The only constant is change. Thankfully. If not, dinosaurs would have been going through your wheelie bin right now. And, believe it, dinosaurs (of any kind) leave a mess!So why would some try to keep the financial dinosaurs alive? The world will continue long after they're gone. Stock market crashes are the natural result of greed. Speculative manias have caused spectacular financial evolutions: the tulip mania of 1637, the Mississippi bubble in October 1720, the South Sea bubble in October 1721, Black Thursday in October 1929 which led to the Great Depression, Black Monday in October 1987, the dot com crash in April 2000, and the Big Bank Bust of September 2008. (Never a dull moment in October, it seems.) Yet only a small percentage of the public own shares; in 1929 less than 1% possessed stocks. But that small number of dinosaurs remunerate themselves well: in 2006, Wall Street firms paid out $62 billion in bonuses and by 2008 the brokers had cashed in more than $100 billion.
And now, while charities for people and animals in need receive about $200 billion a year to the benefit of millions, politicians are gambling with $700 billion of tax payers money to keep a mere handful of dinosaurs alive. In the words of Ernest Benn, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." Even Nikita Khrushchev admitted, "Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where they is no river." After all, as Oscar Ameringer kindly warns, "Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other."
When dinosaurs disappear (again), birds and bees carry on happily pollinating the flowers. Thank goodness for small businesses. Always support mom-and-pop stores. Their bonuses are the same as yours.
