The trouble with banking is they mixed other high risk activities in their business?Banking is banking, deposits, loans and checking. Separate fundamental banking from all the rest. The S&Ls were best for home mortgages. All the deregulation in banking, accounting etc. has been an utter diaster. | |
Try that they sucked it all up and hid it out of country. Or funneled it where they could get $1.74 per $1. Don't you hear the tone of 'Oh, Geez, I think we've beaten her enough...?'
They had their way and couldn't stop when they planned to.
A classic painting way back at the start of this and they gave him Hell: Alex Ross. Look up George W. Bush as Dracula sucking the life out of the Statue of Liberty. Tells the whole story and it was just starting.
Sorry,
It was not DEREGULATION that did us in...
It was WRONG REGULATION that caused all this problems.
After the tech bubble, a healthy and natural progression would have led us into recession. Alan Greenspan never allowed us to take that medicine, opting instead to inject the economy full of fiscal and monetary drugs. The resulting imbalance steadily built through the years and arrived at our doorstep with a thud...
It's not wise to mess with Mother Nature. We're now witnessing the other side of risk gone awry and the comeuppance of a scorned business cycle. While Washington wiggles through its next iteration of stimuli, we're left to remember that time and price are the only arbiters of our financial fate.
A:~)
I sat through the "Hard Talk" chat with Ken Rogoff (ex IMF) on BBC last week, which was on this subject. Ken Rogoff recommends that most of the big banks must declare bankruptcy in US, if we are to recover from the present situation. The funding needed is $ 2 Trillion. Anything less would simply result in window dressing and take the problem forward, for another crisis in future. Very enlightening argument put forth by him. In case you would like to go though it, the link is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/7878661.stm
You got it exactly right. There's nothing wrong with high-risk investments--in the proper time and place. A bank or S&L is not that place.
To put it another way--you don't play the lottery with the rent money. That's what banking regulation is designed to prevent.
Yes. That's the gist of it. They took risks with very little security attached. There weren't enough assets to cover loans that defaulted, things like that.
