The headline writer has it ass backwards. We must save the banks from capitalism.

A resource-based economic groundswell will make our survival on the planet an actual possibility.

I used to want to kill all the lawyers. Now I want to kill all the bankers.

There must be more to Mr. Taleb's plan. Taleb suggests splitting banking into an insured utility sector and an uninsured "speculative" sector (my phrase) that should be allowed to take on as much risk as they wish. What is to prevent this "speculative" sector from getting too big to fail, whether or not they are insured? Because of the current bubble and crisis the government has had to insure many types of assets after the fact, i.e., no insurance or limited insurance had existed prior to the prospect of a "too big to fail" failure.

The answer is that banking should be run and regulated like a public utility and all financial institutions (and corporations generally) should be kept at a manageable size. (Trust busting, anyone?) If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist and therefore must be broken up.

A second step in reality. Yay!

What happens when snowflakes stick together?...............friends come together and have snow ball fights. :)

Leea

Two Thumbs Up for Mr. Taleb's suggestion, which sounds a lot like the solution that was created during the original Great Depression. What Mr. Taleb proposes is not original. In essence it is a return to the prudence of the Glass-Steagall separation of merchant and investment banking. Otherwise known as "keeping the gamblers out of my wallet".

I'm personally not inclined to praise capitalism. I find it an inherently cruel and inhumane system. I very much agree with Nassim Taleb that the essential functioning of a banking system for citizens rightfully should be run as a public utility, just as our other basic utilities such as electricity, water & sewerage, highways, health and basic education should all be publicly run. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to any longer believe in the efficiency of the private market. A prime example would be the health care industry where the well-loved Medicare system runs with an administrative burden of less than 3% of the cost of goods delivered while the dysfunctional and much-hated private health insurance rackets rack up over 15% overhead costs on average. Any simpleton should be able to understand this math. Yet Americans for reasons that astound me continue to support the private capitalist mantra as if this superstitious belief in "the market" was a secular religion. We truly do live in an increasingly "Dark Age" of demented consumers believing in things that are patently absurd.

Capitalism is not a bad way for non essential goods to be priced in the marketplace. It must be subservient to human rights, government, democracy and the people.

As a religion, philosophy or mantra to con the gullible it is no good. How many depressions and recessions do we need before we wise up and behave like adults and control the economy for our benefit rather than submit to every silly or sick excess some confidence man can put into play?

Nationalizing the banks is better, but if they let government bureaucrats run them, they are sure to lose money. If they let private individuals and politicians run them, they will steal money.

A much better way is to issue equal shares of non-negotiable stock in these banks to each American citizen. Let We the People run the banks in stockholders meetings. We'll be able to hire and fire our bank administrators according to their performance. And We the People will be able to make sure our banks deal only with reputable companies and honest people.

The banks are being bailed out not because Wall Street is in trouble, but because the government is in trouble and the banks know it.

Our current system allows a monopoly on money to stifle free enterprise. Issuing some sort of shares to each person would create a stake each person would have in things, but the problem would then be the inevitable centralization of these interests in the hands of a few (look at what happened in Russia), and apathy and non-participation by these stake holders. Nevertheless, it is obvious that some sort of nationalization of the highest levels of "banking" must occur. It is "our money", and control of it should not be surrendered to those who openly seek their own interests. Look around at what the Invisible Hand has done. The Federal Reserve is owned by entities who borrowed money from it to buy the original ownership interests, never intending or required to pay it back. They've gotten a great deal of getting indeed for nothing.

Robert Rubin and his making $100,000,000 dollars from Citibank is just another
member of the Bubba Clinton Machine that has destroyed our Industrial Base when
they outsourced it to China. We have to outsource both the Clinton and Bush Machine people..Obama does not seem to have a clue of what is going on.
What possible reason would Foreign countries have, to donate more than
$500,000,000 to Bubba Clinton in the past few months? I can think of only one
reason, and that is that they are gratefull for the outsourcing of our industrial base to all those countries. It's a matter of record that Hillary was outsourcing
our computer jobs to India, yet all is quiet in the MSM..
Retailers and small businessmen are closing shop and laying of people by the
thousands all over the country and in return are not advertising in our newspapers
all over the coutry, it has become a domino type of bankruptcy.
Obama has been taken over by the members of the Senate Club house and he does
not seem to have a clue. Where is Ralph Nader?

