Kevin Phillips

Now for a little bit of background. We're not just looking at a real estate mess. Over the last quarter century, the total of public and private credit market debt in the United States -- most of it, in fact, is private -- has more than quintupled from $8 to $48 trillion, the biggest such orgy in world history. Over that period, domestic financial debt - the money borrowed by the financial sector for expansion, consolidation, empire-building, leverage, exotic mortgages, gambling, you name it - swelled from just $1 trillion to some $14 trillion. Employing these economic steroids, the financial sector ballooned itself from 14-15% of what back in the mid-1980s was the Gross National Product to 20-21% in 2004 of the newer Gross Domestic Product calculation. In the meantime, the once-dominant manufacturing sector fell far behind, dropping to just 12% of GDP. In a nutshell, the economy has been hijacked in recent decades by the very groups who now purport to have remedies - Wall Street, from whence Paulson emerged, and the money-bubbling, don't regulate the dangerous practices Federal Reserve Board, from whence Bernanke comes.

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