It seems that nobody understands what's happened to our economy better than Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.
His column today begins:
"The revelation that Bernard Madoff -- brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community -- was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.
"Yet surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?"
Krugman nails it. The expansion of wealth in the financial sector has come at the expense of working people in this country. Our economy, apparently, is built on wishes and fantasies -- the rich get richer while the rest of us go deeper into the hole the new robber barons have dug.
Read the whole thing here.
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