10 days That Changed Capitalism

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from OurFuture.org:



10 days That Changed Capitalism
By Robert Borosage
March 28th, 2008 - 12:31pm ET


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By Rob Johnson and Robert Borosage

The world has changed. The market fundamentalism that has dominated our economics over last three decades has been unmasked as a sham, deemed useless by the guardian of the integrity of finance itself, the Federal Reserve.

Without a vote of the Congress or a public debate, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve have made government the guarantor of the shadow banking system – the unregulated, unhinged hedge funds and investment houses whose compulsive excesses now threaten the global economy. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but we seen only a part of the new machine, not surprisingly, the part that buttresses Wall Street. They have scrambled to put this together in an emergency, behind closed doors, without a hint of the necessary regulatory changes that must rationally accompany such guarantees. That is what the fight in the coming months will surely be about.

As the article below by David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal summarizes, the intervention puts at risk hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

It also transforms the economic debate. It is inconceivable that taxpayers should be asked to bail out private buccaneer speculators without enforcing limits on their speculation – capital reserves, limits on what gambles they can take, oversight, transparency, new restrictions on their pay packages to remove the current multi-million dollar personal incentives to invent new Penza schemes and scams.

The shadow banking system now must be brought out of the shadows. After all we are constantly told that finance serves the economy, and the market system is the best means to solve our social goals. It feels very uncomfortable when our servant's servant becomes our master's master as Wall Street has been permitted to become in America in recent years by contribution- hungry elected officials.

As Barack Obama noted in his speech yesterday, the deregulation that fostered this folly was supported by both parties. It began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Ronald Reagan, went into hyper speed under Bill Clinton, and spiraled into catastrophe under George Bush. The freedom to gamble with other peoples’ money has been protected by lavish campaign contributions and powerful lobbies. These financial buccaneers have treated the laws and rules that govern our financial markets like just one more asset to be bought and sold. They have been unabashed in their arrogant abuse of power, rigging the rules and daring the world to stop them. A particularly audacious example occurred only last year when a concerted lobby campaign convinced the Democratic majority in the Senate to sustain the tax dodge that enables billionaire hedge fund operators to pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/10-days-changed-capitalism

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