Michael Lewis - Inside The Fraudulent Collapse Of Wall Street
For those of you who don't know Michael Lewis, he is the author of Liar's Poker. Taken from the opening lines of Amazon's editorial review of Liar's Poker, "As described by Lewis, liar's poker is a game played in idle moments by workers on Wall Street, the objective of which is to reward trickery and deceit. With this as a metaphor, Lewis describes his four years with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, from his bizarre hiring through the training program to his years as a successful bond trader.".
That book was written to describe Lewis' experiences 25 years ago. Now, if you believe Lewis, and you should, our economy has been built on the thinking of complete economic idiots. And while I make many sardonic remarks on here using colorful adjectives, I use the word idiot in the literal sense. These are truly economic idiots running Wall Street. And the tens of billions they have spent buying our government has resulted in completely idiotic economic policy. So every economic decision that has negatively impacted you over the last 25 years where some idiot in Washington, the mainstream media or Wall Street has fed you endless pablum on how it was good for our economy was more than likely a result of legalized bribery and/or stupidity.
We linked to an excellent Michael Lewis article over at Portfolio.com some time ago. (I still highly recommend it for its timeliness.) Now he is on 60 Minutes giving one of the most succinct and excellent interviews on Wall Street's endless stupidity. Lewis completely dismisses the prima facie view adopted by society and Wall Street's megalomaniacs that there is any brilliance associated with any of their endless deceits and maneuvers meant to defraud society.
These are the cretins that your tax dollars have bailed out. The crooks, the liars, the deceivers. It's very hard for me to believe thousands upon thousands of them should not be in prison right now. That includes most of the CEOs. But then since there is no rule of law, we'll likely never see a full accounting and responsibility. The state apparently wants to brush aside fraud and deceit. To chalk it up to unfortunate circumstances created by our morally pure Wall Street mobsters.
I don't want to idealize human nature but we would see none of this with public banking. None of it. We may see politicians seeking to spend more money than they should, but they would also be directly within the view of American voters who could directly remove them from office. Our current banking system is completely insulated from the rule of law, democracy and American voters. The outright fraud and complete misappropriation of capital in the economy to schemes, frauds, gambling, trading and derivatives to name a few, would never happen. Any deceits could and would be contained because the incentive to do so would comparatively be small for endless reasons. Not the least of which is public banking would pay public banker salaries.
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