On his radio show today, Dennis Prager said: “You know how much fear I have for big government. My contempt for most banks in the world is deep as it is for big government.”
“The profession of banking has soiled itself so often. You don’t have to be on the left to acknowledge how incompetent or corrupt so many in banking have been.”
Dennis Prager talks like this is a moral problem among bankers. I suspect the problem is one of incentives and that most people in that position would act similarly. Bankers get to keep the massive gains they can make from gambling with their money while banks get bailed out if they lose. So losses are shared with the public while huge gains are in private hands. The incentives that bankers face are to gamble rashly. If they win, they win big and get to keep a good chunk of change. If they lose, they get bailed out.
Dennis: “The [real estate] bubble burst and now there’s a run on the banks in Spain. The biggest bank in Spain has a garbage rating from the agencies. Junk. There’s no liquidity. No money in Spain. So they want the Euro to bail them out. I think the Euro could collapse, at least in certain countries, in the course of the next year. The breakdown of nationalism was a bad idea but Europeans don’t trust nationalism. Why? Because the Germans used nationalism as a racist tool to exterminate people, therefore nationalism is bad?”
“What are you then? People aren’t European. You might as well say we’re North American. How many people listening feel North American? Zero. You feel American or Canadian or Mexican. Do you think Mexicans feel bonded to Salvadorans because they’re both latino?”
