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Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

But of course, the WSJ would never want to admit that massive wealth inequality has negative consequences...

If you believe the reason some children are fatherless is because a hedge fund manager owns a jet, you're reaching.

It’s not that the own a jet, it’s the fact that financial capitalism extracts money from people through rentier economics that enable them to make such exorbitant profits so they can afford to buy a jet.

How about the idea that the people working at the dollar store or walmart are making poverty wages while the leadership team hoovers up all the profits? The UAW went on strike this year because the auto makers returned to huge profitability and wanted to keep the concessions the workers gave to keep the manufacturers afloat during the hard times once the hard times were over.

So, yes, it’s not that big of a reach to say that some children are fatherless because the money that might have gone into their parents’ pockets is going to pay for that hedge fund manager’s jet.

If you take a quarter for each person and give it to an executive as additional compensation, the executive will experience a 250/hr increase in pay given a 1000 employee company, and the individual will experience only a loss of 25 cents. Cut executive compensation by that much and they will leave. Heck, cut it by half as much and they will do so. Aside from that, research shows that executive compensation issues are down to the conflict of interest that boards and CEOs have, since the CEO hires the compensation analysts for the board. Hedge funds doing 'vulture capitalism' or stripping the equity from a company without a bias towards a going concern is not down to Jets. Its down to the regulatory environment incentivizing companies to do so.

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