The film "Inside Job" was an eye opener in a variety of ways. Academia and government officials were taken to task in this documentary. "Wall Street government" is a phrase that refers to the officials (who ran the economy in those years of deregulation). But check their former affiliations and board memberships -" these folks were by and large part of the bankster community! The film also gives some examples of other scholars and officials who warned top policy makers about what was happening. Not surprisingly, however, their warnings fell on deaf ears.
Many blamed greedy home buyers in the subprime mortgage market. They blamed Americans for spending money they didn't have, they blamed China for not buying enough of our products, etc. But they never questioned how these very unstable financial arrangements were built over the years, and why they were put together the way they were.. And did you ever hear any apology from banksters or top-level officials or even from their aides in academia and government? No you did not.
According to "Inside Job," financial institutions spent over $5 billion on lobbying between 1998 and 2008. As part of their grand scam, they hired top-notch economists to write on the "stability" of these highly unstable markets. Many of these economists-for-hire were and are on the boards of financial institutions or credit rating agencies! All too incestuous.
The most famous examples are top-level executives on Wall Street, plus some academics, who all later became government officials and carried out the deregulation: Henry Paulson, former Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO, Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, Glen Hubbard of Columbia University and Larry Summers of Harvard were all part of this bipartisan group of deregulators. They praised Frederic Mishkin's report written for the Iceland Chamber of Commerce, which lauded the "stability" of Iceland's financial system in which banks' toxic assets grew until they exceeded 10 times the country's GDP! -- whereupon the country's economy collapsed, when the truth of this wildly unstable situation could no longer be kept secret.
It is said that people cannot be blamed for what they cannot foresee. But aren't there, at the very least, ethical and regulatory aspects that should be questioned here? And yet for Obama and his Department of Justice, mum's the word. So what does that signify? Do they really see, yet pretend that they don't? Or do they really not see? Remember that old maxim, "It's difficult to get a man to see or understand something when his great privileges depend on not seeing or understanding it"?
True, the Obama administration has tried to regulate some parts of the derivatives market, but the result of these efforts is a long way from satisfactory. The banksters on Wall Street joined forces and were strengthened even further during the crisis, and now, after many buyouts by the larger institutions, ever fewer institutions control (i.e. dominate) the same marketplace. Are these players regulated enough? Of course not. Do they have ever more powerful lobbies infiltrating Washington, D.C.? Yes, for sure. So who's going to stop these oligopolistic thieves? And how? And as the middle class continues to be decimated by their supremely well organized thievery, for how much longer can our economy avoid further collapse?
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