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[...] Not only does finance measure and profit by speculation on the fundamentals of economic life; it also helps shape and discipline the reality of production and circulation. [...] financialization essentially represents an unaccountable form of global economic planning, yet one with no broad go…

[...] You see people who’ve blown up in spectacular fashion go on to get another high-profile job. And the things you hear are, “I want to hire him; he’s learned a very expensive lesson.” Or “He’s proved he’s a risk-taker.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that! Yeah, he’s proved he’s an …

That the level of profits for the financial sector was too high. If you look sectorially, the financial sector was generating an unusually large share of corporate profits and of GDP. And a lot of that was not sustainable. It was a frenzy of trading that didn’t lead to an ultimately productive resu…

[...] to deal with the fact that we have an eccentric corporate taxation system, we’ve allowed these loopholes to be created so that U.S. companies are not uncompetitive relative to companies from other countries. So he wants to get rid of these loopholes—that’s fine if we’re also going to redo the…

The mortgage brokers probably spent all of their money. The mortgage-backed securities structurers maybe didn’t spend all of their money. But when you have an economy where contracts can be rewritten and you can go back and try to claw back money from people years after the fact, that’s going to be…