Who allowed Wall Street to destroy the American economy while keeping a closed eye to all the signals something is wrong?

The best answer for this might be found on Public Broadcasting System (PBS), "Frontline: Inside the Meltdown" which is available online. You might also benefit from the under-oath testimony of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke before Congress once the GOP-caused near-fatal FINANCIAL SYSTEM MELTDOWN plunged the U.S. and most of Europe into depression-level Great Depression in 2007 and 2008---long before President Obama had even been elected.

The "source" given to you by respondent "Pixie" is not even close to accurate, because National Public Radio (NPR) was warning about looming catastrophic problems with our nation's housing and credit markets way back in 2004 and 2005, with NPR economic analysts predicting the collapse would be "worst than the collapse of our nation's savings and loans" (which occurred as a direct result of deregulation and "trickle-down" bad policies in place throughout the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle days.

In Greenspan's sworn testimony, he said of the Republican-controlled House and Senate during those years, "We were WRONG to believe that they [banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, lending institutions, Wall Street] "could or even would self-regulate." This is another way of saying that when the cat (oversight, consumer protections) is away (or stricken with Alzheimer's in the case of Reagan) the corruption-prone greed-driven rats (CEOs, banksters, Wall Street) come out to devour everything in site until there is nothing but ruin.

One of the basic root problems with our political system, a problem that causes many other problems, is that we have allowed money to become just too important in our electoral politics. In an open election race, i.e. one where there is no incumbent running for re-election, the candidate who spends the most money will win about 95% of the time, 19 of 20 times!

So our elections campaigns have become fund-raising contests. It's like we no longer have elections, we have -auctions-!

Both our political parties desperately need wheelbarrows full of cash to run campaigns, and they both get the money from the same sources! So it's dumb to believe their real agendas are all that much different!

In the early 2000s there was a spate of scandals on Wall Street. The big brokerages were found doing insider trading, manipulating stock prices, and even selling crap stocks to their trusting customers so they could bet against them in the market. Our benighted president at the time didn't believe any reform was necessary. He believed in deregulation, and in non-enforcement of existing regulations! This eventually led to a complete melt-down on Wall Street that caused the whole stock market to lose half its value!

But money is just as important, just as powerful as it was before. We identified one major problem being that some investment brokers and insurance companies were Too Big to Fail. So the managers of these companies could take huge risks, gambling with their investors' money. If they won they'd be heroes, and if they lost the taxpayers would come in and bail them out and they'd still get their 8-figure 'bonuses'. If we were smart, if our government's regulatory function actually worked, we would have then broken these companies up to prevent this from happening again. But we didn't! We still have companies that are Too Big to Fail, and it's just a matter of time before we'll have the same thing happen again!

Lanny Breuer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHWTsDPaCXk

Recession does not mean destruction- It means temporary slump

Look at it this way- Even in the recession, our standard of living was far above average for the world

Bush43.

America is not destroyed.

http://www.whiteoutpress.com/articles/q42012/list-...