The Banks Drove Consolidation into Destruction

The bankers are the enablers.
In industry after industry in recent years you see a few chosen people being allocated the capital to gobble up everyone else.
Frank Stronach gobbled up race tracks across the country. Now in bankruptcy.
A very few media companies were funded to buy everyone else, to consolidate control. Even Gatehouse Media was funded to buy out hundreds and hundreds of smaller community newspapers. An independent, Media News led by the Denver Post's Dean Singleton, was just taken out by the banking consortium led by Bank of America.

Investment bankers began consolidating the past few years, with some then liquidated and the remnants reallocated among the few.
Smaller grocoery store chains have been absorbed by larger ones like Kroger.
This consolidation trend is driven by Wall Street and Fleet Street.
(Of course, Fleet Bank was itself consolidated into....was it Chase?)

In Denver in the space of about three years in the mid 90s seven independent hospitals were absorbed into one surviving public entity.funded by Wall Street.
Pick your industry....name your consolidations already.
Anyone can see the Orwellian, collective, totalitarian path being taken.
A healthy nation would be comprised of countless small human scale enterprises.
The banks won't allow that. They constantly allocate capital to just a few.

Look at how retailing was consolidated in the last century. And then how the few well funded retailers allocated advertising to the newspapers that were chosen to survive.
And the few surviving newspapers could shape public thinking...and acceptance.
Barriers were dropped on the limits on TV station ownership
Much easier to control three or four owners - and the the thinking they allow - than three or four hundred. Of course hundreds of independent TV owners exist don't they?....in the smaller markets.
Even Gatehouse did not buy every puny newspaper in America.
But would it if it could have? The money would have been there.
Until the rug was pulled.
This is not conspiracy. It is "Darwinian" economics. Big, protected fiat-money banks, driving out the weak, the unfunded, the unconnected

Time to shrink the Too Big to Fail

Great article on Seeking Alpha today. Totally agree Glassman-Steagall should be reinstated; regulators should regulate or be fired.
I do not see why shrewd investors outside Goldman Sachs (GS)continue to buy stock in a firm that hands all the profits - and then some - to its employees, and then stick the shareholders and the taxpayers with losses because managers did not retain reserves.
This continued buzz about front running and internal conflicts of interest should inspire fiduciaries to withdraw their trading funds from delegated money managers such as GS.
As for JP Morgan and GS benefiting from being the last ones standing, Jefferie Group (JEF) is now fourth largest with lots of upside potential.
It would be better for the markets if a whole bunch of boutique firms rose up to capture pieces of the business pulled out of GS and JP, a lot better. Then we would have a whole bunch of small firms that could easily be liquidated if they frick up.
These smaller firms could all be staffed from the "immense" talent that bails out of GS as its revenue and asset base is downsized to levels that are no longer Too Big to Fail (TBTF).
I am surprised that the TBTF banks have not been sued in federal court for unfair trading advantages related to their lower interest costs, which are clearly contributing to restraint of trade for its competitors. The federal government could be in violation of racketeerin g laws (RICO) with its preferential treatment policies. Just threw that in because RICO supposedly has a chilling effect.
It is clear that the big banksters and the government are guilty of racketeering, with the general public the class action victim.
Lack of litigation must reflect a feeling that the federal judges are too corrupt to rule against the insider elites

Our financial, political elites have committed treason

I did not vote for Shrub either time, which makes me smarter than those of you who did.
I hope your short term profits he (and Greenanke) made for you are worth the destruction of the country that sustained us so well for so long.
Back in 2006 I laughed at the Dartmouth economics professor who told us parents in Denver how wonderful globalism and the weakening dollar was for all Americans and how it made us all richer. All those well suited and well coifed parents nodded on while I, the guy with counter culture long hair and a sport coat, marveled at their dumbness.
Wilson Siu and some of you others fully grasp the big picture.
If globalism and free trade drive the value of our dollar to zero I say globalism and free trade are not reckoning with a real world in which all the players are not so abstractly noble and self-deceptive.
What good is a globalism and free trade policy that provides jobs for Chinese peasants while our citizens turn into peasants.
Let each country produce and consume for its own, and then export excess to where it is needed and wanted.
I am tired of globalists and world traders enriching themselves while destroying the livelihood and economic strength of we the people.
The foundation of our national defense is a strong economy - so our financial and political and Federal Reserve elites should be jailed and tried for treason.

Goldman Sachs Should Not Have Been Pampered, Protected

Rolling Stone had every right to write a story about a complex financial issue that was so baffling the experts who got defrauded didn't understand it and thus it required a popular niche market entertainment publication to explain to them what happened.

If the Goldman Sachs moles and public agents in the government had not put a gun to the head of Congress to bail out the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank and Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs and all the other sophisticated experts we would not have read your essay this morning You would have been writing about how much you miss the rugged individualistic Goldman Sachs that was put out of business by Neanderthal free market capitalism.

Which is what should have happened. Unemployment is now realistically 20 percent; there are millions of empty homes; federal income tax receipts are down 29 percent, the U. S. is being laughed at by totalitarian Russia and China and snickered at by Venezuela.

How did Saving GS save the nation from its present situation?
The entire banking system needed to start from scratch with a fresh balance sheet. The folk wisdom of the Old Testament demands a year of jubilee to wipe out unsustainable usury.

The people on the street will have to toughen up to survive - and if they turn to guns Goldman Sachs will lobby the White House to call in foreign troops. Instead, the unemployed should lobby the White House to disarm Goldman Sachs.
Instead, while the street people learn jungle survival skills and become lean and mean GS fat cats turn to guns because their brains and morals failed them - but all that government cream they get and the street people don't tastes so good and makes them feel fat and superior.

Our economic system truly died when the government artificially propped up a failed Goldman Sachs, thus insuring that the morally and intellectually over complicated (in reality) breed on and further weaken the economic species. Goldman Sachs should have been culled from the system, not rescued.

A predatory financial enterprise that had to be rescued was no different from a General Motors. Both had become bloated and inefficient and destructive to the broader economy.

Only GM is looked down upon for being blue collar and GS is supposedly so much better because it is white collar - with a lot of sweat stains.. And the blood of a deconstructed nation on its hands.

As for the New York Times turnnig against Goldman, it is about time they woke up and realized how much of their own precarious position can be traced to bad advice from money grubbing investment bankers.