Straight from the Horse's Orifice:
"Did you know that Wells Fargo now has more than 30% of this nation's mortgage market? That's unheard of in a country where the limit of one bank's tentacles in housing used to be no more than 9.9%. They wouldn't let that happen. They would never let any bank get this powerful for fear that it would become a monopolist. But the exigencies of the financial crisis allowed us to look the other way, and Wells to take such huge share, that the regulators had no other choice but to agree to the consolidation."Well, there you have it. In the Idiocracy there are no conspiracies - greed and gluttony are now openly accepted, it's business as usual.
So, to refactor historical context, based on the latest factoid:
We took rules that were put in place after the 1930s Depression to ensure future generations would learn from that era, and then let Congress at the behest of the Finance industry throw the rules away systematically in the years 1980-2000. No big surprise, financial crime and malfeasance escalated commensurately, leading to the S&L crisis, the Dot Com bust (Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing etc. etc.) and culminating in the financial collapse of 2007/2008. Meanwhile, a key artifact contributing to 2008, brokerage firms (aka. Goldman Sachs), engaged in the practice of generating speculative insurance contracts packaged with (only) the lowest quality (subprime) mortgages, which they sold to the bonus-addled dimwits at AIG, until it went bankrupt. Then taxpayers were forced (by Hank Paulson, former of CEO of Goldman Sachs), to bail out AIG under the auspice of being too big too fail, thereby repaying GS in full on their designed-to-fail speculative contracts. Meanwhile, still other banks (mentioned by Mad Man, above), capitalized on the mayhem by further growing their business to a size 3x larger than would have been allowed at any time in the past 70+years, thereby ensuring that they would become even too bigger to fail. And in the meantime of course, since 2008, policy-makers have done nothing to reform the finance industry.
All the while, I am enduring derision from overeducated blowhards like Dr. Barry Shitler, extolling a rally that only recovered 85% of the prior loss. We have now officially entered the Twilight Zone.
With logic like the above, all I can say is that if by some miracle the global economy does not collapse in 2012 under the weight of all this unprecedented greed and stupidity. Then it's not owed one day more...
