Does anyone remember what got us into this mess? Does anyone remember why the world economy is in such bad shape right now? It was the financial crisis. Now I know we have a lot to think about but one thing that deserves some attention is the fact that a financial crisis could happen again. I don't want to sound gloomy and doomy but in some ways we might be worse off now than then. Remember when Citibank said they were fine and the regulators said they could buy up some other banks and then low and behold they needed a bailout after all. Other banks did the same, so if banks were too big too fail then they are much too big to fail now. All our elected officials said they would make sure it could never happen again, but they did nothing to ensure that.
Dodd-Frank is a toothless wonder, Glass-Steagall is dead and apparently no one is enforcing antitrust laws because banks are still much too big to fail. Now they're talking about making Jamie Dimon Treasury Secretary, didn't he say Dodd-Frank was too constraining.
So I have heard it argued that people will just keep coming up with ways around regulations so we might as well deregulate. That's like saying people speed so we should just not have speed limits. Let's get some regulations that work, let's make sure no business is too big to fail, and let's enforce the laws.
For all the libertarians out there who say let the markets be free I say look at what happened when we deregulated the a banks. First we had the Savings and Loan debacle then we had WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL CRISIS.. Is anyone happy that we deregulated the airlines?
Free Markets are great if your God is money and your Messiah is Adam Smith. But markets are never really free, and there are more important things than money. Without regulations unscrupulous rich people and companies can trick poor people out of their hard earned cash. Legal stealing. There is a lot of that going on today, but it would be worse with less regulation.
This nation was founded on rule of law, meaning everyone plays by the same rules. Our goal should be to return to that ideal, not keep making excuses for big companies and rich people to get tax breaks and subsidies while people are hungry in America.
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