Duhhhhhh!!

“When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off. I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off.”

That’s Steve Eisman, life-long Republican, at the height of the sub-prime mortgage era. Want to understand why he said that? 

Sheila Bair may be the most honest, ethical person working in Washington today, and before you jump to lizard-brain assumptions and shut your mind to what she says here, she’s a Republican!

Sandy Weill, the former Chairman of Citigroup, came out Wednesday in favor of the return of the Glass-Steagall Act and said the biggest banks should be broken up.

That’s as shocking as if Sarah Palin said she’s voting for Barack Obama, since Weill was the man most responsible for repealing Glass-Steagall in the late 1990s so he could vastly increase the size and profits of his bank.

This is important because the financial gaming hasn’t stopped just because the world’s economy crashed by the — at the least — imprudent (many might use the word criminal) actions of the world’s biggest banks.

Watch this…

And read these…

The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

Liar’s Poker, also by Michael Lewis

Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System, and Themselves, by Andrew Sorkin

Inside Job, by Charles Ferguson

You can also read an excellent piece on this whole LIBOR mess HERE.

We can stay passive, uninterested and uninformed, and continue to be ripped off or we can get pissed off, throw out all the bums we’ve elected, and take control of our financial future again.

Someone once said, In a democracy, we get the government we deserve.