"The U.S. banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s -- or the United States in the 1930s -- the only way to save it is to nationalize it." Washpost.
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Roubini and Naseem Taleb (the Black Swan man) were on CNBC last week impatiently explaining to the money honeys and intellectually challenged staff pomposities that the financial system is so broken that it will not reconstruct itself and that the reason the financial system is broken is the unfortunate truth that it is largely populated by even greater (and often equally challenged) pomposities as the staffs of the 24/7 business news channels. The news pomposities are those men of wisdom who bleat the numbers of the day and hope for a rise in the markets.
The big beggar banks are driven by people for whom greed and arrogance are the hallmarks of likely success in the "bidness." Roubini says it simply - "Nationalize the big banks now, or nationalize them later under worse conditions."
I will not repeat at length my opinion of the financial traders, those "rational actors," who were indifferent to the likely effect of trading oil futures, mortgage based securities and other such instruments to the sky regardless of the sustainable short term prices of the underlying commodity.
The best that can be said of "this class of people" (Roubini quote) is that some of them had the wit to try to "call" the inevitable crashes in such a way that they had cashed out in time.
Let us hope that many of them failed to do that, pl
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/12/AR2009021201602.html?nav=hcmoduletmv
