To the Editor:
The title of Chris Powell’s article (‘How about first asking why the economy died?’, Sept. 19 edition) is a question I’ve been asking since President Obama launched the first stimulus, and declared clearly that then was not the time to place blame (early 2009).
Most large, over-leveraged corporations have since been taxpayer re-provisioned, and declared Too Big To Fail. True, the federal government has initiated a lawsuit against two large financial lenders for bad mortgage lending, but it wasn’t until I read Powell’s reference to “financialization” that the whole scam began to make sense.
I’m a neophyte to economics and its terms, but I Googled financialization and was amazed that the term gets so little play when it seems so applicable. Perhaps it’s just one of those words that pretends to have a logical basis, but is purely surmise. On the other hand it refers more to a state of mind, and gives a little added cred to the saying “Money goes where money is.”
To this reader, the concept of financialization rationalizes many behavioral changes in corporations, governments, regulators, unions, and science over many decades. The wage-earning public has observed the slow transformation of the wealth paradigm from successfulness to the amassing of money alone for decades, and watched power accrue those who have hitched their wagons to that process.
So why indeed ask about why the economy died? Once everything has turned to gold, who needs an economy? Watching it all implode will be painful, but fascinating.
Chris Williams Middletown