In Vogue to Blame Wall Street

I don't know. It smells of hypocrisy, doesn't it? When politicians stand up to blame Wall Street for their 'excess greed' and 'wanton spending'. I guess the same people have forgotten about McCain's seven homes or Ted Stevens' Bridge to Nowhere. Maybe they've even forgotten about that $700 billion stimulus plan initially blocked by the Senate just so that it can be stuffed first with completely useless incentives like repealing an excise tax on children arrows made by a company in Oregon. Maybe they've even forgotten about the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act, and that policy-makers, the very same ones whom we have let run the financial markets are the exact same ones who have pushed for deregulation which pretty much has almost certainly put us into this mess.

I've been working in the finance industry for a good six months. And if I've learned anything during this short tenure, it is that bankers are not to be trusted. Which kinda makes it hard to actually give them money, and hope that they'd invest it in anything other than a Ponzi Scheme. (Madoff, anyone?) But businesses need money, and hence banks lend money, and bankers collect big fat checks in the process themselves.

Even 'Truth' is not above fraud, as proven by Satyam, when, yeah, never mind. It's not easy to generate $1 billion dollars in fake cash. In the meantime, I have this gold mine AND oil field in Antartica that has been audited by PWC. So if anyone's interested...

I get the feeling that people are outraged by what they perceived as excess. I kinda don't feel it that way; after all if you can afford it, how can it be excess? If someone else can afford a luxury that I can't, is it 'right' to scream how unfair and reckless that is? Okay, they're using taxpayers' money to fund their outrageous bonuses. And the whole system's really unfair because they get a bailout and Main Street people don't. But I blame Main Street for this mess as much as Wall Street.

The whole cycle of rising house prices, rampant mortgages and lifestyles beyond what people can afford is a huge factor in this mess. It wasn't Wall Street forcing people to borrow ARMs or mortgage their homes to unlock equity or basically take out a 110% loan on their houses which they know they can't afford to pay, instead hoping on rising house prices to pay off their debt. How can Main Street be a 'victim' when the old adage still holds true, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"?

For the rest of the world, a mortgage-free home is a dream, a pinnacle of success, of homeownership to finally own something expensive and make it yours after 20 years of mortgage payments. Then whoops, let's take out that 110% loan, to supplement our personal spending and hope that in five years, we can move to a bigger home and repeat rinse cycle.

Americans still own the biggest homes in the world. Where's the outrage in that?

And so if there's demand and money, the bankers will come, swarming like flies over a dead corpse and a feeding frenzy assumes. And then you can hear B. B. King singing "Let the Good Times Roll" and suddenly everyone's rich because everyone has borrowed 20 bucks off everyone else, making this one of the largest cluster-fucks in financial history.

For your information, a cluster-fuck is the vulgar way of saying that the banks have over-leveraged off each other, creating a co-mingling of risks so concentrated and inter-dependent on each other that the moment one of them keels over and dies, they bring everyone else down with it, with a credit default swap market that is worth USD73 trillion dollars, or three times the entire 'insured' bond market.

It's hard to put on the breaks when everyone is sipping champagne out of a glass slipper and the Dow was surging to new highs, all the way to 14,000 and beyond. Forget irrational exuberance or putting the brakes on the economy or, heavens forbid, creating an artificial, small controlled downturn, just to slow the bubble a bit. Everything was rising in value, and everyone from Main Street to Wall Street wants a bit of it.

That is to say, Main Street itself isn't blameless, but then again it isn't any particular group of individual that's to be blamed entirely, or so the politicians would like us to think.

I'm just saying at the end of the day, we should have known better. We should have known better than to trust what other people say. We should have known better than to listen to Jim Kramer of Mad Money, or Goldman Sachs on the price of oil. ($200 anyone?). We should have known better than to trust a banker.

But then again politicians have better sense than that to blame Main Street, their voters base. And of course, it's easy to make a scapegoat out of an industry that is historically characterized by excess, greed and deception. So, it seems strange to me that people play with fire and they don't expect to get burnt. Or dance with the Devil and don't expect to lose their souls. Or whatever, I could do a million different analogies, but they'd all end up the same: We should have just known better.

At this point, I wished Bush had got the saying right: Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice... Well... Never mind. We'd just raise hue and cry, and once the dust settles, we'd let the good times roll again.