The financial services industry makes money by taking money and making more money out of it. Although they claim to loan money to the American people, you would not know it these days, because they seem to only be loaning money to their other moneyed buddies. Oh, right. Corporations are people too. I keep forgetting.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, 50 states Attorney’s General, and private investors are just now finally suing the 17 biggest banks for negligently making billions in worthless loans, bundling the tripe and calling it securities, lying about its tripedness and selling it to unsuspecting investors, insuring the smelly innards against the inevitable failure, and (when their little shell game tanked the economy) lying to congress about a fraudulent scheme to make billions and billions out of rotted cow guts.
The reaction from the banks?
1. Not our fault! It was…uh…the economy’s fault! Yeah, that’s it! The economy!
2. Caveat Emptor! (let the buyer be ware). Investors should have known that we were lying through our collective capped teeth.
3. Best not to come after us, because, if we have to pay this money back, you’ll be “pushing us guys off a cliff” and we’ll go under again and you’ll “just have to bail us out again.”
Oh, gosh, in as much as I really fear that suing the criminal banks might “sap earnings and contribute to losses in the financial services industry,” I have to look on the bright side.
Firstly, I think that, in general, corporations that lose money by taking money, and loaning that money out to thin air and then lying about it repeatedly, when caught in flagrante delicto, ought to be held to their own caveat emptor, or e pluribus unum, or et tu Brute or whatever.
Secondly, since the financial services industry has not been in the business of loaning money to businesses that actually put people to work making something for quite some time, I am even less moved by their crocodile tears. Bail you out again? Seriously?
Thirdly, I am not an idiot. I know (and we all are learning) that the financial services industry can make more money by dealing in money with other money-people, than by loaning it to companies that make widgets (actual stuff) and that their investors (other bankers, hedge-fund managers, and the super rich) might not see the usual double-digit quarterly returns on their stock portfolios, if the financial services industry went back to helping start-up entrepreneurs, builders, farmers, inventors, and personal service providers. But, being a glass-half-full kinda guy, I see change as a good thing.
So the mega-corps and super rich make slightly less profit and small and medium businesses get the money they need to invest in creation and expansion, which will mean jobs making goods, jobs growing food, jobs providing personal services, jobs building buildings, jobs inventing technology for the 21st Century, and jobs marketing all these new businesses to the public.
To me, people are people too and this would be a good thing for those people.
A little less of the whole oligopoly-world-hegemony thing, and more of the American Dream.
J. Brandeis Sperandeo
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