Of course, when banking is boring and less profitable, it will attract less capital

Why would you want to spend more on paper-shuffling overhead than you have to?

and will therefore not be able to meet the demand for loans that was present over the past four years.

You need to make a distinction between capitalizing banks and capitalizing industry through banks. I would argue that it would be most efficient to minimize the cost of capital formation by minimizing the cost needed to maintain the mechanism of formation, which would be the bank.

Meaning that you take out a loan with the lowest rate. For reasons which should be obvious, your banker would prefer terms which keeps him swimming in your money.

There's a difference between normal profit and economic rent: normal profit is what you get in a competitive market; economic rent is abnormal profit obtained by successfully evading competition. In theory, nobody should be able to get rich in a mature, competitive market, because your success should attract competitors and reduce your profit to a normal level.

Is it not so?

That said, I submit to you that the existence of billionaire bankers swimming in money is prima facie evidence that the market for financial services lacks significant competition or similar market-based controls. In other words, they're cheating. And they have to be cheating a lot.

I guess we should go back to the good old days when banks would happily loan money to anyone, as long as they did not need it.

An exaggeration.

What's needed is to go back to lending money to those who need it but can demonstrate some history of responsibly paying bills and a reasonable ability to repay the debt. That means no more NINJA loans.

Lenders should also be prohibited from changing the terms of contracts after the fact, which is something they are presently allowed by law to do. Reasonably, a contract is a contract unless a court says otherwise, according to principles established fairly. Presently the law says that people are prey, and that is an abomination, and that has to stop.

That would make banking boring, of course, and not exhorbitantly profitable and therefore would not be a business attractive to racketeers, gangsters, loan sharks, predators, leeches, and shakedown artists, who would then be constrained to pursue their real lifes work making license plates in undecorated institutional facilities.

The existence of the industry is only justified by proper service to the public, which of course means that the big banks have no justification for their existence.

It would be very reasonable to restrict retail banking to local credit unions exclusively. That way only big business risks getting screwed by big banks.

when you called Ayn Rand a slut and a whore i nearly fell out of my chair!

Did you get burned when you spilled your coffee? Darn that, now you'll have to sue yourself. Go for an out-of-court settlement, it'll be cheaper.

I never called Ayn Rand a whore. And I never did get around to pointing out that, clinically speaking, she was the archetypal psychopathic egoist, according to her own writings. An oversight on my part.

Your recent post about unemployment being a leading indicator is just bad economics

I didn't propose the concept. I merely showed why it was true. I'm still waiting for a refutation, however invalid, which will never come, precisely because it is true. That discussion is best reserved for Ph.D.-level econometricians, anyway.

your “shadowstats” unemployment number was debunked long ago.

Never happened, and not true in any case, since it's based on the same kind of statistics the US government used to provide before BEA statistics became politicized.

Since you provide no evidence, you must be lying.

I provide plenty of evidence. You're just annoyed because you cannot refute it.

15%-30% may seem outrageous, but you'd be outraged at the number of defaults.

Defaults are what you get for lending money to people who can't afford it in the effort to increase your herd of debt slaves. Defaults are your way to "justify" raping everybody else.

In the world of credit, everyone pays for the sins of the few.

Sin is evidently basic management strategy.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

John Maynard Keynes

Nobody wants to argue with us anymore.

-snif-

How the Rich are Destroying the Planet

Why, when the situation is so clear and alarming, does it remain so stubbornly intractable to change? It's because those who have power in the world want it to be this way.

http://www.truthout.org/article/how-rich-are-destroying-planet

"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Humans beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet..."

- Agent Smith

"We're not going to make it, are we? People, I mean."

"It is in your nature to destroy yourselves," said The Machine.

The plunder will stop
when the fish are gone.

This message was brought to you by the Committee to Save the Humans.