Matt Taibbi nails it over at Rolling Stone::
The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people’s money would make his dick bigger.
Read the whole damn thing.
like nonnie said – how about when banks made a tidy profit being a bank and not a roulette wheel.
FUCK phil gramm – more and more i see him as the cause of this mess. patient zero. and greed
and ronald reagan who taught us we all can have free lunches
when is the country going to get real angry
YEAH BUT. . .
Here’s the killer— Tiabbi:
“While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn’t taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.
No one knows who’s getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America’s credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.”
Multiple choice answer:
1.) The inmates took over the asylum using campaign donations to get rid of the regulatory regime instituted by FDR to prevent another depression.
2.) The golden rule mutated into an end justifies the means ethic in which those who controlled the gold made the rules.
3.) The invisible hand of capitalism turned into an iron fist.
4.) Social Darwinism replaced the social contract.
5.) All of the above.
am i old, or does anyone else remember the good old days when the stock market was more or less for people who had some extra money to gamble with? when did it become the foundation of our economy? the foundation used to be decent jobs where you were appreciated and from which you retired after many years of faithful service with a pension. seriously, what the hell happened?