Apparently, the banks are getting bigger… Well, the top three, anyways. With all the mergers and acquisitions through the financial crisis, it looks like somebody has benefited. (via)
The last things I want to do is to defend giant corporations, but I’m not sure if the FEDs had any other options other than forcing these shotgun marriages.
I mean, look at the one case they didn’t intervene; the one giant financial institution they didn’t bail out, nor did they force anybody to buy it; Lehman brothers.
Prior to Lehman, the feds had prevented bankruptcy of bear sterns, freddie & fannie, but this time they decided to let Lehman fall because of moral hazard.
& look what happened: the crisis just escalated.
I’m not defending protecting rich guys. But that’s something you should have prevented years ago.
Once the crisis starts, there’s not much you can do. Some go broke, some get rich. Therefor, these kind of mergers, unfortunately, can’t be prevented & can be justified.
What can be prevented & what can’t be justified is the way the feds & right wing economists & politicians ran the economy before the crisis, blindly following their own ideological agenda (ie. free market crusade) & their political motivations (ie, protecting their sponsors).
Barack Obama and John McCain have raised millions of dollars for their presidential campaigns. In GOOD’s second installment of Political NASCAR, we look at the uniforms the two candidates would wear if companies wanted to use their political donations as advertisements, and if running for president ended with the winner doing donuts on the White House lawn.
The Billion Dollar Gram is a comparison of various things and how much they cost, organized by category (green = spending, blue = earning, red = giving, purple = fighting, yellow = losing, grey = “ilin’”). The big purple block in the right hand corner represents the Iraq war, while the yellow represents the financial crisis.
If the the world were a village of 100 people…
