Wow. This is some pretty strong stuff from Jim Cramer, the “Mad Money” guy, who is looking more & more like one of the few guys who saw early on which way this was all going. I have to go back to Sept. ’07, when I looked in the faces of some international bankers and saw stark terror.
Anyway, he bites off Nixon’s quote to say that in the wake of the $2.5 trillion bailouts we’ve had to do for the reckless, irresponsible bankers, we are all communists now. Which in a twisted sense, is absolutely true. Only the twist is a particularly cruel one. In the past, the State taxed the workers, and the proceeds of that taxation were given back to the workers in the form of grand socialist projects – dams, highways, canals, high-density housing blocs, tractor factories, guaranteed pensions.
These days, the proceeds of the taxes on the workers are being given to the elite. To the bankers who ran their businesses into the ground, with investment strategies that were looser and more deranged than wandering drunkenly into Benny Binion’s and putting your net worth down on the Hard Eight.
I’d like to think that the American public will have the memory, the intelligence and the resolve to hold some of these thieves accountable for their actions, but based on the last decade’s worth of foolishness, that seems to be a wan hope indeed.
The one bright spot is that Cramer identifies the same general date that the other bankers I’ve talked to – June 30, 2009 – as the date when the financial implosion will hit bottom. That does not mean, however, that that is when things will start to turn around. It just means it will stop getting galacticÃ¥lly worse.
Between now and then, however, there are going to be a lot of people losing their homes, jobs, families, livelihoods and minds. Watch the video (hope it actually manages to embed), and stick around past the first shouty bit for the reasoned discussion that follows. It’s instructive to see the sick look on the panel’s faces when he lays out just how bad things have gotten, and what the ultimate price the American workers are going to have to pay for the de-regulation idiocy of the last 8 – hell, 30 – years.
Technorati Tags: mortgage implosion, cramer all communists, mad money, msnbc, aig bailout, june 30, 2009