The Market Ticker ® complains that the banks and the regulators are flagrantly and massively violating laws that are necessary for borrowing and lending to work – violating every step that is necessary for the trust to work along the chain, with the result that our entire financial system is massively disfunctional, and continues to leak huge amounts of money. He gives lots of interesting details of a multitude of flagrantly criminal acts.
But he fails to ask how the widespread criminality began.
It began because the law both commanded and forbade affirmative action lending, and to comply, what was illegal had to be done, therefore, had to be made de-facto legal.
Repeating my much repeated rant yet again:
When they gave a Nobel prize to Marie Curie for being female, that did not hurt anyone except more deserving potential Nobel prize winners. But handing out phony Nobels on the basis of sex, race, and nationality necessitated handing out phony degrees on the basis of race and sex, and handing out phony degrees on the basis of race and sex necessarily led to a crisis where these phony degrees were being ignored by employers, so employers necessarily had to be forced to give out well paid phony jobs on the basis of race and sex. But being given well paid phony jobs on the basis of race and sex failed to result in recipients living a middle class lifestyle, so lenders had to be forced to give out a middle class lifestyle on the basis of race and sex. Which required every single banker to become dishonest or get a new job. Which has led to our present financial crisis. It all began with Marie Curie.
So if you roll back the most unpopular, extreme, and disastrous form of affirmative action, you then immediately face a problem with less extreme and more popular forms. And if you roll them back … All solutions are either radical or unworkable. Roll back affirmative action loans, and pretty soon you are going to have to ridicule Marie Curie, and say her husband should have kept her in the bedroom and the kitchen, and not put her in the lab. And since no one wants to start walking down a path that ends in them saying it was inappropriate for Pierre Curie to try to make Marie Curie into a scientist, no one wants to stop bankers doing criminal things.
And so the financial system continues to leak money