Tweet
2009 was one of the very best years in history for the financial industry, with over $50 billion in profits for the top half-dozen firms alone. Forget for a moment about the fact that this industry was literally saved from death with taxpayer dollars. The real question is, what are they there to do?
The short answer to that question is that the financial industry exists to make capital available, and to allocate it efficiently to productive uses in the real economy.
Instead, what did the financial industry do to make its money? The Wall St. firms ran proprietary trading programs as never before, and they raked in huge fees underwriting issues of debt by the largest corporations, who used the money to improve their balance sheets but not to invest in new productivity.
The old-fashioned banks spent the year lending Fed funds to the Treasury, profiting risk-free from the steep yield curve.
In short, the provision of capital and sound allocation decisions delivered to the real economy fell far short of justifying the financial sector’s huge profits. As it has been for some time (at least two decades), this industry, in significant measure, is a parasite.
When will that change? As soon as the industry stops being so good at manipulating the political process and the regulators, and as soon as Washington stops needing Wall St and large banks to finance its headlong plunge into control over more and more of the economy.
I guess it’s true — President Obama HAS united the country — against the policies he is tacitly supporting…
13 Comments
Tacitly?
I’d say, blatantly.
Thanks for your diary.
Damn, things are now so friggin bad we find ourselves agreeing with shit on RED STATE? This is depressing. WTF is wrong with the DINOCRATS do they really believe f*cking us over is ok, just as long as its them doing it now? This is anything but “Change we can believe in.” Its just pure BS!
There are two kinds of politicians in the US, the ones who are pimping for finance and the ones who are not. In upcoming elections, the question should not be so much about divisive issues like health care, abortion or LGBT rights as it should be about defeating electeds who pimp for Wall Street and electing those who will stand for Main Street whether they are Democrat or Republican.
Our common opponents, operating through the Democrat Party, have overplayed their hand quite dramatically. This is a good thing, because it provides us an opening to unite to take government away from the parasites Wall Street so that we can reconfigure the US economy so that enterprises that provide good middle class jobs are not hopelessly competing with finance capital which can reap 5 times the return on investment as manufacturing.
I’m willing to put my civil rights as a gay man aside for a moment if that hastens kicking the moneychangers out of the temple of democracy.
The right/left model is so 19th century.
The new model is up/down. Down all agree.
Maybe the last thing in the world we need is for the left and the right to agree.
They ageed in the vote for the Iraq war.
They agreed to bail out the Banks.
They agree on all the Military spending.
They agree that the Corporations come first.
They also agree they can’t give us what we want.
They agree that we should just keep giving them our money to spend.
So You see when the two sides agree, everything turns to shit.
Maybe we are luckier than we think.
Without a Left-Right revolt on this issue alone, all other issues will successfully distract just as the international financial cartels would prefer, until there is nothing left to pillage. When that happens how many of us will be serving drinks on the beach to the bastards who won’t even give us a decent tip?
azhealer: by any chance, do you know anything about this guy?
So typical of the failed cold war era American left, born to lose, addicted to defeat.
Obviously left and right are not the critical distinctions here, as the pro-finance consensus between the two corporate parties transcends the narrow band of ideology that comprises supermajorities in government. Position on Wall Street owned government is all over the place in Congress, not conforming to traditional left and right dichotomies.
Those who came of political age before the fall of the Berlin Wall, they seriously cannot help themselves but to conceive of politics in the limited late 20th century framework, and by so doing, consign themselves to Dantean labors of perpetual political failure. The system they envision and are trying to change no longer exists.
The “most entitled generation to ever walk the face of the earth,” the children of “The Greatest Generation,” the ones who won the war but lost the peace, are so convinced that their political achievements during the late 20th century as the American dream was deflated “would you like some fries with that?” were successful.
They offer nothing new, no political evolution to adapt to changes in how corporations are coming at us, just sniping at those who come after them who are trying to figure out de novo, from a post-cold war political framing, if there is a way out of the mess that they and their parents left us. For them, it will always be 1974.
Thanks for defeating Hitler and Tojo, thanks for Woodstock, but while you all were passing Prop 13 and snorting up a storm of cocaine, the band left the building in the US to set up shop in SE Asia or a maquiladora, every day low prices. Your generation’s political stalemate presided over the outsourcing of 1/2 of good middle class jobs as the population doubled.
The number of conservative market ideologues who would support a Hobbsean economy where corporations outsourced all of their misery to disinterested third parties through unregulated free markets is minimal, about as predominant as progressives who believe that government should run the entire economy.
The Center can be established further leftwards by exploiting that division between right wing economic ideologues and principled pragmatic conservatives. But the boomer generation is too steeped in 1974 to conceive of that transformation of the political equation.
They can be ignored, because the political consensus is that we should live in regulated capitalism. That is, people are wary of going into hock for stimulus, but compared to 1/2 of the economy going bankrupt because Wall Street crimped their access to capital and quenched demand, folks support spending. Conservatives gave us monetary policy to regulate the cost of capital to replace fiscal stimulus, but that dawg don’t hunt no more. Unless they have better ideas, the consensus is Keynesianism.
New paradigm for 2010: There are two kinds of politicians in the US, the ones who are pimping for finance and the ones who get elected.
The tea baggers in my state are largely true conservatives and libertarians who hate the war spending, the bailouts and any waste and corruption they see. They have a myriad of issues in common with progressives (and remember why the GOP didn’t show up to vote for McCain: too many Bush years of spending and failing, right?). They have a list of issues I find repugnant too, but I don’t feel a need to bloody their noses over it.
I would never vote for a Republican except for a local office (the lesser of two evils) and I plan on working for more and better DEMs (read progressives).
But I also intend to continue to team up with my tea baggin’ friends on issues when we are of like mind. I already write against blind DEM loyalists and regularly about abusive DEM power in all levels of government in my county and state. We are defining a new and different kind of centrist and a new and different kind of triangulation to take America back.
The issues that bind the right and left need to be aired as issues ‘of the people’. Let’s give some contrast to the corporate fascism that grips us.
And for all that this administration is fucking us over, there is no disputing that its far and above better than if a GOPerhead was in the WH. The list is longer on what Obama is doing right than otherwise. But what he is doing wrong is so horribly wrong and dangerous to the future of the DEM party that can anyone tell me why the hell should we stop yakking about it?
Obama is the political version of Tiger Woods. Both of these men’s public facades are shattered.
Go Nancy I don’t disagree with a thing You said.
We need to hope that the left, right, and centrists in the population can agree on some things or our Country is lost.
My point was that the Congress agreeing, has cost us about fifty trillion dollars, ruined the country, got us into the useless wars, ruined our economy, drove our jobs overseas while importing cheap labor for many of those jobs still here, and they can’t seem to really do anything for us, but are willing to do things for every other country in the world.
So does this a little more explain why I think their agreeing can be dangerous.
Very good Marcos.
Maybe My answer to Nancy Willing will help You understand where I was comming from.