Meeker in 2006 (photo: niallkennedy)
This is great. Mary Meeker has a report out called USA Inc, telling us all why Social Security benefits should be cut for the good of America. "By 2037, cumulative deficits from Social Security could add another $11.6 trillion to the public debt," warns the cautious and prudent-sounding Meeker.
Among her heart-wrenching conclusions:
The sovereign credit issues in Europe suggest what might lie ahead for USA Inc. shareholders – and our children.
Because that's what we really need. Mary Meeker re-inventing herself as a bosom-clutching family values troll as she puts her stamp of approval on the Pete Peterson Simpson-Bowles report, recommending belt-tightening to the middle class as a way to pay for the tabs she and her fellow feudal financial overlords saddled us with.
I'll leave it to the wonks to rip apart her latest bag o' bullshit and her hallmark brand of fact-stuffing, but in case anyone has forgotten about the role Meeker played in the dot-com boom, let me remind you.
Remember when the internet bubble was growing like gangbusters, and there was that little problem of no firewall between the analysts and the investment bankers in the big Wall Street firms? And how analysts were keeping their ratings of big internet stocks high long after they knew they were vastly over-inflated, and engaging in practices that stoked the profits of their firms while trying to pass themselves off to the public as "objective analysts?" You may have even lost some money yourself taking their advice.
Well, Mary Meeker was one of those analysts. In fact, she was the queen. [cont'd.]Here's John Cassidy's 1999 New Yorker article on Meeker, entitled The Woman in the Bubble: How Mary Meeker helps Internet entrepreneurs become very, very rich (PDF). And according to Fortune in 2001, Meeker was the poster girl for conflict-of-interest in the dot com era:
No comments:
Post a Comment