The Banking Crisis is Over?! Since when?

In response to Douglas A. McIntyre's article :

"More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over" from Time Magazine

McIntyre argues that, " the great banking crisis of 2008 is over" which is in part true. He references the fact that Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup are all recovering from the huge losses in 2008 and expect to do better throughout 2009. All good news to be sure. Financial insurance giants such as these are involved with such a tangled web of securities, equities, mortgages, hedge funds, CDOs, CDSs, and a whole host of ridiculously complex transactions that there is really no way of telling how frozen business would be should they have continued down the path they were on. AIG is only worth $50 billion dollars if it was sold tomorrow, but insures over $300 billion worth of other companies and governments.

The problem lies with the part of McIntyre's article where he notes that the trillion dollars the government has promised to use and threw nearly blindly at the banks is utterly useless now. Henry Paulson admitted that when they started the TARP program last year they, "gave away money so fast NO ONE kept track of it!!!" The American taxpayer is out billions upon billions of dollars, and is now crippled with debt for easily 3-4 generations.

Not only that, but just because the banks are turning around does not mean everything is going to be fine. We have an 8.5% unemployment rate that does not even count those not seeking working and trying to get back to school or have not registered as "unemployed." It does not address the fact that banks are still not lending again leaving new businesses in the dirt and homeowners ("struggling" is putting it lightly) to pay for homes, cars, food, school, and the whole mess of things any normal person has to deal with on a day to day basis!

How in the hell did these banks rebound so quickly? The TARP money could definitely be noted as helpful, but the Obama plans have barely gotten rolling yet. Treasury basically asked the banks and insurance companies for reports on how deeply they had gotten themselves in the earth, and over just a few months a bunch of institutions rebounded! McIntyre writes, "[there is] almost no one with an in-depth knowledge of the credit market tapestry who does not believe that there are hundreds of billions of Confederate dollars being held in the vaults of the major banks." You know what that means? It means that while these finance industries begged Congress for our money, they could just as easily had a plan B, C, and D to fix themselves if government stuck up their noses and sniffed, "screw you!"

Another thing. The key words above are, "almost no one." Treasury guys aren't stupid, but they aren't as corruptingly smart as the guys who figured out how to drag the world into this mess in the first place. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, (see The Obama Deception<--I do not agree with a majority of the views in that film) but the people who were at the very top of the banking food chain really fucked the rest of us with one hell of a good plan. The sheer volume of money that is getting poured like butter over the steaming crab legs of this injustice to Americans is enough to make one cringe, but what do we do now that investigations are showing us that some of these major institutions may have had their own safety nets? It's not a golden parachute, it's a goddam platinum mattress.

The government refuses to bail out the smaller, local banks that millions of Americans have their money in because they "don't affect enough people". They won't bail out automobile companies that actually make tangible products and employ 1/5 of the US workforce because of the companies own incompetence and refusal to change. Yet we hurled billions upon billions at insurance and banking giants who did not divulge any in depth reports on why they got the way they were (their own incompetence, see Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone) did not give any explanations to their problems and just said, "Oh, you wouldn't understand, don't worry about it, we got it, it's cool. Can I have $500 billion please?"

We need more intelligent minds at Treasury working for the American people (not saying they aren't smart/patriots) and less of them going into shadow industries that ruin and lay waste to the world around them. We should not support massive bailouts if the causes of a half-year recession are not addressed (lack of oversight, government communication, hypercapitalism, etc.) and we should not blindly allow our elected officials to be connived into funding the insatiable pigs that are major finance companies. Not everyone is a bad guy, again see Taibbi's article for who is/isn't, but frankly it's a shame to let ourselves be suckered into this calamity

Greed and stupidity got Wall Street and unfortunately all of us into this catastrophe of catastrophes, but the more we find out about how much the insider guys knew about what was going to happen and cashed out while begging for our help, the sooner we can get our money back.