Ann Woolner measures the pulse of the masses perfectly with her piece “Sue Them, Jail Them, Make Them Pay for Meltdown” in Bloomberg today. Her commentary sketches everything that is wrong with the last 15 years of the American Capitalist Experiment, and, like a Pokemon episode* to a photosensitive epileptic, leaves the unwashed reader twitching with anti-capitalist convulsions.
As it stands, the rest of us will be paying much money over a long time for the greed and bad judgment of those who melted down the economy.
Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are propping up firms that a relative few money lenders and Wall Street wizards ruined.
If that weren’t enough, the crisis is shrinking the money that Americans diligently socked away for retirement, down payments on first homes, college for the kids or this winter’s heating bill. We might as well have opened our windows and tossed out cash.
Beyond crimping living standards around the globe, the crumbling of the U.S. financial system has prompted action radical for a nation devoted to free enterprise. However necessary, it’s nothing short of astounding that the U.S. government essentially nationalized the largest insurance company in the country.
* Warning: May cause seizures in epileptics or Lehman employees.
More after the jump.
The degree to which this mirrors the American version of “return entitlement” boggles the mind. Last I checked “greed and bad judgment” were not illegal. Moreover, they are just a 15% jump towards the “good judgment line” away from receiving hero-like status in this culture.
The oft celebrated Warren Buffet is a greedy bastard. So is Bill Gates. That’s not up for debate. It is only the “judgment” element of Ms. Woolner’s discourse that makes any difference. Considering the rather small number of asset managers who actually beat the broader market, criminalizing bad investment judgement seems like a poor idea to me. But I might be in the minority here. Still, no one was complaining when Lehman returned quarter after quarter of record earnings in 2007.
No one is to blame for your poorly invested and badly diversified retirement losses other than you. If you didn’t know that you were getting 8%+ returns in the market because there was some risk of catastrophic loss involved, then you shouldn’t have been there in the first place. “…a relative few money lenders and Wall Street wizards…” did not ruin the economy. All of the market participants did with their blind belief that housing prices could only go up. That oil would remain cheap forever. That sovereigns might never lose their taste for subsidizing conspicuous consumption.
I think that the Woolner’s and Cox’s of the world have it backwards. We shouldn’t be restricting short sellers. We should give profits from short sales and puts preferential tax treatment.
The idiot who decided that owning a home was the American Dream actualized to such an extent, and the desire for which was honed to such a keen edge, that we were going to allow people to put down a mere 3% if they joined a government home ownership program is the nimrod that Woolner should be jumping on. (Three guesses who scuttled risk based pricing here).
The corrupt, nepotistic emperor who turned Freddie and Fannie into a cushy slot to drop big campaign contributors and political operatives into as a reward for a job well done should attract Woolner’s ire.
You are not entitled to an affordable MacMansion, cheap insurance on a hurricane scarred floodplain, 9% annual returns on your index fund for 40 years in a row or equities that go up but never come down, and as a Bloomberg contributor you really should know this.
Grow up.
PWNED
All congress or FASB had to do was eliminate the moronic mark to market rules on very illiquid assets and this entire problem goes away.
They never ever ever figure out the law of unintended consequences.
This was caused by over regulation
Make a CDO out of Woolner’s article, because that is not greedy
“All congress or FASB had to do was eliminate the moronic mark to market rules on very illiquid assets and this entire problem goes away. ”
Because we’d be so much better off with a bunch of zombie banks whose books are clogged up with crap overvalued paper.
There’s a reason we spent a good chunk of the last decade laughing at Japan.
cramer is a dumbfuck spreading the terrorist shit around. i’m a foreigner and already worried about capital controls. now i might be a small fry in the low 6 figures but think about big money in asia starting to pull out. that’ll be fun to watch.
Damn EP. Smack that biznatch up.
psy·cho·path (sk-pth)
n.
A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse.
well said.
if anyone is to blame for this, its the same idiots who got us into this BS in iraq and used their Social Security money to buy nukes: the baby boomers.
worst. generation. ever.
pay your f’ing mortgage poors!
