Wouldn't that just be the kick in the junk if it turned out that with all our writhing and begging the Obama administration to do something about the unchecked greed and corruption on Wall Street and at Bank Corp USA ... that it was the republican policies that caused this whole thing to begin with the machine that took them down?
First, they moved in on less informed homeowners, making them feel silly for being so obsessed with the equity in their home and the interest rate on their payments. When the bubble burst and they all tried to pretend like it was the Democrats who made them do it, the real stories started to unfold about how Wall Street and Bank Corp USA have been operating while no one was looking and we realized we didn't even have half the story.
Middle Class America was being raped of its wealth, and the economy's dollars were being pumped upstairs in a sump pump of greed that no one even saw coming.
When ordinary Americans started cashing in their 401(K)s, it wasn't because they had finally realized what a tortuously phony scam the whole program was from the beginning; a hologram of hope to get worker bees to loosen their grip on "The Pension" and free up even more of the local economies' wealth to be sucked up through the Reagan Sump. No, they cashed them in because they just needed the money. Boy did that piss off Wall Street. Because we found out that while 20 or 30 grand in some bullshit savings program would never amount to a real retirement, they were using that capital to get HELLA rich! And when you took your money out, the game was starting to end.
That jerk in the system sent ordinary savers running for the hills, throwing all their money in savings accounts and under mattresses. Recently there was a diary here at Kos which quoted a few Too Big To Fail banks that made it clear they planned to punish the middle class for this instinct of self preservation.
Now, what is perhaps the next to the last domino to fall is reported today in the NY Times.
Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.
If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.
Small investors are "losing their appetite for risk," a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.
You think Too Big to Fail freaked when the Middle Class pulled out?! Wait until THIS memo gets around. This kind of contraction will leave companies staggering for capital to feed their little Derivatives Rampage. And it may just be the plug that starts a draining that will send the fragile, fake system into the pipes from the top down.
In the end, it won't be regulation, laws, bipartisanship or Allen Grayson that takes them down, sets them back on their heels and sends them toppling like Goliath with a head wound. It will be the very policies that made them so filthy rich in the first place. Those very techniques had a built in self destruct mechanism, for anyone stupid enough to be at the top when someone pulled the lever. Republican conservative protection and the Reaganite deregulation that set them free, will set them on fire because of one little thing they didn't take into consideration.
"Self Preservation".
It's what will kill Too Big To Fail.