And this:

"The bank bailouts of 2008 continue to bring the broad economy harm, all the while restraining the ability of the banking system to get back on its feet. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.

To put it simply, while business failure of any kind is always painful for investors and employees alike, it’s a happy sign of economic revival for revealing in living color that capitalism is working. Business failure hardly constitutes business disappearance, and the beauty of failure is that it ensures that poorly managed assets are released at frequently low prices to managers with a stated objective to develop those human, mechanical and financial inputs more effectively on the way to growth.

To make basic what already is, failure signals an economy on the mend simply because the bad business ideas, investments and labor misuses are cleansed from the economy. Failure means that bad ideas won’t be perpetuated, that an ineffective status quo won’t be maintained, and that’s why Silicon Valley’s rather ruthless approach to failed concepts means that it thrives, while Michigan languishes for propping up concepts that rational investors and workers long ago left behind as yesterday’s news."

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/heres-why-the-bank-bailouts-are-still-crippling-the-economy.html/

Ammonite,

Good point - seems the money was spent merely to prop up the system.

Nor should we overlook the billions that international governments pumped into the stock market to artificially stimulate faltering confidence when the markets first began to display volatility.

Curate's egg.

Pilger is spot on when describing the stultifying system that operates in the majority of large corporations, rewarding mediocrity at every step and placing conformance at the top of their performance evaluations.

Nowhere, by the way, is this more prevalent than in the Public Service "industry". Filled to the brim with yes-people, toe-the-liners and jobsworths, they are the biggest drain on productivity that the world has yet invented.

Big business and the Public Service have other traits in common: they set their own pay scales - which are answerable to no-one who is prepared to do anything about it - and both maintain the posture that it is the world that owes them a living.

A pox on the lot of them.

The essential Pilger disconnect is his grasp of finance. While the pay rates of senior bankers are obscene, he throws the institutions out with the bathwater. The Banks weren't "bailed out". Their clients were. If the GFC contagion had caused Banks to close their doors, the losers would not only be the Banks themselves, their rapacious executives and their fat-cat shareholders (which indirectly include pension-fund members), but their entire customer base.

Streets filled with people unable to buy food would have been a truly ugly sight. Who would Pilger find to blame then?

Poirot,

Don’t know if you’re in agreement with my observation or just trying to lay blame?

<< The despotic dictatorships are aided and abetted wherever possible by the "big bad West" - under the auspices of the IMF and the World Bank which in turn represents Western corporate interests.>>

Isn’t that what despotic dictatorships do? Are you saying that it is the fault of the west for offering or the despotic dictatorships for being despotic and accepting?

Spindoc,

"...the fact that it is despotic dictatorships that are actually responsible for the lack of social equity and justice and not the big bad "West".

I was pointing out that the West is embedded in many cases, like the rise of Yusef Boutros Ghali, from the Egyptian elite, who was educated in the U.S. and began his career with the IMF.
Having served his Western apprenticeship, he returns to Egypt to implement IMF strategy, not for the social equity of justice of the people at large, but to swell the coffers of his own elite and corporate interests abroad.

This is what the IMF and the World Bank do - ingratiate themselves with the ruling elite of countries, in order to profit corporate interests at the expense of the common man in "developing" societies.

Pericles, Ammonite, Poirot, and others.

Stable, sustainable banking depends on a BALANCE OF TERROR. Borrowers must fear the consequences of not being able to service their debt. Banks must fear the consequences of making too many dud loans.

Upset that balance by bailing out either borrowers or lenders or both and you will cause economic chaos.

Bail out bankers and they will continue lending with gay abandon, and pay themselves huge bonuses, because they know they will suffer no consequences if things go pear shaped.

Bail out borrowers and you, in effect, bail out bankers who will lend with gay abandon ....

You see where this goes.

But there is a deeper malaise in the USA and, to a lesser extent, in most Western countries. In the USA, while AVERAGE incomes have risen over the past decade, there has been an actual DECLINE in the real incomes of most households. Most American household are poorer than they were a decade ago.

How can this happen? How can most people get poorer while average incomes rise?

Because there has been a surge in inequality.

Today in the US the top 1% of earners get +- 24% of the “national payroll.” In the 1970s the top 1% got 10-12%. What should have been a decline in living standards for most Americans has been masked by easier access to credit. Americans have been borrowing more to maintain their lifestyles. This cannot continue indefinitely.

While the situation has not been as drastic in other Western democracies inequality has increased in most of them - with along with increases in consumer debt to finance all those nice goodies like giant TVs and iPhones.