Comments by "coolmodelguy" (@coolmodelguy6304) on "Age of Easy Money (full documentary) | FRONTLINE" video.
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@Ashleysaintclaire - I set out to learn also, so I will attempt to elaborate (in a simplified form) and hope it helps. The key words are in the original post, "a lack of understanding of the financial system." That lack of understanding is not an accident. To use the word "system" in reference to the economy or finance is actually inaccurate, because every system has limits (for example, upper and lower limits), but the accumulation of wealth has no upper limits and we allow people to go broke, become homeless, and drop out of the bottom economically. The entire point of our economy has been oriented toward the accumulation of wealth, as I will demonstrate using the Federal Reserve's own data. Shortly after World War Two (1947), the grand total of financial assets was 2.88 times the size of the economy. Over the following 75 years, financial assets grew faster than the economy by an average of 0.5% annually. Now, financial assets are five times the size of our economy. The words "financial assets" are just another way of saying wealth. If wealth grows faster than the work that is supposed to create wealth, then there is a problem. That is our crisis in a nutshell, except that no one wants to face that reality. I stated earlier that our lack of understanding is not an accident. Anything to do with money has been purposefully over complicated and obfuscated over time, so the question is who has the most to gain by making it so? It costs a lot of money to throw out so much misinformation and smoke screen over time, so my assessment is that the wealthy are responsible for our present orchestrated confusion.
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