Thanks for the link to the CNBC video. That was very informative.
Back in the fall, I started reading the role Wall St. had played in this crisis with the mortgage securities, but that video provided much more explanation. In reading some of your other comments on this thread, I suspect you and I might have similar views about what caused the economic crisis.
I don’t have sympathy for the people who lost their homes due to buying properties they could never afford and/or refinancing again and again. I’m a notorious penny-pincher; our house is relatively small, and our family has never taken a vacation. So, when I see the built-in swimming pools in their backyards, etc., and listen to how they lied about their incomes, I don’t feel sorry for them.
But, I never saw Wall St. as victims, either. They share the blame in this mess. Government also shares the blame, as Peter Schiff explains so well.
In “Atlas Shrugged”, Rand’s heroes are the businesspeople that produce something of value, like steel, a railroad system, sound loans, and more. I have to go back through the book or maybe earlier Freeperbookclub threads to find the lines I think she wrote that criticize the people who shuffle papers but produce nothing of real value. I don’t think I imagined those lines (or did I?). In any case, it might take me some time to find them.
I’ll be back later to respond to your other post and to reply again to Publius.
That was me in a reply to another FReeper. I pointed out that we converted our economy from manufacturing -- which we moved abroad to take advantage of lower labor costs -- to shuffling paper assets from one pile to another. The leasing industry, which exists because of lines in the tax code, is a good example of this. So is the entire derivatives industry on Wall Street -- which has gotten us into a real fix.