> It is your intelligence I am insulting, in the hope that you will wake up, realize that ...
Not a great way to bring people over to your side either ;-) .
> If you look at all the ways that Wall Street got itself into trouble through malinvestment of liquidity that was publicly provided, requiring continuing massive public bailouts,
I realize that I am wasting my writing effort. However, its a holiday ...
Financial mis-investment did not cause the 2007/2008 problem. It was caused by mis-direction of investment due to government interventions. No private enterprise would willingly invest into losing causes. It is government subsidies funneled through the Fannie/Freddie monstrosities that created the ground work for the disaster. This was made worst by the bailout. Keep in mind that even in 2007/2008 there were many well managed and profitable financial companies. Under normal circumstances, we would have had a massive cleanup taking place on Wall Street. Bad firms would go under and their resources would be absorbed by those organizations that were well run. Unfortunately, the bailouts made sure that this cleanup would never occur. The really horrible mistake of the Bush bailout is it effectively transferred financial resources from well run companies to the the mis-managed once.
LOL! Like I said, your naivte is touching.
It was Alan Greenspan himself who admitted his great surprise (and grave error) upon discovering that individual officers at investment banks would operate to maximize their personal gain at the expense of the welfare of the shareholders. Lots of losing causes made lots of money for individuals while tanking the whole operation.