The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
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Q&A: Umair Haque on How to Beat Wall Street Once and for All « @ggregator
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America is watching a great tragedy unfold: The collapse of the middle class. That society needs megabanks is, to put it kindly, a finely tailored piece of marketing. In fact, as I’ve written about a few months back, banks need society a lot more than society needs banks. How do we know? Well, consider the Irish Bankers’ Strikes of the 1970s, when fed-up bankers petulantly decided to go on strike (with the assumption that the economy would collapse, and society would beg to have them back). Instead, the economy kept growing, and a kind of peer-to-peer banking system arose spontaneously. Far from instability, the result was relative stability.The larger point is that the “instability” that is the heart of Wall Street’s scare tactics is in fact already upon us, savagely so. The global financial system is still being propped up with liquidity injections and implicit guarantees of every kind—and on the flipside, income, wealth, and job creation are stagnating while poverty is growing. That is economic instability—and the solution isn’t subsidizing Wall Street to the hilt, because that only sets the stage for a bigger, nastier, meltdown in the next five years or so. The solution is building fundamentally, radically better financial institutions.
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