightened governmental moderation ..

Capitalism is the economics that is compatible with reason, reality, human nature, natural rights and freedom. And Marxism is not.Any economy, such as Marxism, that disrupts the interplay of immutable natural organic forces is inherently flawed and doomed to failure. Centralized planning, investment, control,and decision making is doomed to failure because technology is always progressing and advancing and its evolution is impossible to predict.