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John Quiggin 
I know I put this link somewhere else very recently JQ, but does anyone think the US financial system is a product of a democratic capitalist system?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print
I dont – not anymore.
I think the US financial system is a laissez faire oligarchy and what regulation remains is tragically woefully inadequate, bordering on a total sham.
The new plan for a PPS style purchase of toxic assets “where taxpayers get the downside but get to share in the upside..” is just more of the same spin emanating from Wall Street CEOS (ie they are telling Govt how they want they want their faulty business models fixed).
It will bring nothing more than the dead cat bounce by way of market confidence.
These institutions (AIG, Goldman and the others) should be left to fail, as they have existed only to gamble and they reward their largest gamblers within.
I see no other remedy and it will only prolong the agony. Glass Steagall needs to come back and other legislation passed by Gramm reversed and some decent regulators appointed. Even that wont be enough. I dont think the damage can be repaired.
If this is what Monte Pelerin / neoclassical / free market deregulated theory produces (thanks to people like Gramm) then its just chaos, not efficiency. Monte Pelerin and Hayek and free market economists to me are an insult to every prior economic theory – in essence its antitheory – a handbag of economic terms misappropriated to the purpose of supporting monumental greed by financial behemoths grown obese on deregulation, now crushing the life out of the US financial system, the US government and US capitalism.
These large financial behemoths are not too big to fail. They need to fail to clear out the deadwood but the US government needs to have a good long hard look at the virtual absence of any financial regulation and its questionably close relationship to the executives of these institutions.
They are a worse threat to the U.S. than terrorism ever was.
Alice 1 writes:
“[D]oes anyone think the US financial system is a product of a democratic capitalist system?
I dont – not anymore.”
Alice, why did you ever think it was?!
We still find people (some Austrians and libertarians citing Friedman or Mints) saying we should have 100% reserve banking system (ie illegalise fractional reserve banking). As if anybody ever had the political power to bring this about.
Does anyone know whether radical ideas about the dominance of financial capital are finding their way into respectable discourse? By respectable, I suppose I mean economics. (Apologies to those doubtless slighted.)
As if anybody would ever have that power – you are right Bruce. They wouldnt. All the pressure is bearing down hard the other way (no rules on what you can lend out, who you can lend to, or how you create what you lend, as long as the commissions keep rolling in).
But what will the outcome be? Printing money has normally led to high inflation, but don’t we need high inflation to avoid the deflationary effects of pricking an asset bubble that had overvalued financial assets and housing by 100% or more?
Alice,
You persistently and seemingly wilfully refuse to address the point that the financial firms are the most regulated of all. Please at least attempt to address this or will will have to call it for what it seems to be. At the moment ignorance may still be a plausible excuse.
.
Bruce,
That’s not Freidman – it’s Rothbard.
.
O6,
Many would argue that the only way you can get overinflated assets like that is because of the printing of money. It is therefore somewhat ironic that the cure that seems to be being advocated it, you guessed it, the printing of money.
You persistently and seemingly wilfully refuse to address the point that the financial firms are the most regulated of all
that is absolute bull**** andrew and i am embarrassed for you
#5
It’s Friedman (too): Amer Econ Review June 1948
It’s associated with early Chicago: e.g. Simons 1934
Andrew
You persistently and misleadingly argue that there is too much regulation despite all evidence to the contrary. Andrew it is quite clear there has been a failure of regulation as regards this global financial crisis. There wasnt nearly enough regulation. In fact there has been virtually no effective regulation on what these large firms did.
None Andrew, none.
John, today Rudd warned against a resurgence of protectionism for which he called “an intrinsic evil”. But is Rudd out of step with countries instituting new protective measures or was it a slip of the tongue?
Islamic banks, 100% reserves, no fractional banking at all (well a little bit due to fiddles of Sharia Law, but compared to western banks insignificant).
You can lend out what you have and nothing else. Still run the risk of liquidity shortages (lending long with short term deposits) but much, much less vulnerable to asset speculation/boom/crashes.
An interesting model.
Once upon a time the Christian religion banned interest (as does Islamic banks now). Remember Christ and the money lenders? In fact Western banking/speculation practices are actually anti-Christian, though that hasn’t stopped the Vatican salting away squillions in Swiss banks over the centuries, but then again the Vatican is not religious, it is the very first multi-national corporation.