A+++ would read again
also agree w/ #9, but doubt #9 agrees with me
Hey Bess the comment section in the “just putting it out there” post is not working.
@9 you are correct sir. this crap about gen x gen y entitlement narcissm whatever drives me nuts. we’re probably closer to the pragmatic realists then the BBs could ever hope to be.
@10 – this mess goes way beyond poor people you Rush Limbaugh-loving idiot.
@13– should work now
“Another priority for a new term is to build an ownership society, because ownership brings security and dignity and independence.
Thanks to our policies, home ownership in America is at an all- time high.”
–GWB 2004 RNC Acceptance Speech
for full text:
http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/campaign/rncspeeches/bush.html
-C
Yeah, well Ann Woolner is like 60 and just getting married for the first time. She’s a little slow.
EP you just lost me.
Quoting from Atlas Shrugged rings too much of high school. I’m jumping ship to Clusterfuck.com or where ever Carney is going.
Astringent but worth it. High dudgeon notwithstanding, the home ownership piece struck me as truth-telling. When I read real-estate articles touting new college grads buying up luxury loft condo’s on Chicago’s Near West Side, I re-allocated my investments out of real estate. Yes, the high returns were unrealistic. But I was reminded of the adage for winning at poker- to double your money, fold it in half and put it in your pocket.
Ep what ever happened to business ethics? Forgot about those huh.
Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get. What’ya mean the markets aren’t always bright ‘n shiny?? I PAID for this vacation!
Institutions have a sense of entitlement. That includes GS, MS, banks, etc. They’ll keep “hiding” their toxic paper and manipulate the markets to stay afloat. They have friends in high places, Joe Blow doesn’t.
But ultimately that strategy can’t be sustained. I bet we can all agree on that. Today’s short squeeze and options expiration anomaly might be a good time for longs to bail out of their positions. The dollar index is not liking this already, going down.
Lets see where we are one week from now.
“Posted by EconAnalyst, Sep 19, 2008 10:35AM
EP you just lost me.
Quoting from Atlas Shrugged rings too much of high school. I’m jumping ship to Clusterfuck.com or where ever Carney is going.”
Well, sorry to hear that. Carney will enjoy having you, I know.
(Though I think you read the post before it was properly edited, still, to each his/her own).
@2 –> Exactly.
EP, that gave me a boner. And I don’t even know what you look like.
I really just blame poor people for not paying their mortgages. Let’s face it, if you can’t pay your mortgage you’re a bum. If you’re the executive who didn’t discriminate between rich people and poor people, you deserve to lose your job. How dare you forget your elitist ways.
I’m going to take the first step in the right direction and spit on a homeless man on my way to buy a suit this afternoon.
But at the end of the day, Wall Street is a one way street: make money for your firm and take home a big bonus, loose money and others will cover the losses. So much for Atlas Shrugged. EP?
If people are snapping up treasuries like candy, some paying in the negative numbers then why doesn’t the government just issue 30 year treasuries at 4% to finance the debt. They’ve done it before.
@2 – you’re an idiot. oh so you let these companies carry these illiquid assets on their book at a value that they themselves think is reasonable? that’s exactly like Enron booking revenue on its bandwidth trading business when the thing wasn’t even operational yet.
i propose that MS and GS get taxed at 85% now since without the government’s intervention both would’ve ceased to exist. we’ll call it a survivorship bias tax and if they don’t like it, we’ll reinstitute short selling.
Atlas Shrugged? Thats IS funny, I had thought it went out with Don Johnson and Greed is Good.
If we dont think that Wallstreet and the government had responsilbity for this mess then we are quite deluded.
I think in a country with such vast resoruces as the US everyone is ‘entitled’ to a roof over their head and 3 squares a day.
