
Originally Posted by
bsnub
He urged the Obama administration to take bolder action, either by recapitalizing or nationalizing the banks and forcing them to lend at attractive rates. His advice went unheeded."
It went like this-
the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008.
"There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie...
"It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an 'economy' is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before."
America's growing anti-intellectualism - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
Absolutely nothing substantive has changed. If anything, the banking sector has cemented it's position at the top of the hierarchy, and Congress' subservient role as a Lobby group for business and financial interests. Banks still make huge amounts of money trading in opaque and complex instruments of uncertain risk, which land large amounts of capital in the hands of a few, with no benefit whatsoever to broader society. The capital thus employed in this opaque shell game is deployed from fulfilling the traditional bank role of providing credit to business and consumers. Not one banker has been held accountable for the near collapse of our financial system, and the expensive bailouts thus entailed. Quite the opposite- bankers basically ran the so called 'financial reform process' post crash. Reform was the last thing on their mind- stifling reform was their collective aim. A pig does not destroy it's own trough.
Most of the people demonstrating wouldn't know the difference between a CDO and a financial futures contract. They wouldn't know that, when Daddy buys some shares, he is not actually buying them from the NYSE at all- he is buying them from a 'book' kept by the institution he is buying them from. He wouldn't know that the Bank aggregates all buy and sell orders at a particular time, and uses 'high speed trading' to make money off this inside information- with the net result that the customer pays a bit more. When I was first stockbroking, there was a name for this- "front running". It was unethical, illegal and immoral, but now it is standard practise. Neither would he know that, after daddy has bought and paid for them, the Bank keeps them in their own custody ('nominee'), and proceeds to use them as collateral for their own trading activities, or other money making schemes such as stock lending. In other words, what dad has bought and paid for they get to use as if they owned it. This is merely the tip of the iceberg.
He or she just knows there is something wrong, that they are being ripped off, paying for the consequences of other peoples folly and greed, and not being told anything about what is really going on. And he or she is quite right.
They also know their politicians and political system has betrayed them- that Congress does not actually represent their interests at all, quite the opposite. You hardly need to be a guru to work that out.
(The Linked article is very good btw. I'm going to look up more stuff by this Paul Rosenberg fellow.)