Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #199

No final act in sight for U.S. financial crisis

A lot of smart people have tried to call the bottom on Wall Street this year.

So far, they have all been wrong.

Since the financial crisis first hit in August 2007, markets - and the financial industry - have gone through a series of swoons, each more dizzying than the last.

Last week, the crisis reached a new pitch, as Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, struggled to avoid joining Bear Stearns on the trash heap, and shares of Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan, fell briefly below $2.

Now even Wall Street's professional optimists have given up predicting exactly when their industry might stabilize. One senior executive at a top investment bank suggested recently that there was no ending in sight to the crisis.

Emphasis added by me.

And pay attention:

"We have to find a new way - or maybe it's an old way - to stimulate enough demand for the economy to do what it's supposed to do without speculative excess," Bernstein said. "A recovery that's driven by more broadly shared prosperity, where consumption is fairly evenly shared through the economy, that kind of growth is more sustainable."

Emphasis added by me.

Trickle-down is now thoroughly discredited.

This is the sixth seventh financial crisis post I have done on this blog in less than three hours.

I don't think I've ever before posted as many in so short a time.

I could begin to detail the shit that's coming up.

But none of you have believed me so far, so you'd only find the rest of it even more unbelievable.

All prior Chronicles of Depression 2.0 posts. Read them before you must.