Rana Foroohar Quotes
America's economic illness has a name: financialization. It's an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business.
"Saving Capitalism", Time, May 23, 2016
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Arguably, for most of American History, most of the “smartest” people contributed to manufacturing, construction, research and development—activities that produce things that are wanted and/or needed. However, Wall Street began attracting and paying for some of the smartest people in the society, who when they engaged in finance—not only contributed less to manufacturing, but began to create highly complex financial instruments and procedures that few people could understand and with which regulators have difficulty understanding. These and the other schemes of financing have been major factors in the economic problems that have beset the economy including the meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent Great Rescission.
For many general government regulations—labor, environment, non discrimination—the small business has a proportionately heavier burden of compliance. So large businesses have always been able to count on small business to lobby against regulation and for deregulation. However, when it comes to financial regulation such as the Dodd-Frank regulations essentially apply to large businesses. As a matter of fact, small businesses were on many ways the most frequent victims of the large banks and investment bank excesses in the Meltdown of 2008. Before most of the regulations could even take effect, the financial industry was already trying to get small business to lobby to roll back the protective regulations preventing future meltdowns and bank failure resulting from loose regulation and greedy irresponsible financial industry behavior. The President campaigned to convince the small business not to support the finance industry over their usual “knee jerk” reaction to any regulation.
Running against FDR for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination:
If there would be free competition in banking as opposed to monopolies in each area, This is the first major history of banks written in the United States. At the time, there was hardly any competition amongst banks. Each bank had a do facto or official monopoly in its area. In many communities of America, this is still true, but competition in banking has reached almost all high density areas of the country.
Trump himself was known for being quite greedy and this admission was made before the Wall Street firms had been shown to be as greedy as they were during the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown recession when Wall Street Executives had their entire industry bailed out by the average taxpayer. Then they demanded their multi-million dollar bonuses while a large proportion of the people whose taxes bailed them out, were put out of work themselves by the greed, risk and profligacy of Wall Street.
Rana Aylin Foroohar is an American business columnist and an associate editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN's global economic analyst.
