Goodbye, Wall Street
These are historic times we live in. I simply can’t believe the turbulence this country has been through in the past couple of days. We came very, very close to financial collapse and utter ruin. First it was Bear Stearns, then Lehman Brothers, and then AIG, and it’s not over yet. One after another, these once giant financial institutions collapsed, and left their massive debts on the shoulders of American taxpayers. And now, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the “last two independent investment banks,” have been converted to bank holding companies.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment banks, will become bank holding companies, the Federal Reserve said Sunday night, fundamentally altering the landscape of Wall Street.
The move fundamentally changes one of the mainstay models of modern Wall Street, the independent investment bank, soon after the federal government unveiled the biggest market intervention since the New Deal. It heralds new regulations and supervision of previously lightly regulated investment banks, as well as an end to the outsized paychecks that underpinned the traditional image of the chest-thumping Wall Street banker.
Source: The New York Times
Is this the end of Wall Street? This guy thinks so:
“The decision marks the end of Wall Street as we have known it,” said William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. “It’s really too bad, as our country has benefited greatly from the entrepreneurial risk takers on Wall Street.”
Source: Bloomberg
The Bush administration has been disastrous for this country. They came in and started a war, eroded our civil rights and are now leaving the country in utter financial collapse. Who or what is to blame? Greed? Hubris? The blame game has already begun. The right is blaming the poor who were too “stupid” to accept loans they couldn’t pay back, and the left is blaming the money-hungry corporations. What makes me angry is the lack of transparency on the part of our government. It seems to me that we, the people, don’t really know what’s going on in the upper echelons.
How would you define the political system of America today? Is it a democracy, an oligarchy or a plutocracy?
The next administration has a big mess on its hands. It must end the war, manage the financial crisis and steer the country in the right direction. I don’t think that person is Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, John McCain. But I am not really convinced that it’s Barack Obama either. Even though Obama might have better ideas to solve the crises we are in, he still has to work with the Senate and the Congress. I doubt that the Republicans there will allow him to pass the radical legislations and reforms this country needs to get out of this mess. At one time everyone was saying that the Iraq War was the beginning of the end of the mighty American Empire, but it seems to me that this financial collapse might just be it. God help us all.
