Two of my favorite bloggers are Barry over at Cynical Nation and the Captain over at Captain Capitalism...there are many other must reads, but these are two of my all time favorites
The Captain always comes up with some economic gems, like this one (http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/07/week-of-oil-charts-4-you-are-big-oil.html) on the not so widely reported fact of WHO OWNS “Big Oil.”
Turns out, YES. it’s YOU and I, with some 29.5% owned by various and widely popular Mutual Funds, 27% owned by pension funds, another 14% owned by IRAs – totaling a whopping 70.5% OWNED by investment vehicles regular working people almost universally and very heavily depend upon for their retirement funds.
Of the remaining nearly 30%, well, 23% of that is owned by individual investors, the bulk of whom are regular working people, like you and me. Another 5% are owned by “other institutional investors,” likes banks and 457s and 401Ks, leaving a paltry 1.5% owned by (gulp) “Corporate insiders).
Check out Captain Capitalism’s piece, it has charts to go along with his colorful commentary on this.
While there, check out the piece on the Starbucks Solution (http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2008/07/starbucks-solution.html) as well. It’s priceless.
Seems that Starbucks is in the process of closing some 600 underperforming (less profitable) stores, in order to consolidate during the current economic turbulence.
Nothing strange there.
But the reaction of its “customers” (for the Starbucks crowd, that term must be used very loosely, as sitting and reading for four hours while nursing a single cup a Joe, isn’t exactly a “customer”) has been to...yup...start a petition drive to keep those stores open!
As the Captain wryly notes, the solution obviously lies in “a free-market solution like BUYING MORE FREAKING COFFEE!!!!”
Check out Captain Capitalism. He’s always worth the read!
