Opting for Swedish over Japanese
Tired of my rants against Wall Street?
Consider this “guest” rant instead, which IMHO is pitch-perfect (minus a few #!%#!, perhaps):
After 40 years of pain avoidance, can we just rip off the f**kin’ band-aid already? Enough with the asset price protection, it is the root cause of everything bad about the economy right now. Had we saved the banking system and said f**k the banks themselves, we’d be two thirds of the way out of this by now. Had we gone Swedish instead of Japanese and said the banks are now “Wards of the State” until cleaned up, then yes, we probably would have seen Dow 5000…but so what? Was stopping at Dow 6500 so much better? We would have had an unencumbered financial system at this point, one healthy enough to cope with a new leg down in housing, rather than the debt-ridden George Romero zombie film we find ourselves re-watching every quarter.
Pain avoidance and shortcuts is what we got instead. Nobody gets fired and nobody upsets the banking-government nexus too much. There are campaigns to be financed after all.
No wonder Obama put Volcker on ice as soon as he Dracula-sucked the Street Cred right out of his neck. Volcker was probably telling him to fire everyone, take over the systemic banks, prosecute the asshole executives and piss off everyone in the short-term for the good of us all in the future. Obama’s too eager to please to go down a road like that.
–Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker
As I’ve written previously, it’s hardly the case that “no one knows what to do.”
In fact, at least away from Wall Street and Washington, there’s surprising consensus across a wide group of commentators on the step(s) needed to get out of our current financial mess.
So, thanks, Mr. Brown, you saved me the trouble.
