It sort of reminds me of the Titanic, which was thought to be unsinkable and the technological marvel of the age. All it took was a single iceberg to plunge it to the bottom of the seas. Talk about a lesson in humility.

you see, Mr Lautaro, there are knuckleheads who claim that Obama is going to raise taxes on income, and go on a spending spree. well, here is the deal. the economy goes in cycles, from boom at one point, to bust at the other. any fool knows that you cannot apply the same solution to both conditions. what we have now is a drying up of liquidity, and credit. money has to be pumped back into the system, so people can purchase white goods (stoves and refrigerators), and automobiles. government has to embark on deficit spending, with roads and other infrastructure projects. it HAS to put people back to work. the private sector CANNOT solve the current problem. it will make it worse. there is a massive population of desperate, unemployed people out there looking for work. the LAZY FAIRY (laissez faire) capitalists are going to offer slave wages, further exacerbating the problem. hey, just remember that it was a Calvin Coolidge Supreme Court that decided that minimum wage legislation was unconstitutional!!

And they have the guts of calling his future gov. a Nanny state, when it has been precisely the state under the current admin which have delivered them all their prized wet dreams (tax cuts for the rich, curtailment of the laws protecting the labourers, and infinite other etc. ad nauseam). As you have said on other occassions, they only care about a socialist state when it suits their purposes, all other things can go to hell for all they care.

thankfully, the american public has exercised the good sense to exorcise the nation of the neo conservative demon and pestilence .now they get to sit on the sidelines and grumble. they want bailouts, at taxpayer expense, yet there is no mechanism in place to pay the taxpayer back for the monies they are getting. yet, they have the gall to complain about tax increases for milionaires.off with their heads, i say!!! in 1929, just before the stock market crash, 82% of all the dividends paid out on corporate profits went to 4% of the population. that type of number makes people like anthonyc happy, which is why america ran his boys off. and never forget that after Black Friday, Hoover told the nation that "the economy was sound" can you say "reincarnation"?

Great job keeping this thread off topic guys! Let me add and keep it going.

A bank with 10% capitalization is actually a good thing. This is how growth and expansion of economies are powered. The issues of late stem from the fact that so many non-bank institutions, many of them mega-institutions, were leveraged 20, 30, 40 times! At this point those that have survived (ie. Morgan, Goldman) have thrown in the towel and agreed to become real banks subject to the 8%-10% fractional reserve system that most of the world seems to agree is sane. Still there are very many other institutions out there with inasane amounts of leverage, from hedge funds to securities brokerage houses to consumer lenders. Also some banks and insurance companies made use of loopholes to hide leverage above and beyond permissible levels (AIG).

I have to disagree that circumstances today are identical or analogous to 1929. Finance will never be perfected, and innovations in the movement/deployment of money will always open up new abuses. This was in a sense unavoidable, it is part o the system that it crashes and reboots no and then. In today's case there is a confluence of many many factors. One of these is the fact that the world at large had too much money/capital to invest chasing big returns. So although it is true the bankers got greedy, and that the regulators fell asleep at the switch, there is also an extent to which too many foreigners saved too much and sent it to US, feeding the fire.

Some other pieces of discussion...

Directly bailing out homeowners vs. banks is not a great deal of difference. The net positive is that people aren't kicked out of homes, but the banks appear to be moving in the direction of stalling foreclosures at any rate. Banks are not evil guys, they are necessary institutions like courts and legislatures...there is some sense in protecting them.

dread I'm not sure about the genealogy of neocons you suggest. Goldwater doesn't seem to me to be the progenitor, though he was prob the start of the larger conservative counter-revolution of which the neo-cons are a subset. I always thought of him more at the fore of the libertarian strains of that movement, whereas the certified neo-cons have a very specific heritage including strains of Trotsky commie thought. As for their demise of their ideology I think these rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated.

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Manhattanite, 10% leverage is good enough today, but remember that in 1929 there was no fiat money; the USA was still on the gold standard. the Federal Reserve, created in 1913, by Woodrow Wilson, was intended to be the Supreme Court of the banking system, the lender of last resort. it had 12 regional offices, strategically located so that none would be more than a night's train ride away from any commercial bank in the country. that way, if there was a run on a bank, the manager could put all the certificates of deposit in a briefcase,get on a train, and be at the fed by opening time next day. but, my point is that with the gold standard, the fed could only provide as much liquidity as it had in gold reserves. even though by today's standards 10% is unheard of, today we are not constrained by the gold standard.

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are you sure you are not referring to anthonyc, cibaeno? i am serious. most of the posts we see from him suggest that he is a disciple of Leo