Tag Archives: declining incomes

The latest piece on Huffington Post

A red tide of toxic debt has poisoned the nation’s financial system. And the American taxpayers are paralyzed as the financial oligarchs brazenly plunder their Fed and Treasury pockets.

The collateralized debt obligations, the credit default swaps, the mortgage backed securities and other debt instruments were, of course, only able to bloom to toxic levels in an environment overly rich in the necessary nutrients (deregulation, lax oversight, etc.).

And we over-fed the debt markets because we had lost our real wealth and incomes since the end of the gold standard and the beginning of financial deregulation. And the subsequent explosion in personal debt has left us further unable to respond to the financial meltdown. Without the resources to survive on our own incomes, we had grown ever more dependent on the very debt choking off the oxygen to our real economy.

Read more here