All of us felt the suction from Wall Street. One day you would get an email saying, 'We will buy no-doc loans at 95% loan-to-value,' and an old-timer like me had never seen one,' says Mr. Barnes. 'It wasn't long before the no-doc emails said 100%.'"
You don't read many accounts like this of businessmen bashing Wall Street in the business press. Could it all have been stopped? Of course, if there were real regulators and rules protecting consumers and the public interest. And if there was a social movement that championed exonomic justice.
And also, if there were investigative journalists like the ones who just wrote a series on the "debacle" of the "debt bomb" in the Journal - but after the collapse, not before. And what do they admit now? That this is NOT just a subprime problem but far more serious and global.
They note that "credit problems once seen as isolated to a few subprime-mortgage lenders are beginning to propagate across markets and borders in unpredicted ways and degrees. A system designed to distribute and absorb risk might, instead, have bred it, by making it so easy for investors to buy complex securities they didn't fully understand. And the interconnectedness of markets could mean that a sudden change in sentiment by investors in all sorts of markets could destabilize the financial system and hurt economic growth."
Will the rest of the media follow up and explain what is really going on?
This is very serious folks, but far too many progressives, activists and politicians alike haven't spoken out about the crime behind this rolling scandal. We should be calling for major debt reform in America, like Bono advocates for Africa. We should demand criminal penalties for the profiteers who started out to enrich themselves and seem to have ended up destroying the very system they misused. We should press the Congress to use its subpoena power to investigate the corporate criminals and their government enablers.
When they propose a bailout, we should demand a "jailout." The Washington Post reports that the US has started a bail out "pumping more than $150 billion into the financial system to keep it operating smoothly." Where is this money coming from? Not from the military budget you can be sure.
Blogger Carolyn Baker writes that we all must become more engaged with these issues saying she is:
"profoundly aware of the role of economic issues-perhaps more than militarism, healthcare, education, politics, or any other institution, in the dead-ahead demise of empire.
I also notice that few in the left-liberal end of the political spectrum have a firm grasp on economic issues which I suspect comes from a fundamental polarization between activism and financial intelligence."
She writes about a book by a conservative named Michael Panzner called "Financial Armageddon" criticizing his analysis as limited, and by extension, many of the left's avoidance of these issues as well.
She writes: "What is most disturbing to me about the book is what appears to be a total lack of perception regarding the role of fraud, theft, and malicious intent in the American and global financial train wreck which has been exacerbating over recent decades."
Indeed! What are we going to do about this? How about starting with becoming more aware?
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