Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well.
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Frank Rich, writing in the NY Times on 10/18/09 concurs:
The less that we the people know, the easier it is for reckless gambling to return to capitalism's casino, and for Washington to look the other way as a new financial bubble inflates.
Economist Dean Baker chimes in, lambasting the Federal Reserve for blowing the bubble, and pointing out that those who caused the disaster are trying to shift the focus and stop any real corrections as fast as they can:
The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a "systematic risk regulator" to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse.
Baker continues:
Instead of striving to uncover the truth, Congress seeks to conceal it, essentially telling the banksters that they're free to steal again.
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Economist Thomas Palley points out that Wall Street has a vested interest in covering up how bad things are:
That rosy-scenario thinking has returned to Wall Street should be no surprise. Wall Street profits from rising asset prices on which it charges a management fee, from deal-making on which it earns advisory fees, and from encouraging retail investors to buy stock, which boosts transaction fees. Such earnings are far larger when stock markets are rising, which explains Wall Street's genetic propensity to pump the economy.
NYT columnist Frank Rich agrees: Companies like Goldman Sachs are back to business as usual: making money by high-risk gambling, blessed as they are by all the advantages that the best government connections and cheap loans from the Fed can bring -- the Fed being an agency, led by former Goldman execs, that Goldman essentially now controls. Goldman is further blessed by the high-speed trading algorithms their computers employ, and to hell with the legions of sucker investors who try to play the stock market without this huge advantage.
As the Reuters columnist Rolfe Winkler wrote last week, "
Main Street still owns much of the risk while Wall Street gets virtually all of the profit."So, for how much longer are we going to let this gigantic and systematic theft continue? Must we wait until the entire system collapses before we wake up? This would certainly be no problem for most of the Wall Street billionaires; they would eventually pick up the pieces -- at bargain prices that were unprecedented. And their power over us would then dwarf anything we know today.
