kalm,
You continue to blame the banks, Wall Street, and any other leviathan out there.
The fact is that everybody had a hand in the meltdown. EVERYONE.
It comes down to simple greed...and there are very few, with the exception of maybe Frodo...that do not have their own best interest in mind. Blaming things mostly on the banks is just foolish.
I'll recant a story I think I put on here a while back, but it is very relevant.
I sat in a room with only a handful of people, including one of the very top Bank of America executives (let's leave it at single digits..I don't want to get sued). We were deciding what to do with personnel regarding a few mergers (I was only concerned about my small areas, but my boss was absent so I was in there representing her as well). We really were not talking about cuts...we were talking about shuffling/reassigning responsibilities, reworking existing physical assets (buildings, phones, etc.), and in a lot of cases, simply renaming the existing positions (with a little training needed to bring the acquired folks up to speed). We needed people, so very, very few people would be let go...especially during the transition period.
This guy starts laughing...and I mean almost pissing his pants. They had decided that they were going to spread word about laying people off and shutting down facilities in a couple states in order to get money to do our renovations. They leaked that "layoff" story to the press and politicians, and sure enough, everyone started panicking. Offers of tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives started pouring in from each state if BOA would say they were saving a certain number of jobs for a certain amount of time.
WE WERE NOT GOING TO LAY THOSE PEOPLE OFF! In fact, we were very concerned about maintaining service and had plans to hire MORE people. But, instead of the bank paying for the retraining, systems integration, and facility upgrades (and we had plans to do just that), it was, instead, the TAXPAYERS in those states who paid for it.
I had to laugh when I saw our local paper naming the jobs that would be saved and in what facilities...and the cost to the state to "keep" them there. The same thing happened in the other states...big announcements from their state politicians about what a great job they did negotiating with the bank.
Every time I see the faces of the politicians involved, and I see them several times each year at small functions, I think about what suckers they were. They really have no idea of what they did and what they were up against. And, of course, the employees were in a panic, as were local businesses that were partially supported by those employees. News articles had them stating that our Governor and other representatives HAD to do something to save the economy. Use taxpayer money…just don’t allow my lunch patrons or retail operation to suffer.
in the end, EVERYONE was willing to have someone else (other taxpayers) pay in order to keep their little portion of the American dream going. It’s the American way…a culture drummed into everyone’s head.
And it wasn’t just in America…real estate bubbles and other forms of greed were happening all over as ordinary people tried to get in on the gold rush. Workers didn’t accept anything but large yearly increases in both salary and pension benefits. Local politicians made ridiculous pension promises that demanded higher returns on investments in order to make it possible to pay them out.
Those derivatives you mock were only purchased because they promised to pay more than normal investments…even though the risk was supposed to be only nominally higher than boring treasury offerings.
GREED.
Driven by rich, poor, and everyone in between.
It was ALL unsustainable the way it was done.
)
