"What happened to Obama?," asks a psychology professor in an August 6 op-ed in the New York Times. Our brains, he avers, require stories to make sense of things, and in 2009, "Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end."

The story the country awaited from Barack Obama, according to Professor Drew Westen, went like this: "This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out."

The trouble is that "Wall Street gamblers" didn't do the speculating. The American public did. This was a Ponzi scheme by the people, of the people and for the people, the most democratic crony-capitalist scam in the history of humankind. Households made more money than the bankers during every year of the bubble, and ended up better off than they were before the bubble, while the bankers got wiped.

David Fuller's view Veteran subscribers will recall that I have long regarded banking, as opposed to all individual bankers, as one of the most amoral businesses.

Nevertheless, this article, written by a former banker, has an interesting perspective. I think you will find it interesting.