The Banking Crisis: Not the Fault of Poor Minorities
But as usual, leave it to the rich and conservative to blame the poor and underprivileged for the problems suffered by the middle class.
18 Comments
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Alan Bedenko
About Alan: Voted Best Buffalo Blogger by the readers of Artvoice 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010. Voted best Online Writer by the readers of the Buffalo Spree 2009. Please visit the Buffalo Pundit FAQ for more info.
It is disgusting that banking reform and regulation has actually been made into a controversial subject! It is astonishing how we are so willing to drive over a cliff for these guys. These guys would all be in jail if it were up to me.
I love the part where he described how the Feds lend money at no interest to the banks who turn around and lend the money back the to feds and then claim huge profits from their loans which they then use to justify their huge ego inflated salaries. Our system has become pathetic from top to bottom.
The banking industry had become irrational actors due to Federal Reserve and Government policies and regulations. That is the nexus of the financial collapse, not capitalism.
Mike is right.
I blame a policy of government bailouts leading to consequence-free decision making more than I blame ”regulations,” but the fact remains that government intervention removed market forces that would likely have prevented this collapse.
I guess I’m just being more dense than normal, but I didn’t see anything in the 60 Minutes piece where anyone rich and/or conservative placed the blame for this on poor people.
Umm…hate to break it to you but the banks were pulling all kinds of fraudulent, malicious shenanigans long before the bailouts happened.
hahahaha “irrational actors”…..I prefer “conniving crooks”
Just like the arsonist whose defense is “but you closed down the fire station in my neighborhood!”
Yeah, I could see how the repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act, weakening of SEC oversight and the Greenspan-Bush effort to deregulate in the past decade drove bankers and financiers to act like, as Gabe said, “conniving crooks”
This buffoon did. You remember Rick Santelli and his rant that birthed the Tea Party movement.
Mike that’s bullshit and you know it. The government didn’t force them to make risky investments. They did it to themselves.
That is right becasue without the governnent intervention they would not exist right now and would ne unable to continue fleecing us. Of course we would also be in a massive depression as well.
There is absolutley no precident throughout history that shows the private business can be 100% self policing.
Business is not self policing ,the world is not flat, and it is also not the center of the universe. You are just going to have to get rid of these beliefs.
If anything, history has shown us that the less regulation you put on businesses, the more they’ll exploit people for profits.
The free market didn’t stop kids from being used as industrial chimney sweeps.
Perhaps not in this specific 60 minutes piece, but you’re clearly ignoring about 12 months of right wing talking points in order to make your point.
Because they got bailed out in the 80′s… Like I said, it was a “pattern” of bailouts not one individual bailout that led to a consequence free mentality.
And I bet that you didn’t hate to break it to me, but that you kinda liked it.
PS to Pundit: If the use of emoticons violates the blog’s standards, please feel free to delete my post.
That is exactly the point that I was making. Risks that normally would have been seen as irrational became rational because the decision-makers could be confident that if the risk paid off they would make obscene amounts of money, and if the risky moves went badly, they would get bailed out and still make pretty obscene amounts of money.
The government didn’t force them, it just removed the disincentives…
No, Geek, I wasn’t trying to make a point. Really. Pundit is usually pretty good about providing links to support his references. When I didn’t see one in the body of his post, I assumed it was in the video. I expected to see Santelli or someone like him making an ass of himself, or someone else dressing him down. That’s all. No larger point, just an observation.
Jon, you can’t judge the past through the lens of the present. Every modern industrialized country has gone through a period where child labor was preferable to starvation. It is part of the process. The same thing happens now in third world countries. Boycotting goods produced under those conditions only ensures the starvation of more people.
@C’mon Mike, the Federal Reserve flooded banks with newly printed fiat money. That put financial pressure on the banks to quickly make loans. That pressure resulted in risky loans that ordinarily wouldn’t have been made.