A system based almost entirely on fraud

There's another important anniversary at this time of year. Five years ago this week the Banksters crashed our economy, basically by lying and stealing. Their "punishment" cost trillions. Out of our pockets, not theirs.

In summary, the financial industry collectively decided that you could fund economic growth despite stagnant wages through piling on mountains of debt. But when it all went bad, the solution wasn’t to rebalance the economy, to get money into the hands of ordinary workers and preference wages over assets. The solution was to point a fire hose of money at the people who caused the problem, and inflate their assets to preserve the status quo. The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending and then quantitative easing rescued bank balance sheets. The five biggest U.S. banks are now 30 percent bigger than they were at the height of the crisis, nursed back to health by the government. [...]

Worst of all, despite a crisis built on fraud, nobody who perpetrated that fraud saw the inside of a jail cell, removing any meaningful deterrent for financial crimes. Most of those criminals walked away with enough money to fund their lavish lifestyles forever.

Which brings us once again to the largest income gap between since the Roaring 1920s when the previous record was set.

The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected 19.3 percent of all household income in 2012, their largest stake in Internal Revenue Service figures in at least a century. The previous peak of 18.7 percent came back in 1927, according to an analysis of IRS figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.

And do spare me the wailing about how the 1 percenters suffered more during the crash:

[S]ince the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

Last year alone, the incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 19.6 percent, compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

There oughta be a law. Oh wait. There was a law. They got it abolished and they'll be damned if they're going to allow it to be reinstated.