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Power Femme
How Do You Identify?:
Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
Preferred Pronoun?:
She
Relationship Status:
Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
Posts: 1,733
Thanks: 1,132
Thanked 6,844 Times in 1,493 Posts
Rep Power: 21474852
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Apocalipstic
Wait, did not we get into this mess by cutting regulations for banks and financial institutions?
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Yes. We did. The repeal of Glass-Steagal is going to go down in American history as one of the most singularly stupid things EVER done by Congress. We actually had regulatory firewalls in place so pretty much *precisely* the kind of thing that happened couldn't happen. If you were a commercial bank, you couldn’t be an insurance company. If you were an insurance company, you couldn't be an investment bank. Then we tore down that firewall and banks snatched up insurance companies and then investment firms turned around and snatched those up and on and on. The meme that is out there is that these poor banks were just trying to make an honest buck and then along came the government and forced them to give loans to undeserving (read brown skinned) people. The fact that they bundled these arcane financial instruments called credit default swaps (which were a bet on people *failing* to pay their mortgages) is conveniently swept under the rug and into the memory hole because it doesn't fit the dominant meme that poor people are losers who deserve their hardships while rich people are winners who are being put upon by all of those loser poor people who, for instance, may have not had sufficient foresight to pick rich parents at birth.
Cheers
Aj
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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