The Professionals

Bye Bye Miss American Pie:

Forget all the other stuff. The death of professionalism is the wolf at the door.

The wolf lived with the GOP for the last 8 years as they built up bigger and bigger piles of federal debt, embracing and celebrating any and all theories that justified making truly gigantic piles of money - where customers are consumers who need only to hear a professional tell them to "buy it, it's all going up forever."

The professionals - on whom we must depend, conned the common man and may have buried the American dream.

The Glans Professional:

Alan Greenspan says, "The vast increase in the size of the over-the-counter derivatives markets is the result of the market finding them a very useful vehicle. And the question is, should these be regulated? Well, indeed, for the United States, they are obviously regulated to the extent that banks, being the crucial creators of these derivatives, are regulated by the banking agencies, but not beyond that. And the reason why we think it would be a mistake to go beyond that degree of regulation is that these derivative transactions are transactions amongst professionals. And the institutions which are involved have very considerable what we call counterparty surveillance, where, for example, one major bank will know far more about its customer, whether it's a bank or something else, than we could conceivably know as regulators. In a sense, this counterparty surveillance has become the crucial element which has created stability in that particular system."

Now you know.