since I knew exactly what he's talking about. He might be referring to the 2008 debacle, but he could be talking about what's going on again today. More deregulation has occurred, the loans are even shakier, and it's not going to take a whole lot for the whole business to collapse again. Rooms are still full of cigar chomping bully boys who think since they've got control of a lot of money, that has conferred superior wisdom upon them and they're impervious to anything but the sounds of their own voices.

So yeah, we're set up to have it happen again, deregulation like playing Jenga with the economy, remove one regulation too many and the whole thing is a pile of rubble. Only when the bully boys are broke can the regulators appear and start fixing things.

. . . . to that page. I couldn't not post it. He's referring to the Bear Stearns collapse, March 2008.

The names were listed in the preceding paragraph. "It was an august gathering of Wall Street's most powerful men." All the usual suspects. Dimon. Blankfein. Geithner. Bernanke. Rubin. A few others slightly less familiar, even to us old-timers.

I still remember my rage after Obama appointed Geithner and Summers and Rubin to his transition team, and the shit I took here for it. My opinion never changed.

Obama was a "first," meaning he desperatly needed to maintain some semblance of the status quo. Reformers take the chance that their reforms will blow up in their faces, and a "first" doesn't have the ability to do that, since s/he is always terrified that s/he will be the only one in that "first" category if that happens. So Obama, while not awful, was more of a place holder.

I understood that, but Geithner? Summers? He couldn't have picked anyone more wretchedly antiworker than those two.

And I'm not sure that ultimately they did any good at all and may have done a lot of harm, especially in terms of setting the stage for the great orange 💩.

Bank failures breed uncertainty

End of message.