Bankers - Is there no end to their greed?

[whiskeysteve]

Since the early nineteen-eighties, by contrast, financial blowups have proliferated and living standards have stagnated. Is this coincidence? For a long time, economists and policymakers have accepted the financial industry's appraisal of its own worth, ignoring the market failures and other pathologies that plague it. Even after all that has happened, there is a tendency in Congress and the White House to defer to Wall Street because what happens there, befuddling as it may be to outsiders, is essential to the country's prosperity. Finally, dissidents like Paul Woolley are questioning this narrative. "There was a presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable," Woolley said to me. "The first thing I discovered was that it wasn't backed by any empirical evidence. There's almost none." ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy#ixzz18C020UyL

Dont have time to read all the article but I imagine it cuts to heart of the parasitical nature of the financial institutions we are burdened with, that fundamentally the banks do not create or build anything with intrinsic value, they merely exist to channel money from one source to another and take a cut each time.

As Max Kaiser once said, they trade toilet paper with each other and pay themselves huge fees each time. A damned shame for our generation that we bailed out an exclusive international casino.

[seafoid]

Since the early nineteen-eighties, by contrast, financial blowups have proliferated and living standards have stagnated. Is this coincidence? For a long time, economists and policymakers have accepted the financial industry's appraisal of its own worth, ignoring the market failures and other pathologies that plague it. Even after all that has happened, there is a tendency in Congress and the White House to defer to Wall Street because what happens there, befuddling as it may be to outsiders, is essential to the country's prosperity. Finally, dissidents like Paul Woolley are questioning this narrative. "There was a presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable," Woolley said to me. "The first thing I discovered was that it wasn't backed by any empirical evidence. There's almost none." ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy#ixzz18C020UyL

Dont have time to read all the article but I imagine it cuts to heart of the parasitical nature of the financial institutions we are burdened with, that fundamentally the banks do not create or build anything with intrinsic value, they merely exist to channel money from one source to another and take a cut each time.

As Max Kaiser once said, they trade toilet paper with each other and pay themselves huge fees each time. A damned shame for our generation that we bailed out an exclusive international casino.

They are going to destroy the financial system.

[DoireGael]

Quite a good/simple video to get our head around it all.

http://www.crisisofcredit.com/