[quote=davelj][quote=jpinpb][quote=gandalf]Just wondering, where’s the outrage re: financial services corporations and the bullshit mortgage securitization racket these criminals ran for more than a decade? Where are the consequences for Wall Street?
…… Just wondering, where are all of the ‘Angry People’ when it comes to banks? Countrywide? AIG? Goldman Sachs?
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I think they’re all too busy being up in arms about cops and firemen risking their lives for their exorbitant wages.[/quote]
I think the problem is the ease with which blame can be identified and directly assigned.
The deadbeat homeowners are easy. Living in a house for years on end without making mortgage payments is clearly wrong (albeit technically legal up until foreclosure). If you can’t make the payments, give the keys to the bank and let them sell it to someone else. Don’t fight it through some bogus claim that it’s “yours” and you “deserve” a modification. Move out and let both parties – borrower and lender – move on. So, Joe Deadbeat is easily identified and his actions are transparently wrong. And the issue is easy to understand.
Where the “financiers” (or “banksters”) are concerned, things are more complicated. Sure, there are some easily-identifiable villains: Dick Fuld, Joe Cassano, Stan O’Neal, Angelo Mozilo, and a handful of others. But the rest – that teeming herd of banksters that works just beneath the media radar – are more difficult to identify. And it’s harder to assign specific blame for their actions at an individual level. And that is because for the vast majority of them – as sad as this is – they didn’t actually know they were doing anything wrong. For example, I’m sure that most of the folks in AIG’s Financial Products division were very smart and diligent. They weren’t actually trying to blow up the financial system. But in hindsight we know that very few of them were smart enough to know that their products were flawed and could bring down the financial system in the grander scheme of things. Now, some of this might have been the result of willful ignorance. (It’s hard to convince someone to understand something if their compensation is based on not understanding it.) But I think more of it was just pure ignorance regarding the big picture. And THAT layer of folks has tens of thousands of people throughout Wall Street. So, compared to Joe Deadbeat, not only is it harder to specifically identify that next layer of bankster misfits, what they were/are doing is more difficult to understand to the average person on the street. I would bet that less than 1% of the US Population actually understands the role that John Paulson and Magnetar played in making the whole financial crisis substantially worse than it would have been without them.
Sure, we here at the Pigg bitch about banksters. But to the man on the street, Joe Deadbeat is easier to identify and understand. There is plenty of outrage amongst the populace regarding the financiers… but aside from the obvious villains it’s harder to pin down individuals for specific evil actions.[/quote]
Good post, dave, and think you nailed the elusive nature of the truly guilty parties in the financial system.
I would disagree, though, about the lack of knowledge regarding the eventual outcome of these “innovations” in finance. I’m not involved in finance (other than trading), never took an econ or banking class, and wasn’t privy to the inner workings of the mortgage market, but could easily see where things were going back in 2004. If I could see it, surely “the experts” could have seen it. It’s hard to believe that so many people who had that much power were so completely incompetent.
