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Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
Sure but implying all these companies are inefficient or otherwise incompetent is just untrue. Which was my point.
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Fair. Efficiency of healthy financial sector (as per Summers 2000) is a good question which can't be trivially answered by saying GS is competent and efficient either, though. A few years back Bernanke was listing financial innovations that have made the world so much better a place. Derivatives, sub-prime mortages, and credit cards made the list. How many of these would still remain? Credit cards yes? Derivatives maybe? Sub-prime, not? The best effort GS made was not buying into poop they, along with the others, were trading with. Props for that.
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I like how Tactitus speaks of "powerful interests". "Powerful interests" rarely ever get hurt in any end-of-the-line fashion. Because they're powerful. The ones who get hurt are the ones who aren't powerful. This is why people accept bailouts. Because they believe that sooner or later they end up jobless and on a bread line wondering what the **** they did wrong and it's easier to pay an extra 1% of your income in tax and avoid that.
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There's a grain of truth into ending up jobless if say GM wasn't bailed out, and obviously, herein lies the irony, the debt used to obtain GM will be serviced by the very same people whose jobs seizing it saved. This is becoming an eerie copy of Zeitgeist now. But you could argue that, a person can be happier employed and servicing a debt that is essentially used to employ him (for a more in-depth and "GMM" type analysis of this, along with data, see Richard Layard's "Happiness: lessons from a new science). Whether this is a matrix illusion and desireable or not is a different story then. Oh' be, John Stuart Mill.