The Biggest Rip-off of All Time

by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
11-23-09

In the scenario I’m about to paint for you, the dialog is fictional, but all the facts and figures are real.

The time: 1 AM, November 23, 2011, exactly two years from now.

The place: the White House, suddenly and unexpectedly under siege as a new financial crisis erupts.

The economic booms of 2010 have morphed into superbooms … the superbooms into bubbles … and the bubbles into busts.

Large banks are again on the brink. Financial markets are again in turmoil.

Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley — the outstanding survivors of an off-again-on-again debt crisis — are now its primary victims.

Investments like long-term U.S. Treasury bonds — long sought as safe harbors — are now collapsing in price, turning into torpedoes that can sink even the sturdiest of portfolios.

But most important, the government’s too-big-to-fail bailouts, shotgun mergers, and mad money printing — previously hailed as cures that killed the contagion of 2008 — are now widely viewed as far worse than any disease.

President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner have huddled in the Oval Office for hours, struggling to find new solutions to old problems: Wall Street meltdowns, renewed threats of a great depression, millions more thrown out of work.

After a long and heated debate, the president slumps back into his armchair, signaling it’s time to talk more frankly — to reminisce about past policies and rethink what might have gone wrong.

“With 20-20 hindsight,â€