Winners And Losers of the Financial Crisis

The LA Times reports on who came out of the financial disaster of 2008 better off, and who got pummeled.  Not surprisingly, the big winners were banks, giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy, while the big losers were ordinary people with money in bank accounts, low wage and factory workers, and foreclosed and underwater homeowners.  A little bit of their analysis on the banks:

In the second quarter of this year U.S. banks earned a total of $42.2 billion — the biggest industry profit in history, and double the earnings of the same period in 2010.
It's no accident that the banks have prospered mightily since the crash, said Neil Barofsky, who was the watchdog over the U.S. bank bailout program launched in September 2008.
"We turned the entire resources of the nation toward one goal: setting up a situation where the banks could earn their way out of this," said Barofsky, now an attorney at Jenner & Block in New York. The plan was not, he lamented, "about holding institutions accountable" for the debacle.
After brokerage giant Lehman failed Sept. 15, 2008, credit seized up and the financial system became a place of titanic falling dominoes: Merrill Lynch & Co., Wachovia Corp., American International Group Inc., Washington Mutual Inc. Rotten home loans were at the core of it all.
The Bush administration scrambled for a plan to restore confidence in the system. The $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was created to buy bad loans from banks. But the government quickly switched course and instead used the money to make investments in hundreds of banks, bolstering their capital cushions.
Yet in the longer run, TARP was less significant for many banks than the aid of the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

And for corporations:

The government's broadest measure of corporate earnings reached an annualized rate of $2.1 trillion in the second quarter, an all-time high and more than double the rate at the end of 2008.
The dramatic rebound in earnings has occurred despite a slow-growing U.S. economy and continued weakness abroad, particularly in Europe.
Corporations' profit success stems in part from the layoffs and other deep cost-cutting many firms undertook in the 2008-09 recession — and their relative lack of domestic hiring since. And, like the banks, companies have reaped the benefits of the Fed's super-low interest rates by refinancing debt.
The surge in earnings has helped buttress stock prices, which are near record highs.

Meanwhile, most Americans are no better off, or worse off than they were before the crisis.  It would be nice if there was a political party who looked out for common folks against the banks, corporations and ultra-wealthy folks who use their wealth and power to secure more for themselves at the expense of everybody else.  However, we don't seem to have one.