"Freddie Kilowatt February 4th, 2009 9:03 pm

... It's a matter of record that Hillary was outsourcing
our computer jobs to India, yet all is quiet in the MSM.."

WHEN was Billary doing that; since joining the Obama team, as U.S. Senator, or earlier, and if the latter, then precisely when was it?

Outsourcing of U.S. computer jobs to India was underway during the 1990s, during the Bill Clinton presidency and enough of both terms, while especially the second one. This outsourcing was also worked by the importation of computer programmers, f.e., from many countries, while especially India, importing them to work in the U.S. and based on the false claim that there was a shortage of qualified people nationally, in the U.S. This importation was done through mostly the H-1B program, but apparently also the L-1 program, and I don't know when the latter was started, but it was the Pres. GHW Bush administration that established H-1B, while either the U.S. Dept of Labor or else Commerce condemned this program, saying there was no justification for it at all and that it'd put around 152,000 graduating students in computer and adequately related degree programs, at U.S. colleges and universities, in danger of not being able to get computer related jobs. Dr Norman Matloff of U.Cal., Berkeley I believe, professor of computer science also spoke to I believe Congress, saying much as the U.S. govt dept had said, but while differing in terms of the justification part. He said that only around 15,000 visas per year and only for jobs requiring people with relevant masters and PhD degrees could be justified; while absolutely none could be justified for importing workers with only a bachelor's degree and less.

Pres. GHW Bush started the program, apparently because a son of his working for some law firm had requested it, with 65,000 visas per year; and Pres. Bill Clinton later doubled and subsequently nearly tripled the number of visas per year. Many enough parties with their own self interests at "heart" pushed and feverishly so for this program, aiming to have the cap on the number of yearly visas totally eliminated, but Pres. Clinton let it go, instead, to around 3x the original number set by Pres. Bush Sr. And the number or cap wasn't respected; apparently around 15,000 to 20,000 additional visas were "accidentally" alotted per year and pretty much every year, due to the computer system the visas were tracked through or with weren't centralized.

And during all of those years, while life began getting very difficult for many then working professionals during the second half of the 1990s, if not the first half, U.S. high tech. corporations were working on setting up "shops" in India; IBM, I believe Lucent, Intel, Microsoft, Dell, and enough others. By importing people from India to train with these corporations in the U.S., the corporate heads could later have a trained pool of people of India to send back to continue working for the corporations set up there. That's understandable business strategy, but still economic treason.

There was a documentary aired in Canada over the past couple of years and on the subject of these U.S. corporations in India. Major luxury businesses did they set up there!

"War IS A Racket" applies to more than only military warfare, I'll add.

Anyway, so when did Hillary Clinton get involved in working for this racket?

Nassim Taleb, and his book, "The Black Swan", are well referred to in the following article, which definitely a good and interesting one to read. Stephen Lendman provides plenty of variously related information. Really a "must read", imo.

"The Davos World Economic Forum (WEF)
Competing Ideologies: Davos v. Belem",
by Stephen Lendman, Feb 3 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12144

The following is one I just came across over the past hour and haven't yet read, but given what Lendman says in specifically related terms, the following should be good reading.

"Declaration of the Assembly of Social Movements at the World Social Forum 2009",
by the Assembly of the Social Movements, Feb 4 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12160

And maybe the following will be of interest to readers of this post or this CD page.

"California goes broke, halts $3.5 billion in payments",
by Stephen C. Webster, RawStory.com, Feb 3 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12152

I haven't read the following, but the author's with the Mass. School of Law, MSL, which is not on the side of the rich and corrupt elites, based on what I've gathered from other writers associated with MSL and who had articles posted at GlobalResearch.ca.

