The Trouble With the U.S. Economy is Too Much Financial Deregulation

For many Americans the deregulated economy has made Wall Street seem a kind of Enron, Global Crossing or Long Term Capital Management generally with ever new ways of misdirecting U.S. investment to billionaire stock option accounts abroad instead of producing goods.

Americans lost about 13 trillion dollars of value in the 2009 Wall Street reshuffle. That makes it more difficult for thte unemployed to have capital to invest in a garden patch or small business and paradoxically increases the vulnerability of Americans to the increasingly deregulated U.S./Global financial systems which stands ready to deliver another knock down punch to American industry and ecological economics should it get up off the canvas.

From engineer-CEO's manufacturing goods with a regulated financial sector in the 1960's the economy transitioned steadily to a business environment commodified and traded like stock portfolios deregulated banks, brokerages and insurers merged and were taken and madeover into fewer and larger firms. The broadcast and entertainment industry became sycophants of corporate controller's will. The management class made profits through cutting costs and firing workers rather than creating new products. Workers were regarded as exploitable profit units and expected to pay for their own health care and retirement. In fact society had to pay for the medical costs and food stamps of poorly paid workers.

Sub-prime mortgages and packages of derivatives issued by deregulated conflict of interest banks and trading firms made short term profit with bad loans passed on to investors. American home mortgages were bought and bundled for sale around the globe. Politicians accomplished a form of national treason through financial and stock trading deregulation with support from unpatriotic or economically illiterate conservative egoists and liberal redactors of reform interpreting freedom as corporate servility.

The deregulated financial industry followed Internet and optic cable global crossing lines to investments abroad. The prospects for reducing unemployment and increasing the income of ordinary Americans declined as even politicians accepted a deregulated financial sector and concentration of wealth as the highest existential good; they would be too satisfied looking good with billions of bucks to be aware of the danger to the nation and downturn in long-range national prospects.

Manufacturers found it more difficult to invest in new infrastructure with the prospects for a hostile takeover circling overhead like predator vultures. Politicians invested in American decline by cutting taxes on the rich and slipping regressive tax increases on average Americans. President Carter and Clinton joined Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush in accelerating deregulation. None had a grasp of economic changes of the time and how those changes would affect the long-term prospects for the United States. Neither did candidates for 2012 express any awareness of the need for a sweeping reformation of the business and finance laws of the United States.