As a gambling addict, I find the idea of a casino that refunds your losses (if they are sufficiently big) most appealing--but as likely as a snowball in hell. However, banks don't gamble; they speculate.
Spitzer's new paradigm explains to a certain extent how complex instruments spawned by pre-TARP investment bankers (in offshore cahoots with savvy individual players, and involving arcane, financial-derivative insurance deals), could produce legal profits in the billions for some individual investors, even as those same too-big-to-default investment bank instruments fell to pieces, and needed government money to put them together again. Nobody on Wall Street missed a meal, I know that--but the rest of us poor, everyday suckers, benighted as to the true nature of the financial predation, find ourselves nonetheless stuck with the tab for a ridiculous bailout funded by a central bank that masquerades as financially solvent.
As regards this sort of immodest profiteering, I strongly suggest Chinese-style justice. This would mean exposing, prosecuting--and possibly, executing, on live color television--members of the known obscurantist charlatans. These latter will no doubt express an uncharacteristic willingness to disgorge their gain, once face-to-face with the hatcheteer--but more importantly, such a display of populist countermeasure will ensure that the next generation of financial rapists will think twice, and perhaps even break a sweat, before they proceed to loot America's trusts. Further, a well-produced pageant of executions--broadcast far, wide, around the globe, and in vivid color--will make marvelous purgation for the rest of us.
And for the season finale, let's send Bush 43 and Uncle Dick on a vacation to Bonn--in shackles.
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Closely related to Spitzer's perverse financial paradigm is another uniquely American Humpty-Dumpty scenario, swaying precariously, and certainly about to fall. I have not found the juste mot for this big noise, although we hear it all day, everyday on CNBC, MSNBC, and any other financial network you may follow. I am talking about the glut of arcane verbiage spewing from legions of American media experts and celebrity touts. These ubiquitous oracles believe with every corpuscle that their unverifiable and frequently erroneous explanations, opinions, and prognostications are too true to ignore. Why can't they all be like Abby Joseph Cohen and just go-the-hell away? Nobody who knows the truth would dare utter a word.
Like Bernanke, Hitler was also Time Magazine's "Person of the Year." Overbearing credentials imply no special wisdom. The Nobel laureates of Long Term Capital Management were merely the first to kick off the parade of emperors in new clothing. Their financial misjudgment will seem scarcely a poof when the bilious build-up presently set to incinerate the dollar finds it fuse. Bernanke's successor/stooge won't utter a squeak when the Department of Treasury overrides interested private parties and blue-lights a mighty passel of green-backs, just to get the rest of the world off our back. Necessary new fiat currency will drop American dollar-hegemony like a dead cat off the roof of the Federal Reserve Bank. The rest of the intertwined victims will follow suit for a truly spectacular show of bouncing dead cats. Cat has long been a staple of the oriental diet.
When the world catches wind of the bad smell emanating from dollar reserves around the world--the Fed will of course do their utmost to maintain decorum, to restrain falling value until the selling pressure goes away: Ugh! we . . . got to hold . . . it . . . back!---Pphhhhhhhhhhaaaaapppp!--but its got to blow up sometime! Unless a sovereign bankruptcy by the biggest debtor in the universe is preferable, the US Treasury must let presses roll, and let by-gones be by-gones. We've got to provide some consolation to our juked debtors, don't we? Then we will see some glorious executions, betcha.
Since its inception in 1913, our Federal Reserve Bank has never been audited, nor have its stockholders been disclosed. Calls for transparency have been answered with inscrutable pronouncements, the likes of which would throw any honest bank examiner into apoplectic fits if foisted on him by a state bank.
Ron Paul's idea of auditing the Federal Reserve Bank makes sense, both bad and good. Bad, because conspiracy theorists will no longer have their elaborate, paranoid delusions. When the stake-holders of our national (and global) economy are seen as stark-naked, store-window mannequins, the abuse of deregulated bank powers will become obvious even to saps like us. I'm not even going to mention what Jefferson thought. Good, because ethical practices may find their way back to banking. Alas, it will not be.
Media will repeat until we all believe the colossal misstatements: an audit of the Fed would constitute a grave threat to national security--which it would, but not to the visible America. Audit supporters will find themselves labeled as unpatriotic, terrorist-loving traitors--boarding their flights with exploding soles on their shoes and box-cutters tucked into their butt-cracks. The very idea! Exposing the infrastructure of the temple! God himself would consume the auditors with fire! Oh, wait a minute. We're talking dollars, not shekels.
Ron Paul and his central bank apostates threaten to expose not only the emperor's new clothes, but the emperor himself, in the full glory of his filthy, secreted underthings--bindings on our national economy that have strangled us, hidden from view, for nearly a century. I say, heck yes, let's remove the veil from our overlords, order up a firing squad, and send in the paparazzi. Cheney may become persona non grata on the Saudi royal yacht. Formerly safe, super-rich folk might get nervous tummies. But these are all to the good. I personally am bored to tears by the upper classes--they become so self-enamored over time. Screw them.
"Socialization of financial loss and privatization of gain" is exactly backwards for the present situation, and one more incremental step on the path to enthrallment of all the working people. You might've taken a knock without these so-called bail-outs, but how much do you have in money-market funds and Dow-Jones industrials? Until they institute a TARP-like bailout for gambling addicts, I don't support bailing out anyone who so much as owns a telephone.
Since old Homeless T doesn't have a phone, or a home, or a real job either--or any goddam thing at this point--the delicately balanced lies of financial capitalism don't matter much to him. Spread 'em out in the sun to dry.