saw a headline today:
“Bank of America May Need $34 Billion in New Capital”
WAIT, isn’t that just another way of saying:
“Bank of America Fails To The Tune of At Least $34 Billion Dollars”
And in a parallel dimension the same “story” might headline thus:
“All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Cached; Please Restock”
Who are these DIY bank execs? And why should we, the public, indulge these sympathetic headlines? Here are some headlines from my very own parallel dimension:
“Bank Executives’ Families Reclaimed to Feed Bank Executives”
“Money No Longer Funny”
“They” is “us”. There’s not an American who was of legal voting age in 2004 who isn’t partially responsible.
As voters, we get agitated about issues that are either more morally charged (eg, reproductive rights) or tangibly felt (eg, gasoline prices) or universally compelling (eg, global warming).
But as voters we don’t pay attention to the decidely unsexy arcana of things like financial sector regulation. This was a simple matter of [Normal Human Pursuit of Material Gain] + [Prolonged Poor Regulatory Oversight by the Federal Government] = [Large-Scale Disaster]
Next time you get to vote at any level–local, state, federal–it’s worth paying attention to where politicians stand on the boring stuff.
As to ‘why the bailout?’ – because the alternative to spending billions to fix messes created by a few unregulated capitalists is to return to a barter economy…anyone willing to give me a set of clothes in exchange for my pet pig ‘Sneezy’?