What we arent entitled to are $400 bottles of Ketel One, $300 shirts, Maseratis, 1500+ per sq/ft housing, and conspicious consumption. (It is not sour grapes but rather the hypocracy of experience). The disparity of wealth was becoming too great in this nation and when that occurs there always is upheaval [economic, social etc.]. If anything the IB’s, banks, ‘the street’ in general has to realize it was too greedy and should suffer the consequences. Or as we have seen be rescued by a new deal type entity–in which case how dare we/they complain when healthcare, or other government subsidies are given to those who do not have as much.
-C
All of this bailout shit just pisses me off and I get more pissed with each passing day. Reward the greedy and irresponsible, great message to send to younger generations! The government should just let the worthless shit the banks hold go to hell and the homeowners who bought homes they can’t afford move to Mexico or back in with their parents. Why should I pay for this shit?
@15, it does now, but it started with subprime, non-investment grade mortgages (read: only mortgages poor people, or rathe,r the ones who really couldn’t afford it) being carried on the balance sheet at washed AAA levels (through the ratings agencies using a method of over collateralization). Just pointing out where it began.
It’s falling home priced stupid.
@21 Business Ethics 101 was only a 1 unit class
@33
Should Cox be asked to resign? If yes, why?
Can’t wait for the new formula thats gonna prevent any new securities from doing the same thing.
Bravo. More of this EP.
Yes, and Thain bears responsibility (maybe more) too. I also don’t agree with all this bailout mess either (from a philosophical point of view).
Why: but because there was a failure of transparency/ oversight. This is what the SEC is tasked to do.
My earlier points are simply to remind people where this started not who’s fault it is or what is to be done about. If there had been no decrease in housing prices, we would not in the position were in today. Defaults exacerbated this. But…there was and here we are.
So its the fault of those that felt they were entitled to own a home? I think its instead the fault of those who felt compelled to pump the post 2001 economy. Lets face it: what little Bush era prosperity we saw was linked entirely to the housing boom. Absent that, the administration was a total zero. Blaming homeowners for Bush’s pump and dump scheme (who could forget “ownership society”) is really too much. Good thing it didn’t get its hands on social security as well.
This Woolner bee-yotch is really quite something. Who should we put in jail? Greenspan? The foreign investors who propped up U.S. asset prices? Franklin Raines? Barney Frank (er, never mind-he’d probebly enjoy it)? This hag should be writing at the Huffington Post, not Bloomberg.
@39 see 17
The upgrade from Carney to EP is so immense as to be ridiculous. Not only are EP’s writing quality and grammar significantly better, but she actually has cogent arguments and takes real stances. If it means more EP, then good riddance Carney, he was a hack in comparison.
EP you conveniently forgot that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates were also philanthropists. And you also ignored the fact that this was not a mere market downturn but the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
“Bad judgment were not illegal.” Really? So when a air traffic controller’s bad judgment causes disaster, he or she is not responsible? I’m sure as hell not wanting to live your version of capitalist Utopia. The financial terrorism was not committed by the short sellers but laissez-fair fundamentalists like you.
Equity Private…
When Paulson, Bernacke, and Cox assumed office, they each took an oath, part of which says, “to defend against ALL enemies, foreign and domestic”. This is the same oath I took when I was commissioned a Naval Officer long ago, a commission I still have, a commission I’m proud of, a commission I will have till I die, and a commission similar to those held my many millions of other americans.
Whether you like it or not, the current financial crisis is an “enemy”, a powerful and dangerous enemy, brought about by powerful and dangerous individuals, and an enemy that if left unchecked would bring the financial system that the entire world looks up to into ruin, into a state of Financial Anarchy.
The enemy is being checked, our defenders are using desparate means, means that everyone doesn’t agree with, but means that are being viewed warmly by the financial markets.
Perhaps instead you’d rather see rugged capitalism run its course, and have the world slip into that Financial Anarchy.
Then we can have the Russian criminals, you know, the ones with the black leather jackets, the greasy unwashed hair, the unshaved faces and the bad teeth, yeah those guys running things. The ones buying houses in Greenwich. The ones who’d pull your strings and kill your familes if you didn’t do what they said.
