It's been ten years since the financial crisis, when barely regulated banks destroyed the world's economy, kicked off wars, and directly and indirectly killed millions.
The Wall Street Journal is a curious beast; its news stories tend to be firmly reality-grounded (because investors don't get a return on ideology, and reality has a well-know left-wing bias), while its editorial page has grown steadily more troglodyte since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper.
The WSJ's retrospective of the decade since the crash is much more in the reality-based news than the ideology-driven editorial section, despite a lot of editorializing.
In a series of snappy graphics and pithy text-blocks the Journal's writers hit all the high points:
* Markets are peaking
* Bankers are getting paid more than ever
* Unlike everyone else, whose wages suck
* We're more unequal than ever
* The bank bailouts pissed off everyone except bankers
* The banks got bigger and are now way, way too big to fail
* The finance sector continues to eclipse the economically useful parts of the economy
* Regulators are inevitably former execs in the industries they're regulating
* Bond-rating firms are dirty af
* Even more US mortgages are underwritten by the US government
* We're in the midst of a new round of asset-bubbles (see e.g. Bitcoin)
* Companies are amassing ever-larger silos of sensitive data and leaking it like crazy
* Student debt is hitting crisis levels and could spark the next crash
* Index funds now dwarf stocks, and are creating systemic risk
* More people rent than ever, and chances are their landlords are rapacious private equity funds
* Consumer debt is up
* The financial sector is increasingly based on the kind of "complex" (e.g. bullshytte) instruments that led to the 2008 crash
* The next crisis will be way worse: the US government can't borrow the way it did in 2008, and there's no more room to cut interest rates
What could possibly go wrong?
The financial crisis and the massive federal response reshaped the world we live in. Though the economy is in one of its longest expansions and stock indexes have hit new highs, many people across the political spectrum complain that the recovery is uneven and the markets' gains aren't fairly distributed. The Wall Street Journal takes a look at some of the most eventful aspects of the response and how we got to where we are today.
10 Years After the Crisis [Cezary Podkul. Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli, Jess Kuronen, Tyler Paige, Peter Santilli and Hanna Sender/Wall Street Journal]
(via Late Stage Capitalism)
