Nowhere is the evidence of unbridled corporate greed stronger than in what the financial crisis did to the U.S. economy. The losses are staggering. Economic growth was killed to the tune of over $13 trillion. Homeowners lost a whopping $8.1 trillion in home values.
It is 2013, five years after the start of a recession and two and a half years after so called financial reform legislation was passed. Yet, Too Big To Fail Banks have just gotten bigger, the financial system is still at risk and most of the disaster was buried in a mountain of bail out money.
The noise from the election machine is at 120 decibels. If you don't wear ear plugs you'll damage your hearing. Campaigns and their surrogates are misquoting statistics, rewriting history and are carpet bombing Ohio with ads and armies of campaign workers knocking at the door.
Another financial crisis, a prolonged recession, or changing political ideologies could cause a re-examination of the status quo and lead to a decision to break up the big banks. If that should happen, policy makers could well take another look at the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 as a model for accomplishing such a breakup over a limited time span of, say, seven years. The political mood is already shifting. The 1980s mantras -- government regulation as problematic, free-market competition as an unquestioned good, financial engineering as worthwhile innovation and finance as more important than commercial and industrial enterprise -- are now being reconsidered. This could lead to a more responsible balance between government, finance and industry. Dodd-Frank, despite its length and complexity, is only the beginning of real regulatory reform. It's a continuation of the complexity of already overly complex financial and regulatory systems. What we need is a simple regulatory scheme to create a simpler banking system.
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