Sounds like a much better arrangement, doesn’t it?
The Guy from Delaware
Who should we put in jail?!?!? Who should carry the burden of belieiving that our friends will help make good?
We have oursevles to blame.
And we are in the jail that we built.
“EP you conveniently forgot that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates were also philanthropists.”
You prove my point. Their unbridled greed was required to amass the avarice that permits one to be abundantly charitable.
“‘Bad judgment were not illegal.’ Really? So when a air traffic controller’s bad judgment causes disaster, he or she is not responsible?”
OOPS! You blew it. The words “responsible” and “illegal,” which you conveniently merged here, are quite distinct. And no, you don’t see an ATC employee going to jail for making a bad call on the air. Your weak example was only scuttled quicker by the fact that “responsible” and “illegal” are in your personal thesaurus together.
You better do everything perfectly from now on, or it’s off to the Gulag for you! Strict liability and mandatory death sentences for everyone! Hurrah!
“all enemies foreign and domestic”
TGFD I am interested to see how you define enemies
Is an enemy one who wishes inherent harm?
Is an enemy one who is against capitalism?
Is an enemy one that causes a reduction in our standard of living?
Is an enemy one that causes job losses?
Is evolution and enemy, Darwinism?
Or are those that simply look like the bad guys enemies?
If our actions are to based on such definitions I am very curious how one defines this.
43, you’re trying make this an argument about how much wealthy people give to charity? And if they don’t give enough, then they should be locked up? Move back to Russia, and do some research on Fuld’s charitable causes before making absurd comparisons. Don’t judge anyone’s compensation whom you know nothing about, whether it be their intelligence, hard work or career advancement.
As far as the aircraft controller, there is a big difference between gross negligence and simply making a mistake or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The former is punishable, the latter is not.
The ghost of Kafka @ #45? Could it be?
EP, nice smackdown of Guy from Delaware’s tendentious, Cramer-influenced sermonizing. Keep it up.
“Mr Sharkey? He’s not at his desk right now, can I take a message?…..You connect the dots; you put the pieces together.
You know I can see two tiny pictures of myself and there’s on in each of your eyes.”
-William S. Burroughs, “Sharkey’s Night”
—#45
@49: I’ve got a great deal on a quiet peaceful place. You in?
Great article, thanks!
Am I the only one or others also think that TGFD is one of the biggest sore-ass losers there are out there.
@51,
I’m down ’til I’m underground. Meet me at the cigarette machine.
@53: You’re not the only one.
@53
I agree. The guy from Delaware is a homeless LOSEr. Mofo SOB.
@53 looks like we have a quorum.
@53:
TGFD = Faggot
I went to have lunch, Back now.
smackdown@#50…
I don’t see any reference to TGFD in ep’s #46 entry. Do you? Also, I never listen to or watch Cramer; he’s like a cartoon character anyway.
guests@#53 & 55-58…
Quorum?? Why should I give a damn about what you think? Your comments are meaningless.
The Guy from Delaware
@TGFD
“guests@#53 & 55-58…
Quorum?? Why should I give a damn about what you think?”
And yet, you do. Sad.
Businesses lose money and go bankrupt every day. Wasteful enterprises need to go bankrupt- our modern, wealthy lives are possible only because markets redirect wealth from less productive enterprises to more productive ones.
If unsuccessful entrepreneurs were punished for making losses, successful entrepreneurs – and our economy – would be destroyed as well. The real criminals are the politicians forcing you to pay for the market’s mistakes. Unfortunately, people like Ann Woolner are only encouraging them to continue to rob us – and cripple the market.
http://www.Idonthaveasite.com – Nosite Excellent post! Really loved it, havent seen an artice this good in a while.
Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is an extremely well written article. I’ll make sure to bookmark it and return to read more of your useful information. Thanks for the post. I will certainly comeback.
get twitter followers
FYI, your blog doesn’t look right in Opera.
background and credit check
Simply desire to say your article is as surprising. The clearness in your post is just nice and i can assume you’re an expert on this subject. Fine with your permission let me to grab your RSS feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the enjoyable work.
hot looks for summer
Really interesting articles. I enjoyed reading it.
affordable car insurance
Great information gived from you.
ios 5 jailbreak
I’m extremely impressed with your writing skills and also with the layout on your blog. Is this a paid theme or did you customize it yourself? Anyway keep up the excellent quality writing, it is rare to see a great blog like this one today..
SEO Software
Hello! I noticed that your news feed is broken :/ I thought I should remind you that. My RSS reader failed for your site’s domain.
bars Denver
I was recommended this web site by my cousin. I’m not sure whether this post is written by him as nobody else know such detailed about my problem. You’re amazing! Thanks!
Denver night clubs
Can I just say what a relief to seek out somebody who truly knows what theyre talking about on the internet. You positively know the way to deliver a difficulty to light and make it important. Extra people need to read this and understand this facet of the story. I cant consider youre not more fashionable because you definitely have the gift.
Ashton cigar
wicked blog, this is going on my twitter.
rare gold coins
Nice post. I study something tougher on different blogs everyday. It is going to all the time be stimulating to read content material from other writers and follow a bit something from their store. I’d desire to use some with the content material on my blog whether you don’t mind. Natually I’ll give you a hyperlink on your internet blog. Thanks for sharing.
Nyt Tag
I like your website, i really enjoy seeing your articles, good luck in the future.
Ashton Cabinet
Hmm, there seems to be some difficulties with the first link, as it returns a 404 error
spilleautomater
Wow, amazing blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you made blogging look easy. The overall look of your site is fantastic, let alone the content!
search engine marketing
Much more of this please
cigars cheap
Hola from Florida! I am just bored to death in the office and so I chose to check out your website on my [url=http://202.51.192.166/mediawiki/index.php/User:Hunter]Source Of Stats[/url] iphone during lunch break. I enjoy the information you present here and can’t wait to take a look when I get home. I’m surprised at how fast your blog loaded on my mobile .. I’m not even using WIFI, just 3G .. Anyways, wonderful site!
Hi! I know this is kinda off topic nevertheless I’d figured I’d ask. Would you be interested in trading links or maybe guest writing a blog [url=http://208.75.149.220/~ugalambd/mediawiki/index.php/User:Orlando]Click Here[/url] post or vice-versa? My blog covers a lot of the same topics as yours and I think we could greatly benefit from each other. If you might be interested feel free to shoot me an email. I look forward to hearing from you! Excellent blog by the way!
Right now it seems like Movable Type is the best blogging platform available right now. (from what I’ve read) Is that what [url=http://community.techearup.com/wiki/index.php?title=User:Anna]Here You Go[/url] you’re using on your blog?
Superb post however , I was wondering if you could write a litte more on this topic? I’d be very thankful if you could elaborate a little bit [url=http://wiki.multikulti-exchange.de/index.php?title=User:Brandon]From Here[/url] further. Cheers!
making time and real effort to make a good post. Cool!
HVAC Training
Hey you’r website is cool, I very enjoyed it.
seo seo software tool
The next time I read a weblog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I know it was my option to learn, however I actually thought youd have one thing interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you possibly can repair if you werent too busy in search of attention.
(Leather sofas|black leather sofas|Cheap leather sofas}
There’s a vast quantity of info on the webpage you’ve started. With thanks.
facebook.com/DDCoilandgas
This submit was very nicely written, and it also contains quite a few valuable details. I appreciated your expert manner of writing this post. You’ve got produced it simple for me to realize.
edge tek
I just identified your weblog on Ask Jeeves, a really fine understand.
used tires san diego
Hi, i think that i saw you visited my site so i came to “return the favor”.I am trying to find things to improve my website!I suppose its ok to use some of your ideas!!
Eforce Compliance
Hi! I imagined your article was trendy and will visit generally.
click here
Quite good post, the post gave a bunch of information. Thank you
suspensiones rough country