8 ms·

An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%

198 points by niels_olson 15y ago

ryanmarsh 15y ago
I'm still not discouraged... keep trying.
ShabbyDoo 15y ago
In summary: Those in the 99th to 99.9th percentile of wealth may be richer than those in the 98th percentile, but they don't enjoy most advantages implicitly granted to the top 0.1% of Americans.
- gburt 15y ago
  I think this is a very important point. The 1% is not the enemy except for in symbolic terms. The enemy is a much smaller group of individuals/corporations than that, and perhaps even, the enemy is more of a "process" than it is any group. I doubt Wal*Mart executives sit up at the top of their tower and plan about how they can tear apart society for their own self interest, but rather, there is a whole process and system built up that is doing exactly that.
  - cynicalkane 15y ago
    I was ready to agree until you said Wal*Mart, in particular in the context of 'tearing apart society'. Economists--including progressives, such as Matt Yglesais--often comment on the bipartisan fetishization of small businesses and liberal demonization of large ones. This attitude often seems motivated by isolated incidents--the tendency of any deep pocketed company to attract bad press and lawsuits--not the general effect of large business on people as accounted for by sound economic data. In general, large businesses tend to offer better jobs and more advanced economies tend to have more, larger businesses. Nor should Wal-Mart be constructed as harming the lower class, as their very low prices are especially important for the lower class which they achieve by real efficiencies of scale for which mom-and-pop stores are generally incapable. I don't have time to find citations everything, but for the last claim you can check out http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/features/2006/is_walmart_good_for_the_american_working_class/the_low_prices_are_good_news.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/fe...
    - nekojima 15y ago
      In some markets WalMart is losing market share or decreased revenue growth because it has priced itself above what the 'lower class' can afford. This is largely why dollar (or less) stores have done so well in recent years in North America.
    - pyre 15y ago
      What about their response to employees trying to start a union?
      - dantheman 15y ago
        Unions in America are broken; no one has problems with a group of people organizing as long as they don't get special rights. For instance, being able to fire a person when they don't show up for work, e.g. firing strikers. Or look at what the NLRB is doing to Boeing as they try to open up a new plant in SC. It's unfortunate, but unions are a cancer - they enshrine an us vs them attitude, they demand special rights, they encourage bad management, and in general act as a parasite sucking as much benefit as they can from their host.
        lifeisstillgood 15y ago
        > Unions are a cancer I don't wish to start a flame war so I shall be measured here. Unions came in to being to fight massive, widespread exploration of workers that today would be considered criminal. Unions are still required for their original purpose across the globe ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides) I agree that the USA has been curiously free of unionisation (having 5% of your population as illegal indentured servants probably helps) but most western countries have had the unions win their important battles and it will take a while, if ever, before unions as they were in late 19c early 20c will be needed again oddly it feels like movements such as occupy are going to become the new union movement. Anyway my point was that unions = cancer is such a self evidently wrong thing to say for billions of workers that it even makes cancer cringe.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Yes, it is unfortunate. 1% was a convenient number when the movement was formed. It does not seem to be factually accurate.
    - scarmig 15y ago
      We are the 99.932%! I wonder if the increase in inequality is scale invariant, or if you end up seeing some kind of kink at some point in it.
ebaysucks 15y ago
The top 1% is only 1.2 million USD net worth, top 0.5% is 1.8 million USD. So basically for a team of 2-3 tech founders raising a series A round is the entry ticket to becoming part of the 1% (on paper at least).
- randomdata 15y ago
  You don't even need a fancy startup. Interest rates are quite low right now, which makes saving more difficult. But if we assume an average 5%, saving just $6,000 per year once you reach normal working age doing a regular old job will find you with well over $1.2M by the time you retire. $6,000 is a lot of money, but it's not that much money. An iPhone, for example, costs approximately $2000-3000 by the time it is all said and done and I see a lot of them out on the street in the hands of normal Americans. With enough time, $1.2M can be made with a regular job. Nobody said you had to be in the 1% of net worth holders by the time you turn 25, or it doesn't count.
  - sbov 15y ago
    The top 1% won't be $1.2M by the time I retire. For your comparison to be valid go ask someone who was born in the 40's how easy it would have been for them to save $6,000/year.
    - randomdata 15y ago
