The Revelations of Sheila Bair: Wall Street’s Power Grab By Michael Hudson
January 20, 2010
You almost could hear the bankers heave a sigh of relief when Haiti’s earthquake knocked the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings off the front pages and evening news broadcasts last week. At stake is Wall Street’s power grab seeking to centralize policy control firmly in its own hands by neutralizing the government’s regulatory agencies. Their strategy certainly made money for themselves–and they made it off those for whom the financial crisis “didn’t work out well,” whose bad bets ended up paying Wall Street’s bonuses. So when Paul Krugman poked fun at the four leading “Bankers without a clue” in his New York Times kcolumn, he was lending credence to their pretense at innocent gullibility.
Recipients of such enormous bonuses cannot be deemed all that clueless. They blamed the problem on natural cycles–what Mr. Blankfein called a “100-year storm.” Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase trivialized the crisis as a normal and even unsurprising event that “happens every five to seven years,” as if the crash is just another business cycle downturn, not aggravated by any systemic financial flaws. If anything, Wall Street accuses liberal government planners of being too nice to poor people, by providing cheap mortgage credit to the uninitiated who could not quite handle the responsibility.
But the Wall Street executives were careful not to blame the government. This was not just an attempt to avoid antagonizing the Congressional panel. The last thing Wall Street wants is for the government to change its behavior.
The Wall Street boys are playing possum. Why should we expect them to explain their strategy to us? CONTINUED
The Revelations of Sheila Bair: Wall Street’s Power Grab – Progressive Democrats of America