That is a point that is beyond dispute, now. The free market, as envisioned by Republicans, has utterly failed. If the free market worked, we, as tax payers, would not have to pump in hundreds, if not trillions, of dollars into the free market in order to rescue the capitalists from their folly.
If we do this, if we have to bail out all of the banks because they were all such greedy fucks as to make such moronic loans and then were so fraudulent as to bundle those loans and market them as "securities," then we should regulate the living shit out of them. Bankers should not be able to wipe their asses without following a procedure specified by Federal regulators.
Yes, I know, if we regulate the shit out of those people, we may "stifle innovation" and have "slower growth." So fucking what, we would not be now faced with having to pump enough of our money into the financial sector that the Iraq War costs are, by comparison, chump change. We are going to have to take on so much additional debt that it may be a minor miracle if Treasury Bonds manage to retain their AAA rating from Standard & Poors and the other rating organizations.
We have truly fucked over our future. This will result in the Federal deficit that existed when Bush came into office being more than doubled under his watch. Not all of it is Bush's fault, Greenspan has a large share of the culpability for this disaster, but much of it is, for Bush and the ideological idiots in his administration refused to do anything to regulate the financial institutions.
As a nation, we will not be able to invest in the future, for like any family who has maxed out their credit cards, we are going to be paying off our debt. No Mars mission. No extra money to fix roads or build high-speed rail systems. Just servicing our debt for the next fucking century, like the debt-ridden banana republic that the Republicans have reduced this nation to.
There are a lot of banks that stuck to sound principles and are not in danger. But many did not, they went after the fast money. And what gripes my ass the most, is that even though the banks and the mortgage brokers were busily turning cities like Cleveland into ghost towns, none of those guys will pay for what they have done. Oh, they may have lost some money, but you do not see the presidents of Countrywide, IndyMac, Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers being perp-walked. None of those guys are going to go to jail. Their biggest sacrifice may be that they have to give up flying NetJets and go back to flying on the airlines.
Poor babies. It is too bad that we cannot build some tumbrels, borrow some guillotines from French museums and start taking heads.
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2 comments:
As much as I would like to see a perp walk, I'm afraid that you, like many ters have been misled into believing that what you see is the result of Free Markets. It wasn't, because they weren't. It's worse than that.
If the markets were truly free (and I hasten to say I do NOT think they should be) then there would have been NO regulation. What we have here is cronyism: the regulations were suspended for people who were friends and fellow-travelers of the administration. Everyone else had to abide. This made things MUCH worse, as there could be no corrections, because the normal reporting procedures had been premepted.
We need to call for more transparency (which means accounting and accountability) but not the cluster-fuck that is/was Sarbanes-Oxley.
This is the sort of thing that always happens when people start believing in invisible best friends who'll make everything right, whether you call your invisible best friend "God" or "the market". Free market economics jumped the shark into religion territory decades ago, hell, I commented about that very thing on my personal web site back in, hmm, 1998! When you start hearing people muttering about invisible hands, be scared. Be very scared. Because invisible hands do not exist. And invisible best friends never save you from your own stupidity.
-- Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin
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