On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 12:04 PM, Marv Gandall <[email protected]> wrote:
> The central issue is not the size of the overweight financial industry, > but that it needs to be nationalized, rationalized, and reoriented to serve > public needs rather than private interests. Despite their being conditioned > to regard public ownership in the abstract as anathema, I’m convinced that > most Americans would rally to the takeover of the unpopular financial, > pharmaceutical, and energy industries were any US politician improbably > bold enough to propose these as solutions. > Hi Marvin, The question of nationalization is more interesting and complicated than you suggest. After all Henry Paulson's Treasury had no qualms about nationalizing Fannie and Freddie when they ran into trouble. So it is not as if the idea is politically impossible or anything like that. Why were Lehman Brothers, AIG and the other major Wall St firms treated differently than Fannie and Freddie? Certainly the legal status of FNMA was somewhat different than than of Lehman, but I don't think that is the whole story. I think the real answer to why Lehman and others were not nationalized has to do with the fact that many of the activities of these entities were purely speculative and have no public utility whatsoever. If this is true, then what we really need is a good portion of Wall St to be shut down, not nationalized.. -raghu.
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