In truth, the U.S. banking system as a whole is probably insolvent.
By that I mean the likely future losses of loans and assets already on balance sheets at U.S. financial institutions, if incurred today, would reveal the system as a whole to lack the necessary regulatory capital to continue functioning under current guidelines.
In fact, some prognosticators believe these losses far exceed the entire capital of the U.S. financial system !
Yeh. But what’s the critical bit?
How about ‘cronyist financial sector’.
Even if the sector were more competitive it is inevitable that monetary policy focused on shoring up asset prices will benefit the primary asset-holders in the economy, which in itself is a regressive transfer of wealth to the rich.
The idea that supporting asset prices is the best way to support the wider economy is not far away from the notion of trickle-down economics (or as Will Rogers put it: “money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.”).
We know some things about what happened between the start of the Iraq war and 2008 in the commodities market. We know the amount of speculative money in commodities exploded, that between 2003 and 2008 the amount of money in commodities overall went from $13 billion to $317 billion, and that because virtually all investment in commodities is long investment, that nearly twenty-five-fold increase necessarily drove oil prices up around the world
Nuts if Republicans take midterms.
One reason for our more modest outlook is that no sector of the private economy stands ready to drive a robust recovery.
As federal fiscal stimulus wanes and state and local government cutbacks accelerate, the private sector has failed to pick up the slack. With only modest gains in private economic activity, the overall pace of growth has slowed.
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
Ideological theories leading voters by the nose while…
Here’s yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class… business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market,
Why stop there?
The problem from the get- go has been the lack of accountability.
The same entities responsible for inflating the bubble with shoddy underwriting are the same entities evicting citizens with the same shoddy underwriting.
Neglect and regulatory capture have become the gift to the Obama administration that keeps on giving … more and more headaches.
Wingnuts and Sarah Palin will fix it. Yeh sure.