      A fair point. I was really just attempting to illustrate how $1.2M is not that difficult to acquire. I admit, I come with a biased perspective. Everyone I know born in the 40s were farmers. They all pretty much lived a life of poverty, putting all their income into appreciating assets. They're now all sitting on multi-million dollar fortunes. Assuming you are in the mid-to-high end earning range of the 99%ers, if you want to live a life of poverty, there's a good chance you'll make the 1% list someday too. That's the problem with blanket statements. I would think someone who made their millions through questionable banking tricks is quite a bit different to the poor dirt farmer who sold his farm at retirement, no?
  - Klinky 15y ago
moocow01 15y ago
One thing I wonder is if the upper crust of the upper crust are actually losing their wealth in relative terms (globally) by damaging the country. In essence, if you extrapolate the trend big money and assets in a broken country are not as valuable as the same in a healthy country (whatever the definition of that is). Now I know they can move their money overseas but I would guess that much of the US's top .1%'s money making vehicles are tied to the US in one way or another.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  One thing that struck me was reading 1984. The inner-party elite of Oceania were barely middle-class by a material standard, and their society was falling further apart every year, but they held a lot of power. Materially, they weren't in an enviable position, any more than kings who died horribly of now-curable diseases are enviable, but the perverse and horrible (like O'Brien) could enjoy the shit out of their power and others' misery. The boot stomping on a face for a thousand years. Most dictators enjoy their peoples' misery, and they get more out of the power than they would out of the 1-10x bump it would give their financial status (they have enough money, and unlimited means to get it) to be leading a healthy nation instead of a failing one. Kim Jong-il? While he was alive, I bet he was one of the happiest fuckers out there. And the U.S. corporatist-fascist oligarchy isn't morally superior in inclination; it's just that there are social structures (like laws and elections) in place retarding their progress. Some people judge wealth and prosperity in absolute terms: what we can do, experiences we can have. That's how most of us on HN feel: it's a positive-sum, win-win mentality. But a lot of people see these things in purely relative terms: they like elitism and exclusion, and that others are suffering from bullshit they don't have to deal with. It makes sense when one considers that excessive financial ambitions are usually sexual in nature, and the sexual benefits derived from obscene wealth are based solely in relative social status (being "alpha"). The OP needs to be read by a lot of people (who probably won't read it): people who conflate $400k/year neurosurgeons who got "rich" and startup new-money by working their asses off (who are generally held to deserve their good fortune, and I agree) with an entrenched, culturally underaccomplished, fascistic, and depraved aristocracy of indolent, manipulative parasites that society should be getting rid of+ through whatever means necessary. (+ To make it clear, I mean we need to get rid of the aristocracy as an institution, not "get rid of" the individual people. I'd find it quite morally acceptable to solve society's problems in a way that finds them bad, if they weren't willing to decline peacefully and gracefully, but I also think revenge is an utterly stupid impulse and find it most useful to not care either way what happens to them, as long as they're removed from power.)
api 15y ago
... and the problem I have with Occupy's "tax the rich" and similar sloganeering is this: Given the immense political connections of the financial class, it is a virtual certainty that any attempt to "level the playing field" would end up falling not on them but on the more productive rich and the upper middle class. In other words, the burden will fall on the people who actually earned it. If anything, the financial elites will find a way to benefit from it at the expense of the "lower rich." It's not the haves vs. the have-nots. It's the connecteds vs. the connected-nots. The connected-nots with high net worth are just peasants in fancy suits. Really... doctors, lawyers, engineers, business owners, and executives in productive industries ought to be marching in the streets too. This is not the 99% vs. the 1%. This is about a sophisticated, complex, deeply embedded system of financial con artistry vs. everyone else on the planet. What we have here is a worthless parasite class -- a decadent nobility -- that has buried itself into our civilization like a tick.
- cynicalkane 15y ago
  [EDIT: I may have misinterpreted the parent post as criticizing finance. I'd delete my comment but I'm leaving part of it here because it has already been replied to.] What we have here is a worthless parasite class -- a decadent nobility -- that has buried itself into our civilization like a tick The fact of the matter is you will have a very hard time finding a financial person who defends the current state of things. I never have. Nobody considers bailouts or too-big-to-fail optimal, and nobody likes the regulatory mud the financial industry swims in. And the financial industry, and probably my paycheck, would be smaller if none of this stuff existed. And I wouldn't mind because it'd be made up for by living in a more productive nation. Of course, you'll still see mega-rich financiers because the economies of scale are unbeatable in this industry. And calling the financial system "con artistry vs everyone else on the planet" is a worthless thing to say because trading, investing, credit, and risk management add value and to say otherwise puts you in a very flimsy position, a position by which you'd have to adopt a wildly heterodox economic view--such as classical Marxism--to reasonably defend yourself.
