Are banks which have grown so large that they are "too big to fail" still a Capitalist enterprise?Any sort of business that has grown so large that its failure would damage the entire financial system and the economy, but has an implied guarantee that if it fails it will be rescued does not sound much like Capitalism to me. It sounds more like a Hostage Situation. I thought that Capitalism meant taking... |
FU$K THESE BIG BANKS. They are not too big to fail.. If they failed, many others would be there to pick up the pieces, just like all the other companies saved by the government. It just killed the American dream of family businesses that could have picked up the slack.
Of course. Such banks are the ultimate destination of capitalism as are the bailouts of those banks. Without those bailouts global capitalism would have completely collapsed. And it still might.
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Why Socialism?
Albert Einstein
http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-...
Excerpt:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
The large banks collaborate and actually do hold the world hostage through financial terrorism. Go to youtube and type in "Max Keiser Financial Terrorism." And no Keiser is not a socialist. Quite the opposite.
If Western societies were not so dependent then it would be possible to allow the banks to fail.
The corporations have encouraged this dependence for their own gain.
How many of you could continue to live in a calm orderly fashion if all the shops were to shut down for 2 weeks ?
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They should be allowed to fail and man banks have or have been bought out by bigger banks. If not allowed to fail, there's no incentive to make proper decisions.
The responder above me makes a good point. Fannie and Freddie should have gone under. Making risky loans to people who should have never been given paperwork to complete in the first place is exactly why tax payers coughed up hundreds of billions to bail them out.
This is why Dodd/Frank was an exercise in masturbation. Totally useless and a complete failure to resolve this so-called too big to fail fallacy.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1302794657
Frontline: The Warning - the story of Brooksley Born, the Clinton appointee who was shunned by the Clinton admin for advocating regulation of derivatives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebWJ892h5...
Shocking Video Unearthed Democrats in their own words Covering up the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Scam that caused our Economic Crisis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEX...
Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFwv0FgtebI
Bill Clinton "democrats at fault for Fannie & Freddie
The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed by the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley banking deregulation act, which passed with overwhelming majorities of both parties in both houses of Congress, then it was eagerly signed into law by Bill Clinton. The 2008 meltdown was attributed directly to this law.
Arthur Levitt, Jr. was the longest serving head of the SEC. Do a Google search on him, see what pops up.
He was appointed by Clinton in 1993 and again in 1998. He left in 2001, so he covered the entire Clinton administration.
Levitt gave Madoff a free pass because they were both members of the Harmonie Club, a social club for the ultra wealthy in NYC.
Madoff was first reported to the SEC in 1992:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/02/bernard-madoff-sec-report
Report: Regulator was tipped off about Madoff fraud as early as 1992
"a suspicion of trouble at Madoff Investment Securities arose as early as 1992 when customers of Avellino & Bienes, a fund that invested all its money with Madoff, complained about documents making a seemingly impossible promise of "100%" safe investments. Although the SEC shut down Avellino & Bienes, the agency only made a "brief and very limited" examination of Madoff."
Avellino & Bienes was shut down by the SEC in 1993, the year Levitt took charge.
Levitt also gave a special exemption to Enron, exempting it from accounting rules. This special exemption led directly to the Enron scam and the subsequent meltdown of the company, which took down a major chunk of the economy with it. It also led to the discovery of similar fraud at many other companies, fraud that got its start in the Clinton years.
If I was going to pick one individual who was most responsible for the rampant fraud of the Clinton years, it would have to be Art Levitt.
The concept of "too big to fail" is not capitalistic. A capitalistic view would be "If you fail, another bank that is better than yours will take it's place".
Yes, it is capitalism. State capitalism, but capitalism, nonetheless.
