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January 25, 2010
After the global financial crisis there’s every incentive for the big bankers on Wall Street to engage in a repeat performance. Since they were bailed out by the state with few strings attached it’s now clear to them that they’re living in a heads-they-win, tails-taxpayers-lose world. After the global financial crisis, global financial capital hates any reform that restricts its casino like activities, which they equate with doing God's work.
There is an emerging conflict between the state and financial capital in the US. after Obama's stated intent to take on Wall Street by announcing plans for stringent rules on the banking sector to prevent commercial banks from making risky trades ups the stakes.This is not before time.
Martin Rowson
Obama is giving his support to two measures to make sure that Wall Street doesn’t crash into another financial crisis: (1) separating the functions of investment banking from commercial banking (basically, resurrecting the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act) so investment banks can’t gamble with insured commerial deposits, and (2) giving regulatory authorities power to limit the size of big banks so they don’t become “too big to fail,” as antitrust laws do with every other capitalist entity.
However, Congress is not really that interested in the state-based approach to limiting the size and risk of big banks, given that the major source of campaign funding is finance capital. On the other hand, the deep and continuing economic stresses in the US means that voters are petrified of losing their jobs, their homes, and what’s left of their savings and don't have much time for the excess of the big banks--bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.
There is a populist backlash building in the US against Wall Street and a bad economy, and President Obama’s kid-gloves treatment of the bankers has put Democrats on the wrong side of this rage.
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the "greed is good" culture sums the big banks up.