  - veyron 15y ago
    I think you misinterpreted the original statement. Both the article and the parent post take a critical view on inherited wealth, which doesn't necessarily come from the financial industry per se.
pg 15y ago
As many pointed out the last time this was on HN, it's pretty misleading to consider anyone who sells their company to have made their money via "direct or indirect participation in the financial and banking industries." Disqualifyingly misleading, frankly.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  OP here. I was actually surprised to see this accepted as a new post on HN. I thought news redirected reposts to the page of the original post. Google actually shows three links http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922500 (died quietly) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786547 (died quietly) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2844059 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2844059 (exploded)
  - ivankirigin 15y ago
    If a post isn't in the cache it can get reposted. It's a technical flaw but enables a good UX where if enough time has passed, a repost works.
nezumi 15y ago
If the top 0.1% do indeed manage to destroy the US economy, and, say, China becomes the preeminent economic superpower, does anybody happen to know if China's financial system would be able to resist the same sort of abuse? (If, indeed, it's not already too late.)
taa 15y ago
A very interesting article indeed. Not much new, though. I am curious, though .. many co-founders with very successful exits make the top 0.05% or 0.01% in terms of networth, but they're new money. They're not part of the 0.01% closed circle. What happens to them, usually? Are they accepted into the 0.01% circle once they've made enough money to afford it, or are they treated like a wealthier bottom half of the top 1%? And for the wealthy people who have pledged 50%+ of their wealth to charity - where do they fall in all this classification?
- moocow01 15y ago
  I don't have any statistics to back up my points but I would think the following would be the case... With the exception of really tremendous exits, let say a pretty successful cofounder gets between .5 million and 5 million (I'm making these numbers up but Id assume these are pretty reasonable guesses for a majority of moderately successful exits). So if thats the case you have a nice chunk of net worth but after an exit you may not have much cash flow to keep up with the big hitters who have a tremendous stream of cash coming in consistently. Im certainly not arguing that the co-founder with the successful exit is in a bad position - just that their cash flow may be comparatively low compared to someone else who has an ongoing "money printing machine" so to say.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kennethh 15y ago
If anyone is interested in topics like this I would recomend: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ This is one of the top financial blogs currently. Look at articles regarding fraction reserve lending like this one: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/03/central-bank-authorized-fraud.html http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/03/central-b...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
simonh 15y ago
One thing I as a Brit find strange is how the US taxes it's citizens and companies on income from abroad. The UK certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of anywhere else that does it either. It seems to me that if you are doing business abroad, say in the UK, you are not benefiting from US physical or legal infrastructure while doing so any more than a brit working in britain, so why are you expected to fund it? To put it another way I'm sure Apple's operations in the UK are self-funding by now, so if Apple earns money in the UK and moves it to the US it is taxed by the US, where if a UK company transfers money earned in the UK to the US it isn't taxed. What's the justification for that? It seems nuts.
SudarshanP 15y ago
When Google's employees started to become rich, they were taught the best investment was index funds; that investment firms like Goldman were just out to grab their fees and didn't perform any better over the long run. http://www.tradersnarrative.com/the-best-investment-advice-youll-never-get-1550.html http://www.tradersnarrative.com/the-best-investment-advice-y...
tryitnow 15y ago
There's some other fascinating articles on this guys site. I especially like his look into the local real estate industry. I don't share all his leftist proclivities but his research has been very eye opening and informative (and paradoxically made me a bit more libertarian).
marchdown 15y ago
It just occurred to me that some might not see the parallel between the "nighty-niners" and the bolsheviks. Both words mean "members of the majority".

