Entitlement is considered an anathema in the poor by the conservatives but they are strangely silent on Big Bank entitlement. Welfare for the rich is a favorite of the far right.
The greed merchants needed a co-conspirator, Mr. Forstmann argues, and that co-conspirator is and was the United States government.
"They're always there waiting to hand out free money," he said. "They just throw money at the problem every time Wall Street gets in trouble. It starts out when they have a cold and it builds until the risk-taking leads to cancer."
The Treasury has lent banks money, guaranteed Wall Street's debt and declared every firm to be a commercial bank, from Citigroup with close to $1 trillion in U.S. deposits, to Morgan Stanley with close to zero. They are all "too big to fail" and so free to trade as they please—on the taxpayer dime.
What if the Fed hadn't eased Wall Street's pain in the late 1980s, and again after the 1994 bond-market collapse? What if policy makers in 1998 had allowed the markets to feel the consequences of risk—allowing LTCM to fail, and letting Lehman Brothers and possibly Merrill Lynch die as well? -- There would have been pain—lots of it—for Wall Street and even for Main Street, but a lot less than what we're experiencing today.
Three Decades of Subsidized Risk