A Wasted Financial Crisis???

Adam Davidson at the New York Times asks: Did we waste a financial crisis?  (see here).  Davidson says:

Remarkably, five years after the crisis, the health of the financial industry is just as hard to determine. A major bank or financial institution could meet every single regulatory requirement yet still be at risk of collapse, and few of us would even know it.

So, while Republicans block every attempt at financial reform and Democrats (those who aren't secretly glad the Republicans are blocking reform) go on the talk shows and decry how "hard" they are trying, the rest of us are stuck with a huge bill for stabilizing the financial sector with the added insult that it most certainly can happen again.

Once again: Why we call it "the Great Recession"

CalculatedRisk updates it's (very informative) graph (see here for more ):

Read Robert Putnam's essay in the New York Times

Robert Putnam's essay "Crumbling American Dreams" is surely worth a read (see here).  Below is a quote from the concluding paragraph:

The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.”