What you describe isn’t a depression, then. If people want to nationalize the banks and overnight lending and payment systems in a responsible way, that’s a different conversation than “let the banksters collapse.” It also doesn’t address the reason why the financial industry became the place to make fortunes in the first place, given that all the other big markets came to be locked up with IP and market power and multi-generational dynasties like the Johnsons or Kochs. The issue of banking is pretty straightforward: make the private side of banking transparent, bureaucratic and require so much financial security and insurance as to make it only marginally profitable, and only allow “innovation” at the Fed as necessary to respond to crisis.
Instead people seem to think that banking will forever be the center of everything bad in the economy, that inequality stems from banking, that corruption stems from banking, that… zzzzz. That kind of discussion makes the oligarchs very happy. McDonalds isn’t a bank. Walmart isn’t a bank. General Mills isn’t a bank. Lockheed Martin isn’t a bank. Why do you think the German industrialists and war profiteers funded the far right and allowed the demonization of Jewish bankers? It deflects responsibility very effectively. The message of antisemitic bigotry doesn’t resonate in this century (much), but the message that still works is the easy deflection to banking, to the central bank, and away from true power.
The true power of oligarchs and the money they pull out of the economy resides in industry. True power rests on removing competition, underproducing, overpricing, and maximizing monopoly rents. Patents. Licensing. Land and actual rents. Mining and drilling concessions. When moderately rich people argued for more “innovation” in banking, that was a symptom of the lack of innovation allowed by the top players in the rest of the economy. Making big money, global money, in industry is restricted to a very few in a very limited club.
So with power concentrated in the pointy end of the industrial pyramid, any discussion of copyright or patents is deflected into ludicrous conspiracy bullshit about the bankers and how the economy should be stifled to match the stifled pace of corporate “innovation.” Banking will always cause problems, but deflecting away from the arrogance of the most powerful claiming to “own” ideas, that’s the real scam.
