Good Layman's guide to the financial crisis

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I put the financial crisis issues into two buckets.

1) Corporate personage - Thomas Jefferson wanted to have it declared that Constitutional rights should be for people and tried to make that an amendment. The pro-slavery group and anti-slavery groups for various reasons fought that amendment. Corporations have no soul and can't go to jail. In fact in many laws they are considered super-persons with extensive extensions to financial laws and rights.

2) The stock market - which is not the economy. The stock market is a false economy that allows companies to leverage from below wort to 30 or 40 times their possible valuation based on future worth. Volatility of the stock market is "emotion" rather than "logic" and as such can be manipulated by any of the many information operations tools.

The stock market is not the economy, but it is the heart beat of the economy. Everyone on earth with two grey cells in their head knows that stock values "should" be around 15 times current values and "cannot" be over 25. Arguing what stock values "should" be is just like disbelieving the ability of an airfoil to fly. Unfortunately for foolish investors, (But fortunately for the rest of us) large crowds of idiots are willing to risk their money to buy tulip bulbs just because everyone else is, no matter what the price.

Thank you sir, I have been looking for a way to explain my opposition to a system based on "growth" over one being based on sustainable profit. Your discourse on the subject is spot on and says it far better then I could. I also agree strongly with point one, but that standpoint has been easier to articulate.
Reed

You can oppose the law of gravity (or aerodynamics) all you want, but you really can't change it. Of course, you could revert to a command economy, such as many are now advocating, but I think we all know how that one is going to turn out.... "Sustainable economy" is buzz-speak for Marxist Command Economy controlled by an "elite"....