198 points by niels_olson 15y ago

I'm still not discouraged... keep trying.

In summary: Those in the 99th to 99.9th percentile of wealth may be richer than those in the 98th percentile, but they don't enjoy most advantages implicitly granted to the top 0.1% of Americans.

gburt 15y ago
I think this is a very important point. The 1% is not the enemy except for in symbolic terms. The enemy is a much smaller group of individuals/corporations than that, and perhaps even, the enemy is more of a "process" than it is any group. I doubt Wal*Mart executives sit up at the top of their tower and plan about how they can tear apart society for their own self interest, but rather, there is a whole process and system built up that is doing exactly that.
- cynicalkane 15y ago
  I was ready to agree until you said Wal*Mart, in particular in the context of 'tearing apart society'. Economists--including progressives, such as Matt Yglesais--often comment on the bipartisan fetishization of small businesses and liberal demonization of large ones. This attitude often seems motivated by isolated incidents--the tendency of any deep pocketed company to attract bad press and lawsuits--not the general effect of large business on people as accounted for by sound economic data. In general, large businesses tend to offer better jobs and more advanced economies tend to have more, larger businesses. Nor should Wal-Mart be constructed as harming the lower class, as their very low prices are especially important for the lower class which they achieve by real efficiencies of scale for which mom-and-pop stores are generally incapable. I don't have time to find citations everything, but for the last claim you can check out http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/features/2006/is_walmart_good_for_the_american_working_class/the_low_prices_are_good_news.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/fe...
  - nekojima 15y ago
    In some markets WalMart is losing market share or decreased revenue growth because it has priced itself above what the 'lower class' can afford. This is largely why dollar (or less) stores have done so well in recent years in North America.
  - pyre 15y ago
    What about their response to employees trying to start a union?
    - dantheman 15y ago
      Unions in America are broken; no one has problems with a group of people organizing as long as they don't get special rights. For instance, being able to fire a person when they don't show up for work, e.g. firing strikers. Or look at what the NLRB is doing to Boeing as they try to open up a new plant in SC. It's unfortunate, but unions are a cancer - they enshrine an us vs them attitude, they demand special rights, they encourage bad management, and in general act as a parasite sucking as much benefit as they can from their host.
      - lifeisstillgood 15y ago
        > Unions are a cancer I don't wish to start a flame war so I shall be measured here. Unions came in to being to fight massive, widespread exploration of workers that today would be considered criminal. Unions are still required for their original purpose across the globe ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides) I agree that the USA has been curiously free of unionisation (having 5% of your population as illegal indentured servants probably helps) but most western countries have had the unions win their important battles and it will take a while, if ever, before unions as they were in late 19c early 20c will be needed again oddly it feels like movements such as occupy are going to become the new union movement. Anyway my point was that unions = cancer is such a self evidently wrong thing to say for billions of workers that it even makes cancer cringe.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Yes, it is unfortunate. 1% was a convenient number when the movement was formed. It does not seem to be factually accurate.
  - scarmig 15y ago
    We are the 99.932%! I wonder if the increase in inequality is scale invariant, or if you end up seeing some kind of kink at some point in it.

ebaysucks 15y ago

The top 1% is only 1.2 million USD net worth, top 0.5% is 1.8 million USD. So basically for a team of 2-3 tech founders raising a series A round is the entry ticket to becoming part of the 1% (on paper at least).

randomdata 15y ago
You don't even need a fancy startup. Interest rates are quite low right now, which makes saving more difficult. But if we assume an average 5%, saving just $6,000 per year once you reach normal working age doing a regular old job will find you with well over $1.2M by the time you retire. $6,000 is a lot of money, but it's not that much money. An iPhone, for example, costs approximately $2000-3000 by the time it is all said and done and I see a lot of them out on the street in the hands of normal Americans. With enough time, $1.2M can be made with a regular job. Nobody said you had to be in the 1% of net worth holders by the time you turn 25, or it doesn't count.
- sbov 15y ago
  The top 1% won't be $1.2M by the time I retire. For your comparison to be valid go ask someone who was born in the 40's how easy it would have been for them to save $6,000/year.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    A fair point. I was really just attempting to illustrate how $1.2M is not that difficult to acquire. I admit, I come with a biased perspective. Everyone I know born in the 40s were farmers. They all pretty much lived a life of poverty, putting all their income into appreciating assets. They're now all sitting on multi-million dollar fortunes. Assuming you are in the mid-to-high end earning range of the 99%ers, if you want to live a life of poverty, there's a good chance you'll make the 1% list someday too. That's the problem with blanket statements. I would think someone who made their millions through questionable banking tricks is quite a bit different to the poor dirt farmer who sold his farm at retirement, no?
- Klinky 15y ago

