Let It Burn: A Nutshell

Tony Wikrent spells out how the Wall Street game saps the true economy.. go read the whole thing with graphs and charts and details and stuff..

At the cost of your future, the U.S. financial system is being saved. For a half century, the United States has been unable to find a hundred billion or so a year to fund general healthcare, but now that financial powerhouses like Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG are crumbling, the U.S. Treasury can magically procure trillions of dollars in promises without so much as a nit of resistance in either chamber of the U.S. Congress.

Your future earnings have now been committed to saving the asses of the millionaire and billionaires who postured as geniuses as they managed and oversaw the financial follies of the past 28 years. The future potential of your country – and the future potential of your children and grandchildren, is being wasted, now, to save a financial system that subtracts real value from the economy; a financial system that enriches the few by impoverishing the many.
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Empire building and increased managerial compensation are often a primary motive behind bank mergers. Forbes reported last week that the five principals of Goldman Sachs were paid over $300 million. This is really what the game has been about for the past thirty years.

Once we have eliminated the big Wall Street institutions that have been essentially looting the economy, and redirected the financial system back to providing capital for capitalism, we need to ensure that speculation does not again become a problem. The best and easiest thing to do is simply to tax speculation.
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After being the most profitable business on Wall Street, generating more than $65 billion in pretax profits for the four largest U.S. securities firms between 2002 and 2006, trading has become a black hole. It still accounts for about half of the revenue at the Wall Street firms. Yet Lehman Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld and Merrill CEO John Thain have been unable to convince shareholders to attach a value to the businesses.

So what if we as a society now prohibit the masters of the universe from trading? It seems we would actually be doing them a favor. But let’s do ourselves a favor, and just shut down the whole damn casino.
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As of this past Monday morning, only two independent investment banks are left standing: Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Is there any doubt that either of these companies is indeed now “too big to fail”? And what about Bank of America, which swallowed Merrill Lynch? If these companies are “too big to fail” why should we as a society wait to see if we will have to bail them out in case of their failing? They should be immediately broken up ... The entire idea of national banking companies should be abandoned as a badly failed experiment. What about having to compete in the global marketplace? Let’s face facts: ever since U.S. banks have been deregulated to be better able to compete in the global marketplace, they’ve had their asses handed to them over and over again. Let’s just accept that deregulation is a failed experiment, and accept the fact that a strictly regulated domestic banking system, geared only to domestic needs, is actually the strongest and safest.

In fact, when you look at what our country’s needs are, you see just how spectacular a failure the whole conservative experiment in deregulation and “free markets” has been. We need to move off of a dependence on fossil fuels. How much progress has been made toward that goal in the past 28 years? Practically none. We have not even been able to maintain our existing infrastructure adequately, let alone build new infrastructure to meet national requirements – such as urban mass transit rail systems. Of the 39 largest U.S. urban areas, beginning with Nashville, Tennessee which has a population of over 1.2 million, thirteen have no urban rail transit at all, and another five have less than 20 kilometers of rail line. Houston, Texas, now the sixth largest U.S. metropolis, with an urban population of 4.2 million, has a laughable twelve kilometer “system” served by sixteen stations. If the financial system has been unable to steer investment into this crying need, then let’s just let the damn thing collapse. It’s really of no use to our society.

As Dean Baker concluded:

The basic story is Wall Street has our money. There will be innocent victims in the battle to rein in Wall Street: the administrative assistants, the custodians, the ordinary workers who will also lose their jobs. This is unavoidable. If we eliminated sweetheart defense contracts with Halliburton and Blackwater, innocent people would also lose their jobs, however few would argue that we should therefore continue to throw taxpayer money in the garbage paying exorbitant fees to these firms.

We have an historic opportunity to correct one of the major distortions to the U.S. economy if we move now. There is no way to reverse the growth in inequality over the last three decades without attacking the elite Wall Street crowd. Those folks who back away from this task simply are not serious about addressing inequality. They have our money. It's that simple.