Just some random thoughts for the never ending debate.
Michael#8
Rudd is probably in the U.S. listening to bailmeoutsoIcandoitagainspeak (thats slang for AigandGoldmanspeaks).
Now I am really skeptical (oldskeptic2).
#8, protectionism is coming, already here (did it ever go away)? Let me think, when can we sell beef to the US under our {pause to stop laughing} FTA with them.
Oh Govt’s will give a lot of lip service, but just about everyone: is, is planning, is looking how to do it.
Carbon duties are going to be be one way, from the EU no less. Under the guise of saving the planet they will slap carbon taxes on their imports (oops Australia). Other countries will follow quickly, don’t you just love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning?
Then again, since we never actually had free trade, what’s to lose? Oh, there goes our trade {another pause for laughter} trade surplus, or more accurately there goes our ever increasing current account deficit. Plus there goes 30% of living standards, by one way or another.
hey john why did my comment dissappear?
Well, maybe we should just commence on the long hard road to autarky. The idea appeals to me. A nation should be predominantly self-sufficient in the main categories; energy, resources, agriculture, technology, light and heavy industries.
Well said Alice and Bruce (BTW Bruce you taught me some economics 20 years ago :).
If I understand the maths of the US bailout correctly, the total cost may be $2 trillion, about $60,000US for every citizen; about $90,000 per taxpayer. People might well ask why they didn’t jsut pay off the otustanding loans instead. The average mortgage is $136000, so many people now lumped with paying off this debt via their taxes could have cleared their total debts for less. The total value of US mortgages was US$10.6 trillion as of midyear 2008 (Wikipedia quoting Fderal Reserrve stats) so it isn’t true that all mortgages could have been paid back more cheaply. The sub prime ones could have been – they were worth $1.3 trillion, and not all are in default. So it would have been cheaper for the government to take over all the failed mortgages and make those foreclosed renters.
I know economists often don’t consider equity as much as growht and employment, but I think it is time they gave it more attention. This deal just seems to be massively unjust, with the innocent punished (public debt) and the guilty bailed out. I can’t believe that, at some level, there must have been multiple massive frauds in this.
Alice,
I can drop all of the relevant regulations on your desk if you would choose – it is my business to know them.
Once you are done reading that (say in about 3 to 4 months) then you can start on the individual rulings given by each of the regulators. In the US, that is about 58 (the Fed, the FDIC, the OCC, the state based ones and several other, peripheral ones) all of which have the power to close down the operations of any regulated entity.
In Australia there are probably only about 4 or 5 of those (APRA, ASIC, AUSTRAC, the ATO from memory). Oh – should add in all the States’ regulators that affect the business of a bank.
Face it – banking is simply the most regulated business of all – bar perhaps only armaments manufacture or nuclear energy.
Nice to see that you have put the word “effective” in there, though – gives you some weasel room.
Why, then, do you see all of these as in effective? Do you propose that giving them more powers will make them “effective”? Perhaps the ability to execute bank executives summarily. They seem to have every other power they could possibly want.
.
Ikonoklast,
Why not? Autarky worked brilliantly in every other nation that tried it. North Korea, Cambodia, Albania, Burma …
.
Oldskeptic,
Sharia compliant banking does allow fractional reserves. As for “lend out what you have and nothing else” that rule applies to every single bank now. Banks can in fact only lend out up to about 90% of what they have (and nothing else). Looks like ignorance strikes again.
Worked out how to disprove the labour theory of value yet? After your efforts with Black-Scholes I would expect nothing less.
you really are kidding yourself andrew,
just because a set of regulations exist, it does not mean they are enforced
the SEC in the US hadnt prosecuted one case of insider trading in about ten years,
whilst huge funds nnaked shorted companies like bear stearns,
there is no investigation into who did that, hich they could easily do,
that bloke whose name escapes me handed bernard madoff to the regulators on a platter and they did not want to know,
you live in a dreamworld
I am not in favour of autarky at all – I much prefer internationalising ourselves. But that doesn’t necessarily mean being a bunch of suckers or exploitative creeps. I really can’t see why I should be thrilled that someone I have never met gets a bailout job in Melbourne as against someone I’ve never met gets the job in India or France. In what way are they less deserving?
