I confess I have not paid much attention to the Occupy Wall Street protest. Watching New York cops arrest whole bunches of them on the Brooklyn Bridge for obstructing traffic was briefly entertaining, but it occurred to me I had no idea why they were protesting except for the fact that they were mostly young, mostly unemployed, and mostly led by the usual demonic Communists that have a beef with American exceptionalism.
As a sign of the times, Occupy Wall Street has a spiffy website, but it is filled with the most ignorant nonsense right out of the Communist Manifesto. Apparently the protesters have identified banks and corporations as the enemy. If you ask bankers and Wall Street folks, they will tell you the enemy is the federal government and they would be right.
Bankers and Wall Street want stability and predictability. They want to pile up money and loan it out to make more money or they want to sell stocks and make bets on which will go up and which will not. It’s called Capitalism and it works unless the government gets deeply involved in telling them what to do and picking winners and losers in the free market.
In the case of the most recent financial crisis, the government got into the home mortgage market back in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac were set up to purchase mortgages from banks in order to “stimulate” the housing market.
You can read the U.S. Constitution from beginning to end and not find the words “housing market” in there anywhere. The house of cards the federal government created, combined with the pressure brought to bear on bankers to make “ninja” loans (no job, no assets) resulting in the 2008 meltdown when the “bundled” mortgages turned out to be worthless and generally untraceable. Wall Street didn’t create this, Washington did.