"Let's be real. This is what happened the past ten years. You, for political reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, finagled the mortgage system so that people who make, like, zero dollars a year were given mortgages for $600,000 houses. You got to run around and crow about how, under your watch, everyone became a homeowner. You shook down the tax payer and hoped for the best.
"Democrats did it because they thought it would make everyone Democrats: 'Look what I give you!'
"Republicans did it because they thought it would make everyone Republicans: 'I'm a homeowner, I've got a stake, don't raise my property taxes, get off my lawn!'
"And Wall Street? We went to town, baby. We bundled the mortgages and sold them to fools, or we held them, called them assets, and made believe everyone would pay his mortgage. As if we cared! We invented financial instruments so complicated that no one, even the people who sold them, understood what they were.
"You're finaglers and we're finaglers. I play for dollars, you play for votes. In our own ways we're all thieves. We would be called desperadoes if we weren't so boring, so utterly banal in our soft-jawed, full-jowled selfishness. If there were any justice, we'd be forced to duel, with the peasants of America holding our cloaks. Only we'd both make sure we missed, wouldn't we?"
Peggy again:
"OK, Charles Prince didn't say that. Just wanted to get your blood going. Mr. Prince would never say something so dramatic and intemperate. I made it up. It wasn't on the news because it didn't happen.
"It would be kind of a breath of fresh air, though, wouldn't it?"
Wouldn't it, though?
2 comments:
Well, I guess we know better with the benefit of hindsight. But why didn't anyone see the trainwreck coming? I mean the housing bubble and the easy loans didn't really add up, did they?
I think it's because highly educated business graduates came up with financial models so complex that most people thought, "gee, that's gotta work since it was designed by super-geniuses."
Ironically, capitalists made the same mistake made by Marxists. Das Kapital is to dense, difficult, and daunting that most communists never read or understood it; so, they just put their faith in it. I mean if the wise old genius prophet poured so much time and effort into it, it must be true!! Does one question God? Can a cockroach understand the human intelligence?
And so communists decided to embark on the Marxist model. It was a total disaster, but everyone was too busy BELIEVING to realize that they'd embarked on a crazy idea.
Now, we know capitalism is infinitely superior to communism in general, but crazy and stupid capitalism is still crazy and stupid capitalism. It's like a gun is better than a bow-and-arrow, but if you blow your brains out, gun is much the worse. It depends on how you use it.
Anyway, with the fall of communism, we got TRIUMPHANT capitalism. Capitalism could do NO WRONG. And since finance became the #1 sector in the US economy--and since it's very complex and labyrinthine--, most people couldn't make heads or tails out of it. So, they just left it up to the gurus, the Harvard and Yale educated 'geniuses' who seem to actually understand that stuff.
Boiled down to basics, what they came up with was just plain crazy, but no one could see this since we were told that the innovative models--which few people could figure out(including the regulators)--were supposedly brilliant and infallible.
Similarly, most communists were too awed by Marx's intellectual feat to challenge its veracity or practicality.
Lessons to be learned. Outside advanced math and physics and especially in politics and economics, demand an explanation in simple arithmatic. If none is forthcoming, it's not because the problem is really so complex but because it's been obfuscated by people with a genius for deception(and perhaps self-deception).
But whaddya expect in a nation that elects nonentities like Bush and Obama as president?
Love this ... thanks for posting it ... I have a novel coming out about this stuff set in Geneva in 2008 ... looking at the idea of whether ethics and kindness could conceivably take a front row spot in the finance sector...
I'll get back to you when it comes out...
Best, Lynette
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