Kevin o'leary has a meltdown

Financial Times: Thomas Piketty’s exhaustive inequality data turn out to be flawed


From the FT article:

‘The exact level of European inequality in the last fifty years is impossible to determine, as it depends on the sources one uses. However, whichever level one picks, the lines in red in the graph show that – unlike what Prof. Piketty claims – wealth concentration among the richest people has been pretty stable for 50 years in both Europe and theUS. There is no obvious upward trend. The conclusions of Capital in the 21st century do not appear to be backed by the book’s own sources.’


The FT Isn't Just Saying Piketty Made A Mistake — It's Saying He Manipulated Data
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Amanda is no doormat.
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Well, yes. I think most people know that Lang is the brains of the show and O'Leary is there for entertainment and shock value (and we got our values worth in that segment). Really, this is a CBC specialty it seems as it worked for years on Hockey Night In Canada with Ron MacLain and Don Cherry.


But perhaps that's a bit unfair, Grapes at least achieved something respectable - even if it was with the Bruins.

Kevin O'Leary: He's not a billionaire, he just plays one on TV

There are many people in the business who don't really agree with everything O'Leary says or does. For example, I haven't really read anything great about his fund, of which he's not legally licensed to actually manage (it's just his name that he's selling).

Would You Invest In The O’Leary Funds?

It turns out that the MERs appeared to be relatively high indeed. A spring 2009 post by Wellington Financial states that the MER for OGE.UN as an example was “at 3.52%…a far cry from the ‘low’ 1.5% level that Mr. O’Leary promised last summer”.

O’Leary created a hidden “vampire fee” by supposedly originally stating that the OGE management fee would be only 1.5%, but because of the 0.4% trailer mentioned in the fund’s prospectus, the management fee is now 1.9%.
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And with those high fees it seems the only one getting rich is Kevin himself.

Canadian Tire savings accounts trump O’Leary bond fund

Judging by his book titles and TV appearances O’Leary Funds founder and chairman Kevin O’Leary doesn’t like to lose; especially to a hardware store. He actually would have knocked the tam off of old Sandy McTire if it wasn’t for his fund’s 1.2 per cent annual management fee, which helps pay administrative costs, advisors who sell the funds, and – of course – Kevin O’Leary. Without the fee the fund would have returned about 2.4 per cent.
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Perhaps that's why he was so emotional about wealth distribution and yet failed to provide any viable arguments to support his view: All he knows is that he likes money and lots of it.
 
Glaucus said:
Perhaps that's why he was so emotional about wealth distribution and yet failed to provide any viable arguments to support his view: .
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And the "super duper super smart" opposing argument is to "read the book" ( of Piketty's ) who "adjusted' and cherry picked the data to fit his conclusion

O'Leary had valid example, you want to see the effect of Piketty's policies, look at what happening in France now
 
metalman said:
And the "super duper super smart" opposing argument is to "read the book" ( of Piketty's ) who "adjusted' and cherry picked the data to fit his conclusion

O'Leary had valid example, you want to see the effect of Piketty's policies, look at what happening in France now
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The argument wasn't "Read the book". She wanted an intelligent discussion about the topic in the book, which is kinda impossible when the guy who didn't read the book calls it "evil".

His argument about France is also a non-argument. What about France? Right now, their economy isn't dong great, but so what? They've been doing great for decades, now one or two not so great quarters completely illegitimizes their way of doing things? I don't think so. At any rate, O'Leary doesn't really even know what he's arguing against as he hasn't read the book so his argument, if you want to pretend that it is an argument, is an uniformed argument.
 
metalman said:
O'Leary had valid example, you want to see the effect of Piketty's policies, look at what happening in France now
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Sounds like you haven't read the book. Also sounds like you don't know what's happening in France either.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Sounds like you haven't read the book. Also sounds like you don't know what's happening in France either.
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A book where the data is fudged to fit the premise? May as well read a book of fairy tales
I've noticed the people who recommend Pitteky's book all like to sniff farts


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The Economist: - The decision by Peugeot-PSA, a loss-making carmaker, to shut its factory at Aulnay, the first closure of a French car plant for 20 years, and to shed 8,000 jobs across the country has rocked France. It has become an emblem both of the country’s competitiveness problem and of the new Socialist government’s relative powerlessness, despite its promises, to stop private-sector restructuring.
...
Over the past 12 years, a competitiveness gap has opened up between France and Germany, its biggest trading partner. This shows both in manufacturing unit-labour costs, which have risen by 28% in France since 2000, but only 8% in Germany, and in France’s declining share of extra-EU exports. A cross-border study of two chemicals firms by Henri Lagarde, a French businessman, points to part of the problem: the German company pays only 17% of its employees’ gross salaries in social charges, next to 38% for its French counterpart. A recent study of competitiveness ranked Germany in sixth place; France came 21st.
 
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Yes, you'd expect a socialist government to bail out it's failing auto industry. Surely, no capitalist nation would ever dream of such a thing.
 
Piketty's entire "tax everyone, everywhere" book is based on nonsense, because he confuses relative income inequality with absolute wealth inequality. Absolute wealth inequality is lowest level it has ever been in human history. Wealth is the goods and services available in an economy at that specific time. A poor person today is much wealthier in many ways than the richest people in the world were 100 years ago, because not only has the quantity of goods increased, but so has the quality. Compare health care goods of 2014 to 1914, in 1914, they didn't have CT scanners, MRIs, modern surgery, modern pharmaceuticals, etc... Compare consumer goods, cars, electronics, home appliances to those available in 1914
 
metalman said:
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And don't forget ... coal and oil. There was thinking and inventing and innovative banking going back at least a hundred years before the hockey stick but everything went straight up with cheap energy. People only made $3 a day because that's all people COULD make. Coal and oil could make much more. We aren't making that extra wealth, fuels are. If we don't transition to a new energy source before the ones we have run out then we all go back to making $3 a day... and during that time three or four billion of us will have to die of starvation.
 
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