rs
Dagobah Resident
Arctodus said:
You are missing the point. Imagine that you unknowingly walk into a cancer ward at Sloan Kettering and start to walk around and look at the patients. Very quickly you would notice that they all have cancer. There are at least two ways to interpret this in the absence of additional facts. 1) there is an epidemic of cancer at Sloan Kettering and somebody should look into it. 2) Well, maybe its a cancer ward.
There is always constant turbulence in the thin upper crust, that is how it is in hard core STS hierarchies. What matters more than the fifty names is the thousands of other names not mentioned, how they relate to the fifty and what, if anything makes them truly different.
While I don't discount Yet Another Financial Disaster in the near term, the idea that the upper rats are all abandoning ship would imply that there was something better to go to. The next wave of financial crisis will affect fiat money itself. When money becomes devalued, the only thing that remains is the lust for power. It is control that will remain important (in fact it will increase in importance) in the next crisis. Those "jumping ship" are taking themselves out of the race.
Take for example Bill Gates. At one time he was worth something like 120 billion dollars. If he lost 99% of that, he would have still been a billionaire. If he again lost 99% of that, he would be worth 12 million dollars, a net worth that would still keep him in the top thin layer of the wealthy. My point is that at some level, the money no longer matters. Bill Gates cannot buy anything more for 120 billion than he could for a mere 1.2 billion except maybe for his own personal space shuttle. At that level it is not about buying toys or art collections, it is about power. And do not be mistaken, all his "philanthropic" efforts are also about power.
No, I disagree. They are not jumping ship - mostly because the open ocean is not a better place to be. What you *may* be witnessing (with particular emphasis on "may") is that the feeding frenzy has begun, there is blood in the water and the sharks will eat anything, including each other.
To take any aspect of the reported list seriously you need lots of additional context, and so far, none has been presented.