Monday, October 10, 2011

Misplaced Rage of Occupy Wall Street


Misplaced Rage of Occupy Wall Street
By Jeff Carter
10/10/2011

I have written how I don’t caucus with the Occupy Wall Street Crowd. They are a fraud.

The knee jerk reaction is that if I don’t concur with Occupy Wall Street and their assault on capitalism, that I must be a greedy capitalist and think the bankers are great guys that should be left alone.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will find that’s not true. Banks weren’t the root cause of the massive financial crisis we had, but they certainly were maidens to the disaster.

Banks responded to incentives that were put in place by regulators and government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Today, banks are being castigated for not lending to Main Street. But, you can’t blame them. The Federal Reserve is creating a situation where banks can just surf the yield curve and make a lot of money. They don’t need to work hard and take a larger risk to make a profit.

What’s really clear to me is that Washington DC really doesn’t know what to do about banks. Dodd-Frank is a miserable failure and already has raised the cost of doing business and hurt consumers. People in the CFTC and SEC are clueless to changes in the industry and what to do about them.

Bankers have become one of Obama’s favorite whipping boys in public. Behind the scenes he enjoys cashing their checks.

Occupy Wall Street is the right outrage, but it’s in the wrong place. It’s not capitalism that is killing us. It’s the people that try to control capitalism for their own means that are killing us.

UPDATE
Every good protest needs a whiny song. This is fantastic.
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To read more about the Occupy Wall Street protests, click here.

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