'Lessons We Should Have Learned from the Global Financial Crisis'

from economonitor..........

"For Washington and Wall Street (is there any longer a difference?) the GFC is but a distant memory. The tens of trillions of dollars (that is not an exaggeration) committed by Uncle Sam to the bail-out of banksters has been claimed to be a great success. Wall Street’s share is back up to 40% of all corporate profits. The rich are doing just fine, thank you. Compensation, profits, stock options, and bonuses are up for our elite class. According to a new study (by Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin and Sheila Palma at Northeastern), since “recovery” began in the second quarter of 2009 corporate profits took 88% of the growth in national income. Workers? Oh, they captured just 1% of that growth. And all of that was in the form of benefits (thanks to rising healthcare costs!)—real wages and salaries actually fell for the first time ever in a “recovery”. Needless to say, it is also a jobless recovery—the worst performance ever in terms of employment creation, too.

But that is easy to overlook in Washington/Wall Street since the biggest financial institutions escaped with barely a scratch, and have returned to the same practices and rewards that caused the GFC. By hook and by crook, Wall Street also escaped re-regulation as the flaccid Dodd-Frank Act avoided any fundamental reform. In any case, the Republicans have made clear that they will not provide new funding to regulatory agencies, so even the weak rules in the Act will never get enforced. And, so far (fingers crossed!) none of the big Wall Street crooks has been prosecuted for high crimes. Yes there have been some fines and civil cases, and a few lesser criminals like Bernie Madoff were sacrificed, but all the big banksters are not only free—they are still running their criminal organizations (called “chartered banks” in polite conversation), advising the White House, and gearing up to fund the next presidential campaign".........READ MORE