Nought to five
No one here gets out alive
Time to channel some Jim Morrison to describe the financial crisis.
At the beginning of the year, Wall Street had five major American investment banks: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
As of today, there are none left.
Bear Stearns and Merril Lynch went almost bust and were both bought by other banks. Lehman Brothers just went plain old bankrupt, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley turned themselves into plain old better regulated banks to avoid further trouble.
Is it clear now that deregulating a sector of the economy will just cause itself to crash? Some of these banks had been around for more than a century, and it's not like Barings, where lax internal oversight allowed one rogue trader to bring the bank down.
Something has to been done to prevent powerful lobbyists from playing the American political system to remove regulations to power shortsighted greed. And that is not going to be done by John "the Great Deregulator" McCain, Phil Gramm, his economic advisor who played a large part in the deregulation of investment banking and the dozens of other lobbyists on his team.
A question you can ask of your Republican friends:
We have deregulated a sector of the economy in investment banking, and now it has completely disappeared. Do you want to deregulate health insurance? Do you want to deregulate Social Security? Do you want them to disappear as well?