When a current account deficit comes home to roost…
From Der Spiegel:
“As the global recession bites, Latvia, a small and open economy, is being hit especially hard by declining exports. Its problems are exacerbated by having a currency pegged to the euro — a linchpin of the country’s economic policy that now looks increasingly problematic. But the foundations of the crisis were in fact laid years earlier.
It’s a familiar tale of an overheated property market, fed by lax credit, excessive borrowing, and complacent regulators. “This real estate market was insane,” says Aleksis Karlsons, a hotel owner and property developer in Riga. “The mentality set in: I own an apartment or two-that means I’m rich. People thought they were wealthy without doing anything.” At their peak two years ago, apartment prices in Riga reached €2,000 per square meter ($234 per square foot). They have since plunged by more than 50 percent.
While ordinary Latvians can be partly blamed for their naivete, the government bears an even heavier responsibility for failing to prick the bubble when it had the opportunity. “The government did nothing to stop the party. Instead it joined in,” says Peteris Strautins, chief economist of Swedbank in Riga. Even at the height of the boom, when the economy was growing by an unsustainable 11 percent a year, Latvia ran a budget deficit. Latvia’s current account deficit, the excess of imports over exports and capital inflows, reached a colossal 25 percent of GDP in 2007.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,610991,00.html
Excessive borrowing, an overheated property market, declining export revenue, a woefully large CAD… sound familiar?
Andrew (yet again)
says
“Banks can in fact only lend out up to about 90% of what they have (and nothing else). Looks like ignorance strikes again.”
No Andrew – it looks like your routine dose of disinformation strikes again. You wouldnt be trying to get a promotion in the financial sector would you? If you repeat something often enough you start to believe it (or at least you hope someone else does) – The poor financial behemoths like AIG and Goldman Sachs were struggling under the weight of all that regulation but hundreds (thousands) of their employees could still manage to live like Pharoahs and they get the inner hotline to the president’s best men.
“When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.”
Smiths#16
No Andrew doesnt live in a dreamworld Smiths. Being a diligent footsoldier for the economic misinformation campaign, Andrew is creating a dreamworld he hopes we will live in.
Socrates#14
“If I understand the maths of the US bailout correctly, the total cost may be $2 trillion, about $60,000US for every citizen; about $90,000 per taxpayer.”
If they had given that money to taxpayers, instead of the Wall St firms (and let those firms sink in their own free market quicksand), I think we would have been better off. Thus far bailout funds appear to have been excessively hoarded or wasted on bonuses to the ‘directors of disaster’.
Had the Obama admin distributed it to all citizens, it would have been much more likely to have been spent due to a higher overall average propensity to consume than the way they have proceeded ie a quicker injection all round which would have kept unemployment from ‘bearing the brunt as usual’ in such crashes. It would also have acted to reduce the pattern of widening inequality in the U.S.
But it was never going to happen. Employees and other citzens will get the token efforts (and unemployment will bear the brunt). We cant possibly risk all those wealthy clients of the Wall St Financial Pyramids losing their money can we?.
Andrew,
Maybe if bankers stoped coming up with innovative ways of shifting risk to other parties, or to some future point in time (e.g. negatively amortising loans), then maybe there wouldn’t be the need for so many regulations. You know it used to be the case that the principle role of the bank manager was to judge the credit worthiness of his customers. But it seemed that that was all thrown out when deregulation arrived.
Rachel Maddow does a good job of explaining financial deregulation here for us simple folk who don’t have a degree in economics.
Alice i am sure that Andrew isn’t currently involved in any conspiracies, whther or not he is wrong.
They tried letting Lehman brothers fail and it automatically had systemic repurcussions, none the least of which was AIG. Sytemic instability has negative effects on the real economy, truly it does, to let every fincial firm die will not make our lives any better. Whatever there excesses these companies got upto, they are still also the companies that loan people (who can afford it) the money to buy houses, loan businesses (even the non-evil businesses) the money to do business and hire people. So the ramifications are wide spread and we won’t get out of the recession till we have a working financial instituitions.
