When you buy enough stocks to give you control of a target company, that's called mergers and acquisitions or corporate raiding. Hedge funds have been doing this, as well as corporate financial managers. With borrowed money you can take over or raid a foreign company too. So, you're having a monopolistic consolidation process that's pushed up the market, because in order to buy a company or arrange a merger, you have to offer more than the going stock-market price. You have to convince existing holders of a stock to sell out to you by paying them more than they'd otherwise get.

Almost all of the demand for oil that suddenly pushed prices up was speculative demand. People began to speculate not only in stocks and bonds and real estate, but also in commodities. The market went up for old tankers, which were used simply to store oil in. A lot of the oil was simply being stored for trading, not used.

Normally, if someone goes bankrupt, you wipe out the debt and get a fresh start. But that's not permitted with student loans. So the effect is to impoverish many graduates with very high debts.

Education is something that should not be organized on a for-profit basis, because in that case its purpose is not really to provide an education. It's not to teach students how to get better work, but how to provide banks with a free giveaway opportunity from the government, by making junk loans that are defaulted on. The effect may be to wreck the futures of the graduates that fall for the false promises that are being made.

When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that "real wealth." It exposes what's wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.

There really isn't a recovery, and no signs of it on the horizon, because people have to pay the banks. It's a vicious circle - or rather, a downward spiral.

Throughout history, the only way of restoring stability is to write down the debts. That is treated now as if it's something that can't be done. But it's the only thing that's going to revive the economy.