moocow01 15y ago

One thing I wonder is if the upper crust of the upper crust are actually losing their wealth in relative terms (globally) by damaging the country. In essence, if you extrapolate the trend big money and assets in a broken country are not as valuable as the same in a healthy country (whatever the definition of that is). Now I know they can move their money overseas but I would guess that much of the US's top .1%'s money making vehicles are tied to the US in one way or another.

michaelochurch 15y ago
One thing that struck me was reading 1984. The inner-party elite of Oceania were barely middle-class by a material standard, and their society was falling further apart every year, but they held a lot of power. Materially, they weren't in an enviable position, any more than kings who died horribly of now-curable diseases are enviable, but the perverse and horrible (like O'Brien) could enjoy the shit out of their power and others' misery. The boot stomping on a face for a thousand years. Most dictators enjoy their peoples' misery, and they get more out of the power than they would out of the 1-10x bump it would give their financial status (they have enough money, and unlimited means to get it) to be leading a healthy nation instead of a failing one. Kim Jong-il? While he was alive, I bet he was one of the happiest fuckers out there. And the U.S. corporatist-fascist oligarchy isn't morally superior in inclination; it's just that there are social structures (like laws and elections) in place retarding their progress. Some people judge wealth and prosperity in absolute terms: what we can do, experiences we can have. That's how most of us on HN feel: it's a positive-sum, win-win mentality. But a lot of people see these things in purely relative terms: they like elitism and exclusion, and that others are suffering from bullshit they don't have to deal with. It makes sense when one considers that excessive financial ambitions are usually sexual in nature, and the sexual benefits derived from obscene wealth are based solely in relative social status (being "alpha"). The OP needs to be read by a lot of people (who probably won't read it): people who conflate $400k/year neurosurgeons who got "rich" and startup new-money by working their asses off (who are generally held to deserve their good fortune, and I agree) with an entrenched, culturally underaccomplished, fascistic, and depraved aristocracy of indolent, manipulative parasites that society should be getting rid of+ through whatever means necessary. (+ To make it clear, I mean we need to get rid of the aristocracy as an institution, not "get rid of" the individual people. I'd find it quite morally acceptable to solve society's problems in a way that finds them bad, if they weren't willing to decline peacefully and gracefully, but I also think revenge is an utterly stupid impulse and find it most useful to not care either way what happens to them, as long as they're removed from power.)

api 15y ago

... and the problem I have with Occupy's "tax the rich" and similar sloganeering is this: Given the immense political connections of the financial class, it is a virtual certainty that any attempt to "level the playing field" would end up falling not on them but on the more productive rich and the upper middle class. In other words, the burden will fall on the people who actually earned it. If anything, the financial elites will find a way to benefit from it at the expense of the "lower rich." It's not the haves vs. the have-nots. It's the connecteds vs. the connected-nots. The connected-nots with high net worth are just peasants in fancy suits. Really... doctors, lawyers, engineers, business owners, and executives in productive industries ought to be marching in the streets too. This is not the 99% vs. the 1%. This is about a sophisticated, complex, deeply embedded system of financial con artistry vs. everyone else on the planet. What we have here is a worthless parasite class -- a decadent nobility -- that has buried itself into our civilization like a tick.

