Ten Years After The Financial Crisis, The Contagion Has Spread To Democracy Itself
Huffington Post has the article Ten Years After The Financial Crisis, The Contagion Has Spread To Democracy Itself.
Today, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner insist they did what they had to under conditions of extreme duress. Mistakes were made, the government’s former top financial overseers acknowledge in a recent piece for The New York Times, but they did ultimately “prevent the collapse of the financial system and avoid another Great Depression.”
Except they didn’t really rescue the banking system. They transformed it into an unaccountable criminal syndicate. In the years since the crash, the biggest Wall Street banks have been caught laundering drug money, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and Cuba, bribing foreign government officials, making illegal campaign contributions to a state regulator and manipulating the market for U.S. government debt. Citibank, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and UBS even pleaded guilty to felonies for manipulating currency markets.
Not a single human being has served a day in jail for any of it.
Previously, I had gone under the assumption that taking financial decisions out of the political sphere was a good idea. Now I see the problem with that approach. Given how the oligarchs have bought the political sphere, I am not so sure that putting the political sphere back in charge of finances would be a solution. I guess that is exactly what the title of the article is trying to convey.