Yves Smith — Finance and Social Justice

How finance and social justice are joined at the hip.

It thus remains a subject of considerable frustration that it is hard to marshall reader interest in what are clearly problematic and in many cases fraudulent practices. Mind you, it isn’t just that lack of reader engagement is demotivating to us. It’s that it sends the wrong message to regulators and investigators. If they see few comments on posts describing certain types of bad conduct on a site geared towards smarter, savvier readers, they may well assume that the public doesn’t care about this issue and thus they have little reason to stand up to financial services industry demands. 

As Simon Johnson described in a seminal 2009 Atlantic article, The Quiet Coup, the financial crisis was not merely a massive transfer of wealth to financiers but allowed them to capture the US government. The banking industry also emerged more powerful in the Eurozone. 

It is not obvious how to break the stranglehold of elite financiers. But remaining ignorant about how they operate guarantees that they will be able to improve upon their already advantaged position. Remember, as much as debating news stories on Ukraine may sharpen your resistance to propaganda, you can’t influence that course of events. By contrast, you can have an impact on the banking front, in ways small and large, from warning friends and colleagues about the dangers of various borrowing and investment products, to writing regulators about why you are opposed to yet more concessions to a bloated financial services industry. This is a front where citizens like you can take ground back, but only if you go to the effort to arm yourself with information.

Naked Capitalism
Finance and Social Justice
Yves Smith