Word Acts: 13 Bankers
...Nice work if ye can get it:
everything to gain, nothing to lose (of your own)...
Lawrence Willson writes the poem that demanded to be written about the current crisis in international financial affairs.
Deregulation, self-policing markets,
flexible capital requirements, credit default swaps,
securitization, increased leverage,
government bailouts of banking cronies
While regulators looked the other way
such junk left the big (“too-big-to-fail”) banks
with huge corporate profits
and their huge debt nationalized
Nice work if ye can get it:
everything to gain, nothing to lose (of your own)
Just trillions of dollars of losses on
mortgages and mortgage-backed securities
and a decade of poor economic growth
with declining real household income
Failure to well-regulate the markets
came from the political influence
of Wall Street wed to the ideology
of the late B-film-actor-cum-president
Elected deregulating pols
appointed regulators who advanced
the interests of the regulated and
created hell on earth: blame the voters
if they fail to cast out the greedy devils
**
Source: Simon Johnson & James Kwak, 13 Bankers in the Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 2010).
