re: #534 brookly red

eventually this class warfare crap has a backlash…

I don’t think that trying to prevent the next severe recession/depression is a bad thing or qualifies as “class warfare”. Have we already forgotten how close those clowns came to destroying the world economy? But for absolutely extraordinary (and extraordinarily expensive) measures we would be in a depression right now. Are we supposed to be OK with a repeat of that? Should we just pretend everything is fixed, when in fact NOTHING substantive has been done to prevent a recurrence?

It is most decidedly NOT “class warfare’ to say that we should fix the financial system so that this can never happen again. And while you can argue over exactly how to do that, there is no reasonable fix that doesn’t put a dent in Goldman Sachs’ market cap. Tough cookies for them. I have zero sympathy for a firm that sells a security to a customer and shorts it simultaneously. And I refuse to think that Lloyd Blankfein has some sort of legal or moral right to roll the dice with our economy.

For that matter, owning stock in one of those firms makes you a risk taker with them. (That is, after all, the nature of an equity investment.) If you want to throw in with those guys, you had better be prepared for some volatility in that investment.

One article I read put it best: “too big to fail is too big to exist”. No firm should have such a stranglehold on our economy that it KNOWS we have to bail it out. Fixing that situation is not “class warfare”, anymore than Glass-Steagal was.