The End of the Financial World as We Know It | New York Times Op-Ed - Michael Lewis
AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We've been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet's college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don't know what they are doing with money, who does? Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what? <...> There are also a handful of other perfectly obvious changes in the financial system to be made, to prevent some version of what has happened from happening all over again. A short list: Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices. ... End the official status of the rating agencies. ... Regulate credit-default swaps. ... Impose new capital requirements on banks. ... Close the revolving door between the S.E.C. and Wall Street. ... But keep the door open the other way. ... The funny thing is, there's nothing all that radical about most of these changes. A disinterested person would probably wonder why many of them had not been made long ago. A committee of people whose financial interests are somehow bound up with Wall Street is a different matter.
This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world seems to be saying, if they don't know what they are doing with money, who does?
Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?
<...>
There are also a handful of other perfectly obvious changes in the financial system to be made, to prevent some version of what has happened from happening all over again. A short list:
Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices. ...
End the official status of the rating agencies. ...
Regulate credit-default swaps. ...
Impose new capital requirements on banks. ...
Close the revolving door between the S.E.C. and Wall Street. ...
But keep the door open the other way. ...
The funny thing is, there's nothing all that radical about most of these changes. A disinterested person would probably wonder why many of them had not been made long ago. A committee of people whose financial interests are somehow bound up with Wall Street is a different matter.
Also, the entire essay is actually divided into two parts (I quoted from both above):
The End of the Financial World as We Know It
How to Repair a Broken Financial World Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
It really shows that the Wall Street people are such thiefs.
It's not hard to compare the current crisis management with the one we had in Sweden back in 1992, and the main difference is: patriotism. Or rather the lack of it.
The regulators and bankers in the US quite clearly don't care about America. They put the special interests of the financial lobby in front of everything else. The FED doesn't care the least about unemployment, inflation or financial stability. Only about stock prices.
In Sweden, the bank CEO's and the public officials all knew each other and solely worked in the interest of the public.
I'm really quite shocked by the behaviour of the US elite. They are a bunch of thiefs who do not put their country first. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