My main gripe however is that nothing which has been done so far has worked but whatever the structure of the ultimatly successful plan i am certain that some unworthy instituitions will remain. I hope (but not at all confident) that somehow individuals might be punished and the correct, and enforceable regualtions are put in placed to stop it happening in the future. Probable the most important would be to intervene to nip the “to big to fail” problem in the bud
Ikonoclast I am guessing your belief that nations should be self sufficient in those areas is due to the idea of a sustainable steady state economy. I am wondering why this sort of economy requires autarky?
Smiley,
The risk of lending from the banks is actually shifted the other way under US regulations. If a bank funds a house through a mortgage then the borrower always has the option, under US regulations, of walking away from the house with no more to pay. The incentive, then, is for the borrower to walk away when the price starts dropping – meaning that housing downturns turn into routs as once anyone walks away, the incentive is for everyone in the area to walk away.
In Australia we do not have that regulation, so most housing loans are full recourse. Sounds bad for the borrower – but for the system it is good as it is then in th eborrower’s interest to maintain the value of the home and to keep living there.
Combine the US no recourse loan with the US Federal mandated lending to the poor (i.e. sub-prime), the de-facto US Government support behind these loans through Fannie and Freddie and you have a recipie for instability.
Sure the idiots at AIG deserve to get everything they have for sheer stupidity, but pointing the finger at the execs and then walking away and saying that it was all their fault is going to end up missing at least a large part of the problem – the regulations. Bringing in more to try to fix the existing broken set is hardly a good first step.
Looks like the mention of a certain feathered friend has got one of my comments moderated. Fair enough. Alice will just have to wait.
Everyone expected banks to be bailed out so their credit worthiness was never really questioned until the US Government decided otherwise. What happened is that the market realised that there is such as a thing as a major bank collapse.
On a completly different note. Does anyone else find if you read something you disagree with before sleeping you don’t sleep well because, you are thinking about it for the whole night (why they’re wrong, why they might be right, why might i be wrong ect) and if you respond you think the whole night if you got your point across. I think i need to stay away from all blogs, message boards and maybe even youtube after 8:30. Or maybe stop being crazy….
@28
Yes, happens to me too. Read a good book instead, much more relaxing.
26# Andrew – Im hardly quaking in my boots..You will just have to wait. Im sure you will get your chance. All in good time and remember patience is a virtue…
cheers, Alice
Oh and didnt Japan try the big bank bail / buy out in the early 1990s. How did that go for them…?
Alice,
Japan is a perfect example of “holy hell, let’s not do that”.
The bad debts sat on the banks’ balance sheets because they did not want to embarrass companies by revealing the true extent of their losses.
The Japanese Government (which you conveniently ignored) spent trillions of yen on white elephant projects and bailouts – Keynesian policies in action and nothing gained.
i wondered andrew if you havent read the article alice started by linking to,
so i exerpted what i think to be a pertinent part of it,
How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small Office of Thrift Supervision is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct.
Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator,
provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans).
Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts.
In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.
given that the SEC was worse than useless it takes some doing for the OTS to be more compliant than the SEC doesnt it?
is that regulation?
Andrew
I have seen your own website, understand the area you work in, and accept that banks are regulated in a complex and cumbersome fashion – much like the tax system we all suffer under.
However volume of regulation is not the test – breadth and effectiveness is. Much of the current problem stems from markets (CDO and CDS) which are NOT subject to regulation. Hence the current regulation is inadequate. Thus we need more regulation, in that those markets must be controlled. Either that, or regulated (and govt guaranteed) banks should not be allowed to trade in them. If you suggest that we should have reform of existing regulations, which are often a historically accumulated mess, then I agree.
Different era and political and economic milieu, I know, but perhaps a re-assessment or even just a reminder of the whole Jack Lang episode would prove interesting,especially as many are not aware of the personalities and events.
Andrew, you seem to have accepted the point that there’s been a regulatory failure. The rest I am afraid is semantics, you may want to call it fixing the current ‘broket set’ of regulations, or ‘bringing in more’ but effectively this means the same thing really: fixing up the current mess of a regulatory system in the US and imposing rules on the currently unregulated sectors such as credit default swaps.
