Biggest and most complex banks are "fundamentally inconsistent with capitalism."

[TalkingDog]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/fed-official-biggest-banks-put-future-capitalism-risk-161922790.html

"So long as the concept of a exists, and there are institutions so powerful and considered so important that they require special support and different rules," declared Hoenig, who is known as a hawk on monetary policy, "the future of capitalism is at risk and our market economy is in peril."

That's because, he argued, the existence of banks that are understood to be "too big to fail" distorts the functioning of the free market. "For capitalism to work, businesses, including financial firms, must be allowed, or compelled, to compete freely and openly and must be held accountable for their failures," Hoenig said. "Only under these conditions do markets objectively allocate credit to those businesses that provide the highest value."

/snip

The questions then become:

If they are not capitalists, what are they?

What, other than owning the world and everything in it, is their end game? Do they have an end game? Or are they sharks that need to keep swimming and consuming just to stay alive?

If they crush they system, what will take it's place?

Special support suggests... what? Socialism?

[Zenlitened]

1. Socialism is the LAST thing this special support suggests.

Socialism is NOT government of, by and for large corporations.




Edit typo in my subject line: "socialism," not "social." :)

[TalkingDog]

2. Sorry, should have included the sarcasm thingy...

[Zenlitened]

6. Whew, good to hear. Yes, please make generous use of the sarcasm smiley!

:D

[damntexdem]

3. Oh, they're capitalists, all right. The biggest threats to the capitalist system are ...

capitalists.

[tblue37]

8. Marx explained so quite well. Although he was naive about what would happen when

another system replaced capitalism, he was very astute in his critique of capitalism and of the way it contains the seeds of its own demise.

[blindpig]

4. Yet they are also inevitable.

Capitalism is full of contradictions, which is why we have 'the business cycle', crashes. But it works well enough for most of the capitalists, so that's what we get. Until we get rid of the parasites.

[kenny blankenship]

5. Another who can't deal with the fact that capitalism escapes what he needs & wants it to mean

Capitalism is whatever people with capital are doing today to maximize their advantage and increase profits. When it needs to remake the laws which it previously made, it does this. When it needs to arrange a market and some laws to require all citizens to enter this market and to pay more and to pay regularly, it does that. It takes more and more control year after year to extract more and more profits, and capitalism can neither stand still, obeying fixed laws out of some economist's fantasy about how capitalism works to the benefit of society, nor can it accept stagnation or decrease of profits, without the debt based monetary system at its core going into reverse and collapsing everything.

[jwirr]

7. So the next target of the disaster capitalists are big complex banks

too big to fail! Sounds like a good plan to me.

[hifiguy]

9. Capitalism works just fine on a small scale

and when the necessities of human life are not allowed to be objects of profiteering.

Capitalism is great at making iPods, computers, cars, appliances, furniture, electronics and consumer goods.

Capitalism is a miserable failure at providing for a clean environment, public spaces, health care and energy, among other things. Banks by definition should be regulated so tightly they need to ask the government's permission before so much as letting a fart.

The sensible solution is to have a mixed, German/Scandinavian style economy. People can still get rich in such an economy, just not as rich. And they have to pay taxes, too.

[applegrove]

10. Deregulation always results in a few big corporations and a whole lot of small businesses. The mid

sized corporations get gutted. Look at any industry. Then the big corporations function on a different plane/market than the smaller ones. The banking industry is being deregulated worldwide. Now is the time for the big American banks to become the biggest banks in the world. Now is the window. Why the government will bail them out again if need be. In 50 years it will be too late to be one of the biggest banks in the world or for the USA to dominate worldwide banking industry. So the big banks have the White House over a barrel.

[Starry Messenger]

11. The invisible hand is a myth.

The big guys use it to convince the little guys that the market is some neutral place that settles out like a force of nature. It's bullshit. Capitalism started out with the "special support" of robbing labor and lands. The bigger the institution, the more it takes. That's all. Kill it.