Pax on both houses: Tell It To The Tulips: "Banks Aren't The Bad Guys," by Charles Lane

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Tell It To The Tulips: "Banks Aren't The Bad Guys," by Charles Lane

"Politics and Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/01/politics-and-economics-101-curricula.html

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In a Washington Post opinion piece, Charles Lane argues that "The real scandal (of the 2007-08 financial collapse) is the counterproductive behavior that was perfectly legal: Americans’ shared, erroneous belief in ever-rising housing prices and corresponding mania to profit from them. “People in Wall Street, and throughout, thought that there was no going down in the market. Everybody was going to get rich,” Breuer told “Frontline.”"

Between 2007 and 2010 Americans' net worth declined by 40%. (No typo: forty percent.)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/between-2007-and-2010-family-net-worth.html

Lane, however, would have us believe that such comprehensive criminality has no perpetrators.

Look. Bankers are the "designated adults" in the room and are responsible for the "children" in their care. It is criminal to feed witless kids the crap of sub-prime loans, derivatives, reckless hedge funds.

Since when is child neglect not a crime?

The "people's" failure in all this is like a teenage hedonist taking his Daddy's credit card to a whore house.

Of course these "kids" get f_____.

The failure of the banks on the other hand is the failure of men and women entrusted with the nation's financial health; people with supposedly demonstrated "sobriety" who have learned to behave with fiscal and fiduciary caution.

But drunk on "irrational exuberance" these allegedly knowledgable people refused to believe the invariable evidence of human history; to wit, "markets go up" and "markets go down."

Surely "The Suits" were aware (or should have been aware) of 17th century European mania when tulip bulbs were worth more than their weight in gold. And just as surely they contrived to create "bubble" in full knowledge that they would profit on "the run-up" and then again on the collapse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

To deny "the sine wave of Life" is to pretend there is "up" without "down," negative poles without positive, life without death, victims without perps, conservatism without liberalism.

See "Republican Rule and Economic Catastrophe: A Lock-Step Relationship"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/05/republican-rule-and-economic.html

Such fiscal malfeasance transcends standard rules of culpability and is properly seen as a "crime against humanity."

The economic havoc wreaked on middle class and working class Americans, millions of whom lost their homes -- and many their suddenly-unaffordable health insurance -- affected families at every level of life.

And death.

In the midst of this carnage, the rich got richer, sequestering wealth at an ever accelerating pace. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/reagan-budget-director-top-5-have.html