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John McCain: (not Naomi Klein)
"Wall Street has betrayed us.
They've broken the social contract between capitalism and the average citizen"

John McCain: (not Naomi Klein)
"Wall Street has betrayed us.
They've broken the social contract between capitalism and the average citizen"
John McCain, September 16, 2008

The working people of this state and this nation are the most innovative, the hardest working, the best skilled, most productive, most competitive in the world. This foundation of our economy, the American worker, is strong but it has been put at risk by the greed and mismanagement of Wall Street and Washington.

The top of our economy is broken. We have seen self interest, greed, irresponsibility and corruption undermine the hard work of the American people.

http://www.johnmccain.com/

The end of American capitalism as we knew it
There is a long-standing argument that "there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions
Willem Buiter, Financial Times September 17, 2008

There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer.

Even where private deposit insurance exists, this is only sufficient to handle bank runs on a subset of the banks in the system. Private banks collectively cannot self-insure against a generalised run on the banks. Once the state underwrites the deposits or makes alternative funding available as lender of last resort, deposit-based banking is a license to print money.

That suggests that either deposit-banking licenses should be periodically auctioned off competitively or that depostit-taking banks should be in public ownership to ensure that the tax payer gets the rents as well as the risks.The argument that financial intermediation cannot be entrusted to the private sector can now be extended to include the new, transactions-oriented, capital-markets-based forms of financial capitalism.

Full text

Here’s a link to “Central banks and financial crises”, a paper I presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s symposium on “Maintaining Stability in a Changing Financial System”, at Jackson Hole
Willem Buiter, Financial Times, August 25, 2008