Obama plans to charge U.S. banks fees to try to get the money back that the government shelled out to bail out the banks. Seems reasonable to me.
“The politics on this is really quite easy,” said Doug Elliott, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former managing director at JPMorgan Chase & Co, in a comment to Bloomberg. “The public would be supportive of anything up to shooting and burning the bankers.”
OK, he’s exaggerating a bit. But if the public will is so strong in this area, why haven’t the banks been punished? Why aren’t strong new regulations going into place?
I’m reading Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and it’s making me deeply suspicious about the motivations and rationales normally given for economic crashes. I don’t know enough about the latest crash to say whether I think there was anything other than hubris, greed, and stupidity at play, but Klein’s book makes me wonder whether there’s some who are profiting from all this.
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