Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Wall Street Socialsim

The White House has refused to send any help to so called Main Street, but when it comes to Wall Street there is a different standard.

E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them.

1 comment:

Butch said...

I often feel the same way when I hear congress people complaining about welfare queens... but would have a heart attack if the useless military base in their home district was finally allowed to close. Such hypocrisy.