Let banking be boring

I’ve written enough about the vanity and incompetence of the financial class, so I am not going to belabor the point through a loquacious post.  This article from New York, “The Wail of the 1%,” again shows just how disconnected and self-righteous the financiers are.  We are much closer to an oligarchy than polite society wants to admit.

It is easy to run deficits when you don’t produce anything of value.  Buying and flipping assets is not producing value; it is trying to find a sucker bigger than you.  (Most of the time, there is a reason the asset is so cheap.)  It has been part of our ideology that finance was the next step in the value chain of wealth (agriculture -> industry -> services -> finance), but it has always been clear that wealth does not come from slicing and dicing assets (unless that asset is deli meat): wealth comes from producing them.  Japan and Germany are both huge exporters, and they’re developed countries.  The conceit that finance is better than making products is a just-so story deployed by the oligarchy to justify their reign, a rhetorical tactic very similar to the invocation of divine rule for royalty.