Taxpayer-funded monopoly

Dakinkat at the Confluence has written a remarkable piece. Yes, it has many typos; they indicate her passion.

The gist: It's not really good news that the big banks are paying back the TARP money, because those banks have engineered "recovery" only by merging and acquiring and engulfing and devouring, all without regulation.

Unbridled mergers lead to monopoly power -- or to a cartel that functions as a monopoly. Back in the day, even kids understood that monopolies were evil. We knew about monopoly power because history classes taught us about company stores, which served as excellent illustrations of what not to do. I wonder if today's kids learn that lesson.

What we have going on now is a game of Monopoly played with taxpayer dollars.

In 1994, the top four banks, taken together, held 7% of the market. In 2006 -- just before the financial tornado hit -- they held 20%. Now it is up to 40%.

That's illegal, by the way. Not that anyone cares about legality anymore.

(Incidentally, the regulations on mergers and monopolies were written during the Reagan era.)

In essence, the bankers who nearly destroyed the world, the bankers who acted without regulation by either law or common sense, they bankers who packaged crap mortgages into AAA-rated financial instruments which were mis-labeled and sold to investors...

...you know, those guys, the ones we considered tossing into the clink not long ago...

...they now run everything. Everything. They have more power than ever before.

They went to Congress and screamed "Give us trillions NOW or it's Apocalypse Time!" -- then they took that cash to buy the entire banking system.

The right-wingers call the current situation "statism" or "socialism." They don't know the meaning of those words. This is capitalism -- monopoly capitalism, the stage of capitalism that occurs when regulation plays no role.