Two Awful Numbers

On his segment with me yesterday, Dylan Ratigan pointed out two astonishing figures yesterday that, when you put them side by side, illustrate just how out of whack our economy really is. On one side there is the $29 TRILLION that the Fed reportedly deployed to save Wall Street; on the other side there are the record numbers of Americans in poverty, some 46 million of them. Truly historic inequity. And here's the key point: the same Wall Street and the same oversized banking sector exists today, though it is hardly lending or doing much of anything else to grow the economy. Meanwhile the persistence of the Too-Big-to-Fail problem and the fact that opaque over-the-counter derivatives trading is now HIGHER than it was in 2008--it's gone from $600 trillion to $708 trillion--virtually ensures that Wall Street will continue to be coddled with our capital while the middle class continues to disappear. NO ONE in Washington is doing anything to change this. So clearly we need to change Washington.