"Derivative Trade: More On The Madoff Mess", by Lawrence Velvel, Feb 3 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12151

The following isn't about the U.S. govt giving more ... much money to Israel, but maybe does involve that, and definitely involves potentially serious profit for Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

"US warships to steel Israel for new war", by PressTV, Feb 2 2009

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12155

How about:

Privatize the recovery of ill-gotten public funds: waste, fraud, abuse, pallets of Benjamins, lost trillions at the Pentagon, etc. 5% finders fee/ 10% recovery award.

Lots of unemployed accountants, brokers and un-parachuted bankers might like to fiddle around with that.

If the banks are nationalized, the government will become the owner of the banks’ good and bad assets and it will have to assume the banks’ contractual obligations towards their creditors, investors, and account holders. In particular, any contractual guarantees given by the banks to the owners of now-worthless risky “innovative” financial vaporware will become de facto contractual obligations of the government towards these owners.

If we ignore small-fry investors, pension funds etc., these owners are greedy trillionaires who bought the financial vapor ware with full knowledge of its risks. If the “financial system” goes bankrupt the trillionaires of the country (and of the world) will lose humongous amounts of money and hence will lose much, if not most, of their economic and political power (but they won’t be reduced to misery, far from it; yes, smaller investors who chose "risk" will also go down in flames and they will deserve it, even if not as badly).

That’s why the trillionaires have mobilized bribed economists, journalists, and politicians and ordered them to call wolf about the horrors of letting the “financial system” fail. “Saving the financial system” is indeed the obfuscating phrase invented by these bribed economists, journalists, and politicians to try saving this neo-feudal class of trillionaires that is “essential“ to what “America stands for” and to “how things should be after we help them out”, as the “radical” Paul Krugman has put it in print repeatedly.

As you may remember, in the middle ages whenever the feudal class created a mess they “rescued themselves” for the “sake of the country” by taxing the hell out of the serfs and the bourgeois, but now with “the triumph of liberty” all of that has changed… yeah right!

Nationalizing the banks will open the gates to all kinds of pompous declarations by congress demoblicans about the government’s solemnial duty to honor the contractual commitments that came with the “act of nationalization” bla bla bla, so they can save their trillionaire friends amidst an apotheosis of self-righteous complacency and flag waving.

Let’s not give them that chance to demonstrate so much friendship. There is no need to save the trillionaires, regardless of how much money they have given to economists, journalists, and politicians and of whether the flow of bribes may stop if the trillionaires fail for good. The banks should be allowed to go through an orderly bankruptcy that preserve their real-economy presence and protect the savings of their non-reckless customers up to say 200k per account and up to say 1 million total net worth per person (IRS-declared), where a sliding scale could be used that reflect how "aggressive" the interest-gathering strategy chosen by each account holder was and the extent to which the account holder chose risky “lucrative’ financial-speculation products over investments in actual production. The necessary paper trail is available…

One should fire everybody in the *failed* banks' upper management (because they failed, duh!) except for whistle blowers and those essential to day-to-day operations, for those managing customer accounts, and for those having expertise in evaluating loans applications by companies that produce actual goods, be they trinkets, essential insurance products, etc.

Social criteria like protecting pensions could also be used by simply dividing the amount invested by each pension by the number of people the pension represents in order to determine what the pension can get in terms of protection and for which individual accounts (since pension-holders who chose especially reckless financial-speculation products should be protected less).

So it’s not time to nationalize the losses of this self-anointed neo-feudal class of trillionaires masters of the universe. Rather, it’s time to shut down their failed banks, to let the greediest investors bite the dust, to claw back any bailout money given so far to them and the banks, and to use this money to jump start the flow of credit into the economy after “nationalizing” (hiring back!) the banks’ existing experts in locating, evaluating, financing, and following-through worthy entrepreneurial ventures in real production and giving them a new institutional backing and responsibilities.

This crisis must teach harsh lessons to the most reckless of investors and bankers, and spare those investors and bankers who tried the hardest to stay away from the greedy madness of the last 30 years, even if only for moral reasons.