>>all that from an Alaskan who enjoys government checks once a year<<
Thanks for the reminder. I need to get my 2008 PFD application in by March 31st. BTW, Alaska is so flush this year they are talking about giving us an extra check to defray high energy prices! ;>)
>>I'm seeing a lot of panic set in, which begets more panic.<<
There is good reason for panic...
The Bubble Economy
The sub-prime mess, the huge risks taken by hedge funds, and the conflicts of interest that led to Enron are all the consequences of serial bouts of financial deregulation. Will we reverse field in time to prevent another 1929?
Robert Kuttner | September 24, 2007
The federal reserve is still struggling to contain what is already the most severe credit contraction since the Great Depression. Yet in all of the press coverage, commentators have scarcely acknowledged that this old-fashioned panic is a child of deregulation. During the past decade, the financial economy has repeated the excesses of the 1920s -- too much borrowing to underwrite too many speculative bets with other people's money, too far beyond the reach of regulators, setting up the entire economy for a crash.
The sub-prime mess, the huge risks taken by hedge funds, and the conflicts of interest that led to Enron and kindred scandals, are all the consequences of serial bouts of financial deregulation. Since the 1970s, in the name of free-market efficiency, Congress and presidents of both parties repealed key protections put in place by the New Deal. But the main effect has been to engineer windfall profits for financial insiders, replace real productive innovation with financial engineering, shift wealth from families to corporations, and put the entire American economy at ever greater risk.
more: prospect.org
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