From YESMAGAZINE.ORG:
If we were to boil the financial crisis down to its root cause, we could sum it up with former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ phrase, the “curse of bigness.” The crisis was caused by massive industry consolidation, which leads to destructive corporate behavior because the decision-makers at these vast institutions are so far removed from the impacts of their decisions.
Perhaps the best way to understand the problems inherent in an economy that separates actions from consequences is to look at its opposite. Last fall, not long after Lehman Brothers collapsed, I was speaking on a panel alongside a community banker. His bank, he said, did not offer mortgages that people could not afford, or that would balloon in cost a few yeas out, for two simple reasons. One was that the bank did not sell mortgages to Wall Street, but kept loans on its own books. The bank’s financial well-being, therefore, was directly tied to the well-being of its customers. The other reason was that he invariably knew or got to know the borrowers. “I don’t relish the idea of foreclosing on a family I regularly see at the grocery store,” he explained…
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