[kevingadd]

Limitless spending? Do you know anything about regular people? To suggest that the TARP banks are in any way more responsible than the average consumer is simply ignorant. 'Regular people' these days are not spending more than they used to, and they're not examples of limitless spending: http://www.yale.edu/law/leo/052005/papers/Warren.pdf

Furthermore, TARP being repaid is not an inherently good thing. Who cares whether we got the bailout money back if the system is still completely broken? We're still in a situation where those banks can do whatever they want, and when things collapse the government will have no choice but to bail them out again because the alternatives are unacceptable. Now that the banks don't owe the government TARP money it has even less leverage than it might have had before.

[fiesycal]

You can't just blame Wall Street for everything. I never suggested consumers were more responsible I just said that heaping 100% of the blame on Wall Street is ridiculous. Yes consumer debt was on the rise before the financial crisis: http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/debt/review.pdf

You say Banks, which part of the Banks? You can't lump the whole Banking system into one group and blame it all. Also the top 1% encompasses much more than these 'greed fuelled' bankers on Wall Street.

[gyardley]

That paper uses a 2001 data set, and things have certainly changed since the housing crisis, but it was interesting all the same.

The paper argued that certain things - like the cost of housing (due to rising prices) and health care - were the cause of middle-class debt loads, and that consumption on frivolous items was actually down from the 1970s.

This is a plausible argument. The cost of housing, health care, and education has certainly skyrocketed. What Warren doesn't mention, though, is that all of these areas are heavily regulated and subsidized by the federal government - unlike all the areas where middle-class consumption has declined.

You might be able to persuade me that people are in fact spending responsibly, but you'll have a harder time persuading me that the solution to their problems is more regulations, or that the appropriate target of these protestors is anywhere outside Washington DC.