Nationalize the Banks

MUST READS: Two in-depth articles are worth reading. The first, by Simon Johnson (ex-IMF) in the upcoming issue of the Atlantic discusses the financial crisis from the IMF's p.o.v. and points out how much our situation looks like the problems the IMF encounters in emerging nations: a financial oligarchy with entrenched political power strangling the governments ability to resolve a crisis. The solution, too, is straight out of the IMF's playbook: nationalize the banks and then break the oligarchical influence of Wall Street on D.C.

I liked his quote that said: "anything too big to fail is too big to exist".

This segues into the second article by Joseph Stiglitz (a Nobel Prize winning economics professor at Columbia) in the Nation outlining just how a bank nationalization plan would look like.