I don’t really follow your argument is to be honest: yes, banks are regulated quite a bit already but so they should given their systemic importance to the economy. Financial firms with no systemic risk need not be regulated as much: witness Allco or BNB on this point, there were not part of the regime and that was fine.
Other than that, Socrates #35.
Smith #17: Harry Markopolos is the name. See here: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/12/12/SEC-in-Bernard-Madoff-Fraud.
The SEC is a disgrace.
Oldskeptic wrote “Once upon a time the Christian religion banned interest (as does Islamic banks now). Remember Christ and the money lenders?”
That’s not what happened there at all. I wasn’t money lenders but money changers, and the issue wasn’t the earning of interest but the making of profits of the faithful who had to change ordinary coin – Caesar’s, with his head on it, as in the other story – for Jewish coin that was acceptable for offerings. Questions of usury came up as a moral issue a bit later in church history, though it was partly implied in the functions of the tax collectors (tax farming had other elements as well as collection, i.e. accepting payments in kind at poor rates, organising putting out to get supplies to sell to the government and others – and allowing deferred payments at high interest).
“…the Vatican is not religious, it is the very first multi-national corporation”.
Arguably various pagan temples were, followed by certain Christian monasteries (of which Mount Athos still survives).
Andrew Reynolds and Alice, the financial industry is certainly heavily regulated, but equally certainly it is not regulated effectively. I think there are cross purposes arising from this, and from the fact that “effectively regulate” does not mean the same as “regulate effectively” (if you regulate people in the finance industry, say, you effectively regulate the finance industry, but you still may not regulate the finance industry effectively). There are issues of doing it efficiently as well. Some will take these facts as arguments for more regulation, as they will suppose that it can be made more effective, while others will take these facts as arguments for less regulation, as they will suppose that there is no point but much burden and that the underlying needs can be met in other ways, e.g. by better informed markets. Frankly, I doubt if either approach would work at this point with the resources we have to hand, and that we need to look far more closely at what is going on to work out what to do about it after the current round of dust has settled (probably years from now).
Andrew Reynolds, autarky does work brilliantly (in terms of the goals of the countries involved) when two conditions are met: the goals are compatible with the resources; and, the outside world isn’t pushing at the countries. For instance, it worked in China, Korea and Japan in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Madagascar from the mid 18th to mid 19th centuries, and in Paraguay under the Jesuits and in the first 50 or so years of independence. Those all stopped working when the second criterion did, and your example countries never did succeed because they never met either of the criteria (but Burma has often come close, in terms of its rulers’ goals).
Alice #1 and subsequent postings.
I can sympathises with you as to you frustration with the antics of the Financial sector in the USA but it has been going on for quite a while now. It seem that the finance sector is now creaming off approximately %40 of all corporate returns world wide. Not bad money for nothing. You can listen to Paul Wolley’s speech on Radio National about a year ago to get some idea of the problem. He suggests there has been a market failure on a massive scale. The URL is:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2008/2149972.htm
But bad behaviour from b(w?)ankers isn’t new. I liked Edna Carew’s book ”Westpac: the Bank that Broke the Bank” has a encellent read about the antics of one of the local banks during a similar period of deregulation to that has recently taken plance in the USA. The names and place change but the behaviour doesn’t. The following is the URL to a review of the book in Quadrant.
http://www.articlearchives.com/banking-finance/banking-institutions-systems/645352-1.html
The latest banking fiasco in it GFC clothing probably was caused by the excess of funds that these guys were able to get their hands on because of the mercantile trade policies of the East Asian economies and the resultant carry trade. But if history teaches us anything at all it is that these guys (bankers) require constant adult supervision. If this is present they have the capability to destroy large parts the economies productivity.
Given the large number of people currently relying on the financial sector to feed their families, I suspect that there will be must distress winding back the resources currently appropriated by this sector for it current 40% of corporate returns to a more reasonable 10%. This apparently is what it was 40 years ago.
Btw, autarky also works fine if you invade places that have what you need but don’t have. Trade then becomes both efficient and internal.
It is interesting that “The Church” got into almost everything (education, politics, charity, building, wealth accumulation) — except banking.
