Don't Trust a Ho*

* Don't Trust Me by 3OH!3

The fundamental disease of the current financial system is a well founded lack of trust. By deciding to trust exclusively in the "wisdom of the marketplace" the conservatives have forced a situation where nobody is willing to trust anybody, except the government, which they trust only because there is nobody else left.

The repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which put ordinary banks in direct competition with the investment banks, induced or perhaps even forced them to become hos. The payoff was the goodlife of multihundred million dollar bonuses, and the payback was the collapse of the international banking system.

The odd thing is that so much supposedly "smart money" trusted where it should not have - Bernie Madoff, for example. Near the core of these failures, though, was failure of the government, especially the SEC and the Fed, to do their jobs. This was Reagan's "the government is the problem, not the solution" coming back to bite us in the butt. Until George III, the government managed to maintain a minimal competence despite Reagan, but with W, incompetence as a policy trumped everything else.

As a country, we sowed the wind.

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