Sorry to be a bit harsh but those are a lot of strange claims.
The Fed comes very close to a government entity in that its board is nominated by the government and confirmed by the Senate. It is not made up of corporate banks and is definitely not a coalition of corporate banks.
I'm not sure how you get the idea that the US Treasury loans the fine to the Fed? Do you have a source for that?
And if those big banks are major stock holders of Facebook they definitely do not want fines imposed on Facebook. Loosing money is the one thing that businesses need to avoid and fines are a pretty direct way of hurting business while not being useful in any way. Just because those banks might want to see Zuckerberg go (which is not necessarily right) they do definitely not want to loose money to make that happen. Fines are also not very effective in that regard.
Can you elaborate? How is it the banks are “free of the government” and Facebook is somehow beholden to the regulators? My experience leads me to the exact opposite conclusion. I don’t think Zuck is losing any sleep at night worrying about the FTC and the pennies they might decide to fine FB.
I wasn't referring to this specific case, but rather the mentality of big multinational companies when it comes to government interactions.
I've been in the C-suite when concerns about government regulation have been discussed. You "play ball" on some things in order to avoid other, worse things happening.
I have no idea if Zuckerberg made this trade-off.
I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that was the strategy.
It's not like Facebook wasn't already in the hot seat when it came to Congress.
Are you arguing for more government control of monetary policy through regulating Facebook or less government control of monetary policy through Facebook's competing currency?
It seems like Facebook is worse in both directions. Both serving the interests of activist regulations and governed by a corporation with it's own interests first.
Legislatures and regulators give a bunch of excuses for why this is bad, but the reality is that they don’t want to lose control over the monetary system. and Facebook is already and easy political target.
The banks already broke free of the government. Facebook just wants to get in on that action. What other business gets to make money out of nothing through fractional reserve banking and gets trillion dollar bailouts at taxpayer expense when it regularly overextends itself with all that newly created money?
I did not make claims whether nationalizing FB is neat or not. Just that if you want to nationalize a company, setting fines that make the company immediately insolvent and government by far largest creditor is quite a neat way to do it.
I assume you're saying you disagree with this action by congress, but you're jumping past the issue and into something fairly different.
For what it's worth, the two primary issues I've seen raised with Libre is monopoly and finance regulation. I wouldn't be very excited to hear Bank of America is getting into social networking; I'm not sure why I should be excited that Facebook is getting into banking. As for regulation, my (limited) understanding is that if Facebook wants to act like a bank, it needs to be regulated like one.
Facebook can also rig the economy, even more probable because it is a for-profit business. And if current state monetary powers are quite unaccountable already, imagine when the monetary power is a foreign company.
Plenty of companies have refused or even actively opposed the FBI and have managed to “avoid issues” with the federal government. There absolutely is a point where a company’s wealth and influence affords then the ability to push back against the government with little fear of the possible repercussions. And whatever that level of wealth and influence is Facebook has absolutely far surpassed it.
This seems like a statement of faith. Facebook, and the markets it operates in, have seen very little government oversight for most its lifetime. It's mostly market forces that got us here. I don't see any reason to think that market forces will improve the situation in the future.
Our government, on some level, is supposed to be accountable to general public and there exists, in principle, a mechanism to hold them accountable.
Whether that mechanism is flawless or not, whether it works as well as we want it to, should not distract from the fact that there isn't even REMOTELY such a mechanism for big corporations. When people clamor for flawed government being replaced by companies, I shudder exactly for that reason. You're trading system with public protection/accountability that's flawed, to one where public protection/accountability do not exist, by design.
My post should not be mis-interpreted as being against government or regulation.
But I don't think Facebook is infringing upon my constitutionally protected free speech. If we want to regulate Facebook (and I think we should), we need to have a more thought-through reason, method, desired goal and tracking of outcomes.
That's the only thing that will keep the next social media/mass media/big bank/big telco exec from leveraging people's data/weakness/biases and denying responsibility for unintended consequences.
There is no question of govt regulating this stuff. They can't even handle the illiterate Taliban after 20 years of spending 2 trillion, why the fuck do people believe govt can take on sophisticated actors like Facebook and Wall St.
A lack of regulation is a bit of the draw, isn't it?
Let's not pretend any of the processors are doing this because they have ethical issues with Facebook. They are likely doing it at the behest of the Fed, the Treasury and other international currencies. It's about power.
100%, yes. When was the last time the US killed a public company with legal action? Enron? And that was a very different situation, and a far less valuable company.
Banks like Wells Fargo have done astonishingly evil and illegal things and gotten away with a slap on the wrist. Hard to see why FB would be different.
While Zuck is too rich and ruthless to ever be relegated to the sidelines of power, we can at least hope FB gets broken up.
Facebook would have to be stupid to not be bribing everyone in sight, it's not like anyone is going punish them. Anyone who still uses the site must think it's a good deal and additional information clearly won't change their mind at this point. The US government can't regulate any corporation without 50% of the population losing their shit at "big government overreach". There's no mechanism beyond those two to affect change in a corporation.
The Fed comes very close to a government entity in that its board is nominated by the government and confirmed by the Senate. It is not made up of corporate banks and is definitely not a coalition of corporate banks.
I'm not sure how you get the idea that the US Treasury loans the fine to the Fed? Do you have a source for that?
And if those big banks are major stock holders of Facebook they definitely do not want fines imposed on Facebook. Loosing money is the one thing that businesses need to avoid and fines are a pretty direct way of hurting business while not being useful in any way. Just because those banks might want to see Zuckerberg go (which is not necessarily right) they do definitely not want to loose money to make that happen. Fines are also not very effective in that regard.
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