Reply #7: Thank you for this PfcHammer.

[ozymandius]

And welcome to the SMW! :hi:

This supports the sentiment here, as it has been stated in many ways, that we have very far left to fall to repair the damage Greenscam and his ilk have done over the past twenty five years. I may get flamed over this but I'll say it anyway: Businesses that perpetrated these excesses (including banks) need to fail. The earnings were unrealistic, based on nothing but easy money and golden rhetoric. Failure is therapeutic. It heals the broken parts of the economic system and strengthens the weaknesses through reforms.

Conversely, if you look at every major decision on economic policy that has been made over the past twenty five years (with the possible exception of Sarbanes-Oxley) we have witnessed a sustained attack on weakening the strengths of our body economic. As mentioned here yesterday - my belief is that those who benefited from the wild excesses over these years benignly, perhaps inappropriately, through the right-place/right-time scenario should not be marched to the guillotine. That punishment is reserved for the engineers of our morass.

Traditional banks should never have been perverted through legislative action to act as investment brokerages. Period. Wanton speculation possibly could have been nipped in the bud if access to a titanic supply of money in traditionally conservative portfolios had been placed off-limits. Saving money, rather than investing it in some "exotic" product, should not be penalized.

As always: This opinion and $1.75 will get you a grande-size cup of coffee.