[lbo-talk] Yves Smith: Treasury Trying to Defend Bank Gaming ofPublic-Private Partnership

Marv Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Tue Apr 7 13:07:01 PDT 2009


B writes:


> I'm going to this, locally, on April 11:
>
>
> http://www.anewwayforward.org/
>
>
> Is anyone else going to their local city's demo of this April 11 event?
>
> Is it perfect? Hell no! Good luck waiting for the 'perfect' demo - you
> will second-guess yourself back to first base, back onto your computer if
> you focus laserlike on the flaws, which can be done - with anything, this
> not excepted.
>
> But it is something.
===================================== Hmm. I think the thrust of the demo - against the foreclosures and bailouts- is good and should be supported, but I still have to wonder about the counterposed demand for smaller banks. The US financial system seems to me to already have too many small private banks, needs the restoration of Glass-Steagall or some variant of it for the larger ones, and should be under the control of a dominant state bank.

Are the big insolvent banks really too big to fail? Why not redirect the billions in bailout money to the formation of a new national bank to reconstruct the financial system? Why the obscene bribes to hedge funds and other private institutions in an indirect and futile attempt to revive private lending?

A publicly-owned big bank is not in the cards - Wall Street is widely discredited but still in command of the state - but pity the US left seems to be promoting an historically outmoded alternative to bad policy.



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