If US President Barack Obama and the Democrats are punished as brutally in the mid-term elections as seems likely, their handling of the banks will be one reason for it. The administration’s critics come from every point on the political spectrum but they agree about this: the banks pushed the country into a crisis, got bailed out and walked away scot-free. Bank profits are surging. The new financial rules, so voters think, have been shaped by the industry to spare it inconvenience. God’s work, as Lloyd Blankfein – chief executive and chairman of Goldman Sachs – put it, goes on. The only difference is that lending is suppressed while the banks recuperate – keeping the rest of the economy in the recession that the banks made in the first place. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, the pre-eminent US regulator under the new Dodd-Frank structure, is more sanguine. He and other regulators will have the tools they need in future, he recently told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. They are on the case. Maybe, but the more cynical reading is not so far from the truth. Once the crash began, it was already too late: Mr Bernanke and other policymakers had few good choices. Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has said that when the financial system began to melt down, you could either punish the banks or restore their vital functions but not both – and he is right. It is good news that US banks’ are recapitalising and that their profitability is restored. The country would be in worse shape otherwise. And this too-easily forgotten point might yet be driven home. Should the housing market turn uglier, as it could, the US will get an extra lesson in the need for healthy banks.
看来美国总统巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)和民主党很可能会在中期选举中遭受痛击，如果情况果真如此，那么他们对银行的处置将是造成这一局面的原因之一。奥巴马政府的批评者们虽然有着各式各样的政治立场，但他们在下面这一点上却看法相同：银行让国家陷入了危机，却得到纾困，而且之后并未受到应有的惩罚。