Instead of Changing their Behavior to Prevent Another Crisis, the Powers-That-Be Double Down On the Strategies that Caused the Financial Crisis In the First Place

Liberals blame deregulation and reckless Wall Street greed for the economic crisis.

Conservatives blame bad government policy.

Now, the D.C. politicians are doing the exact same things which got us into the crisis in the first place.  For example, they are:

• Pushing banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit (sound familiar?)

• Deregulating and even promoting insane levels of derivatives (ring a bell?)

• Following policies which lead to rampant inequality (that didn’t work out so well last time)

• Letting white collar criminals know that they have free rein to do whatever they want, and they won’t be prosecuted (once again)

• Letting the giant banks get bigger and bigger (the government helped them get big in the first place)

• Bailing out the banks with hundreds of billions of dollars a year (which creates dangerous “moral hazard” – just like before the 2007 crisis – and once again destroys sovereign nations)

• Indeed, crony capitalism has gotten worse than ever

• Enacting policies which suck money out of the U.S. economy … and ship it abroad (as they’ve been doing for decades)

• Enacting policies which discourage people from even trying to find work

• Giving the Federal Reserve more power than ever (while economists say the Fed caused many of our problems in the first place, and has too much power for the good of the economy)

• Blowing insanely large speculative bubbles (when they burst in 2007, that caused the last crisis; and see this)

• Leverage is back to pre-crash levels (too much leverage was one of the main causes of the crash)

•  The humorously-labeled “financial reform” laws passed in the wake of the crisis have intentionally allowed fraudulent accounting; and here and here (deja vu all over again)

And the big banks and financial institutions are engaging in the same risky behavior which got us into the crisis in the first place.  For example, they are:

• Trading even more risky derivatives than at the height of the financial crisis

• Taking insanely risky bets (see this, this and this)

• Getting back into “synthetic” financial instruments – and here – which are even more disconnected from real assets than regular derivatives

• Once again doing no-document mortgage loans

What could possibly go wrong?