centralized oversight

[Joseph Tracy]

1)What follows is excerpted from a blog post by Ilargi at the Automatic Earth

"If we don't save the banks and the financial system at large, there'll be Armageddon to pay". That's the endlessly repeated prevailing line. 

However, if we keep on spending ever more trillions to prevent Armageddon from arriving, surely we must invite it, by the very act of doing exactly that, to at some point come knocking on the back door. After all, you can't spend more and more and then some, without ever being served with the bill for doing so.

So we’ve had all these rescue missions over the past 5 years. Behemoth-sized amounts of taxpayer money and future taxpayer money have been poured into our economies in this alleged attempt to try and save them. 

Now, take a step back and tell me what you see. I'll tell you what I see: a financial system that is in worse shape than ever before during those 5 years. At least half of Europe is flat broke, most banks have lost 50%-80% of their market value, Bank of America, a major bailout recipient, is fast on its way to becoming a penny stock, China sees shrinkage wherever it looks and Japan is rumored to be awkwardly close to the chopping block.

Evidently, something's not working the way it's supposed to.

2) This from a Nov 10, 2011 NYRB review of Michael Lewis's Boomerang 
Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that “the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained.”