Reductio Ad Absurdum

Normally, Ted Rall and I are polar opposites on whatever issue he covers. Not this time. "Too Big To Fail" BOA just has to charge fees for debit cards on money sitting in their accounts that rarely draw interest. Boo hoo. They just have to charge more in other areas because the .gov got after them for usurious fees charged to merchants for card usage, and made them quit. In order to pay the huge bonuses for exceptionally bad job performances, BOA (they're not alone in this) has to make it up somewhere!!! Our bailout money was just the ticket to add to the ol' profit side.

The sad bankers had to withdraw their plan to charge for debit card usage. Sad, sad, sad. See them cry sad tears. See them charge more hidden fees to accomplish the same thing. Happy bankers at bonus time! Yay!

Maybe this makes me a hypocrite as far as staying true to the principles of libertarianism and free markets. Let 'em charge what they want, and let the marketplace sort it out, right? Isn't that what happened here? The backlash made BOA back off right? Well, if it was a free market, yeah. It is not. The banking industry is tightly regulated, ostensibly to protect consumers. Yeah. That's why banks aren't putting their deposited money back into small business loans and growing the economy, but rather investing in very shaky ventures and basically gambling through loopholes, a practice that grows nothing but profit and actually hurts the economy.. The last TARP fiasco was to cover for the banks losing their asses in speculative investing and hiding their losses until it was too late. Regulated? Yeah. Who owns the elected people who initiate the laws? The wealthy banks or you and me? The dice are loaded.