Shackled By Debt: Slaves to the Banks

Remember this? A year ago to the day I posted about this video, Money As Debt:



It's interesting to watch this again given the current crisis. Ignoring the paranoia/conspiracy overtones for now, we are seeing the main theme of the video act itself out to a large degree. We're seeing the fallout from the collapse of the huge credit bubble that grew in the last decade. We're seeing how enormous money center banks and similar financial entities - Citi, Bank of America, AIG - are by their essential nature holding the U.S. Government - and thus the American taxpayer - hostage. These banks that are "too big to fail," necessarily protected by a doctrine implicit in that belief, having failed to function effectively in a poorly-regulated free market, are now dependent on support from the very people that are suffering due to the negligence, poor risk management, and gross incompetence of these banks.

Moving forward we cannot allow "too big to fail" to exist because it carries with it an inherent risk to the health of the financial system.