Deregulation and Credit Default Swaps

Occupy Wall Street Protests Rankle the Rich

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The grumbling from the wealthy took off with a sign posted in the windows of the Chicago Board of Trade last week, in a place where street protesters easily could see it, which proclaimed: "We Are The 1%."

No one is sure who put up the sign, but plenty of folks in the building could be included in the 1 percent.

If a joke, it was one many protesters didn't get. "I thought [the sign] was extremely disrespectful," a special education teacher named Corey, 35, told TimeOut Chicago. Mike Polski, 53, from Joliet, disagreed, telling TimeOut, "These people wish they were the 1 percent! The 1 percent are billionaires."

He's wrong. According to IRS tax data, anybody earning $380,354 or more qualifies for membership in the top 1 percent. That would include some of the better-paid traders at the Board of Trade. (IRS data shows, too, that the top 1 percent holds 35.6 percent of the nation's wealth, not the 50 percent claimed by Occupiers.)

Whoever posted the sign, trader Eric Wilkinkson says he is in sympathy with it. The real parties responsible for the nation's economic ills are not the rich, in his view.end quote.

I personally think it is not the rich or the poor or even Obama or the present government that should be blamed for the present problems we are facing. Though the overall change this time is caused by Globalization, more specifically the problems of the U.S. have to do with only two things. Bank and finance deregulation and Banks using Credit Default swaps as a form of impossible insurance for various transactions. So, even though globalzation is affecting all economies on earth in a really profound way both for good and ill, putting back into place the reguations on banks and finance that were put the last time it got like this during the Great Depression would do the most to put people back to work and to allow property values to rise once again. Until financial regulations like we had in place after the Great Depression are in effect, no one will take the risks necessary to move forward financially as a now world financial culture.