The Best Friends the Banksters Ever Had

The Republican Party.

So the Republicans are going to go to the mat to stand up for the interests of the banksters, the same people who pumped up the housing bubble and then deliberately popped it, so that they could try to make money on both sides of it?

Let's refresh, shall we? The banksters created the "liar loans", the mortgages where the only thing that it took to qualify for a large loan was a pulse at the closing table. It was so bad that the mortgage brokers could basically take a homeless dude, give him a shower, a shave and a haircut, dress him in a suit and get him a half-a-million dollar mortgage. The banks then packaged all those mortgages into securities, got the rating agencies to label them as triple-A grade investments and then sold them on the bond markets.

So all of those bonds rested on the ability of that formerly homeless dude to make his $3,500 per month mortgage payment, which he could do provided that he was able to pick up 70,000 discarded soda bottle each month. And the banksters professed surprise and shock that the homeless dude couldn't make his payment.

They say they have learned their lesson. But history teaches us otherwise. They all said that regulations should be lifted from the savings and loans because the lessons of the Great Depression were learned. It took less than seven years for them to fail massively. Then the banksters, though their personal Senator, Phil Gramm, got most of the bank regulations lifted in the 1990s. They got the rules forbidding banks from operating as investment houses lifted and within eight years, several large banks were teetering on the edge of failure and were absorbed by even larger banks, when then almost collapsed.

The people who set all this up took home huge amounts of money and then stuck everyone else. It's not just the bailouts (the only thing that the Republicans are faux-angry about), it's the millions of people who were thrown out of work. It's the employers who went out of business because they couldn't get operating capital or whose customer base evaporated or a mixture of both.

But now the banksters say they have learned their lesson.

Bullshit. The next group will be just as greedy as these guys. They will realize that they will also be able to take the money and run. It has all happened before, repeatedly and without strong regulation and the regulators to enforce them, it will happen again.

Which apparently suits the Republicans just fine, which is why they are carrying water for the banksters.