QOTD: Felix Salmon
by digby
Besides, banks shouldn’t be obscenely profitable: they’re intermediaries, and in an efficient economy their profits should be quite easily competed away. When bank profits are high, that’s a sign that the bank in question is extracting rents from the economy, rather than helping it to grow.
Important point, don’t you think?
Anyway, that’s just a throwaway line in a must-read post about a CNBC appearance by Alex Pareene (what were they thinking?) in which he takes these delusional greedheads downtown. It’s awesome all the way around.
The rest of the interview is a glorious exercise in watching CNBC anchors simply implode in disbelief when faced with the idea that JP Morgan in general, and Jamie Dimon in particular, might be anything other than a glorious icon of capitalist success. In the world of CNBC, the stock chart tells you everything you need to know, while the New York Times is a highly untrustworthy organ of dissent and disinformation.
A thing of beauty:
I hear tell that nobody under 55 watches CNBC anymore, not even the Wall Street cowboys. It’s just another insular little corner for rich white guys (and the money honeys who love them.)
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