Danny Schechter - ColdType

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“The biggest crime on the American economy may go
unpunished with no consequences to the perpetrators. The
biggest crime was not predatory lending, but predatory securitizations,
packages of loans that did not deserve the ratings or
prices at the time they were sold. They ballooned what should
have been a relatively small problem into a global crisis.
“Wall Street owes the American public for its key role in
bringing the global economy – and in particular, the U.S.
economy – to its knees. Goldman is not alone in owing the
American public. It is not the worst of all of the Wall Street
firms. But among all of Wall Street’s offenders, it is the most
well-connected, and Goldman was the firm that cleaned up
the most as the result of government bailouts.”
Political Scientist Ben Barber put Tavakoli’s concerns in a
deeper context: “Capitalism has sort of gone off the rails. It
ceased to be capitalism – it’s financialization. The fact that
it’s now all about speculation, the fact that it’s about Ponzi
schemes, the fact that it’s about selling and buying paper.
“We went from an economy of real goods, real commodities
and real services to a system where people were buying and
selling money, buying and selling assets, buying and selling
other firms, where no new value was created.”
Moe Saceriby, once with Standard & Poor’s, sees the system
changing, too: “I think we had a transition from what
truly was a free-market system to something now that is out
of control and probably what I would define as a predatory
system.”
He told me this leads to manipulation.” Frequently markets
that are manipulated for the end of maybe a few out there – a
few investors, mega-investors. It’s even – even that’s very difficult
to tell. We still don’t know who in fact is making money
while so many in fact are losing money on Wall Street right
now.”
What we do know is that thanks to Wall Street’s interven-