Reply To: would nuclear energy really be accessible to all?

[Warwick]

Just about ALL financial assets are vastly overvalued—debt obligations, stocks. commodites—expecially oil—real estate, etc.

I’d agree about commodities, although this speculation started for a reason. There’s money washing around and it has to live somewhere, so it stupidly fled to gold, and asinine legislation demanding biofuel use in the West sparked anticipation of a global food shortage. Both of these are now bubbles, plainly. Real estate I’m not so sure about since this comes up against the labour theory of value – houses in some places became so cheap that they are not incomparable to their rebuild cost…

It will need a poltical fight to ensure that those losses are incurred by the very few people who own the vast majority of those assets

In global terms the owners of BP, Exxon, RWE are few. As a proportion of people in developed countries, I think they’re ubiquitous. Most people with an occupational pension scheme, most people with a savings account, most people with insurance policies. If some kind of Glass-Steagall had been reenacted by now in response to the banking crisis, this would have changed a lot of course: maybe by now, the biggest investors would be the institutions of high finance, acting on behalf of those who can afford to lose it.

I suppose there are two separate issues here really. One is that people investing money on behalf of the everyday citizen shouldn’t be exposing themselves to the risks of high finance (making governments have to guarantee those risks while the rich make high profits out of them — a case of “privatise the profits, nationalise the losses”). The other issue is that holding equity in large oil and coal companies may not be seen as a high risk strategy at all, but in reality they are quite high risk.