Friday, December 19, 2008

Nobody could have predicted

You know, for about... oh, at least a decade I've been saying that the stock market was nothing but a giant casino, and a crooked one at that, and the money invested there couldn't possibly be creating real value in the economy commensurate with the attention that was being paid to it.

Now I have a fake-Nobelist on my side.

Still, these people clearly deserved their trillion-dollar bailout, while the autoworkers deserve to starve.

One of the things that will mark a return to sanity is a much smaller, poorer financial sector. Something approximately half the current size, where million-dollar compensations are exceedingly rare, would be an indicator that the financial sector has been put in it's proper place. Of course, any effort to do this rationally (i.e., as part of a conscious policy) will be labelled Marxism and dismissed. Which means 1) it will happen anyway, but more painfully than necessary, or 2) it won't happen at all, and we'll just set ourselves up for another round of bubble-and-trouble in 10 years time.

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