I suppose they got anti-usury more from the Old Testament, as did Islam pretty much.
My appologies.
The last sentence of the 2nd last paragraph in posting 41 should read:
“If this is NOT present they have the capability to destroy large parts the economies productivity.”
Every single set of new regulations that arise will always result in the evolution of a mechanism to evade them by those who are affected
by those regulations. (yep verbal logic).
So go ahead and fight the bad guys with carefully crafted regulations, but the cracks will open up again. An analogy to this is the never ending battle between antibiotic development and the creation of ever more resistant bugs .
So the first question is can we carefully craft regulations that ultimately solve the problems of our financial industry ? answer not yet .Will they prevent actions to evade those regulations ? unlikely. If so at what cost to our freedoms does this come ? for those who care. Finally is there another way to elliminate all those evil greedy desires ?
But wait here is a solution expressed by G.O
“In 1984, Winston Smith lives in London which is part of the country Oceania. The world is divided into three countries that include the entire globe: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Oceania, and both of the others, is a totalitarian society led by Big Brother, which censors everyone’s behavior, even their thoughts. Winston is disgusted with his oppressed life and secretly longs to join the fabled Brotherhood, a supposed group of underground rebels intent on overthrowing the government. Winston meets Julia and they secretly fall in love and have an affair, something which is considered a crime. One day, while walking home, Winston encounters O’Brian, an inner party member, who gives Winston his address. Winston had exchanged glances with O’Brian before and had dreams about him giving him the impression that O’Brian was a member of the Brotherhood. Since Julia hated the party as much as Winston did, they went to O’Brian’s house together where they were introduced into the Brotherhood. O’Brian is actually a faithful member of the Inner-Party and this is actually a trap for Winston, a trap that O’Brian has been cleverly setting for seven years. Winston and Julia are sent to the Ministry of Love which is a sort of rehabilitation center for criminals accused of thoughtcrime. There, Winston was separated from Julia, and tortured until his beliefs coincided with those of the Party. Winston denounces everything he believed him, even his love for Julia, and was released back into the public where he wastes his days at the Chestnut Tree drinking gin”
The drift to a totalatarian world is not as unrealistic as it seems. All you need is a institute of a science (the new god) that makes sure the right numbers are presented to the civilians and the suppression of dissent (and independent thought) through state controlled compulsory education systems and thought(=religious) police and the world would be perfect in every way.
You may call the above an extreme example, but sometimes extreme examples can make a good point. Just asks the climate change advocates. They are called “climate alarmist” by some
Personally I think the “motherload” type regulation most of you assert that is required to make the world a fair place is a dream, completely unrealistic, and unlikley to work as well as you think.
John, the latest info suggests the US is in a really big poo for the Federal government has since December 2007 only spent $2.7 trillion of the allocated $12.9 trillion to rescue the economy. God help America.
It is time the government realizes it has two simple options: tightly regulate entities that are too big to fail or break them up so they aren’t.
Eliot Spitzer
ha, what does he know, these companies are very well regulated i was told …
the paradox at the heart of this ostensibly clever and undoubtedly complex plan is its dependence on subsidies to private investors
this statement comes from a Financial Times piece on ‘the new plan’ – clever (you gotta love that sort of clever eh?)
anyway, apply this statement to the free market in general and you’ll find it fits just about everywhere …
clever is creating a global casino where the big players have heads they win, tails we lose kind of odds,
and everyone thinks they are mismanaging the bailout …
this is what you call, a killing joke
Bruce Littleboy wrote ‘It is interesting that “The Church” got into almost everything (education, politics, charity, building, wealth accumulation) – except banking’.
That depends on your definitions of “Church” and “banking”. Certainly the mediaeval military orders like the Templars and the Knights of St. John were involved, although more like pawnbrokers than true bankers.
John, what is the thinking about the new bail out devised by Geithner? It seems to me to be adding a new type of junk derivative to a market that failed due to exactly the type of derivative they now propose. Are we blindly following the wrong the wrong US style solution? Is Britain stoney broke after all their bail outs?
at times the church got too far into banking,
have a read about roberto calvi and the vatican bank
his demise was a symbolic display of some sort