In the financial world, no news is good news.  By that measure, boy are things bad.

That’s not to say it’s the end of financial life as we know it, but reading the news out of Europe you might come to that conclusion.  What’s astonishing is the growing feeling that the public cannot and should not take on socialized risk any longer, meaning that banks are going to have to fend for themselves.  The same medicine appears to be popular for nations that have run up huge tabs.

This is no longer about Occupy Wall Street or even Occupy Main Street.  This is turning into a worldwide rebellion.

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Risk and reward management are the heart of any investment.  Money goes into ideas and efforts that have a chance of paying it back with a little bit of profit at the end.  If risk is completely removed anyone will make decisions and try things that they might not have otherwise.  When the risk is spread out to people that they don’t know or necessarily care about, disaster is pending.

That’s pretty much what just happened to our economy – socialized risk with private profit.

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Protests continue on Wall Street and around the nation calling for a vague program of reform.  Polls continue to show that the effort is popular, with opinion against Big Government even stronger than feeling against Big Business.  It seems that after many years we are beginning to develop the courage to make small plans once again.

At the heart of it all is 30 years of an applied theory, a history that appears to be discredited but never been properly repudiated.  As we move past the dogma of Supply-Side economics there is a lot more than government taxing and spending policy to clean up.  There are the banks whose turf is being occupied today, those that are beyond Too Big to Fail and well into Too Big to Understand and simply Too Big.  They got that way the same way our government did – by leaving common sense and history behind.

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