not to mention their balance sheet is pretty clean

fwiw

“Why not let the market devise its own system of financial checks and balances?”

ummm, haven’t we tried that before?… let me see… yep, thats what got us into this mess! – 20 years of ultra-free market-radicalism – apparently that didn’t work

financial innovation completely outpaced regulators
and free-market-ers thought it was a good idea to break-down glass-steagall, let investment banks grab 30-40x leverage, and thought no money-down mortgages were a good idea

not picking on you crudge, I just obviously have a different view of the solution and think it would be catastrophic to simply let the market determine the fate of our economy at this point

of course, but I couldn’t resist lobbing that Softball out there, though.. (:

Transor,

I’m not sure which is better, the great lyric, or the funny quip, though, no matter

and, for our friends, far afield, wondering who Jefferson was, here’s the .gov approved version, sure to keep you off, at least one, Terrorist List..
http://sc94.ameslab.gov/TOUR/tjefferson.html

ref. http://thetruthorthefight.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/secret-state-police-report-ron-paul-bob-barr-chuck-baldwin-libertarians-are-terrorists/

he he…Cohen and Jagger/Richards, all in one post. Impressive.

Well I don’t really know shit about high finance and stock trading so I try to bring something to the table to keep Barry from booting my ass out of here. :-)

“because our mothers all neglected us and owe a million dollars tax.”

he he…Cohen and Jagger/Richards, all in one post. Impressive.

@Mark E Hoffer:

Of course I meant something like Section 8. We could do w/ a little more Jefferson and a little less Hamilton about now it seems.

Clearly, the New Deal approach, most notably FDIC, relies on there being a sharp line drawn between government and private sector finance. The lesson of our times has got to be that either we go the route you suggest and have government get out of the banking business or create a true firewall between the two sectors.

Trying to keep the New Deal dream alive may be quixotic given the sophistication of 21st-century corporations in having their agendas translated into law and regulations — or the absence thereof. The current state of affairs only reinforces the notion that, to the extent Lincoln’s idealistic words “of the people, by the people, for the people” ever really existed, we’re losing it. Or God forbid, to quote Leonard Cohen:

Everybody knows that the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost / Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows / Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied / Everybody’s got this broken feeling / Like their father or their dog just died.

The catch-22 that we all sense is that “The People” just can’t get no satis-traction into the process because our mothers all neglected us and owe a million dollars tax.

Until we know what caused it (and we do, but in our co-dependent, dysfunctional state, we pretend we don’t), our attempts to reorganize will be for naught.

So, what caused it?

Fractional reserve lending accompanied by a glaring lack of oversight in an already deregulated environment, aided in and encouraged the formation of a continuing criminal enterprise founded on fraud and characterized by skimming of the revenue stream. In short: the largest Ponzi scheme ever attempted, which, by the very nature of such schemes, is prone to collapse over time, as new “investors” become increasingly difficult to find.

About a year ago, we wondered if we’d reached a “Minsky moment”.

We now find ourselves at a “Madoff moment” (don’t forget – you heard it from me, first).

The jig is up.

do you mean, like this:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html

esp. Section 8.