“In 1989, the chief executives of the seven biggest banks in the country made about 100 times the income of the typical American household, on average. On the eve of the crisis, in 2007, they made more than 500 times the median.
“Economists know there is a point after which more lending stops helping and starts hurting growth. One study puts it at about 110 percent of gross domestic product. On the eve of the crisis, credit to the private sector in the United States reached 213 percent of G.D.P., up from 96 percent in 1982. And all we got was a mass of busted residential mortgages.”
Eduardo Porter, “The Modest Worth to Society of Those Big Banks,” NYT
Embattled Farmers 