Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud
Sophocles
It's really amazing that in the age of unbelief, as a smart man called it, there isn't even more fraud. After all, with no God, there's no one to ever call you to account, and no accounting at all if you can get away with it.
Ben Stein
Gotta love Matt Tiabbi at the Rolling Stone. Below is an excerpt with a link to the full article. Want to know what really happened with TARP? It’s a nice winter read.
Secret and Lies of the Bailout
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come
by: Matt Taibbi
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn…
…So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
Whoever is detected in a shameful fraud is ever after not believed even if they speak the truth.
Phaedrus
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I agree with Matt - the 'bailout' should have autioned off the accounts from the banks that were "too big" to local community banks and credit unions.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I don't use any bank anymore. My credit union, of which I'm a shareholder by definition, pays ME to use their services (1.05% on CHECKING, no minimum balance required).