“In a new column by this best selling hero of all serious media, we finally have a easy to read explanation of the financial crisis—namely the nerds on Wall Street were just plain dumb, or to use an overused term, “stupid.”
. . . .
“. . . overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.”
Tom then lays out who was complicit in all this—with nary a mention of the media that spent years hyping the “financial innovation on Wall Street.” His answer: all of us. Everyone, he concludes, was involved so you can’t really blame anyone, much less prosecute the fraudsters and, to use an FDRis, “banksters” who bamboozled the gullible and laughed all the way to the bank or their high priced condo—which ever came first.
“This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics., ” he divines.”
“So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.”
America: confess your guilt. Because as long we all did it, as long as unsophisticated borrowers and subprime victims are treated in Friedman speak as equally to blame with shrewd lenders pedaling products they knew were unaffordable, then no one can ever be held responsible. To him, the bankers and brokers were not driven by avarice and self-interest but by ignorance and idiocy. How patronizing!
. . . .
Who are the Stupids here — the people who are losing everything or the media wise men who turn their eyes and pens away from examining the crimes of Wall Street who write in well polished generalities that seem critical at first reading, but then reveal themselves as totally superficial?
Can it be that people who live in big houses, can’t see or FEEL the pain of the people shackled by debt in smaller abodes down the street, the folks who are just waiting for the sheriff to toss them out?
Tom Friedman lives in one of those very big houses — you can see it on the Internet at sustainelane.com — but he also purports to be guided by a moral compass even as he blames us all for the sins of a few, concluding:
“That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins.”
One sin Tom doesn’t comment on is the failure of our media to do a better job of assessing how that irresponsibility was permitted, even encouraged, and who should be held accountable.” (Read more from globalresearch.ca)