Category: Wall Street

Art of compromise lost during cantankerous debt limit debate

Posted by dcrim – August 2, 2011

The Senate is expected to approve emergency bipartisan legislation later today to allow the government to borrow more. Speechwriter and author Michael Cohen, writing for Politico, laments that the months-long debate for raising the debt ceiling — once a formality — provides a glimpse of the death of effective politics.

What we have seen over the past few weeks is the continuing erosion of the notion that political compromise, the linchpin of our democratic system, is the key to effective legislating and policymaking. Hostage-taking has replaced deal making in Washington with potentially devastating consequences for the political system.

Click here for the entire analysis.

To the angry rich, sacrifice is for the ‘little people’

Posted by dcrim – September 22, 2010

Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes that the self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable in the fight over the Bush tax cuts.

These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

There’s more.

” …  it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

It will affect many.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

If there is any financial reform, thank Goldman Sachs

Posted by dcrim – April 30, 2010

We certainly wouldn’t want to reform any part of our financial system. Not with these guys in charge.

Maybe it’s time, as Barbara Kiviat of Time magazine suggests, to break up the big banks.

Ezra Klein of Newsweek writes that the market’s rules consist of making as much money as you can without going to jail.

This is a world in which people are applauded for “blowing up the customer” — that is to say, offloading a crap product on a dim investor.

But it’s not the world the rest of us live in. And if Wall Street doesn’t realize that quick, financial regulation might turn out very badly for them.