Beyond Casino Capitalism

Bush let the gamblers run wild. Here's how Obama can rein them in.

By David Moberg

Typically, few people turn to dead French poets for economic analysis, but Stéphane Mallarmé proved wiser than many a billionaire financial trader when he wrote, "A throw of the dice will never abolish chance." Translated into the prosaic language of the global economic crisis, [RETURN TO ARTICLE]

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    Mr. Moberg spells out everything so well.  There is one thing missing, I think.  That’s size.  One aspect of the bail out that bothers me, though there are many, is that it is already leading to more and larger mergers.  Banks quickly took advantage of taxpayer money to scoop up hurting institutions (here in Cleveland is was National City).  There is also talk of the auto corporations doing the same.  In the debate of whether to give companies hand-outs or let them collapse, the problem is we can’t let them collapse because they are too big and would play havoc on so many other aspects of the economy.  This is especially evident in financial sector.  So we can’t let them fail because they’re too big, but they’re only getting bigger.  If we had real competition between banks or car companies, for example, which allowed smaller institutions to compete, during the same sort of crisis we could let the smaller, poorly run ones to collapse, just as capitalism is supposed to work.  We have a key opportunity here not only to regulate markets, but to regulate the virtual monopolies and oligopolies that have too much economic power to direct the economy.  We recongized this early in our industrialization and tried to help create more orderly markets with real competition.  It’s time to bring back the trust-busters.

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