cynicalkane 15y ago
[EDIT: I may have misinterpreted the parent post as criticizing finance. I'd delete my comment but I'm leaving part of it here because it has already been replied to.] What we have here is a worthless parasite class -- a decadent nobility -- that has buried itself into our civilization like a tick The fact of the matter is you will have a very hard time finding a financial person who defends the current state of things. I never have. Nobody considers bailouts or too-big-to-fail optimal, and nobody likes the regulatory mud the financial industry swims in. And the financial industry, and probably my paycheck, would be smaller if none of this stuff existed. And I wouldn't mind because it'd be made up for by living in a more productive nation. Of course, you'll still see mega-rich financiers because the economies of scale are unbeatable in this industry. And calling the financial system "con artistry vs everyone else on the planet" is a worthless thing to say because trading, investing, credit, and risk management add value and to say otherwise puts you in a very flimsy position, a position by which you'd have to adopt a wildly heterodox economic view--such as classical Marxism--to reasonably defend yourself.
- veyron 15y ago
  I think you misinterpreted the original statement. Both the article and the parent post take a critical view on inherited wealth, which doesn't necessarily come from the financial industry per se.

pg 15y ago

As many pointed out the last time this was on HN, it's pretty misleading to consider anyone who sells their company to have made their money via "direct or indirect participation in the financial and banking industries." Disqualifyingly misleading, frankly.

niels_olson 15y ago
OP here. I was actually surprised to see this accepted as a new post on HN. I thought news redirected reposts to the page of the original post. Google actually shows three links http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922500 (died quietly) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786547 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786547 (died quietly) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2844059 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2844059 (exploded)
- ivankirigin 15y ago
  If a post isn't in the cache it can get reposted. It's a technical flaw but enables a good UX where if enough time has passed, a repost works.

nezumi 15y ago

If the top 0.1% do indeed manage to destroy the US economy, and, say, China becomes the preeminent economic superpower, does anybody happen to know if China's financial system would be able to resist the same sort of abuse? (If, indeed, it's not already too late.)

taa 15y ago

A very interesting article indeed. Not much new, though. I am curious, though .. many co-founders with very successful exits make the top 0.05% or 0.01% in terms of networth, but they're new money. They're not part of the 0.01% closed circle. What happens to them, usually? Are they accepted into the 0.01% circle once they've made enough money to afford it, or are they treated like a wealthier bottom half of the top 1%? And for the wealthy people who have pledged 50%+ of their wealth to charity - where do they fall in all this classification?

moocow01 15y ago
I don't have any statistics to back up my points but I would think the following would be the case... With the exception of really tremendous exits, let say a pretty successful cofounder gets between .5 million and 5 million (I'm making these numbers up but Id assume these are pretty reasonable guesses for a majority of moderately successful exits). So if thats the case you have a nice chunk of net worth but after an exit you may not have much cash flow to keep up with the big hitters who have a tremendous stream of cash coming in consistently. Im certainly not arguing that the co-founder with the successful exit is in a bad position - just that their cash flow may be comparatively low compared to someone else who has an ongoing "money printing machine" so to say.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

kennethh 15y ago

If anyone is interested in topics like this I would recomend: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ This is one of the top financial blogs currently. Look at articles regarding fraction reserve lending like this one: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/03/central-bank-authorized-fraud.html http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/03/central-b...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

simonh 15y ago

One thing I as a Brit find strange is how the US taxes it's citizens and companies on income from abroad. The UK certainly doesn't do this and I'm not aware of anywhere else that does it either. It seems to me that if you are doing business abroad, say in the UK, you are not benefiting from US physical or legal infrastructure while doing so any more than a brit working in britain, so why are you expected to fund it? To put it another way I'm sure Apple's operations in the UK are self-funding by now, so if Apple earns money in the UK and moves it to the US it is taxed by the US, where if a UK company transfers money earned in the UK to the US it isn't taxed. What's the justification for that? It seems nuts.

SudarshanP 15y ago

When Google's employees started to become rich, they were taught the best investment was index funds; that investment firms like Goldman were just out to grab their fees and didn't perform any better over the long run. http://www.tradersnarrative.com/the-best-investment-advice-youll-never-get-1550.html http://www.tradersnarrative.com/the-best-investment-advice-y...

tryitnow 15y ago

There's some other fascinating articles on this guys site. I especially like his look into the local real estate industry. I don't share all his leftist proclivities but his research has been very eye opening and informative (and paradoxically made me a bit more libertarian).

marchdown 15y ago

It just occurred to me that some might not see the parallel between the "nighty-niners" and the bolsheviks. Both words mean "members of the majority".