"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy.
These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.
If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism."
Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, 2012
"Predator Nation demolishes the view that the global financial crisis was merely some sort of freak accident. Charles Ferguson makes a convincing case that the world’s banking system was brought to the brink of complete collapse in 2008–09 by a virulent combination of unchecked greed and criminal behavior.
This is an epic crime story with an apparently clean getaway, courtesy of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Both presidents proved unwilling to hold anyone to account—or even to launch meaningful investigations.
Leading bankers walked away with billions of dollars in unjustified compensation. The costs imposed on the rest of us can be measured in the trillions of dollars."
Simon Johnson, economist and author, book review of Predator Nation
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy– they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
We have become so frivolous, so easily distracted, and so wantonly shallow that we are all becoming Tom and Daisy now. We get by, like addicts, on partisan fear and hatred. It is unfortunate but most have nothing to fall back on after the bread and circuses have run their course— no money, no love of anything but themselves, and no firm moral beliefs and principles. Nothing but the abyss.
So far this dip we saw today in the wondrously mispriced risks of the US markets is just a pause, merely another day in the dismal lands of Pigmanistan. Let's see if they can keep pumping this pig up to one of the more difficult levels of overhead support.
And a pig of a market this is. The 'smart money' has been selling the rallies for the last couple of weeks. I wonder if they will be able to hang on until the end of the first quarter.
The vested financial interests, aka the dark hearts of fraud, wanted to get the major indices back to at least even if not green in the worst way. And so far they have managed to do it with atavistically named 'Dow Industrials' which is the favorite index of tourists.
What else would you call it, when this august index from history includes such 'industrial giants' as JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, American Express, Travelers, and Visa?
Well, after all, in Pigmanistan the major product is debt, wrapped up as dodgy financial paper.
Have a pleasant evening.
