What is there not to believe in the poem? Or are you one of those people who happily accepted a loan with virtually no down payment, or happily accepted big dividends and increased profits to a 401k/IRA/Retirement plan and didn’t care how the Wall Street guys did it, however, once they weren’t producing suddenly decided they were criminals?
Yes, we have to close banks if we do that. We have to admit the truth. We have to admit that pension funds who claimed 8% "growth" over long periods of time were pushing a pyramid scheme that was impossible to maintain and thus those "benefits" will not be paid.
We have to admit that the claims made to retirees and soon-to-be-retirees as a sop to allow our "2% inflation" were also lies, and that we thus must stop institutionalized inflation.
We have to admit that trees to do not grow to the sky and that the fundamental nature of exponents is that as long as debt grows faster than the economy you are in fact engaged in a pyramid scheme that must, mathematically, fail.
And we must demand that those so-called "economists", central bankers and media personalities who pushed this meme for the last 30 years come on-air, in person, and apologize for running this scam and the damage it has done to our economy.
Everyone pines about "moral hazard" but there is no moral hazard involved in truly fixing this. Moral Hazard only comes when you protect some of the people who should get screwed due to their own bad behavior.
Protect nobody except one group: Bank depositors under the FDIC limit.
Everyone else? You made your bets, you loaned money to people when you bought their bonds, and you should face the consequences.
Our nation's refusal to allow the market to work and clear bad debts dates to the 1980s bailout of Continental Illinois. And yes, it was a bailout - they got broken up and taken over, but their bondholders were protected.
It is that singular event that marked the sea change. The belief was instilled in the institutional and individual investor that if you loaned capital to a bank and they did something stupid -- or even criminal -- with the money, you would not lose anything.
The solution to this problem is simple, it is elegant, and it is mightily-resisted by the monied class, because they believe they're entitled to be protected from their own stupidity.
This is the cause of literally everything what has gone wrong.
My problem with the Wall Street squatters is that they are not disadvantaged in any way, other than being crybabies-I saw some of the interviews with some of them, and they were bitching about all the mean corporate greed and how they had taken off work or cut university classes to be at the protest. Others had no idea why they were there, but it was “fun”-phoney, clueless people pretending to “care” about something, or mad because their lifestyle isn’t as easy as it used to be. I’d love to let one of them walk in my shoes these past 2 years and let them see how REALLY bad times can be thanks to that jerk rhey voted for-I feel like I’ve been transported back to the Carter era.