wrong, and it s wrong a lot of the time. so we start with that. the second thing, which is very important, in the old days, before the crash, only five or six years ago, y could go to safety with your money and get paid. you could say, i m stepping out and going to buy government bonds and get four or five percent and i ll be safe and liquid and then i can come back in. out can t do that now. zero percent. don t get paid for waiting, and so for the average 401k holder or the pension fund manager that done work. let s say a young person comes up and they say, i don t want anything to do with this market. we re hearing young people don t want to have anything to do with it. you tell them what? i tell them the market is you. you re the market. this is where you re inheriting our economy and the capitalism that goes with it, and that capitalism is embodied in these stocks and bonds, and all the other invent products that have
reform. and secondly, but more importantly, are you as a pension fund manager for your state allowing the pension itself to be invested in companies that do dealings with people like the koch brothers or other publicly or privately traded corporations that don t do well by their actual own employees? right. so the first question is, did we try to bust the unions? right, yes. because that s always called reform. i m just wondering,รง you did reform, but you didn t bust the unions, right? right, no, not at all. in fact, the joins were at the table the entire time. and that was critical to getting this done. the day i took office and decided to take on this issue, we said, this is an everybody issue. it s in everyone s interest to fix it. i had a 12-member pension advisory group and four of the 12 members were from organized labor. so we had to listen to them. i spent a great deal of time meeting with rank and file
wealth in the history of the world. a 2300-paged piece of regulation from the democrats, this very simple conflict in which the credit rating agencies completely unresolved. how does this happen? it s really shocking. partly because it s really technical and complicated and a lot of people aren t really interested in the inherent conflicts. it s also about lobbying. it s excellent cover for every investor and fund manager. you can say look, triple-a rated. doesn t some of the responsibility belong to the portfolio manager and investor? i m not disagreeing. i think this is utterly ridiculo ridiculous. in an ideal world, it does. let s play it out. i m the pension fund manager.
the money rolling in from the banks who paid them for the ratings. our friends, the banksters, sell bonds to the pension. those managers, pension managers for teacher, judges, cops, feel safe because the bonds they re buying from the banks are as rated triple-a. for an agency owned by the companies owned by your children s textbook publishers. it turns out what the bank is selling is a pile of crap not worth the paper they re printed on, suckering your pension fund manager in with that triple-a rating. it could have something to do with the fact that the banker is paying the credit agency so it can sucker your pension manager. we know the answer and yet even after the biggest transfer of
exercise. and then you go find a sucker to take the other side of the bet. ideally, a dumb german. if you need proof that this is a clear conflict of interest, i want you to look at this chart here. these are all aaa investments, imagine you re a pension fund manager. aaa from the ratings agencies and look at the yield, the amount of interest that they pay, the cdo s, the things that you re talking about from the goldman sachs inkwir arieinquii everything else. if it looks too good to be true, you ve heard this? it is. and here s the thing, we have yet to see even an amendment to fix the conflict of interest that leads to that level of corruption. although senators like carl levin have promised they ll come up with one, it has yet to hit the floor. again, we ask, where will your senators stand when it comes to the cops working for the crooks and the conflict of interest that exists right now to the advantage of the finance industry and the detriment of america and its future? and most